ft
A CINGHALESE GENTLEMAN.
GREATER BRITAIN,
A RECORD OF TRAVEL
ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES
DURING 1866-7.
CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE.
TWO VOLUMES IN ONE.
WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO.
II
t
^
lp*
4
TO
MY FATHE R
THIS BOOK.
C. W D.
PREFACE.
IN 1866 and 1867, I followed England round the world:
everywhere I was in English-speaking, or in English-gov-
erned lands. If I remarked that climate, soil, manners of
life, that mixture with other peoples had modified the blood,
I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always one.
The idea which in all the length of my travels has been
at once my fellow and my guide a key wherewith to un-
lock the hidden things of strange new lands is a concep-
tion, however imperfect, of the grandeur of our race, already
girding the earth, which it is destined, perhaps, eventually
to overspread.
In America, the peoples of the world are being fused
together, but they are run into an English mould : Alfred's
laws and Chaucer's tongue are theirs whether they would
or no. There are men who say that Britain in her age will
claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across
the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done more
than found plantations of her own that she has imposed
her institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland,
of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England
is speaking to the world.
1* (v)
vi PREFACE.
Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon hum-
bler grounds : the development of the England of Elizabeth
is to be found, not in the Britain of Victoria, but in half the
habitable globe. If two small islands are by courtesy styled
"Great," America, Australia, India, must form a Greater
Britain.
C. W. D.
76 SLOANE STREET, S. W.
1st November, 1868.
CONTENTS
OP
THE FIKST VOLUME.
PART I.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. VIRGINIA 3
II. THE NEGRO 16
III. THE SOUTH 27
IV. THE EMPIRE STATE 33
V. CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT . . . .43
VI. CANADA 55
VII. UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 69
VIII. THE PACIFIC RAILROAD 78
IX. OMPHALISM * .86
X. LETTER PROM DENVER 91
XI. RED INDIA ....... 102
XII. COLORADO 110
XIII. ROCKY MOUNTAINS 115
XIV. BRIGHAM YOUNG 122
XV. MORMONDOM 127
XVI. WESTERN EDITORS . . . . . .131
XVII. UTAH 144
XVIII. NAMELESS ALPS 152
XIX. VIRGINIA CITY . . . . . .166
XX. EL DORADO 119
(Vii)
v iii CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
XXI. LYNCH LAW . . .190
XXII. GOLDEN CITY .... 20 7
XXIII. LITTLE CHINA . . 218
XXIV. CALIFORNIA 227
XXV. MEXICO 233
XXVI. REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT .... 239
XXVII. BROTHERS . . . . . . 249
XXVIII. AMERICA . . ... . . . 258
PART II.
I. PITCAIRN ISLAND 271
II. HOKITIKA .... . . . 278
III. POLYNESIANS ....... 293
IV. PAREWANUI PAH 299
V. THE MAORIES . . . . . . .319
VI. THE TWO FLIES ... . . . 328
VII. THE PACIFIC . . . . 334
APPENDIX.
A MAORI DINNER 339
CONTENTS
OP
THE SECOND VOLUME.
PART III.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SYDNEY . . t
IT. RIVAL COLONIES . . . . . . 15
III. VICTORIA 22
IV. SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY 38
V. COLONIAL DEMOCRACY 44
VI. PROTECTION 55
VII. LABOR 65
VIII. WOMAN 75
IX. VICTORIAN PORTS 79
X. TASMANIA 83
XI. CONFEDERATION .94
XII. ADELAIDE 98
XIII. TRANSPORTATION 109
XIV. AUSTRALIA . . . . . . .123
XV. COLONIES 130 *
PART IY.
I. MARITIME CEYLON . . . . .141
II. KANDY . 154
III. MADRAS TO CALCUTTA . ... 161
IV. BENARES . ... 171
(ix)
CONTENTS.
V. CASTE . . ~ .
VI. MOHAMMEDAN CITIES .
VII. SIMLA .
VIII. COLONIZATION
, ix. THE "GAZETTE"
X. UMRITSUR .
XI. LAHORE .
XII. OUR INDIAN ARMY
XIII. RUSSIA . . .
XIV. NATIVE STATES .
XV. SCINDE .
XVI. OVERLAND ROUTES
XVII. BOMBAY . . . .
XVIII. THE MOHURRUM .
. XIX. ENGLISH LEARNING
XX. INDIA
XXI. DEPENDENCIES
XXII. FRANCE IN THE EAST .
XXIII. THE ENGLISH .
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
I.
PAQB
VIEW FROM THE BULLER . . . Frontispiece.
A CINGHALESE GENTLEMAN ' . Frontispiece.
PROFILE OF "JOE SMITH
" . ' |
TH" .... )
150
FULL FACE OF " JOE SMITH
PORTER ROCKWELL . . . . . . .154
FRIDAY'S STATION VALLEY OF LAKE TAHOE . . 1*76
TEAMING UP THE GRADE AT SLIPPERY FORD, IN THE
SIERRA ........ It8
VIEW ON THE AMERICAN RIVER THE PLACE WHERE
GOLD WAS FIRST FOUND . . . .180
THE BRIDAL VEIL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY
EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY
Y . . ~)
. . . >
MAPS.
ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC RAILROAD . . . .78
LEAVENWORTH TO SALT LAKE CITY .... 92
SALT LAKE CITY TO SAN FRANCISCO . . . .158
NEW ZEALAND . ..... 278
II.
THE OLD AND THE NEW: BUSH SCENERY COLLINS
STREET EAST, MELBOURNE 24
GOVERNOR DAVEY'S PROCLAMATION .... 86
MAPS.
AUSTRALIA AND TASMANIA . . . . .16
OVERLAND ROUTES . . . . . 290
(Xi)
I.
AMERICA.
GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER I.
VIRGINIA.
FROM the bows of the steamer Saratoga, on the 20th
June, 1866, 1 caught sight of the low works of Fort
Monroe, as, threading her way between the sand-
banks of Capes Charles and Henry, the ship pressed
on, under sail and steam, to enter Chesapeake Bay.
Our sudden arrival amid shoals of sharks and king-
fish, the keeping watch for flocks of canvas-back
ducks, gave us enough and to spare of idle work till
we fully sighted the Yorktown peninsula, overgrown
with ancient memories ancient for America. Three
towns of lost grandeur, or their ruins, stand there still.
Williamsburg, the former capital, graced even to our
time by the palaces where once the royal governors
held more than regal state; Yorktown, where Corn-
wallis surrendered to the continental troops; James-
town, the earliest settlement, founded in 1607, thirteen
years before old Governor Winthrop fixed the site of
Plymouth, Massachusetts.
A bump against the pier of Fort Monroe soon
roused us from our musings, and we found ourselves
invaded by a swarm of stalwart negro troopers, clothed
in the cavalry uniform of the United States, who
(3)
GREATER BRITAIN.
boarded us for the mails. Not a white man save those
we brought was to be seen upon the pier, and the blaz-
ing sun made me thankful that I had declined an of-
fered letter to Jeff. Davis.
Pushing off again into the stream, we ran the gant-
let of the Rip-Raps passage, and made for Norfolk,
having on our left the many exits of the Dismal
Swamp Canal. Crossing Hampton Roads a grand
bay with pleasant grassy shores, destined one day to
become the best known, as by nature it is the noblest,
of Atlantic ports we nearly ran upon the wrecks of
the Federal frigates Cumberland and Congress, sunk by
the rebel ram Merrimac in the first great naval action
of the war; but soon after, by a sort of poetic justice,
we almost drifted into the black hull of the Merrimac
herself. Great gangs of negroes were laboring laugh-
ingly at the removal, by blasting, of the sunken ships.
When we were securely moored at Norfolk pier, I
set off upon an inspection of the second city of Vir-
ginia. Again not a white man was to be seen, but
hundreds of negroes were working in the heat, build-
ing, repairing, road-making, and happily chattering
the while. At last, turning a corner, I came on a
hotel, and, as a consequence, on a bar and its crowd of
swaggering whites" Johnny Rebs" all, you might
see by the breadth of their brims, for across the Atlan-
tic a broad brim denotes less the man of peace than
the ex-member of a Southern guerrilla band, Morgan's,
Mosby's, or Stuart's. No Southerner will wear the
Yankee "stove-pipe" hat; a Panama or Palmetto for
him, he says, though he keeps to the long black coat
that rules from Maine to the Rio Grande.
These Southerners were all alike all were upright
tall, and heavily moustached ; all had long black hair
and glittering eyes, and I looked instinctively for the
VIRGINIA. 5
baldric and rapier. It needed no second glance to as-
sure me that as far as the men of Norfolk were con-
cerned, the saying of our Yankee skipper was not far
from the truth: "The last idea that enters the mind of
a Southerner is that of doing work."
Strangers are scarce in Norfolk, and it was not long
before I found an excuse for entering into conversa-
tion with the " citizens." My first question was not
received with much cordiality by my new acquaint-
ances. "How do the negroes work? Wall, we spells
nigger with two 4 g's,' I reckon." (Virginians, I must
explain, are used to " reckon 3 ' as much as are New Eng-
landers to " guess," while Western men "calculate" as
often as they cease to swear.) "How does the niggers
work? Wall, niggers is darned fools, certain, but they
ain't quite sich fools as to work while the Yanks will
feed 'em. No, sir, not quite sich fools as that."
Hardly deeming it wise to point to the negroes work-
ing in the sun-blaze within a hundred yards, while
we sat rocking ourselves in the veranda of the inn, I
changed my tack, and asked whether things were set-
tling down in Norfolk. This query soon led my friends
upon the line I wanted them to take, and in five min-
utes we were well through politics, and plunging into
the very war. " You're a Britisher. Now, all that
they tell you's darned lies. We're just as secesh as
we ever was, only so rnany's killed that we can't fight
that's all, I reckon." "We ain't going to fight the
North and West again," said an ex-colonel of rebel
infantry; "next time we fight, 'twill be us and the
West against the Yanks. We'll keep the old flag then,
and be darned to them." " If it hadn't been for the
politicians, we shouldn't have seceded at all, I reckon:
we should just have kept the old flag and the consti-
tution, and the Yanks would have seceded from us.
1*
6 GREATER BRITAIN.
Reckon we'd have let 'em go." "Wall, boys, s'pose
we liquor?" closed in the colonel, shooting out his old
quid, and filling in with another. " We'd have fought
for a lifetime if the cussed Southerners hadn't deserted
like they did." I asked who these "Southerners'*
were to whom such disrespect was being shown.
"You didn't think Virginia was a Southern State over
in Britain, did you? 'cause Virginia is a border State,
sir. We didn't go to secede at all; it was them blasted
Southerners that brought it on us. First they wouldn't
give a command to General Eobert E. Lee, then they
made us do all the fighting for 'em, and then, when
the pinch came, they left us in the lurch. Why, sir, I
saw three Mississippi regiments surrender without a
blow yes, sir: that's right down good whisky; jess
you sample it." Here the steam-whistle of the Sara-
toga sounded with its deep bray. " Reckon you'll have
to hurry up to make connections," said one of my new
friends, and I hurried oft', not without a fear lest some
of the group should shoot after me, to avenge the af-
front of my quitting them before the mixing of the
drinks. They were but a pack of "mean whites,"
"North Carolina crackers," but their views were those
which I found dominant in all ranks at Richmond, and
up the country in Virginia.
After all, the Southern planters are not " The South,"
which for political purposes is composed of the "mean
whites," of the Irish of the towns, and of the South-
western men Missourians, Kentuckians, and Texans
fiercely anti-Northern, without being in sentiment
what we should call Southern, certainly not repre-
sentatives of the " Southern Chivalry." The " mean
whites," or "poor trash," are the whites who are not
planters members of the slaveholding race who never
held a slave white men looked down upon by the ne-
VIRGINIA. 7
groes. It is a necessary result of the despotic govern-
ment of one race by another that the poor members of
the dominant people are universally despised: the
"destitute Europeans" of Bombay, the "white loaf-
ers" of the Punjaub, are familiar cases. Where slavery
exists, the "poor trash" class must inevitably be both
large and wretched : primogeniture is necessary to keep
the plantations sufficiently great to allow for the pay-
ment of overseers and the supporting in luxury of the
planter family, and younger sons and their descendants
are not only left destitute, but debarred from earning
their bread by honest industry, for in a slave country
labor is degrading.
The Southern planters were gentlemen, possessed of
many aristocratic virtues, along with every aristocratic
vice ; but to each planter there were nine " mean
whites," who, though grossly ignorant, full of inso-
lence, given to the use of the knife and pistol upon the
slightest provocation, were, until the election of Lin-
coln to the presidency, as completely the rulers of
America as they were afterward the leaders of the
rebellion.
At sunset we started up the James on our way to
City Point and Richmond, sailing almost between the
very masts of the famous rebel privateer the Florida,
and seeing her as she lay under the still, gray waters.
She was cut out from a Brizilian port, and when claimed
by the imperial government, was to have been at once
surrendered. While the dispatches were on their way
to Norfolk, she was run into at her moorings by a Fed-
eral gunboat, and filled and sank directly. Friends of
the Confederacy have hinted that the collision was
strangely opportune ; nevertheless, the fact remains
that the commander of the gunboat was dismissed the
navy for his carelessness.
g GEE ATE E B El TAIN.
The twilight was beyond description lovely. The
change from the auks and ice-birds of the Atlantic to
the blue-birds and robins of Virginia was not more
sudden than that from winter to tropical warmth and
sensuous indolence ; but the scenery, too, of the river
is beautiful in its very changelessness. Those who can
see no beauty but in boldness might call the James as
monotonous as the lower Loire.
After weeks of bitter cold, warm evenings favor
meditation. The soft air, the antiquity of the forest,
the languor of the sunset breeze, all dispose to dream
and sleep. That oak has seen Powhatan ; the found-
ers of Jamestown may have pointed at that grand old
sycamore. In this drowsy humor, we sighted the far-
famed batteries of Newport News, and turning-in to
berth or hammock, lay all night at City Point, near
Petersburg.
A little before sunrise we weighed again, and sought
a passage through the tremendous Confederate " ob-
structions." Rows of iron skeletons, the frame-works
of the wheels of sunken steamers, showed above the
stream, casting gaunt shadows westward, and varied
only by here and there a battered smoke-stack or a
spar. The whole of the steamers that had plied upon
the James and the canals before the war were lying
here in rows, sunk lengthwise along the stream. Two
in the middle of each row had been raised to let the
government vessels pass, but in the heat-mist and faint
light the navigation was most difficult. For five and
twenty miles the rebel forts were as thick as the hills
and points allowed; yet, in spite of booms and bars,
of sunken ships, of batteries and torpedoes, the Federal
monitors once forced their way to Fort Darling in the
outer works of Richmond. I remembered these things
a few weeks later, when General Grant's first words to
VIRGINIA. 9
me at Washington were : " Glad to meet you. What
have you seen?" "The Capitol." "Go at once and
see the Monitors." He afterward said to me, in words
that photograph not only the Monitors, but Grant:
"You can batter away at those things for a month, and
do no good."
At Dutch Gap we came suddenly upon a curious
scene. The river flowed toward us down a long, straight
reach, bounded by a lofty hill crowned with tremen-
dous earthworks ; but through a deep trench or cleft,
hardly fifty yards in length, upon our right, we could
see the stream running with violence in a direction,
parallel with our course. The hills about the gully
were hollowed out into caves and bomb-proofs, evi-
dently meant as shelters from vertical fire, but the
rough graves of a vast cemetery showed that the pro-
tection was sought in vain. Forests of crosses of un-
painted wood rose upon every acre of flat ground. On
\he peninsula, all but made an island by the cleft, was
a grove of giant trees, leafless, barkless, dead, and
blanched by a double change in the level of the stream.
There is no sight so sad as that of a drowned forest,
with a turkey-buzzard on each bough. On the bank
upon our left was an iron scaffold, eight or ten stories
high, "Butler's Lookout," as the cleft was "Butler's
Dutch Gap Canal." The canal, unfinished in war, is
now to be completed at State expense for purposes of
trade.
As we rounded the extremity of the peninsula an
eagle was seen to light upon a tree. From every por-
tion of the ship main deck, hurricane deck, lower
deck ports revolvers, ready capped and loaded, were
brought to bear upon the bird, which sheered off un-
harmed amid a storm of bullets. After this incident,
I was careful in my political discussions with my ship-
10 GREATER BRITAIN.
mates; disarmament in the Confederacy had clearly
not been extended to private weapons.
The outer and inner lines of fortifications passed, we
came in view of a many-steepled town, with domes
and spires recalling Oxford, hanging on a bank above
a crimson-colored foaming stream. In ten minutes we
were alongside the wharf at Richmond, and in half an
hour safely housed in the "Exchange Hotel," kept by
the Messrs. Carrington, of whom the father was a pri-
vate, the son a colonel, in the rebel volunteers.
* The next day, while the works and obstructions on
the James were still fresh in my mind, I took train to
Petersburg, the city the capture of which by Grant
was the last blow struck by the North at the melting
forces of the Confederacy.
The line showed the war: here and there the track,
torn up in Northern raids, had barely been repaired ; the
bridges were burnt and broken ; the rails worn down
to an iron thread. The joke u on board," as they say
here for "in the train," was that the engine-drivers
down the line are tolerably cute men, who, when the
rails are altogether worn away, understand how to "go
it on the bare wood," and who at all times "know
where to jump."
From the window of the car we could see that in
the country there were left no mules, no horses, no
roads, no men. The solitude is not all owing to the
war: in the whole five and twenty miles from Rich-
mond to Petersburg there was before the war but a
single station ; in New England your passage-card often
gives a station in every two miles. A careful look at
the underwood on either side the line showed that this
forest is not primeval, that all this country had once
been plowed.
Virginia stands first among the States for natural
VIRGINIA. 11
advantages: -in climate she is unequaled; her soil is
fertile ; her mineral wealth in coal, copper, gold, and
iron enormous, and well placed ; her rivers good, and
her great harbor one of the best in the world. Virginia
has been planted more than two hundred and fifty
years, and is as large as England, yet has a free popu-
lation of only a million. In every kind of production
she is miserably inferior to Missouri or Ohio, in most,
inferior also to the infant States of Michigan and Illi-
nois. Only a quarter of her soil is under cultivation,
to half that of poor, starved New England, and the
mines are deserted which were worked by the very
Indians who were driven from the laud as savages a
hundred years ago.
There is no surer test of the condition of a country
than the state of its highways. In driving on the main
roads round Richmond, in visiting the scene of Mc-
Clellan's great defeat on the Chickahominy at Mechan-
icsville and Malvern Hill, I myself, and an American
gentleman who was with me, had to get out and lay
the planks upon the bridges, and then sit upon them,
to keep them down while the black coachman drove
across. The best roads in Virginia are but ill kept
"corduroys;" but, bad as are these, "plank roads"
over which artillery have passed, knocking out every
other plank, are worse by far ; yet such is the main
road from Richmond toward the west.
There is not only a scarcity of roads, but of railroads.
A comparison of the railway system of Illinois and
Indiana with the two lines of Kentucky or the one of
Western Virginia or Louisiana, is a comparison of the
South with the North, of slavery with freedom. Vir
ginia shows already the decay of age, but is blasted by
slavery rather than by war.
Passing through Petersburg, the streets of which
12 GREATER BRITAIN.
were gay with the feathery-brown blooms of the Vene-
tian sumach, but almost deserted by human beings,
who have not returned to the city since they were
driven out by the shot and shell of which their houses
show the scars, we were soon in the rebel works.
There are sixty miles of these works in all, line within
line, three deep: alternations of sand-pits and sand-
heaps, with here and there a tree-trunk pierced for
riflemen, and everywhere a double row of chevaux de
frise. The forts nearest this point were named by their
rebel occupants Fort Hell and Fort Damnation. Tre-
mendous works, but it needed no long interview with
Grant to understand their capture. I had not been ten
minutes in his office at Washington before I saw that
the secret of his unvarying success lay in his unflinch-
ing determination : there is pith in the American con-
ceit which reads in his initials, "TJ. S. G.," "uncondi-
tional-surrender Grant."
The works defending Richmond, hardly so strong as
those of Petersburg, were attacked in a novel manner
in the third year of the war. A strong body of Fed-
eral cavalry on a raid, unsupported by infantry or guns,
came suddenly by night upon the outer lines of Eich-
mond on the west. Something had led them to be-
lieve that the rebels were not in force, and with the
strange aimless daring that animated both parties
during the rebellion, they rode straight in along the
winding road, unchallenged, and came up to the inner
lines. There they were met by a volley which emptied
a few saddles, and they retired, without even stopping
to spike the guns in the outer works. Had they known
enough of the troops opposed to them to have con-
tinued to advance, they might have taken Richmond,
and held it long enough to have captured the rebel
president and senate, and burned the great iron-works
VIRGINIA. 13
and ships. The whole of the rebel army had gone
north, and even the home guard was camped out on
the Chiekahominy. The troops who fired the volley
were a company of the "iron-works battalion," boys
employed at the founderies, not one of whom had ever
fired a rifle before this night. They confessed them-
selves that "one minute more, and they'd have run;"
but the volley just stopped the enemy in time.
The spot where we first struck the rebel lines was
that known as the Crater the funnel-shaped cavity
formed when Grant sprang his famous mine: 1500
men are buried in the hollow itself, and the bones of
those smothered by the falling earth are working
through the soil: 5000 negro troops were killed in
this attack, and are buried round the hollow where
they died, fighting as gallantly as they fought every-
where throughout the war. It is a singular testimony
to the continuousness of the fire, that the still remain-
ing subterranean passages show that in countermining
the rebels came once within three feet of the mine, yet
failed to hear the working parties. Thousands of old
army shoes were lying on the earth, and negro boys
were digging up bullets for old lead.
Within eighty yards of the Crater are the Federal
investing lines, on which the trumpet-flower of our
gardens was growing wild in deep rich masses. The
negroes told me not to gather it, because they believe
it scalds the hand. They call it " poison plant," or
"blister weed." The blue-birds and scarlet tannagers
were playing about the horn-shaped flowers.
Just within Grant's earthworks are the ruins of an
ancient church, built, it is said, with bricks that were
brought by the first colonists from England in 1614.
About Norfolk, about Petersburg, and in the Shenan-
doah Valley, you cannot ride twenty miles through the
2
14 GEE ATE E BEITAIN.
Virginian forest without bursting in upon some glade
containing a quaint old church, or a creeper-covered
roofless palace of the Culpeppers, the Randolphs, or the
Scotts. The county names have in them all a history.
Taking the letter "B" alone, we have Barbour, Bath,
Bedford, Berkeley, Boone, Botetourt, Braxton, Brooke,
Brunswick, Buchanan, Buckingham. A dozen coun-
ties in the State are named from kings or princes.
The slaveowning cavaliers whose names the remainder
bear are the men most truly guilty of the late attempt
made by their descendants to create an empire founded
on disloyalty and oppression; but within sight of this
old church of theirs at Petersburg, thirty-three miles
of Federal outworks stand as a monument of how the
attempt was crushed by the children of their New Eng-
land brother-colonists.
The names of streams and hamlets in Virginia have
often a quaint English ring. On the Potomac, near
Harper's Ferry, I once came upon " Sir John's Run."
Upon my asking a tall, gaunt fellow, who was fishing,
whether this was the spot on which the Knight of
Windsor " larded the lean earth," I got for sole answer:
"Wall, don't know 'bout that, but it's a mighty fine
spot for yellow-fin trout." The entry to Virginia is
characteristic. You sail between capes named from
the sons of James L, and have fronting you the estu-
aries of two rivers called after the King and the Duke
of York.
The old F. F. V.'s, the first families of Virginia,
whose founders gave these monarchic names to the
rivers and counties of the State, are far off now in
Texas and California those, that is, which were not
extinct before the war. The tenth Lord Fairfax keeps
a tiny ranch near San Francisco; some of the chief
Denmans are also to be -found in California. In all
VIRGINIA. 15
such cases of which I heard, the emigration took place
before the war; Northern conquest could not be made
use of as a plea whereby to escape the reproaches due
to the slaveowning system. There is a stroke of jus-
tice in the fact that the Virginian oligarchy have ruined
themselves in ruining their State; but the gaming hells
of Farobankopolis, as Richmond once was called, have
much for which to answer.
When the "burnt district" comes to be rebuilt,
Richmond will be the most beautiful of all the At-
lantic cities; while the water-power of the rapids of
the James, and a situation at the junction of canal and
river, secure for it a prosperous future.
The superb position of the State-house (which
formed the rebel capitol), on the brow of a long hill,
whence it overhangs the city and the James, has in it
something of satire. The Parliament-house of George
Washington's own State, the State-house, contains the
famed statue set up by the general assembly of the
Commonwealth of Virginia to the hero's memory.
Without the building stands the still more noteworthy
bronze statue of the first President, erected jointly by
all the States in the then Union. That such monu-
ments should overlook the battle-fields of the war pro-
voked by the secession from the Union of Washing-
ton's loved Virginia, is a fact full of the grim irony of
history.
Hollywood, the cemetery of Richmond, is a place
full of touching sad suggestion, and very beautiful,
with deep shades and rippling streams. During the
war, there were hospitals in Richmond for 20,000 men,
and "always full," they say. The Richmond men
who were killed in battle were buried where they fell;
but 8000 who died in hospital are buried here, and
over them is placed a wooden cross, with the inscrip-
16 GREATER BRITAIN.
tion in black paint, "Dead, but not forgotten." In
another spot lie the Union dead, under the shadow of
the flag for which they died.
From Monroe's tomb the evening view is singularly
soft and calm; the quieter and calmer for the drone
in which are mingled the trills of the mocking-bird,
the hoarse croaking of the bull-frog, the hum of the
myriad fire-flies, that glow like summer lightning
among the trees, the distant roar of the river, of
which the rich red water can still be seen, beaten by
the rocks into a rosy foam.
With the moment's chillness of the sunset breeze,
the golden glory of the heavens fades into gray, and
there comes quickly over them the solemn blueness of
the Southern night. Thoughts are springing up of
the many thousand unnamed graves, where the rebel
soldiers lie unknown, when the Federal drums in
Richmond begin sharply beating the rappel.
CHAPTER II.
THE NEGEO.
IN the back country of Virginia, and on the borders
of North Carolina, it becomes clear that our common
English notions of the negro and of slavery are nearer
the truth than common notions often are. The Lon-
don Christy Minstrels are not more given to bursts of
laughter of the form "Yah ! yah !" than are the plant-
ation hands. The negroes upon the Virginia farms
are not maligned by those who represent them as de-
THE NEGRO. 17
lighting in the contrasts of crimson and yellow, or
emerald and sky-blue. I have seen them on a Sunday
afternoon, dressed in scarlet waistcoats and gold-laced
cravats, returning hurriedly from "meetin'," to dance
break-downs, and grin from ear to ear for hours at a
time. What better should we expect from men to
whom until just now it was forbidden, under tremen-
dous penalties, to teach their letters ?
Nothing can force the planters to treat negro free-
dom save from the comic side. To them the thing is
too new for thought, too strange for argument; the
ridiculous lies on the surface, and to this they turn as
a relief. When I asked a planter how the blacks pros-
pered under freedom, his answer was, "Ours don't
much like it. You see, it necessitates monogamy. If
I talk about the * responsibilities of freedom,' Sambo
says, 'Dunno 'bout that; please, mass' George: me
want two wife.' ' Another planter tells me, that the
only change he can see in the condition of the negroes
since they have been free is that formerly the super-
vision of the overseer forced them occasionally to be
clean, whereas now nothing on earth can make them
wash. He says that, writing lately to his agent, he
received an answer to which there was the following
postscript: "You ain't sent no sope. You had better
send sope: niggers is certainly needing sope."
It is easy to treat the negro question in this way;
easy, on the other hand, to assert that since history
fails us as a guide to the future of the emancipated
blacks, we should see what time will bring, and mean-
while set down negroes as a monster class of which
nothing is yet known, and, like the compilers of the
Catalan map, say of places of which we have no knowl-
edge, "Here be giants, cannibals, and negroes." As
long as we possess Jamaica, and are masters upon
2*
18 GEE ATE E B El TAIN.
the African west coast, the negro question is one of
moment to ourselves. It is one, too, of mightier im-
port, for it is bound up with the future of the English
in America. It is by no means a question to be passed
over as a joke. There are five millions of negroes in
the United States; juries throughout ten States of the
Union are mainly chosen from the black race. The
matter is not only serious, but full of interest, political,
ethnological, historic.
In the South you must take nothing upon trust; be-
lieve nothing you are told. Nowhere in the world do
"facts" appear so differently to those who view them
through spectacles of yellow or of rose. The old plant-
ers tell you that all is ruin, that they have but half
the hands they need, and from each hand but a half
day's work: the new men, with Northern energy and
Northern capital, tell you that they get on very well.
The old Southern planters find it hard to rid them-
selves of their traditions ; they cannot understand free
blacks, and slavery makes not only the slaves but the
masters shiftless. They have no cash, and the Metayer
system gives rise to the suspicion of some fraud, for
the negroes are very distrustful of the honesty of their
former masters.
The worst of the evils that must inevitably grow
out of the sudden emancipation of millions of slaves
have not shown themselves as yet, in consequence of
the great amount of work that has to be done in the
cities of the South, in repairing the ruin caused during
the war by fire and want of care, and in building places
of business for the Northern capitalists. The negroes
of Virginia and North Carolina have flocked down to
the towns and ports by the thousand, and find in Nor-
folk, Richmond, Wilmington, and Fort Monroe em-
ployment for the moment. Their absence from the
THE NEGEO. 19
plantations makes labor dear up country, and this in
itself tempts the negroes who remain on land to work
sturdily for wages. Seven dollars a month at the the
rate equal to one pound with board and lodging,
were being paid to black field hands on the corn and
tobacco farms near Richmond. It is when the city
works are over that the pressure will come, and it will
probably end in the blacks largely pushing northward,
and driving the Irish out of hotel service at New York
and Boston, as they have done in Philadelphia and
St. Louis.
Already the negroes are beginning to ask for land,
and they complain loudly that none of the confiscated
lands have been assigned to them. "Ef yer dun gib
us de land, reckon de ole massas '11 starb de niggahs,"
was a plain, straightforward summary of the negro
view of the negro question, given me by a white-bearded
old " uncle" in Richmond, and backed by every black
man within hearing in a chorus of "Dat's true, for
shore;" but I found up the country that the planters
are afraid to let the negroes own or farm for them-
selves the smallest plot of land, for fear that they should
sell ten times as much as they grew, stealing their
"crop" from the granaries of their employers.
At a farm near Petersburg, owned by a Northern
capitalist, 1000 acres, which before emancipation had
been tilled by one hundred slaves, now needed, I was
told, but forty freedmen for their cultivation ; but when
I reached .the place, I found that the former number
included old people and women, while the forty were
all hale men. The men were paid upon the tally sys-
tem. A card was given them for each day's work,
which was accepted at the plantation store in payment
for goods supplied, and at the end of the month money
was paid for the remaining tickets. The planters say
20 GREATER BRITAIN.
that the field hands will not support their old people;
but this means only that, like white folk, they try to
make as much money as they can, and know that if
they plead the wants of their wives and children, the
whites will keep their aged people.
That the negro slaves were lazy, thriftless, unchaste,
and thieves, is true; but it is as slaves, and not as
negroes, that they were all these things; and, after all,
the effects of slavery upon the slave are less terrible
than its effects upon the master. The moral condition
to which the planter class had been brought by slavery,
shows out plainly in the speeches of the rebel leaders.
Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confed-
eracy, declared in 1861 that " Slavery is the natural
and moral condition of the negro. ... I cannot per-
mit myself to doubt," he went on, "the ultimate suc-
cess of a full recognition of this principle throughout
the civilized and enlightened world . . . negro slavery
is in its infancy."
There is reason to believe that the American negroes
will justify the hopes of their friends ; they have made
the best of every chance that has been given them as
yet ; they were good soldiers, they are eager to learn
their letters, they are steady at their work: in Barba-
does they are industrious and well conducted ; in La
Plata they are exemplary citizens. In America the
colored laborer has had no motive to be industrious.
General Grant assured me of the great aptness at
soldiering shown by the negro troops. In battle they
displayed extraordinary courage, but if their officers
were picked off they could not stand a charge ; no
more, he said, could their Southern masters. The
power of standing firm after the loss of leaders is pos-
sessed only by regiments where every private is as good
as his captain and colonel, such as the Northwestern
and New England volunteers.
THE NEGRO. 21
Before I left Richmond I had one morning found my
way into a school for the younger blacks. There were
as many present as the forms would hold sixty, per-
haps, in all and three wounded New England soldiers,
with pale, thin faces, were patiently teaching them to
write. The boys seemed quick and apt enough, but
they were very raw only a week or two in the school.
Since the time when Oberlin first proclaimed the po-
tential equality of the race by admitting negroes as
freely as white men and women to the college, the
negroes have never been backward to learn.
It must not be supposed that the negro is wanting
in abilities of a certain kind. Even in the imbecility
of the Congo dance we note his unrivaled mimetic
powers. The religious side of the negro character is
full of weird suggestiveness; but superstition, every-
where the handmaid of ignorance, is rife among the
black plantation hands. It is thought that the pun-
ishment with which the shameful rites of Obi-worship
have been visited has proved, even in the City of New
Orleans, insufficient to prevent them. Charges of
witchcraft are as common in Virginia as in Orissa; in
the Carolinas as in Central India the use of poison is
often sought to work out the events foretold by some
noted sorceress. In no direction can the matter be
followed out to its conclusions without bringing us face
to face with the sad fact that the faults of the planta-
tion negro are every one of them traceable to the vices
of the slavery system, and that the Americans of to-day
are suffering beyond measure for evils for which our
forefathers are responsible. We ourselves are not
guiltless of wrong- doing in this matter: if it is still im-
possible openly to advocate slavery in England, it has,
at least, become a habit persistently to write down
freedom. We are no longer told that God made the
22 CHEATER BRITAIN.
blacks to be slaves, but we are bade remember that
they cannot prosper under emancipation. All men-
tion of Barbadoes is suppressed, but we have daily
homilies on the condition of Jamaica. The negro
question in America is briefly this: is there, on the
one hand, reason to fear that, dollars applied to land
decreasing while black mouths to be fed increase, the
Southern States will become an American Jamaica?
Is there, on the other hand, ground for the hope that
the negroes may be found not incapable of the citizen-
ship of the United States? The former of these two
questions is the more difficult, and to some extent in-
volves the latter: can cotton, can sugar, can rice, can
coffee, can tobacco, be raised by white field hands ? If
not, can they be raised with profit by black free labor ?
Can co-operative planting, directed by negro over-
lookers, possibly succeed, or must the farm be ruled
by white capitalists, agents, and overseers?
It is asserted that the negro will not work with-
out compulsion; but the same may be said of the Eu-
ropean. There is compulsion of many kinds. The
emancipated negro may still be forced to work
forced as the white man is forced in this and other
lands, by the alternative, work or starve ! This forcing,
however, may not be confined to that which the laws
of natural increase lead us to expect; it may be stimu-
lated by bounties on immigration.
The negro is not, it would seem, to have a
monopoly of Southern labor in this continent. This
week we hear of three shiploads of Chinese coolies as
just landed in Louisiana; and the air is thick with
rumors of labor from Bombay, from Calcutta, from
the Pacific Islands of Eastern labor in its hundred
shapes not to speak of competition with the whites,
now commencing with the German immigration into
Tennessee.
THE NEGRO. 23
The berries of this country are so large, so many,
so full of juice, that alone they form a never-failing
source of nourishment to an idle population. Three
kinds of cranberries, American, pied, and English;
two blackberries, huckleberries, high-bush and low-
bush blueberries the latter being the English bilberry
are among the best known of the native fruits. No
one in this country, however idle he be, need starve.
If he goes farther south, he has the banana, the true
staff of life.
The terrible results of the plentiful possession of
this tree are seen in Ceylon, at Panama, in the coast-
lands of Mexico, at Auckland in New Zealand. At
Pitcairn's Island the plantain grove has beaten the
missionary from the field; there is much lip-Chris-
tianity, but no practice to be got from a people who
possess the fatal plant. The much-abused cocoanut
cannot come near it as a devil's agent. The cocoa-
palm is confined to a few islands and coast tracts
confined, too, to the tropics and sea-level ; the plantain
and banana extend over seventy-degrees of latitude,
down to Botany Bay and King George's Sound, and
up as far north as the Khyber Pass. The palm asks
labor not much, if is true; but still a few days' hard
work in the year in trenching, and climbing after the
nuts. The plantain grows as a weed, and hangs down
its bunches of ripe tempting fruit into your lap as you
lie in its cool shade. The cocoanut-tree has a hundred
uses, and urges men to work to make spirit from its
juice, ropes, clothes, matting, bags, from its fiber, oil
from the pulp ; it creates an export trade which appeals
to almost all men by their weakest side, in offering
large and quick returns for a little work. John Ross's
"Isle of Cocoas," to the west of Java arid south of
Ceylon, yields him heavy gains; there are profits to be
24 GREATER BRITAIN.
made upon the Liberian coast, and even in Southern
India and Ceylon. The plantain will make nothing;
you can eat it raw or fried, and that is all ; you can eat
it every day of your life without becoming tired of its
taste ; without suffering in your health, you can live on
it exclusively. In the banana groves of Florida and
Louisiana there lurks much trouble and danger to the
American free States.
The negroes have hardly much chance in Virginia
against the Northern capitalists, provided with white
labor; but the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida,
and South Carolina promise to be wholly theirs. Al-
ready they are flocking to places in which they have a
majority of the people, and can control the municipal-
ities, and defend themselves, if necessary, by force;
but if the Southerners of the coast desert their country,
the negroes will not have it to themselves, unless na-
ture declares that they shall. New Englanders will
pour in with capital and energy, and cultivate the land
by free black or by coolie labor, if either will pay. If
they do pay, competition will force the remaining
blacks to work or starve.
The friends of the negro are not without a fear that
the laborers will be too many for their work, for,
while the older cotton States appear to be worn out,
the new, such as Texas and Tennessee, will be re-
served by public opinion to the whites. For the
present the negroes will be masters in seven of the
rebel States; but in Texas, white men English, Ger-
mans, Danes are growing cotton with success; and
in Georgia and North Carolina, which contain mount-
ain districts, the negro power is not likely to be per-
manent.
We may, perhaps, lay it down as a general principle
that, when the negro can fight his way through oppo-
THE NEGRO. 25
sition, and stand alone as a farmer or laborer, without
the aid of private or State charity, then he should be
protected in the position he has shown himself worthy
to hold, that of a free citizen of an enlightened and
laboring community. Where it is found that when
his circumstances have ceased to be exceptional, the
negro cannot live unassisted, there the Federal gov-
ernment may fairly and wisely step in and say, " We
will not keep you ; but we will carry you to Liberia
or to Hayti, if you will."
It is clear that the Southern negroes must be given
a decisive voice in the appointment of the legislatures
by which they are to be ruled, or that the North must
be prepared to back up by force of opinion, or if need
be, by force of arms, the Federal Executive, when it
insists on the Civil Rights Bill being set in action at
the South. Government through the negroes is the
only way to avoid government through an army, which
would be dangerous to the freedom of the North. It
is safer for America to trust her slaves than to trust
her rebels safer to enfranchise than to pardon.
A reading and writing basis for the suffrage in the
Southern States is an absurdity. Coupled with par-
dons to the rebels, it would allow the "boys in gray"
the soldiers of the Confederacy to control nine
States of the Union ; it would render the education of
the freedmen hopeless. For the moment, it would
entirely disfranchise the negroes in six States, whereas
it is exactly for the moment that negro suffrage is in
these States necessary; while, if the rebels were ad-
mitted to vote, and the negroes excluded from the poll,
the Southern representatives, united with the Copper-
head wing of the Democratic party, might prove to be
strong enough to repudiate the Federal debt. This is
one of a dozen dangers.
3
26 GREATER BRITAIN.
An education basis for the suffrage, though pre-
tended to be impartial, would be manifestly aimed
against the negroes, and would perpetuate the antip-
athy of color to which the war is supposed to have put
an end. To education such a provision would be a
death-blow. If the negroes were to vote as soon as
they could read, it is certain that the planters would
take good care that they never should read at all.
That men should be able to examine into the details
of politics is not entirely necessary to the working of
representative government. It is sufficient that they
should be competent to select men to do it for them.
In the highest form of representative government,
where all the electors are both intelligent, educated,
and alive to the politics of the time, then the member
returned must tend more and more to be a delegate.
That has always been the case with the Northern and
Western members in America, but never with those
returned by the Southern States ; and so it will con-
tinue, whether the Southern elections be decided by
negroes or by " mean whites."
In Warren County, Mississippi, near Vicksburg, is
a plantation which belongs to Joseph Davis, the brother
of the rebel president. This he has leased to Mr.
Montgomery once his slave in order that an associ-
ation of blacks may be formed to cultivate the planta-
tion on co-operative principles. It is to be managed
by a council elected by the community at large, and a
voluntary poor-rate and embankment-rate are to be
levied on the people by themselves.
It is only a year since the termination of the war,
and the negroes are already in possession of schools,
village corporations, of the Metayer system, of co-
operative farms ; all this tells of rapid advance, and
the conduct and circulation of the New Orleans Tribune,
THE SOUTH. 27
edited and published by negroes, and selling 10,000
copies daily, and another 10,000 of the weekly issue,
speaks well for the progress of the blacks. If the
Montgomery experiment succeeds, their future is se-
cure.
CHAPTEE III.
THE SOUTH.
THE political forecasts and opinions which were
given me upon plantations were, in a great measure,
those indicated in my talk with the Norfolk "loafers."
On the history of the commencement of the rebellion
there was singular unanimity. " Virginia never meant
to quit the Union ; we were cheated by those rascals
of the South. When we did go out, we were left to
do all the fighting. Why, sir, I've seen a Mississippian
division run away from a single Yankee regiment."
As I heard much the same story from the North
Carolinians that I met, it would seem as though there
was little union among the seceding States. The
legend upon the first of all the secession flags that
were hoisted was typical of this devotion to the for-
tunes of the State: "Death to abolitionists; South
Carolina goes it alone;" and during the whole war it
was not the rebel colors, but the palmetto emblem, or
other State devices, that the ladies wore.
About the war itself but little is said, though here
and there I met a man who would tell camp stories in
the Northern style. One planter, who had been " out"
himself, went so far as to say to me : " Our officers
28 GREATER BRITAIN.
were good, but considering that our rank and file
were just 'white trash,' and that they had to fight
regiments of New England Yankee volunteers, with
all their best blood in the ranks, and Western sharp-
shooters together, it's only wonderful how we weren't
whipped sooner."
As for the future, the planter's policy is a simple
one: "Reckon we're whipped, so we go in now for the
old flag; only those Yankee rogues must give us the
control of our own people." The one result of the
war has been, as they believe, the abolition of slavery ;
otherwise the situation is unchanged. The war is over,
the doctrine of secession is allowed to fall into the
background, and the ex-rebels claim to step once more
into their former place, if, indeed, they admit that they
ever left it.
Every day that you are in the South you come more
and more to see that the "mean whites" are the con-
trolling power. The landowners are not only few in
number, but their apathy during the present crisis is
surprising. The men who demand their readmission
to the government of eleven States are unkempt, fierce-
eyed fellows, not one whit better than the brancos of
Brazil; the very men, strangely enough, who them-
selves, in their " Leavenworth constitution," first began
disfranchisement, declaring that the qualification for
electors in the new State of Kansas should be the
taking oath to uphold the infamous Fugitive Slave
Law.
These "mean whites" were the men who brought
about secession. The planters are guiltless of every-
thing but criminal indifference to the deeds that were
committed in their name. Secession was the act of a
pack of noisy demagogues; but a false idea of honor
brought round a majority of the Southern people,
THE SOUTH. 29
and the infection of enthusiasm carried over the re-
mainder.
When the war sprang up, the old_ Southern con-
tempt for the Yankees broke out into a fierce burst of
joy, that the day had come for paying off old scores.
"We hate them, sir," said an old planter to me. "I
wish to God that the Mayflower had sunk with all
hands in Plymouth Bay."
Along with this violence of language, there is a
singular kind of cringing to the conquerors. Time
after time I heard the complaint, "The Yanks treat
us shamefully, I reckon. We come back to the Union,
and give in on every point; we renounce slavery; we
consent to forget the past; and yet they won't restore
us to our rights." Whenever I came to ask what they
meant by "rights," I found the same haziness that
everywhere surrounds that word. The Southerners
seem to think that men may rebel and fight to the
death against their country, and then, being beaten,
lay down their arms and walk quietly to the polls along
with law-abiding citizens, secure in the protection of
the Constitution which for years they have fought to
subvert.
At Richmond I had a conversation which may serve
as a specimen of what one hears each moment from
the planters. An old gentleman with whom I was
talking politics opened at me suddenly: "The Radicals
are going to give the ballot to our niggers to strengthen
their party, but they know better than to give it to
their Northern niggers."
-D. "But surely there's a difference in the cases."
The Planter. "You're right there is; but not your
way. The difference is, that the Northern niggers can
read and write, and even lie with consistency, and ours
can't."
3*
30 ORE ATE E BRITAIN.
D._-But there's the wider difference, that negro
suffrage down here is a necessity, unless you are to rule
the country that's just beaten you."
The Planter." Well, there of course we differ. "We
rebs say we fought to take our State out of the Union.
The Yanks beat us ; so our States must still be in the
Union. If so, why shouldn't our representatives be
unconditionally admitted?"
Nearer to a conclusion we of course did not come,
he declaring that no man ought to vote who had not
education enough to understand the Constitution, I,
that this was good prima facie evidence against letting
him vote, but that it might be rebutted by the proof
of a higher necessity for his voting. As a planter said
to me, " The Southerners prefer soldier rule to nigger
rule;" but it is not a question of what they prefer, but
of what course is necessary for the safety of the Union
which they fought to destroy.
Nowhere in the Southern States did I find any ex-
pectation of a fresh rebellion. It is only Englishmen
who ask whether u the South" will not fight "once
more." The South is dead and gone; there can never
be a " South" again, but only so many Southern States.
"The South" meant simply the slave country; and
slavery being dead, it is dead. Slavery gave us but
two classes besides the negroes planters and " mean
whites." The great planters were but a few thousand
in number; they are gone to Canada, England, Ja-
maica, California, Colorado, Texas. The "mean
whites" the true South are impossible in the face
of free labor: they must work or starve. If they
work, they will no longer be "mean whites," but es-
sentially Northernersthat is, citizens of a democratic
republic, and not oligarchists.
As the Southerners admit that there can be no fur-
THE SOUTH. 31
ther war, it would be better even for themselves that
they should allow the sad record of their rising to fade
away. Their speeches, their newspapers continue to
make use of language which nothing could excuse, and
which, in the face of the magnanimity of the conquer-
ors, is disgraceful. In a Mobile paper I have seen a
leader which describes with hideous minuteness Lin-
coln, Lane, John Brown, and Dostie playing whist in
hell. A Texas cutting which I have is less blasphe-
mous, but not less vile: "The English language no
longer affords terms in which to curse a sniveling,
weazen-faced piece of humanity generally denomin-
ated a Yankee. We see some about here sometimes,
but they skulk around, like sheep-killing dogs, and
associate mostly with niggers. They whine and prate,
and talk about the judgment of God, as if God had
anything to do with them." The Southerners have
not even the wit or grace to admit that the men who
beat them were good soldiers; " blackguards and
braggarts," "cravens and thieves," are common names
for the men of the Union army. I have in my posses-
sion an Alabama paper in which General Sheridan, at
that time the commander of the military division which
included the State, is styled " a short- tailed slimy tad-
pole of the later spawn, the blathering disgrace of an
honest father, an everlasting libel on his Irish blood,
the synonym of infamy, and scorn of all brave men."
While I was in Virginia, one of the Richmond papers
said: "This thing of 'loyalty' will not do for the
Southern man."
The very day that I landed in the South a dinner
was given at Richmond by the "Grays," a volunteer
corps which had fought through the rebellion. After
the roll of honor, or list of men killed in battle, had
been read, there were given as toasts by rebel officers:
32 GREATER BRITAIN.
" Jeff. Davis the caged eagle; the bars confine his
person, but his great spirit soars;" and "The con-
quered banner, may its resurrection at last be as bright
and as glorious as theirs the dead."
It is in the face of such words as these that Mr.
Johnson, the most unteachable of mortals, asks men
who have sacrificed their sons to restore the Union to
admit the ex-rebels to a considerable share in the gov-
ernment of the nation, even if they are not to monop-
olize it, as they did before the war. His conduct seems
to need the Western editor's defense : " He must be
kinder honest-like, he aire sich a tarnation foolish
critter."
It is clear, from the occurrence of such dinners, the
publication of such paragraphs and leaders as those of
which I have spoken, that there is no military tyranny
existing in the South. The country is indeed admin-
istered by military commanders, but it is not ruled by
troops. Before we can give ear to the stories that are
afloat in Europe of the " government of major-gen-
erals," we must believe that five millions of English-
men, inhabiting a country as large as Europe, are
crushed down by some ten thousand other men
about as many as are needed to keep order in the sin-
gle town of Warsaw. The Southerners are allowed to
rule themselves; the question now at issue is merely
whether they shall also rule their former slaves, the
negroes.
I hardly felt myself out of the reach of slavery and
rebellion till, steaming up the Potomac from Aquia
Creek by the gray dawn, I caught sight of a grand
pile towering over a city from a magnificent situation
on the brow of a long, rolling hill. Just at the mo-
ment, the sun, invisible as yet to us below, struck the
marble dome and cupola, and threw the bright gilding
THE EMPIEE STATE. 33
into a golden blaze, till the Greek shape stood out upon
the blue sky, glowing like a second sun.- The city was
Washington ; the palace with the burnished cupola the
Capitol; and within two hours I was present at the
"hot-weather sitting" of the 39th Congress of the
United States.
CHAPTER IV.
THE EMPIRE STATE.
AT the far southeast of New York City, where the
Hudson and East River meet to form the inner bay,
is an ill-kept park that might be made the loveliest
garden in the world. Nowhere do the features that
have caused New York to take rank as the first port
of America stand forth more clearly. The soft even-
ing breeze tells of a climate as good as the world can
show ; the setting sun floods with light a harbor secure
and vast, formed by the confluence of noble streams,
and girt with quays at which huge ships jostle; the
rows of 500-pounder Rodmans at "The Narrows" are
tokens of the nation's strength and wealth ; and the
yachts, as well handled as our own, racing into port
from an ocean regatta, give evidence that there are
Saxons in the land. At the back is the city, teeming
with life, humming with trade, muttering with the
thunder of passage. Opposite, in Jersey City, people
say : " Every New Yorker has come a good half-hour
late into the world, and is trying all his life to make it
up." The bustle is immense.
All is so un-English, so foreign, that hearing men
34 GREATER BRITAIN.
speaking what Czar Nicholas was used to call "the
American tongue," I wheel round, crying "Dear
me! if here are not some English folk!" astonished
as though I had heard French in Australia or Italian
in Timbuctoo.
The Englishman who, coming to America, expects
to find cities that smell of home, soon learns that
Baker Street itself, or Portland Place, would not look
English in the dry air of a continent four thousand
miles across. New York, however, is still less English
than is Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago her people
are as little Saxon as her streets. Once Southern,
with the brand of slavery deeply printed in the fore-
heads of her foremost men, since the defeat of the re-
bellion New York has to the eye been cosmopolitan as
any city of the Levant. All nationless towns are not
alike: Alexandria has a Greek or an Italian tinge;
San Francisco an English tone, with something of the
heartiness of our Elizabethan times; New York has a
deep Latin shade, and the democracy of the Empire
State is of the French, not of the American or English
type.
At the back, here, on the city side, are tall gaunt
houses, painted red, like those of the quay at Dort or
of the Boompjes at Rotterdam, the former dwellings
of the "Knickerbockers" of New Amsterdam, the
founders of New York, but now forgotten. There
may be a few square yards of painting, red or blue,
upon the houses in Broadway; there may be here and
there a pagoda summer-house overhanging a canal;
once in a year you may run across a worthy descend-
ant of the old Netherlandish families; but in the main
the Hollanders in America are as though they had
neven been ; to find the memorials of lost Dutch em-
pire, we must search Cape Colony or Ceylon. The
THE EMPIRE STATE. 35
New York un-English tone is not Batavian. Neither
the sons of the men who once lived in these houses,
nor the Germans whose names are now upon the
doors, nor, for the matter of that, we English, who
claim New York as the second of our towns, are the
to-day's New Yorkeft.
Here, on the water's edge, is a rickety hall, where
Jenny Lind sang when first she landed now the spot
where strangers of another kind are welcomed to
America. Every true republican has in his heart the
notion that his country is pointed out by God for a re-
fuge for the distressed of all the nations. He has sprung
himself from men who came to seek a sanctuary
from the Quakers, or the Catholics, or the pilgrims of
the Mayflower. Even though they come to take the
bread from his mouth, or to destroy his peace, it is his
duty, he believes, to aid the immigrants. Within the
last twenty years there have landed at New York alone
four million strangers. Of these two-thirds were Irish.
While the Celtic men are pouring into New York
and Boston, the New Englanders and New Yorkers,
too, are moving. They are not dying. Facts are op-
posed to this portentous theory. They are going West.
The unrest of the Celt is mainly caused by discontent
with his country's present, that of the Saxon by hope
for his private future. The Irishman flies to New
York because it lies away from Ireland ; the English-
man takes it upon his road to California.
Where one race is dominant, immigrants of another
blood soon lose their nationality. In New York and
Boston the Irish continue to be Celts, for these are
Irish cities. In Pittsburg, in Chicago, still more in
the country districts, a few years make the veriest
Paddy English. On the other hand, the Saxons are
disappearing from the Atlantic cities, as the Spaniards
36 GREATER BRITAIN.
have gone from Mexico. The Irish here are beating
down the English, as the English have crushed out the
Dutch. The Hollander's descendants in New York
are English now; it bids fair that the Saxons should
be Irish.
As it is, though the Celtic irrftnigration has lasted
only twenty years, the results are already clear : if you
see a Saxon face upon the Broadway, you may be sure
it belongs to a traveler, or to some raw English lad
bound West, just landed from a Plymouth ship. We
need not lay much stress upon the fact that all New
Yorkers have black hair and beard: men may be
swarthy and yet English. The ancestors of the Lon-
doners of to-day, we are told, were yellow-headed roys-
terers ; yet not one man in fifty that you meet in Fleet
Street or on Tower Hill is as fair as the average Saxon
peasant. Doubtless, our English eastern counties were
peopled in the main by low-Dutch and Flemings : the
Sussex eyes and hair are rarely seen in Suffolk. The
Puritans of New England are sprung from those of
the " associated counties," but the victors of Marston
Moor may have been cousins to those no less sturdy
Protestants, the Hollanders who defended Ley den. It
may be that they were our ancestors, those Dutchmen
that we English crowded out of New Amsterdam the
very place where we are sharing the fate we dealt.
The fiery temper of the new people of the American
coast towns, their impatience of free government, are
better proofs of Celtic blood than are the color of their
eyes and beard.
Year by year the towns grow more and more in-
tensely Irish. Already of every four births in Boston,
one only is American. There are 120,000 foreign to
70,000 native voters in New York and Brooklyn.
Montreal and Richmond are fast becoming Celtic;
THE EMPIRE STATE. 37
Philadelphia shades of Perm! can only be saved by
the aid of its Bavarians. Saxon Protestantism is de-
parting with the Saxons: the revenues of the Empire
State are spent upon Catholic asylums; plots of city
land are sold at nominal rates for the sites of Catholic
cathedrals, by the " city step-fathers," as they are called.
Not even in the West does the Latin Church gain
ground more rapidly than in New York City : there
are 80,000 professing Catholics in Boston.
When is this drama, of which the first scene is played
in Castle Garden, to have its close? The matter is
grave enough already. Ten years ago, the third and
fourth cities of the world, New York and Philadelphia,
were as English as our London: the one is Irish now;
the other all but German. Not that the Quaker City
will remain Teutonic: the Germans, too, are going
out upon the land ; the Irish alone pour in unceasingly.
All great American towns will soon be Celtic, while
the country continues English: a fierce and easily-
roused people will throng the cities, while the law-
abiding Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it.
Our relations with America are matters of small mo-
ment by the side of the one great question : Who are
the Americans to be ?
Our kinsmen are by no means blind to the dangers
that hang over them. The "Know-Nothing" move-
ment failed, but Protection speaks the same voice in
its opposition to commercial centers. If you ask a
Western man why he, whose interest is clearly in Free
Trade, should advocate Protection, he fires out : "Free
Trade is good for our American pockets, but it's death
to us Americans. All your Bastiats and Mills won't
touch the fact that to us Free Trade must mean salt-
water despotism, and the ascendency of New York and
Boston. Which is better for the country one New
4
38 GREATER BRITAIN.
York, or ten contented Pittsburgs and ten industrious
Lowells?"
The danger to our race and to the world from Irish
ascendency is perhaps less imminent than that to the
republic. In January, 1862, the mayor, Fernando
"Wood, the elect of the " Mozart" Democracy, deliber-
ately proposed the secession from the Union of New
York City. Of all the Northern States, New York
alone was a dead weight upon the loyal people during
the war of the rebellion. The constituents of Wood
were the very Fenians whom in our ignorance we call
"American." It is America that Fenianism invades
from Ireland not England from America.
It is no unfair attack upon the Irish to represent
them as somewhat dangerous inhabitants for mighty
cities. Of the sixty thousand persons arrested yearly
in New York, three-fourths are alien born : two-thirds
of these are Irish. Nowhere else in all America are
the Celts at present masters of a city government
nowhere is there such corruption. The purity of the
government of Melbourne a city more democratic
than New York proves that the fault does not lie in
democracy: it is the universal opinion of Americans
that the Irish are alone responsible.
The State legislature is falling into the hands of the
men who control the city council. They tell a story
of a traveler on the Hudson River Railroad, who, as
the train neared Albany the capital of New York
said to a somewhat gloomy neighbor, " Going to the
State legislatur' ?" getting for answer, "No, sir! It's
not come to that with me yet. Only to the State
prison !"
Americans are never slow to ridicule the denational-
ization of New York. They tell you that during the
war the colonel of one of the city regiments said : " I've
THE EMPIRE STATE. 39
the best blood of eight nations in the ranks." " How's
that?" "I've English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch, French,
Italians, Germans." "Guess that's only seven."
" Swedes," suggested some one. " No, no Swedes,"
said the colonel. "Ah! I have it: I've some Ameri-
cans." Stories such as this the rich New Yorkers are
nothing loth to tell ; but they take no steps to check
the denationalization they lament. Instead of enter-
ing upon a reform of their municipal institutions, they
affect to despise free government; instead of giving,
as the oldest New England families have done, their
tone to the State schools, they keep entirely aloof from
school and State alike. Sending their boys to Cam-
bridge, Berlin, Heidelberg, anywhere rather than to
the colleges of their native land, they leave it to
learned pious Boston to supply the West with teach-
ers, and to keep up Yale and Harvard. Indignant if
they are pointed at as "no Americans," they seem
to separate themselves from everything that is Amer-
ican : they spend summers in England, winters in
Algeria, springs in Rome, and Coloradans say with a
sneer, " Good New Yorkers go to Paris when they die."
Apart from nationality, there is danger to free
government both in the growth of New York City,
and in the gigantic fortunes of New Yorkers. The
income, they tell me, of one of my merchant friends
is larger than the combined salaries of the president,
the governors, and the whole of the members of the
legislatures of all the forty-live States and territories.
As my informant said, " He could keep the govern-
ments of half a dozen States as easily as I can support
my half dozen children."
There is something, no doubt, of the exaggeration
of political jealousy about the accounts of New
York vice given in New England and down South,
40 GREATER BRITAIN.
in the shape of terrible philippics. It is to be hoped
that the overstatement is enormous, for sober men
are to be found even in New York who will tell you
that this city outdoes Paris in every form of profligacy
as completely as the French capital outherods imperial
Rome. There is here no concealment about the mat-
ter ; each inhabitant at once admits the truth of accu-
sations directed against his neighbor. If the new
men, the "petroleum aristocracy," are second to none
in their denunciations of the Irish, these in their turn
unite with the oldest families in thundering against
" Shoddy."
New York life shows but badly in the summer-time ;
it is seen at its worst when studied at Saratoga. With
ourselves, men have hardly ceased to run from business
and pleasures worse than toil to the comparative quiet
of the country house. Among New Yorkers there is
not even the affectation of a search for rest ; the flight
is from the drives and restaurants of New York to the
gambling halls of Saratoga; from winning piles of
greenbacks to losing heaps of gold ; from cotton gam-
bling to roulette or faro. Long Branch is still more
vulgar in its vice; it is the Margate, Saratoga the
Homburg of America.
"Shoddy" is blamed beyond what it deserves when
the follies of New York society are laid in a body at
its door. If it be true that the New York drawing-
rooms are the best guarded in the world, it is also true
that entrance is denied as rigidly to intellect and emi-
nence as to wealth. If exclusiveness be needed, af-
fectation can at least do nothing toward subduing
''Shoddy." Mere cliqueism, disgusting everywhere,
is ridiculous in a democratic town ; its rules of con-
duct are as out of place as kid gloves in the New Zea-
land bush, or gold scabbards on a battle-field.
THE EMPIRE STATE. 41
Good meat, and drink, and air, give strength to the
men and beauty to the women of a moneyed class ;
but in America these things are the inheritance of
every boy and girl, and give their owners no advant-
age in the world. During the rebellion, the ablest
generals and bravest soldiers of the North sprang, not
from the merchant families, but from the farmer folk.
Without special merit of some kind, there can be no
such thing as aristocracy.
Many American men and women, who have too
little nobility of soul to be patriots, and too little un-
derstanding to see that theirs is already, in many points,
the master country of the globe, come to you, and be-
wail the fate which has caused them to be born citi-
zens of a republic, and dwellers in a country where
men call vices by their names. The least educated of
their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar class that
America brings forth, they fly to Europe u to escape
democracy/' and pass their lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice,
living libels on the country they are believed to repre-
sent.
Out of these discordant elements, Cubans, Knicker-
bockers, Germans, Irish, "first families," "Petroleum,"
and "Shoddy," we are forced to construct our compo-
site idea New York. The Irish numerically predom-
inate, but we have no experience as to what should be
the moral features of an Irish city, for Dublin has al-
ways been in English hands; possibly that which in
New York appears to be cosmopolitan is merely Celtic.
However it may be, this much is clear, that the hum-
blest township of New England reflects more truly the
America of the past, the most chaotic village of Ne-
braska portrays more fully the hopes and tendencies
of the America of the future, than do this huge State
and city.
4*
42 GREATER BRITAIN.
If the political figure of New York is not encourag-
ing, its natural beauty is singularly great. Those who
say that America has no scenery, forget the Hudson,
while they can never have explored Lake George,
Lake Champlain, and the Mohawk. That Poole's ex-
quisite scene from the "Decameron," "Philomela's
Song," could have been realized on earth, I never
dreamt until I saw the singers at a New Yorker's villa
on the Hudson grouped in the deep shades of a glen,
from which there was an outlook upon the basaltic
palisades and lake-like Tappan Zee. It was in some
such spot that De Tocqueville wrote the brightest of
his brilliant letters that dated "Sing Sing" for he
speaks of himself as lying on a hill that overhung the
Hudson, watching the white sails gleaming in the hot
sun, and trying in vain to fancy what became of the
river where it disappeared in the blue "Highlands."
That New York City itself is full of beauty the view
from Castle Garden would suffice to show; and by
night it is not less lovely than by day. The harbor
is illuminated by the colored lanterns of a thousand
boats, and the steam-whistles tell of a life that never
sleeps. The paddles of the steamers seem not only to
beat the water, but to stir the languid air and so pro-
voke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and
"Wall Street ferries burn so brightly that in the warm
glare the eye reaches through the still night to the
feathery acacias in the streets of Brooklyn. The view
is as southern as the people : we have not yet found
America.
CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 43
CHAPTER V.
CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT.
" OLD CAMBRIDGE ! Long may she flourish !" pro-
posed by a professor in the University of Cambridge,
in America, and drunk standing, with three cheers,
by the graduates and undergraduates of Harvard, is a
toast that sets one thinking.
Cambridge in America is not by any means a uni-
versity of to-day. Harvard College, which, being the
only "house," has engrossed the privileges, funds, and
titles of the university, was founded at Cambridge,
Mass., in 1636, only ninety years later than the great-
est and wealthiest college of our Cambridge in old
England. Puritan Harvard was the sister rather than
the daughter of our own Puritan Emmanuel. Har-
vard himself, and Dunster, the first president of Har-
vard's College, were among the earliest of the scholars
of Emmanuel.
A toast from the Cambridge of new to the Cam-
bridge of old England is one from younger to elder
sister ; and Dr. Wendell Holmes, " The Autocrat,"
said as much in proposing it at the Harvard alumni
celebration of 1866.
Like other old institutions, Harvard needs a ten-
days' revolution : academic abuses flourish as luxu-
riantly upon American as on English soil, and univer-
sity difficulties are much the same in either country.
Here, as at home, the complaint is that the men come
up to the university untaught. To all of them their
college is forced for a time to play the high-school ; to
some she is never anything more than school. At Har-
44 GREATER BRITAIN.
vard this is worse than with ourselves : the average age
of entry, though of late much risen, is still considerably
under eighteen.
The college is now aiming at raising gradually the
standard of entry: when once all are excluded save
men, and thinking men, real students, sueh as those
by whom some of the new Western universities are
attended, then Harvard hopes to leave drill-teaching
entirely to the schools, and to permit the widest free-
dom in the choice of studies to her students.
Harvard is not blameless in this matter. Like other
universities, she is conservative of bad things as well
as good; indeed, ten minutes within her walls would
suffice to convince even an Englishman that Harvard
clings to the times before the Revolution.
Her conservatism is shown in many trivial things
in the dress of her janitors and porters, in the cut of
the grass-plots and college gates, in the conduct of the
Commencement orations in the chapel. For the dainty
little dames from Boston who came to hear their friends
and brothers recite their disquisitions none but Latin
programmes were provided, and the poor ladies were
condemned to find such names as Bush, Maurice, Ben-
jamin, Humphrey, and Underwood among the gradu-
ating youths, distorted into Bvsh, Mavritivs, Beniamin,
Hvmphredvs, Vnderwood.
This conservatism of the New England universities
had just received a sharp attack. In the Commence-
ment oration, Dr. Hedges, one of the leaders of the
Unitarian Church, had strongly pressed the necessity
for a complete freedom of study after entry, a liberty
to take up what line the student would, to be examined
and to graduate in what he chose. He had instanced
the success of Michigan University consequent upon
the adoption of this plan ; he had pointed to the fact
CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 45
that of all the universities in America, Michigan alone
drew her students from every State. President Hill
and ex-President Walker had indorsed his views.
There is a special fitness in the reformers coming
forward at this time. This year is the~commencement
of a new era at Harvard, for at the request of the col-
lege staff, the connection of the university with the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts has just been dis-
solved, and the members of the -board of overseers are
in future to be elected by the- university, instead of
being nominated by the State. This being so, the
question had been raised as to whether the governor
would come in state to Commencement, but he yielded
to the wishes of the graduates, and came with the
traditional pomp, attended by a staff in uniform, and
escorted by a troop of Volunteer Lancers, whose scarlet
coats and polish recalled the times before the Revo-
lution.
While the ceremony was still in progress, I had
been introduced to several of the foremost rowing
men among the younger graduates of Harvard, and
at its conclusion I accompanied them to their river.
They were in strict training for their university race
with Yale, which was to come oft' in a week, and as
Cambridge had been beaten twice running, and this
year had a better crew, they were wishful for criticisms
on their style. Such an opinion as a stranger could
offer was soon given : they were dashing, fast, long in
their stroke; strong, considering their light weights,
but terribly overworked. They have taken for a rule
the old Englph notions as to training which have long
since disappeared at home, and, looked upon as fa-
natics by their friends and tutors, they have all the
fanatic's excess of zeal.
Rowing and other athletics, with the exceptions of
46 GREATER BRITAIN.
skating and base ball, are both neglected and despised
in America. When the smallest sign of a reaction
appears in the New England colleges, there comes at
once a cry from Boston that brains are being post-
poned to brawn. If New Englanders would look
about them, they would see that their climate has of
itself developed brains at the expense of brawn, and
that if national degeneracy is to be long prevented,
brawn must in some way be fostered. The high
shoulder, head-voice, -and pallor of the Boston men
are not incompatible with the possession of the most
powerful brain, the keenest wit; but it is not probable
that energy and talent will be continued in future
generations sprung from the worn-out men and women
of to-aay.
The prospect at present is not bright ; year by year
Americans grow thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived.
^Elian's Americans, we may remember, though they
were greatly superior to the Greeks in stature, were
inferior to them in length of life. The women show
even greater signs of weakness than the men, and the
high, undulating tones which are affectation in the
French, are natural to the ladies of America; little can
be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive
dancing in overheated rooms.
The American summer, often tropical in its heat,
has much to answer for, but it is the winter which
makes the saddest havoc among the younger people,
and the boys and girls at school. Cooped up all day
in the close air of the heated school-house, th poor
children are at night made to run straight back to the
furnace-dried atmosphere of home. The thermometer
is commonly raised indoors to eighty or ninety degrees
Fahr. The child is not only baked into paleness and
sweated bit by bit to its death, but fed meantime, out
CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 47
of mistaken kindness, upon the most indigestible of
dainties pastry, hot dough-nuts, and sweetmeats
taking the place of bread, and milk, and meat and
is not allowed to take the slightest exercise, except its
daily run to school-house. Who can wonder that spinal
diseases should prevail ?
One reason why Americans are pale and agueish is
that, as a people, they are hewers of primeval forest
and tillers of virgin soil. These are the unhealthiest
employments in the world ; the sun darts down-upon
the hitherto unreached mould, and sets free malarious
gases, against which the new settlers have no an-
tidotes.
The rowing men of Harvard tell me that their clubs
are still looked on somewhat coldly by the majority of
the professors, who obstinately refuse to see that im-
proved physical type is not an end, but a means, to-
ward improvement of the mental faculties, if not in
the present, at least in the next generation. As for
the moral training in the virtues of obedience and
command, for which a boat's crew is the best of
schools, that is not yet understood at Harvard, where
rowing is confined to the half dozen men who are to
represent the college in the annual race, and the three
or four more who are being trained to succeed them
in the crew. Rowing in America is what it was till
ten years since at old Cambridge, and is still at Ox-
ford not an exercise for the majority of the students,
but a pursuit for a small number. Physical culture
is, however, said to be making some small progress in
the older Statef , and I myself saw signs of the tendency
in Philadelphia. The war has done some good in this
respect, and so has the influx of Canadians to Chicago.
Cricket is still almost an unknown thing, except in
some few cities. When I was coming in to Baltimore
48 GREATER BRITAIN.
by train, we passed a meadow in which a match was
being played. A Southerner to whom I was talking
at the time, looked at the players, and said with sur-
prise: "Reckon they've got a wounded man ther',
front o' them sticks, sah." I found that he meant the
batsman, who was wearing pads.
One of the most brilliant of Harvard's thinkers has
taken to carpentrying as a relief to his mental toil;
her most famed professor is often to be found working
in his garden or his farm ; but such change of work
for work is possible only to certain men. The gener-
ality of Americans need not only exercise, but relaxa-
tion; still, with less physical, they possess greater
mental vitality then ourselves.
On the day that follows Commencement the chief
ceremony of the academic year is held once in three
summers the "Alumni Celebration," or meeting of the
past graduates of Harvard a touching gathering at all
times, but peculiarly so in these times that follow on
the losses of the war. lV
The American college informal organizations rest
upon the unit of the "class." The "class" is what at
Cambridge is called "men of the same year," men
who enter together and graduate together at the end
of the regular course. Each class of a large New Eng-
land college, such as Harvard, will often possess an as-
sociation of its own; its members will dine together
once in five years, or ten men returning from Europe
and from the far West to be present at the gathering.
Harvard is strong in the affections of the New
England people her faults are theirs j* they love her
for them, and keep her advantages to themselves, for
in the whole list of graduates for this year I could
find only two Irish names.
Here, at the Alumni Celebration, a procession was
CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 49
marshaled in the library in which the order was by
classes; the oldest class of which there were living
members being called the first. " Class of 1797 !" and
two old white-haired gentlemen tottered from the
crowd, and started on their march down the central
aisle, and out bareheaded into the blaze of one of the
hottest days that America had ever known. "Class
of 1800!" missing two years, in which all the gradu-
ates were dead ; and out came one, the sole survivor.
Then came "1803," and so onj to the stalwart com-
pany of the present year. When the classes of 1859
and 1860, and of the war-years were called, those who
marched out showed many an empty sleeve.
The present triennial celebration is noteworthy not
only for the efforts of the university reformers, but
also for the foundation of the Memorial Hall, dedicated
as a monument to those sons of Harvard who fell while
serving their country in the suppression of the late re-
bellion. The purity of their patriotism hardly needed
illustration by the fire of young Everett, or the graceful
speech of Dr. Holmes. Even the splendid oratory of
Governor Bullock could do little more than force us
to read for ourselves the Roll of Honor, and see how
many of Harvard's most distinguished younger men
died for their country as privates of Massachusetts
Volunteers.
There was a time, as England knows, when the
thinking men of Boston, and the Cambridge profes-
sors, Emerson, Russell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen
more of almost equal fame, morally seceded from their
country's councils, and were followed in their seces-
sion by the younger men. " The best men in America
stand aloof from politics," it was said.
The country from which these men seceded was not
the America of to-day : it was the Union which South
5
50 GREATER BRITAIN.
Carolina ruled. From it the Cambridge professors
"came out," not because they feared to vex their
nerves with the shock of public argument and action,
but because the course of the slaveholders was not
their course. Hating the wrongs they saw but could
not remedy, they separated themselves from the wrong-
doers ; another matter, this, from the " hating hatred"
of our culture class in England.
In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When
America was first brought to see the things that had
been done in her name, and at her cost, and, rising in
her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest blow
for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had
been urging on the movement from without at once
re-entered the national ranks, and marched to victory.
Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agassiz,
and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war.
From Oberlin almost every male student and professor
marched, and the university teaching was left in the
women's hands. Out of 8000 school-teachers in Penn-
sylvania, of whom 800 alone were drafted, 3000 volun-
teered for the war. Everywhere the teachers and their
students were foremost among the Volunteers, and from
that time forward America and her thinkers were at one.
The fierce passions of this day of wakening have
not been suffered to disturb the quiet of the academic
town. Our English universities have not about them
the classic repose, the air of study, that belong to Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts. Those who have seen the
lanes of Leyden, and compared them with the noisy
Oxford High Street, will understand what I mean
when I say that our Cambridge comes nearest to her
daughter-town ; but even the English Cambridge has
a' bustling street or two, and a weekly market-day,
while Cambridge in New England is one great aca-
CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 51
demic grove, buried in a philosophic calm which our
university towns can never rival so long as men resort
to them for other purposes than work.
It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the old-
ness of New England is to be remarked. Although
her people are everywhere in the vanguard of all pro-
gress, their country has a look of gable-ends and
steeple-hats, while their laws seem fresh from the
hands of Alfred. In all England there is no city which
has suburbs so gray and venerable as are the elm-
shaded towns round Boston : Dorchester, Chelsea, Na-
hant, and Salem, each seems more ancient than its fel-
low; the people speak the English of Elizabeth, and
joke about us, " speaks good English for an Eng-
lishman."
In the country districts, the winsome villages that
nestle in the dells seem to have been there for ten cen-
turies at least; and it gives one a shock to light on
such a spot as Bloody Brook, and to be told that only
one hundred and ninety years ago Captain Lathrop was
slain there by Red Indians, with eighty youths, "the
flower of Essex County," as the Puritan history says.
The warnings of Dr. Hedges, in reference to the
strides of Michigan, have taken the New Englanders
by surprise. Secure, as they believed, in their intel-
lectual supremacy, they forgot that in a Federal Union
the moral and physical primacy will generally both
reside in the same State. The Commonwealth of Mas-
sachusetts, at one time the foremost upholder of the
doctrine .of State rights, will soon be seen once more
acting as its champion this time on behalf of herself
and her five sister States.
Were the six New England Commonwealths grouped
together in a single State, it would still have only three-
fourths of the population of New York, and about an
52 GREATER BRITAIN.
equal number of inhabitants with Pennsylvania. The
State of Rhode Island is one-fourth the size of many a
single Californian county. Such facts as these will
not be long lost sight of in the West, and when a
divergence of interests springs up, Ohio will not suffer
her voice in the Senate to continue to be neutralized
by that of Connecticut or Rhode Island. Even if the
Senate be allowed to remain untouched, it is certain
that the redistribution of seats consequent upon the
census of 1870 will completely transfer political power
to the central States. That Few England will by this
change inevitably lose her hold upon the destinies of
the whole Union is not so clear. The influence for
good of New England upon the West has been chiefly
seminal ; but not for that the less enormous. Go into
a State such as Michigan, where half the people are
immigrants where, of the remaining moiety, the
greater part are born Westerners, and apparently in
no way of New England and you will find that the
inhabitants are for the most part earnest, God-fearing
men, with a New England tone of profound manliness
and conviction running through everything they say
and do. The colleges in which they have been reared
are directed, you will find, by New England professors,
men trained in the classic schools of Harvard, Yale,
or Amherst ; the ministers under whom they sit are,
for the most part, Boston men ; the books they read
are of New England, or old English of the class from
which the writers of the Puritan States themselves
have drawn their inspiration. To New England is
chiefly due, in short, the making of America a godly
nation.
It is something in this age to come across a people
who believe strongly in anything, and consistently act
upon their beliefs: the New Englanders are such a
CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 53
race. Thoroughly God-fearing States are not so com-
mon that we can afford to despise them when found;
and nowhere does religion enter more into daily life
than in Vermont or Massachusetts.
The States of the Union owe so huge a debt of grat-
itude to New England, that on this score alone they
may refrain from touching her with sacrilegious hands.
Not to name her previous sacrifices, the single little
State of Massachusetts one-fourth the size of Scot-
land, and but half as populous as Paris sent during
the rebellion a hundred and fifty regiments to the
field.
It was to Boston that Lincoln telegraphed when, in
1861, at a minute's notice, he needed men for the de-
fense of Washington. So entirely were Southerners
of the opinion that the New Englanders were the true
supporters of the old flag, that " Yankee" became a
general term for loyalists of any State. America can
never forget the steady heroism of New England
during the great struggle for national existence.
The unity that has been the chief cause of the
strength of the New England influence is in some
measure sprung from the fact that these six States are
completely shut off from all America by the single
State of New York, alien from them in political and
moral life. Every Yankee feels his country bounded
by the British, the Irish, and the sea.
In addition to the homogeneousness of isolation, the
New Englanders, like the Northern Scotch, have the
advantages of a bad climate and a miserable soil.
These have been the true agents in the development
of the energy, the skill, and fortitude of the Yankee
people. In the war, for instance, it was plain that the
children of the poor and rugged Northeastern States
were not the men to be beaten by the lotus-eaters of
5*
54 GREATER BRITAIN.
Louisiana when they were doing battle for what they
believed to be a righteous cause.
One effect of the poverty of soil with which New
England is afflicted has been that her sons have wan-
dered from end to end of the known world, engaging '
in every trade, and succeeding in all. Sometimes there
is in their migrations a religious side. Mormonism,
although it now draws its forces from Great Britain,
was founded in New England. At Brindisi, on my
way home, I met three Yankees returning from a
Maine colony lately founded at Jaffa, in expectation of
the fulfillment of prophecy, and destruction of the Mo-
hammedan rule. For the moment they are intriguing
for a firman from the very government upon the com-
ing fall of which all their expectations have been based ;
and these fierce fanatics are making money by man-
aging a hotel. One of them told me that the Jaffa
colony is a " religio-commercial speculation."
New England Yankees are not always so filled with
the Puritan spirit as to reject unlawful means of
money-making. Even the Massachusetts common
schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out
their black sheep into the world. At Center Harbor,
in New Hampshire, I met with an example of the
"Yankee spawn" in a Maine man a shrewd, sailor-
looking fellow. He was sitting next me at the ordi-
nary, and asked me to take a glass of his champagne.
I declined, but chatted, and let out that I was a Brit-
isher.
"I was subject to your government once for sixteen
months," my neighbor said.
"Really! Where?"
" Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner there. And very
lucky, too."
"Why so?" I asked.
CANADA. 55
"Because, if the American government had caught
me, they would have hanged me for a pirate. But /
wasn't a pirate."
With over -great energy I struck in, "Of course
not."
My Neighbor. "No; I was a slaver."
Idling among the hills of New Hampshire and the
lakes of Maine, it is impossible for a stranger, starting
free from prejudice, not to end by loving the pious
people of New England, for he will see that there
could be no severer blow to the cause of freedom
throughout the world than the loss by them of an
influence upon American life and thought, which has
been one of unmixed good. Still, New England is
not America.
CHAPTER VI.
CANADA.
THERE is not in the world a nobler outlook than
that from oft' the terrace at Quebec. You stand upon
a rock overhanging city and river, and look down
upon the guardship's masts. Acre upon acre of tim-
ber comes floating down the stream above the city, the
Canadian songs just reaching you upon the heights;
and beneath you are fleets of great ships, English,
German, French, and Dutch, embarking the timber
from the floating-docks. The Stars and Stripes are
nowhere to be seen. Such are the distances in North
America, that here, farther from the sea than is any
56 GREATER BRITAIN.
city in Europe west of Moscow, we have a seaport
town, with gunboats and three-decker; morning and
evening guns, and bars of " God save the Queen," to
mark the opening and closing of the port.
The St. Lawrence' runs in a chasm in a flat table-
land, through which some earlier Niagara seems to
have cut for it a way. Some of the tributaries are
in sight, all falling from a cliff into the deep still
river. In the distance, seaward, a silver ribbon on
the rock represents the grand falls of Montmorenci.
Long villages of white tiny cots straggle along the
roads that radiate from the city; the great black
cross of the French parish church showing reverently
from all.
On the north, the eye reaches to the rugged outlines
of the Laurentian range, composed of the oldest mount-
ains in the world, at the foot of which is Lake St.
Charles, full of fiord-like northern beauty, where at a
later time I learnt to paddle the Indian canoe of birch
bark.
Leaving the citadel, we are at once in the European
middle ages. Gates and posterns, cranky steps that
lead up to lofty gabled houses, with sharp French roofs
of burnished tin, like those of Liege; processions of
the Host; altars decked with flowers; statues of the
Virgin ; sabots ; blouses ; and the scarlet of the Brit-
ish linesman, all these are seen in narrow streets and
rnarkets, that are graced with many a Cotentin lace
cap, and all within forty miles of the down-east Yan-
kee State of Maine. It is not far from New England
to old France.
Quebec Lower Town is very like St. Peter Port in
Guernsey. Norman- French inhabitants, guarded by
British troops, step-built streets, thronged fruit-market,
and citadel upon a rock, frowning down upon the
CANADA. 57
are alike in each. A slight knowledge of the Upper
Normandy patois is not without its use; it procured
me an offer of a pinch of snuff from an old habitante on
board one of the river boats. Her gesture was worthy
of the ancien regime.
There has been no dying-out of the race among the
French Canadians. They number twenty times the
thousands that they did a hundred years ago. The
American soil has left their physical type, religion,
language, laws, and habits absolutely untouched.
They herd together in their rambling villages, dance
to the fiddle, after mass on Sundays, as gayly as once
did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lys
and the memory of Montcalm. More French than the
French are the Lower Canadian habitants.
Not only here, but everywhere, a French " depend-
ency" is France transported; not a double of the
France of to-day, but a mummy of the France of the
time of the "colony's" foundation. In Saigon, you
find Imperial France; here the France of Louis Qua-
torze. The Englishman founds everywhere a New
England new in thought as in soil ; the Frenchman
carries with him to California, to Japan, an undying
recollection of the Palais Royal. In San Francisco
there lives a great French capitalist, who, since 1849,
has been the originator of every successful Californian
speculation. He cannot speak a word of English, and
his greatest pleasure, in a country of fruits and wine',
is to bid his old French servant assure him, upon honor,
that his whole dessert, from his claret to his olives, bas
been brought for him from France. There is much in
the colonizing instinct of our race, but something, per-
haps, in the consideration that the English are hardly
happy enough at home to be always looking back to
what they have left in the old country.
58 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
There is about this old France something of Dutch
sleepiness and content. There is, indeed, some bustle
in the market-place, where the grand old dames, in
snowy caps, sit selling plums and pears; there is much
singing made over the lading of the timber-ships;
there are rafts in hundreds gliding down the river;
old French carts in dozens, creaking and wheezing on
their lumbering way to town, with much clacking of
whips and clappering of wooden shoes. All these
things there are, but then there are these and more in
Dol, and Quimper, and Morlaix in all those towns
which in Europe come nearest to old France. There
is quiet bustle, subdued trade, prosperity deep, not
noisy; but the life is sleepy; the rafts float, and are
not tugged nor rowed ; the old Norman horses seem
to draw the still older carts without an effort, and the
very boys wear noisy shoes against their will, and
make a clatter simply because they cannot help it.
In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British
troops are here employed as guardians of the only
true French colony in the world against the inroads of
the English race. u Nos institutions, notre langue,
nos lois," is the motto of the habitants. Their news-
papers are filled with church celebrations, village fetes,
speeches of "M. le Cure"' at the harvest-home, an-
nouncements by the "scherif," speech of M. Cartier
at the consecration of Mooseigneur Laroque, blessings
Of bells, of ships; but of life, nothing of mention of
what is passing in America, not a word. One corner
is given to the world outside America: "Emprunt
Pontifical, Emission Ame'ricaine, quatre millions de
piastres," heads a solid column of holy finance. The
pulse-beat of the continent finds no echo here.
It is not only in political affairs that there is a want
of energy in French or Lower Canada; in journeying
CANADA. 59
from Portland to Quebec, the moment the frontier was
passed, we seemed to have come from a land of life to
one of death. No more bustling villages, no more
keen-eyed farmers : a fog of unenterprise hung over
the land ; roads were wanting, houses rude, swamps
undrained, fields unweeded, plains' untilled.
If the Eastern Townships and country round Quebec
are a wilderness, they are not a desert. The country
on the Saguenay is both. At Quebec in summer it is
hot mosquitoes are not unknown : even at Tadousac,
where the Saguenay flows into the St. Lawrence, there
is sunlight as strong as that of Paris. Once in the
northern river, all is cold, gloomy, arctic no house,
no boat, no sign of man's existence, no beasts, no
birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with duck
and loons. The river is a straight, cold, black fiord,
walled in by tremendous cliffs, which go sheer down
into depths to which their height above water is as
nothing ; two walls of rock, and a path of ice-cold,
inky water. Fish there are, seal and salmon that is
all. The " whales and porpoises," which are advertised
by the Tadousac folks as certain to " disport them-
selves daily in front of the hotel," are never to be seen
in this earth-crack of the Saguenay.
The cold, for summer, was intense; nowhere in the
world does the limit of ever-frozen ground come so
far south as in the longitude of the Saguenay. At
night we had a wonderful display of northern lights.
A white column, towering to the mid-skies, rose, died
away, and was succeeded by broad white clouds,
stretching from east to west, and sending streamers
northward. Suddenly there shot up three fresh silvery
columns in the north, northwest, and northeast, on
which all the colors of the rainbow danced and played.
After moonrise, the whole seemed gradually to fade
away.
60 GREATER BRITAIN.
At Ha Ha Bay, the head of navigation, I found a
fur-buying station of the Hudson's Bay Company; but
that association has enough to answer for without
being charged with the desolation of the Saguenay.
The company has not here, as upon the Red River,
sacrificed colonists to minks and silver-foxes. There
is something more blighting than a monopoly that op-
presses Lower Canada. As I returned to Quebec, the
boat that I was aboard touched at St. Paschal, now
called Riviere du Loup, the St. Lawrence terminus of
the Grand Trunk line: we found there immense
wharves, and plenty of bells and crosses, but not a
single ship, great or small. Even in Virginia I had
seen nothing more disheartening.
North of the St. Lawrence religion is made to play
as active a part in politics as in the landscape. Lower
Canada, as we have seen, is French and Catholic ; Up-
per Canada is Scotch and Presbyterian, though the
Episcopalians are strong in wealth and the Irish Cath-
olics in numbers.
Had the Catholics been united, they might, since
the fusion of the two Canadas, have governed the
whole country: as it is, the Irish and French neither
worship nor vote together, and of late the Scotch have
had nearly their own way.
Finding themselves steadily losing ground, the
French threw in their lot with the scheme for the con-
federation of the provinces, and their clergy took up
the cause with a zeal which they justified to their flocks
by pointing out that the alternative was annexation
to America, and possible confiscation of the church
lands.
Confederation of the provinces means separation of
the Canadas, which regain each its Parliament ; and
the French Catholics begin to hope that the Irish of
CANADA. 61
Upper Canada, now that they are less completely over-
shaded by the more numerous French, will again act
with their co-religionists: the Catholic vote in the new
confederation will be nearly half the whole. In To-
ronto, however, the Fenians are strong, and even in
Montreal their presence is not unknown : it is a ques-
tion whether the whole of the Canadian Irish are not
disaffected. The Irish of the chief city have their
Irish priests, their cathedral of St. Patrick, while the
French have theirs upon the Place d'Armes. The
want of union may save the dominion from the estab-
lishment of Catholicism as a State Church.
The confederation of our provinces was necessary,
if British North America was to have a chance for
life ; but it cannot be said to be accomplished while
British Columbia and the Red River tract are not in-
cluded. To give Canada an outlet on one side is some-
thing, but communication with the Atlantic is a small
matter by the side of communication at once with At-
lantic and Pacific through British territory. We shall
soon have railways from Halifax to Lake Superior, and
thence to the Pacific is but 1600 miles. It is true that
the line is far north, and exposed to heavy snows and
bitter cold ; but, on the other hand, it is well supplied
with wood, and if it possess no such fertile tracts as
that of Kansas and Colorado, it at least escapes the
frightful wilds of Bitter Creek and Mirage Plains.
We are now even left in doubt how long we shall
continue to possess so much as a route across the con-
tinent on paper. Since the cession of Russian America
to the United States, a map of North America has
been published in which the name of the Great Re-
public sprawls across the continent from Behring's
Straits to Mexico, with the "E" in "United" omin-
ously near Vancouver's Island, and the "T" actually
6
62 GREATER BRITAIN.
planted upon British territory. If we take up the
British Columbian, we find the citizens of the mainland
portion of the province proposing to sell the island for
twenty million dollars to the States.
Settled chiefly by Americans from Oregon and Cali-
fornia, and situated, for purposes of reinforcement,
immigration, and supply, at a distance of not less than
twenty thousand miles from home, the British Pacific
colonies can hardly be considered strong in their al-
legiance to the crown: we have here the reductio ad
absurdum of home government.
Our hindering trade, by tolerating the presence of
two sets of custom-houses and two sets of coins be-
tween Halifax and Lake Superior, was less absurd
than our altogether preventing its extension now.
Under a so-called confederation of our American pos-
sessions, we have left a country the size of civilized
Europe, and nearly as large as the United States-
lying, too, upon the track of commerce and highroad
to China to be despotically governed by a company
of traders in skins and peltries, and to remain as long
as it so pleases them in the dead stillness and desertion
needed to insure the presence of fur-bearing beasts.
"Red River" should be a second Minnesota, Halifax
a second Liverpool, Esquimault a second San Fran-
cisco; but double government has done its work, and
the outposts of the line of trade are already in Amer-
ican, not British hands. The gold mines of Nova
Scotia, the coal mines and forests of British Columbia,
are owned in New England and New York, and the
Californians are expecting the proclamation of an
American territorial government in the capital of Van-
couver's Island.
As Montana becomes peopled up, we shall hear of
the "colonization" of Red River by citizens of the
CANADA. 63
United States, such as preceded the hoisting of the
" lone star" in Texas, and the " bear flag" in California,
by Fremont; and resistance by the Hudson's Bay Com-
pany will neither be possible, nor, in the interests of
civilization, desirable.
Even supposing a great popular awakening upon
colonial questions, and the destruction of the Hud-
son's Bay monopoly, we never could make the Cana-
dian dominion strong. With the addition of Columbia
and Red River, British America would hardly be as
powerful or populous as the two Northwestern States
of Ohio and Illinois, or the single State of New York
one out of for^ty-fi ve. " Help us for ten years, and
then we'll help ourselves," the Canadians say; "help
us to become ten millions, and then we will stand
alone;" but this becoming ten millions is not such an
easy thing.
The ideas of most of us as to the size of the British
territories are derived from maps of North America,
made upon Mercator's projection, which are grossly
out in high latitudes, though correct at the equator.
The Canadas are made to appear at least twice their
proper size, and such gigantic proportions are given
to the northern parts of the Hudson territory that we
are tempted to believe that in a country so vast there
must be some little value. The true size is no more
shown upon the map than is the nine-months' winter.
To Upper Canada, which is no bad country, it is
not for lack of asking that population fails to come.
Admirably executed gazettes give the fullest informa-
tion about the British possessions in the most glowing
of terms; offices and agencies are established in Liver-
pool, London, Cork, Londonderry, and a dozen other
cities; government immigration agents and informa-
tion offices are to be found in every town in Canada ;
64 GREATER BRITAIN.
the government immigrant is looked after in health,
comfort, and religion; directions of the fullest kind
are given him in the matters of money, clothes, tools,
luggage; Canada, he is told by the government papers,
possesses perfect religious, political, and social free-
dom; British subjects step at once into the possession
of political rights; the winter is but bracing, the cli-
mate the healthiest in the world. Millions of acres
of surveyed crown lands are continually in the market.
To one who knows what the northern forests are there
is perhaps something of satire in the statement that
"there is generally on crown lands an unlimited sup-
ply of the best fuel. " What of that, however ? The in-
tending immigrant knows nothing of the struggle with
the woods, and fuel is fuel in Old England. The mining
of the precious metals, the fisheries, petroleum, all are
open to the settler let him but come. Reading these
documents, we can only rub our eyes, and wonder how
it is that human selfishness allows the. Canadian of-
ficials to disclose the wonders of their El Dorado to
the outer world, and invite all men to share blessings
which we should have expected them to keep as a
close preserve for themselves and their nearest and
dearest friends. Taxation in the States, the immi-
grants are told, is five and a half times what it is in
Canada, two and a half times the English rate. La-
borers by the thousand, merchants and farmers by the
score, are said to be flocking into Canada to avoid the
taxation of the Radicals. The average duration of life
in Canada is 37 per cent, higher than in the States.
Yet, in the face of all these facts, only twenty or two
and twenty thousand immigrants come to Canada for
three hundred thousand that flock annually to the
States, and of the former many thousands do but pass
through on their way to the Great West. Of the
CANADA. 65
twenty thousand who land at Quebec in each year,
but four and a half thousand remain a year in Canada;
and there are a quarter of a million of persons born in
British America now naturalized in the United States.
The passage of the immigrants to the Western
States is not for want of warning. The Canadian
government advertise every Coloradan duel, every
lynching in Montana, every Opposition speech in Kan-
sas, by way of teaching the immigrants to respect the
country of which they are about to become free
citizens.
It is an unfortunate fact, that these strange state-
ments are not harmless not harmless to Canada, I
mean. The Provincial government by these publica-
tions seems to confess to the world that Canada can
live only by running down the great republic. Cana-
dian sympathy for the rebellion tends to make us think
that these northern statesmen must not only share in
our old-world confusion of the notions of right and
wrong, but must be sadly short-sighted into the bar-
gain. It is only by their position that they are blinded,
for few countries have abler men than Sir James Mac-
donald, or sounder statesmen than Cartier or Gait; but,
like men standing on the edge of a cliff, Canadian
statesmen are always wanting to jump off. Had Great
Britain left them to their own devices, we should have
had war with America in the spring of 1866.
The position of Canada is in many ways anomalous :
of the two chief sections of our race that in Britain
and that in America the latter is again split in twain,
and one division governed from across the Atlantic.
For such government there is no pretext, except the
wishes of the governed, who gain by the connection
men for their defense, and the opportunity of gratify-
ing their spite for their neighbors at our expense.
6*
66 GREATER BRITAIN.
Those who ask why a connection so one- sided, so op-
posed to the best interests of our race, should be suf-
fered to continue, are answered, now that the argument
of "prestige" is given up, that the Canadians are loyal,
and that they hate the Americans, to whom, were it
not for us, they must inevitably fall. That the Cana-
dians hate the Americans can be no reason why we
should spend blood and treasure in protecting them
against the consequences of their hate. The world
should have passed the time when local dislikes can be
suffered to affect our policy toward the other sections
of our race ; but even were it otherwise, it is hard to
see how twelve thousand British troops, or a royal
standard hoisted at Ottawa, can protect a frontier of
two thousand miles in length from a nation of five
and thirty millions. Canada, perhaps, can defend her-
self, but we most certainly cannot defend her; we pro-
voke much more than we assist.
As for Canadian "loyalty," it appears to consist
merely of hatred toward America, for while we were
fighting China and conquering Japan, that we might
spread free trade, our loyal colonists of Canada set
upon our goods protective duties of 20 per cent, which
they have now in some degree removed, only that
they may get into their hands the smuggling trade
carried on in breach of the laws of our ally, their
neighbor. We might, at least, fairly insist that the
connection should cease, unless Canada will entirely
remove her duties.
At bottom, it would seem as though no one gained
by the retention of our hold on Canada. Were she
independent, her borders would never again be wasted
by Fenian hordes, and she would escape the terrible
danger of being the battle-field in which European
quarrels are fought out. Canada once republican, the
CANADA. 67
Monroe doctrine would be satisfied, and its most vio-
lent partisans would cease to advocate the adoption of
other than moral means to merge her territories in the
Union. An independent Canada would not long delay
the railway across the continent to Puget Sound, which
a British bureau calls impossible. England would be
relieved from the fear of a certain defeat by America
in the event of war a fear always harmful, even when
war seems most unlikely ; relieved, too, from the cost
of such panics as those of 1861 and 1866.
Did Canada stand alone, no offense that she could
give America would be likely to unite all sections
of that country in an attempt to conquer her; while,
on the other hand, such an attempt would be resisted
to the death by an armed and brave people, four mil-
lions strong. As it is, any offense toward America
committed by our agents, at any place or time, or
arising out of the continual changes of policy and of
ministry in Great Britain, united to the standing
offense of maintaining the monarchical principle in
North America, will bring upon unhappy Canada the
whole American nation, indignant in some cause, just,
or seeming just, and to be met by a people deceived into
putting their trust in a few regiments of British troops,
sufficient at the most to hold Quebec, and to be backed
by reinforcements which could never come in time,
did public opinion in Great Britain so much as permit
their sailing. In all history there is nothing stranger
than the narrowness of mind that has led us to see in
Canada a piece of England, and in America a hostile
country. There are more sons of British subjects in
America than in Canada, by far; and the American
looks upon the old country with a pride that cannot
be shared by a man who looks to her to pay his soldiers.
The independence of Canada would put an imme-
68 GREATER BRITAIN.
diate end to much of the American jealousy of Great
Britain a consideration which of itself should out-
weigh any claim to protection which the Canadians
can have on us. The position which we have to set
before us in our external dealings is, that we are no
more fellow-countrymen of the Canadians than of the
Americans of the North or West.
The capital of the new dominion is to be Ottawa,
known as "Hole in the Woods" among the friends of
Toronto and Montreal, and once called Bytown. It
consists of the huge Parliament-house, the govern-
ment printing-office, some houseless wildernesses
meant for streets, and the hotel where the members
of the legislature "board." Such was the senatorial
throng at the moment of my visit, that we were thrust
into a detached building made of half-inch planks,
with wide openings between the boards ; and as the
French Canadian members were excited about the
resignation of Mr. Gait, indescribable chattering and
bawling filled the house.
The view from the Parliament-house is even more
thoroughly Canadian than that from the terrace at
Quebec a view of a land of rapids, of pine forests,
and of lumberers' homes, full of character, but some-
what bleak and dreary; even on the hottest summer's
day, it tells of winter storms past and to come. On
the far left are the island-filled reaches of the Upper
Ottawa; nearer, the roaring Chaudiere Falls, a mile
across a mile of walls of water, of sudden shoots, of
jets, of spray. From the "caldron" itself, into which
we can hardly see, rises a column of rainbow-tinted
mist, backed by distant ranges and black woods, now
fast falling before the settler's axe. Below you is the
river, swift, and covered with cream-like foam ; on the
right, a gorge the mouth of the Rideau Canal.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 69
When surveyed from the fittest points, the Chaudi-
re is but little behind Niagara; but it may be doubted
whether in any fall there is that which can be called
sublimity. Natural causes are too evident; water,
rushing to find its level, falls from a ledge of rock.
How different from a storm upon the coast, or from a
September sunset, where the natural causes are so re-
mote that you can bring yourself almost to see the im-
mediate hand of God ! It is excusable in Americans,
who have no sea-coast worthy of the name, to talk of
Niagara as the perfection of the sublime; but it is
strange that a people who have Birling Gap and Ban-
try Bay should allow themselves to be led by such a
cry.
Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached
by the great Chaudiere : the awesome slowness with
which the deep-green flood, in the center of the Horse-
shoe Fall, rolls rather than plunges into the gulf.
CHAPTER VII.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN.
FROM the gloom of Buffalo, the smoke of Cincinnati,
arid the dirt of Pittsburg, I should have been glad to
escape as soon as might be, even had not the death
from cholera of ( 240 persons in a single day of my
visit to the " Queen City" warned me to fly north.
From a stricken town, with its gutters full of chloride
of lime, and fires burning in the public streets, to
green Michigan, was a grateful change; but I was
full of sorrow at leaving that richest and most lovely
70 GREATER BRITAIN.
of all States Ohio. There is a charm in the park-like
beauty of the Mouongahela valley, dotted with vines
and orchards, that nothing in Eastern America can
rival. The absence at once of stumps in the corn-
fields, and of untilled or unfenced land, gives the
"Buckeye State" a look of age that none of the " old
Eastern States" can show. In corn, in meadow, in
timber-land, Ohio stands alone. Her indian-corn ex-
ceeds in richness that of any other State; she has
ample stores of iron, and coal is worked upon the
surface in every Alleghany valley. Wool, wine, hops,
tobacco, all are raised; her Catawba has inspired
poems. Every river-side is clothed with groves of
oak, of hickory, of sugar-maple, of sycamore, of poplar,
and of buckeye. Yet, as I said, the change to the
Michigan prairie was full of a delightful relief; it was
Holland after the Ehine, London after Paris.
Where men grow tall there will maize grow tall, is .
a good sound rule: limestone makes both bone and
straw. The Northwestern States, inhabited by giant
men, are the chosen home of the most useful and
beautiful of plants, the maize in America called
"corn." For hundreds of miles the railway track,
protected not even by a fence or hedge, runs through
the towering plants, which hide all prospects save that
of their own green pyramids. Maize feeds the people,
it feeds the cattle and the hogs that they export to feed
the cities of the East; from it is made yearly, as an
Ohio farmer told me, "whisky enough to float the
ark." Rice is not more the support of the Chinese
than maize of the English in America.
In the great corn-field of the Northwestern States,
dwells a people without a history, without tradition,
busy at hewing out of the forest trunks codes and
social usages of its own. The Kansas men have set
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 71
themselves to emancipating women ; the " Wolver-
ines," as the people of Michigan are called, have
turned their heads to education, and are teaching the
teachers upon this point.
The rapidity with which intellectual activity is
awakened in the West is inexplicable to the people
of New England. While you are admiring the laws
of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Boston men tell you
that the resemblance of the code of Kansas to that of
Connecticut is consequent only on the fact, that the
framers of the former possessed a copy of this one
New England code, while they had never set eyes
upon the code of any other country in the world.
While Yale and Harvard are trying in vain to keep
pace with the State universities of Michigan and
Kansas, you will meet in Lowell and New Haven
men who apply an old Russian story to the Western
colleges, and tell you that their professors of lan-
guages, when asked where they have studied, reply
that they guess they learned to read and write in
Springfield.
One of the difficulties of the New England colleges
has been to reconcile university traditions with demo-
cracy; but in the Western States there is neither re-
conciliation nor tradition, though universities are
plenty. Probably the most democratic school in the
whole world is the State University of Michigan, situ-
ate at Ann Arbor, near Detroit. It is cheap, large,
practical; twelve hundred students, paying only the
ten dollars entrance fee, and five dollars a year during
residence, and living where they can in the little town,
attend the university to be prepared to enter with
knowledge and resolution upon the affairs of their fu-
ture life. A few only are educated by having their
minds unfolded that they may become many-sided
72 GREATER BRITAIN.
men ; but all work with spirit, and with that earnest-
ness which is seen in the Scotch universities at home.
The war with crime, the war with sin, the war with
death Law, Theology, Medicine these are the three
foremost of man's employments ; to these, accordingly,
the university affords her chiefest care, and to one of
these the student, his entrance examination passed,
often gives his entire time.
These things are democratic, but it is not in them
that the essential democracy of the university is to be
seen. There are at Michigan no honor-lists, no classes
in our sense, no orders of merit, no competition. A
man takes, or does not take a certain degree. The
university is governed, not by its members, not by
its professors, but by a parliament of "regents" ap-
pointed by the inhabitants of the State. Such are the
two great principles of the democratic university of
the West.
It might be supposed that these two strange depart-
ures from the systems of older universities were irreg-
ularities, introduced to meet the temporary embar-
rassments incidental to educational establishments in
young States. So far is this from being the case that,
as I saw at Cambridge, the clearest-sighted men of the
older colleges of America are trying to assimilate their
teaching system to that of Michigan at least in the
one point of the absence of competition. They assert
that toil performed under the excitement of a fierce
struggle between man and man is unhealthy work,
different in nature and in results from the loving labor
of men whose hearts are really in what they do : toil, in
short, not very easily distinguishable from slave labor.
In the matter of the absence of competition, Michi-
gan is probably but returning to the system of the Euro-
pean universities of the Middle Ages, but the govern-
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 73
ment by other than the members of the university is
a still stranger scheme. It is explained when we look
to the sources whence the funds of the university are
drawn namely, from the pockets of the taxpayers of
the State. The men who have set up this corporation
in their midst, and who tax themselves for its support,
cannot be called on, they say, to renounce its govern-
ment to their nominees, professors from New Eng-
land, unconnected with the State, men of one idea,
often quarrelsome, sometimes " irreligious." There is
much truth in these statements of the case, but it is to
be hoped that the men chosen to serve as " regents" are
of a higher intellectual stamp than those appointed to
educational offices in the Canadian backwoods. A
report was put into my hands at Ottawa, in which a
superintendent of instruction writes to the Minister
of Education, that he had advised the ratepayers of
Victoria County not in future to elect as school trustees
men who cannot read or write. As Michigan grows
older, she will, perhaps, seek to conform to the prac-
tice of other universities in this matter of her govern-
ment, but in the point of absence of competition she
is likely to continue firm.
Even here some difficulty is found in getting com-
petent school directors; one of them reported 31 J
children attending school. Of another district its su-
perintendent reports : u Conduct of scholars about the
same as that of ' Young America' in general." Some
of the superintendents aim at jocosity, and show no
want of talent in themselves, while their efforts are to
demonstrate its deficiency among the boys. The su-
perintendent of Grattan says, in answer to some num-
bered questions: " Condition good, improvement fair;
for J of J of the year in school, and fifteen-sixteenths
of the time at play. Male teachers most successful
7
74 GREATER BRITAIN.
with the birch ; female with Cupid's darts. School-
houses in fair whittling order. Apparatus: Shovel,
none ; tongs, ditto ; poker, one. Conduct of scholars
like that of parents good, bad, and indifferent. No
minister in town sorry; no lawyer good!" The
superintendents of Manlius Township report that Dis-
tricts 1 and 2 have buildings "fit (in winter) only for
the polar bear, walrus, reindeer, Eussian sable, or Si-
berian bat ;" and they go on to say: " Our children read
everything, from Mr. Noodle's Essays on Matrimony to
Artemus Ward's Lecture on First Principles of Amer-
ican Government." Another report from a very new
county runs : " Sunday-schools afford a little reading-
matter to the children. Character of matter most
read battle, murder, and sudden death." A third
states that the teachers are meanly paid, and goes on :
"If the teaching is no better than the pay, it must be
like the soup that the rebels gave the prisoners." A
superintendent, reporting that the success of the teach-
ers is greater than their qualifications warrant, says :
"The reason is to be found in the Yankeeish adapta-
bility of even "Wolverines."
After all, it is hard even to pass jokes at the ex-
pense of the Northwestern people. A population
who would maintain schools and universities under
difficulties apparently overwhelming was the source
from which to draw Union volunteers such as those
who, after the war, returned to their Northern homes,
I have been told, shocked and astonished at the igno-
rance and debasement of the Southern whites.
The system of elective studies pursued at Michigan
is one to which we are year by year tending in the
English universities. As sciences multiply and deepen,
it becomes more "and more impossible that a "general
course" scheme can produce men fit to take their
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 75
places in the world. Cambridge has attempted to set
up both systems, and, giving her students the choice,
bids them pursue one branch of study with a view to
honors, or take a less valued degree requiring some
slight proficiency in many things. Michigan denies
that the stimulus of honor examinations should be con-
nected with the elective system. With her, men first
graduate in science, or in an arts degree, which bears
a close resemblance to the English "poll," and then
pursue their elected study in a course which leads to
no university distinction, which is free from the strug-
gle for place and honors. These objections to " hon-
ors" rest upon a more solid foundation than a mere
democratic hatred of inequality of man and man. Re-
pute as a writer, as a practitioner, is valued by the Ann
Arbor man, and the Wolverines do not follow the
Ephesians, and tell men who excel among them to go
and excel elsewhere. The Michigan professors say,
and Dr. Hedges bears them out, that a far higher av-
erage of real knowledge is obtained under this system
of independent work than is dreamt of in colleges
where competition rules. "A higher average" is all
they say, and they acknowledge frankly that there is
here and there a student to be found to whom compe-
tition would do good. As a rule, they tell us this is
not the case. Unlimited battle between man and man
for place is sufficiently the bane of the world riot to
be made the curse of schools : competition breeds every
evil which it is the aim of education, the duty of a uni-
versity to suppress: pale faces caused by excessive
toil, feverish excitement that prevents true work, a
hatred of the subject on which the toil is spent, jeal-
ousy of best friends, systematic depreciation of men's
talents, rejection of all reading that will not "pay,"
extreme and unhealthy cultivation of the memory,
76 GEE ATE E BEITAIN.
general degradation of labor all these evils, and
many more, are charged upon the competition system.
Everything that our professors have to say of " cram "
these American thinkers apply to competition. Strange
doctrines these for young America!
Of the practical turn which we should naturally ex-
pect to discover in the university of a bran-new State
I found evidence in the regulation which prescribes
that the degree of Master of Arts shall not be conferred
as a matter of course upon graduates of three years'
standing, but only upon such as have pursued profes-
sional or general scientific studies during that period.
Even in these cases an examination before some one
of the faculties is required for the Master's degree. I
was told that for the medical degree " four years of
reputable practice" is received, instead of certain
courses.
In her special and selected studies, Michigan is as
merely practical as Swift's University of Brobdingnag;
but, standing far above the ordinary arts or science
courses, there is a " University course" designed for
those who have already taken the Bachelor's degree.
It is harder to say what this course includes than
what it does not. The twenty heads range over phi-
lology, philosophy, art, and science ; there is a branch
of " criticism," one of "arts of design," one of "fine
arts." Astronomy, ethics, and Oriental languages are
all embraced in a scheme brought into working order
within ten years of the time when Michigan wae a
wilderness, and the college-yard an Indian hunting-
ground.
Michigan entered upon education work very early
in her history as a State. In 1850, her legislature
commissioned the Hon. Ira May hew to prepare a
work on education for circulation throughout America.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 77
Her progress has been as rapid as her start was good;
her natural history collection is already one of the
most remarkable in America; her- medical school is
almost unequaled, and students flow to her even
from New England and from California, while from
New York she draws a hundred men a year. In only
one point is Ann Arbor anywhere but in the van:
she has hitherto followed the New England colleges
in excluding women. The State University of Kansas
has not shown the same exclusiveness that has char-
acterized the conduct of the rulers of Michigan: women
are admitted not only to the classes, but to the profes-
sorships at Lawrence.
This Northwestern institution at Ann Arbor was
not behind even Harvard in the war: it supplied the
Union army with 1000 men. The 17th Regiment of
Michigan Volunteers, mainly composed of teachers and
Ann Arbor students, has no cause to fear the rivalry
of any other "record;" and such was the effect of the
war, that in 1860 there were in Michigan 2600 male
to 5350 female teachers, whereas now there are but
1300 men to 7500 women.
So proud are Michigan men of their roll of honor,
that they publish it at full length in the calendar of
the university. Every "class" from the foundation
of the schools shows some graduates distinguished in
their country's service during the suppression of the
rebellion. The Hon. Oramel Hosford, Superintendent
of Public Instruction in Michigan, reports that, owing
to the presence of crowds of returned soldiers, the
schools of the State are filled almost to the limit of
their capacity, while some are compelled to close their
doors against the thronging crowds. Captains, colonels,
generals, are among the students now humbly learning
in the Ann Arbor University Schools.
f*
78 GREATER BRITAIN.
The State of Michigan is peculiar in the form that
she has given to her higher teaching; but in no way
peculiar in the attention she bestows on education.
Teaching, high and low, is a passion in the West,
and each of these young States has established a
university of the highest order, and placed in every
township not only schools, but public libraries, sup-
ported from the rates, and managed by the people.
Not only have the appropriations for educational
purposes by each State been large, but those of the
Federal government have been upon the most splen-
did scale. What has been done in the Eastern and
the Central States no man can tell, but even west of
the Mississippi twenty-two million acres have already
been granted for such purposes, while fifty-six million
more are set aside for similar gifts.
The Americans are not forgetful of their Puritan
traditions.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE PACIFIC RAILROAD.
WHEN the companions of the explorer Cartier found
that the rapids at Montreal were not the end of all
navigation, as they had feared, but that above them
there commenced a second and boundless reach of
deep, still waters, they fancied they had found the long-
looked-for route to China, and cried, "La Chine!"
So the story goes, and the name has stuck to the place.
Up to 1861, the Canadians remained in the belief
that they were at least the potential possessors of the
THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD. 79
only possible road for the China trade of the future,
for in that year a Canadian government paper declared
that the Rocky Mountains, south of British territory,
were impassable for railroads. Maps showed that from
St. Louis to San Francisco the distance was twice that
from the head of navigation on Lake Superior to the
British Pacific ports.
America has gone through a five yearV agony since
that time; but now, in the first days of peace, we find
that the American Pacific Kailroad, growing at the
average rate of two miles a day at one end, and one
mile a.day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in
1869 or 1870, while the British line remains a dream.
Not only have the Eocky Mountains turned out to
be passable, but the engineers have found themselves
compelled to decide on the conflicting claims of passes
without number. Wall- like and frowning as the Rocky
Mountains are when seen from the plains, the rolling
gaps are many, and they are easier crossed by railway
lines than the less lofty chains of Europe. From the
heat of the country, the snow-line lies high ; the chosefl
pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto.
The dryness of the air of the center of a vast continent
prevents the fall of heavy snows or rains in winter.
At eight or nine thousand feet above the sea, in the
Black Hills, or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the
Pacific line will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter
than their brothers on the Grand Trunk or the Cam-
den and Amboy at the sea-level. On the other hand,
fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless suc-
cession of smaller snowy chains which have to be
crossed, upon the Grand Plateau or basin of the Great
Salt Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1870 the line
will be an accomplished fact.
In the act creating the Pacific Railroad Company,
THE PACIFIC E AIL ROAD. 79
only possible road for the China trade of the future,
for in that year a Canadian government paper declared
that the Rocky Mountains, south of British territory,
were impassable for railroads. Maps showed that from
St. Louis to San Francisco the distance was twice that
from the head of navigation on Lake Superior to the
British Pacific ports.
America has gone through a five yearV agony since
that time; but now, in the first days of peace, we find
that the American Pacific Kailroad, growing at the
average rate of two miles a day at one end, and one
mile a.day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in
1869 or 1870, while the British line remains a dream.
Not only have the Rocky Mountains turned out to
be passable, but the engineers have found themselves
compelled to decide on the conflicting claims of passes
without number. Wall- like and frowning as the Rocky
Mountains are when seen from the plains, the rolling
gaps are many, and they are easier crossed by railway
lines than the less lofty chains of Europe. From the
heat of the country, the snow-line lies high ; the choseft
pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto.
The dryness of the air of the center of a vast continent
prevents the fall of heavy snows or rains in winter.
At eight or nine thousand feet above the sea, in the
Black Hills, or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the
Pacific line will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter
than their brothers on the Grand Trunk or the Cam-
den and Amboy at the sea-level. On the other hand,
fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless suc-
cession of smaller snowy chains which have to be
crossed, upon the Grand Plateau or basin of the Great
Salt Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1870 the line
will be an accomplished fact.
In the act creating the Pacific Railroad Company,
gO GREATER BRITAIN.
passed in 1862, the company were bound to complete
their line at the rate of a hundred miles a year. They
are completing it at more than three times that rate.
When the act is examined, it ceases to be strange
that the road should be pushed with extraordinary en-
ergy and speed, so numerous are the baits offered to
the companies to hasten its completion. Money is to
be advanced them ; land is to be given them for every
mile they finish on a generous scale while the line is
on the plains, on three times the scale when it reaches
the most rugged tracts. These grants alone are esti-
mated at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alter-
nate sections, a width of four hundred feet, with addi-
tional room for works and stations, is granted for the
line. The California Company is tempted by similar
offers to a race with the Union Pacific, and each com-
pany is struggling to lay the most miles and get the
most land upon the great basin. It is the interest of
the Eastern Company that the junction should be as
far as possible to the west; of the Western, that it
should be as far as possible to the east. The result is
an average laying of three, and an occasional construc-
tion of four, miles a day. If we look to the progress
at both ends, we find as much sometimes laid in a day
as a bullock train could travel. So fast do the head-
quarters "cities" keep moving forward, that at the
California!! end the superintendent wished me to be-
lieve that whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass,
they threw themselves upon their backs, and held up
their legs, that they might be tied and thrown into
the cart for a fresh move. "They are true birds of
passage," he said.
When the iron trains are at the front, the laying
will for a short time proceed at the rate of nine yards
in every fifteen seconds; but three or four hundred
THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 81
tons of rails have to be brought up every day upon
the single track, and it is in this that the time is lost.
The advance carriages of the construction train are
well supplied with rifles hung from the roofs; but
even when the Indians forget their amaze, and attack
the "city upon wheels," or tear up the track, they
are incapable of destroying the line so fast as the
machinery can lay it down. "Soon," as a Denver
paper said, during my stay in the Mountain City,
"the iron horse will sniif the Alpine breeze upon
the summit of the Black Hills 9000 feet above the
sea;" and upon the plateau, where deer are scarce
and buifalo unknown, the Indians have all but disap-
peared. The worst Indian country is already crossed,
and the red men have sullenly followed the -buffalo
to the south, and occupy the country between Kansas
State and Denver, contenting themselves with pre-
venting the construction of the Santa F and Denver
routes to California. Both for the end in view, and
the energy with which it is pursued, the Pacific Rail-
road will stand first among the achievements of our
times.
If the end to be kept in view in the construction
of the first Pacific Railroad line were merely the traffic
from China and Japan to Europe, or the shortest route
from San Francisco to Hampton Roads, the Kansas
route through St. Louis, Denver, and the Berthoud
Pass would be, perhaps, the best and shortest of those
within the United States ; but the Saskatchewan line
through British territory, with Halifax and Puget
Sound for ports, would be still more advantageous.
As it is, the true question seems to be, not the trade
between the Pacific and Great Britain, but between
Asia and America, for Pennsylvania and Ohio must
be the manufacturing countries of the next fifty years.
g2 GEE ATE E BEITAIN.
Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough: in
1870 we shall reach San Francisco from London in
less time than by the severest traveling I can reach
it from Denver in 1866.
Wherever, in the States, Forth and South have met
in conflict, North has won. New York has beaten
Norfolk; Chicago, in spite of its inferior situation, has
beaten the older St. Louis. In the same way, Omaha,
or cities still farther north, will carry off the trade from
Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Kansas City. Ultimately
Puget Sound may beat San Francisco in the race for
the Pacific trade, and the Southern cities become still
less able to keep their place than they have been
hitherto. Time after time, Chicago has thrown out
intercepting lines, and diverted from St. Louis trade
which seemed of necessity to belong to her; and the
success of the Union Pacific line, and failure of the
Kansas road, is a fresh proof of the superior energy of
the Northern to the Southern city. This time a fresh
element enters into the calculation, and declares for
Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight line,
is in these great distances shorter by fifty or a hundred
miles than the straight lines of the maps and charts,
and the Platte route becomes not only the natural, but
the shortest route from sea to sea.
Chicago has a great advantage over St. Louis in her
comparative freedom from the cholera, which yearly
attacks the Missourian city. During my stay in St.
Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were known to
have reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by
flight to 180,000. A quarantine was established on
the river ; the sale of fruit and vegetables prohibited ;
prisoners released on condition that they should work
at burying the dead; and funeral corteges were for-
bidden. Chicago herself, unreached by the plague,
THE PACIFIC R AIL ROAD. 83
was scattering handbills on every "Western railroad
line, warning immigrants against St. Louis.
The Missourians have relied overmuch upon the
Mississippi River, and have forgotten that railroads
are superseding steamboats every day. Chicago, on
the other hand, which ten years ago was the twentieth
city in America, is probably by this time the third.
As a center of thought, political and religious, she
stands second only to Boston, and her Wabash and
Michigan Avenues are among the most beautiful of
streets.
One of the chief causes of the future wealth of
America is to be found in the fact that all her "in-
land" towns are ports. The State of Michigan lies
between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but the
single State has upon the great lakes a coast of 1500
miles. From Fort Benton to the sea by water is
nearly 4000 miles, but the post is a much-used steam-
boat port, though more distant, even in the air-line,
from the nearest sea upon the same side the dividing
range, than is the White Sea from the Persian Gul
Put it in which way you would, Europe could not hold
this river.
A great American city is almost invariably placed
at a point where an important railroad finds an out-
port on a lake or river. This is no adaptation to rail-
ways of the Limerick saying about rivers namely,
that Providence has everywhere so placed them as
to pass through the great towns ; for in America rail-
ways precede population, and when mapped out and
laid, they are but tramways in the desert. There is
no great wonder in this, when we remember that
158,000,000 acres of land have been up to this time
granted to railroads in America.
One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few
84 ORE ATE E BRITAIN.
lines will be made, and trade being thus driven into
certain unchanging routes, a small number of cities
will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing stations
or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and popula-
tion. Where a system of cheap railways is adopted,
there will be year by year a tendency to multiply lines
of traffic, and consequently to multiply also ports and
seats of trade a tendency, however, which may be
more than neutralized by any special circumstances
which may cause the lines of transit to converge rather
than run parallel to one another. * Of the system of
costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India,
where we see the creation of Umritsur and the pros-
perity of Calcutta alike due to our single great Bengal
line; of the converging system we have excellent in-
stances in Chicago and Bombay; while we see the
plan of paralled lines in action here in Kansas, and
causing the comparative equality of progress mani-
fested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, in Omaha. The
coasts of India swarmed with ports till our trunk lines
ruined Goa and Surat to advance Bombay, and a hun-
dred village ports to push our factory at Calcutta,
founded by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown
to be the third or fourth city of the empire.
Of the dozen chaotic cities which are struggling for
the honor of becoming the future capital of the West,
Leavenworth, with 20,000 people, three daily papers,
an opera house, and 200 drinking saloons, was, at the
time of my visit in 1866, somewhat ahead of Omaha,
with its 12,000, two papers, and a single "one-horse"
theater, though the northern city tied Leavenworth in
the point of " saloons."
Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte,
Atchison, Topeka, Lecompton, and Lawrence, each
praises itself and runs down its neighbor. Leaven-
THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 85
worth claims to be so healthy that when it lately he-
came necessary to "inaugurate" the new grave-yard,
"they had to shoot a man on purpose" a change since
the days when the Southern Border Ruffians were in
the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of
abolitionists stuck on poles. On the other hand, a Ne-
braska man, when asked whether the Kansas people
were fairly honest, said: "Don't know about honest;
but they do say as how the folk around take in their
stone fences every night." Lawrence, the State cap-
ital, which is on the dried-up Kansas River, sneeringly
says of all the new towns on the Missouri that the boats
that ply between them are so dangerous that the fare
is collected in installments every five minutes through-
out the trip. Next after the jealousy between two
Australian colonies, there is nothing equal to the ha-
treds between cities competing for the same trade.
Omaha has now the best chance of becoming the cap-
ital of the far West, bat Leavenworth will no doubt
continue to be the chief town of Kansas.
The progress of the smaller cities is amazing. Pis-
tol-shots by day and night are frequent, but trade and
development are little interfered with by such incidents
as these ; and as the village cities are peopled up, the
pioneers, shunning their fellows, keep pushing west-
ward, seeking new "locations." " You're the second
man I've seen this fall! Darn me, if 'taint 'bout time
to varmose out westerly y," is the standing joke of
the " frontier- bdrs" against each other.
*********
At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepworth
Dixon, just out from England, and with him I visited
the Kansas towns, and then pushed through Waumego
to Manhattan, the terminus (for the day) of the Kansas
Pacific line. Here we were thrust into what space
8
36 GREATER BRITAIN.
remained between forty leathern mail-bags and the
canvas roof of the mule-drawn ambulance, which was
to be at once our prison for six nights, and our fort
upon wheels against the Indians.
CHAPTER IX.
OMPHALISM.
DASHING through a grove of cottonwood-trees draped
in bignonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a
charming scene : a range of huts and forts crowning
a long, low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed
ravine, while the clear stream of the Republican fork
wreathed itself about the woods and bluff's. The
block-house, over which floated the Stars and Stripes,
was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which
continents are to measure all their miles ; the " capital
of the universe," or " center of the world." Not that
it has always been so. Geographers will be glad to
learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the
center of its crust also moves: within the last ten
years it has removed westward into Kansas from Mis-
souri from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest
for centership is no new thing. Herodotus held that
Greece was the very middle of the world, and that the
unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the yet more un-
fortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of
their poor lives in order that the sun might shine on
Greece at noon ; London plumes herself on being the
" center of the terrestrial globe ;" Boston is the " hub
OMPHALISM. 87
of the hull universe," though the latter claim is less
physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley the
Western men seem to have found the physical center
of the United States, but they claim for the Great
Plains as well the intellectual as the political leader-
ship of the whole continent. These hitherto untrod-
den tracts, they tell you, form the heart of the empire,
from which the life-blood must be driven to the ex-
tremities. Geographical and political centers must
ultimately coincide.
Connected with this belief is another "Western the-
ory that the powers of the future must be " conti-
nental." Germany, or else Russia, is to absorb all
Asia and Europe, except Britain. North America is
already cared for, as the gradual extinction of the
Mexican and absorption of the Canadians they con-
sider certain. As for South America, the Californians
are planning an occupation of Western Brazil, on the
ground that the continental power of South America
must start from the head-waters of the great rivers,
and spread seaward down the streams. Even in the
Brazilian climate they believe that the Anglo-Saxon is
destined to become the dominant race.
The success of this omphalism, this government
from the center, will be brought about, in the West-
ern belief, by the necessity under which the nations on
the head-waters of all streams will find themselves of
having the outlets in their hands. Even if it be true
that railways are beating rivers, still the railways must
also lead seaward to the ports, and the need for their
control is still felt by the producers in the center coun-
tries of the continent. The Upper States must every-
where command the Lower, and salt-water despotism
find its end.
The Americans of the Valley Stutes, who fought
88 GREATER BRITAIN.
all the more heartily in the Federal cause from the
fact that they were battling for the freedom of the
Mississippi against the men who held its mouth, look
forward to the time when they will have to assert,
peaceably but with firmness, their right to the free-
dom of their railways through the Northern Atlantic
States. Whatever their respect for New England, it
cannot be expected that they are forever to permit
Illinois and Ohio to be neutralized in the Senate by
Rhode Island and Vermont. If it goes hard with New
England, it will go still harder with New York; and
the Western men look forward to the day when Wash-
ington will be removed, Congress and all, to Columbus
or Fort Riley.
The singular wideness of Western thought, always
verging on extravagance, is traceable to the width of
Western land. The immensity of the continent pro-
duces a kind of intoxication; there is moral dram-
drinking in the contemplation of the map. No Fourth
of July oration can come up to the plain facts con-
tained in the Land Commissioners' report. The pub-
lic domain of the United States still consists of one
thousand five hundred millions of acres; there are
two hundred thousand square miles of coal lands in
the country, ten times as much as in all the remaining
world. In the Western territories not yet States, there
is land sufficient to bear, at the English population
rate, five hundred and fifty millions of human beings.
It is strange to see how the Western country dwarfs
the Eastern States. Buffalo is called a "Western
City;" yet from New York to Buffalo is only three
hundred and fifty miles, and Buffalo is but seven hun-
dred miles to the west of the most eastern point in all
the United States. On the other hand, from Buffalo
we can go two thousand five hundred miles westward
OMPHALISM. 89
without quitting the United States. "The West" is
eight times as wide as the Atlantic States, and will
soon be eight times as strong.
The conformation of North America is widely dif-
ferent to that of any other continent on the globe. In
Europe, the glaciers of the Alps occupy the center
point, and shed the waters toward each of the sur-
rounding seas : confluence is almost unknown. So it
is in Asia: there the Indus flowing into the Arabian
Gulf, the Oxus into the Sea of Aral, the Ganges into
the Bay of Bengal, the Yangtse Kiang into the Pacific,
and the Yeriesei into the Arctic Ocean, all take their
rise in the central table-land. In South America, the
mountains form a wall upon the west, whence the
rivers flow eastward in parallel lines. In North Amer-
ica alone are there mountains on each coast, and a
trough between, into which the rivers flow together,
giving in a single valley 23,000 miles of navigable
stream to be plowed by steamships. The map pro-
claims the essential unity of North America. Political
geography might be a more interesting study than it
has yet been made.
In reaching Leavenworth, I had crossed two of the
five divisions of America: the other three lie before
me on my way to San Francisco. The eastern slopes
of the Alleghanies, or Atlantic coast; their western
slopes ; the Great Plains ; the Grand Plateau, and the
Pacific coast these are the five divisions. Fort Riley,
the center of the United States, is upon the border of
the third division, the Great Plains. The Atlantic
coast is poor and tony, but the slight altitude of the
Alleghany chain has prevented its being a hinderance
to the passage of population to the West: the second
of the divisions is now the richest and most powerful
of the five: but the wave of immigration is crossing the
8*
90 GREATER BRITAIN.
Mississippi and Missouri into the Great Plains, and
here at Fort Riley we are upon the limit of civilization.
This spot is not only the center of the United States
and of the continent, but, if Denver had contrived to
carry the Pacific Railroad by the Berthoud Pass, would
have been the center station upon what Governor Gil-
pin, of Colorado, calls the "Asiatic and European rail-
way line." As it is, Columbus in Nebraska has some-
what a better chance of becoming the Washington of
the future than has this block-house.
Quitting Fort Riley, we found ourselves at once upon
the plains. No more sycamore and white-oak and
honey-locust ; no more of the rich deep green of the
cottonwood groves; but yellow earth, yellow flowers,
yellow grass, and here and there groves of giant sun-
flowers with yellow blooms, but no more trees.
As the sun set, we came on a body of cavalry march-
ing slowly from the plains toward the fort. Before
them, at some little distance, walked a sad-faced man
on foot, in sober riding-dress, with a repeating carbine
slung across his back. It was Sherman returning from
his expedition to Santa Fe\
LETTER FROM DENVER. 91
CHAPTER X.
LETTER FROM DENVER.
MONDAY, 3d September.
MY DEAR ,
Here we are, scalps and all.
On Tuesday last, at sundown, we left Fort Riley,
and supped at Junction City, tire extreme point that
"civilization" has reached upon the plains. Civiliza-
tion means whisky: post-offices don't count.
It was here that it first dawned upon us that we
were being charged 500 dollars to guard the United
States California*! mail, with the compensation of the
chance of being ourselves able to rob it with impunity.
It is at all events the case that we, well armed as the
mail officers at Leavenworth insisted on our being, sat
inside with fort}^-two cwt. of mail, in open bags, and
over a great portion of the route had only the driver
with us, without whose knowledge we could have read
all and stolen most of the letters, and with whose
knowledge, but against whose will, we could have
carried off the whole, leaving him gagged, bound, and
at the mercy of the Indians. As it was, a mail-bag
fell out one day, without the knowledge of either
Dixon or the driver, who were outside, and I had
to shout pretty freely before they would pull up.
On Wednesday we had our last "squar' meal" in
the shape of a breakfast, at Fort Ellsworth, and soon
were out upon the almost unknown plains. In the
morning we caught up and passed long wagon trains,
each wagon drawn by eight oxen, and guarded by
92 GREATER BRITAIN.
two drivers and one horseman, all armed with breech-
loading rifles and revolvers, or with the new " re-
peaters," before which breech-loaders and revolvers
must alike go down. All day we kept a sharp look-
out for a party of seven American officers, who, in
defiance of the scout's advice, had gone out from the
fort to hunt buifalo upon the track. About sundown
we came into the little station of Lost Creek. The
ranchmen told us that they had, during the day, been
driven in from their work by a party of Cheyennes,
and that they had some doubts as to the wisdom of the
officers in going out to hunt.
Just as we were leaving the station, one of the
officers' horses dashed in riderless, and was caught;
and about two miles from the station we passed
another on its back, ripped up either by a knife or
buffalo horn. The saddle was gone, but there were
no other marks of a fight. We believe that these
officers were routed by buffalo, not Cheyennes, but
still we should be glad to hear of them.
The track is marked in many parts of the plains by
stakes, such as those from which the Llano Estacado
takes its name ; but this evening we turned off' into de-
vious lines by way of precaution against ambuscades,
coming round through the sandy beds of streams to
the ranches for the change of mules. The ranchmen
were always ready for us; for, while we were still a
mile . away, our driver would put his hand to his
mouth, and give a "How! how! how! how w!"
the Cheyenne warhoop.
In the weird glare that follows sunset we came upon
a pile of rocks, admirably fitted for an ambush. As
we neared them, the driver said: "It's 'bout an even
chance thet we's sculp ther'!" We could not avoid
them, as there was a gully that could only be crossed
LETTER FROM DENVER. 93
at this one point. We dashed down into the "creek"
and up again, past the rocks : there were no Indians,
but the driver was most uneasy till we reached Big
Creek.
Here they could give us nothing whatever to eat,
the Indians having, on Tuesday, robbed them of every-
thing they had, and ordered them to leave within
fifteen days on pain of death.
For 250 miles westward from Big Creek we found
that every station had been warned (and most plun-
dered) by bands of Cheyennes, on behalf of the forces
of the confederation encamped near the creek itself.
The warning was in all cases that of fire and death at
the end of fifteen days, of which nine days have ex-
pired. We found the horse-keepers of the company
everywhere leaving their stations, and were, in conse-
quence, very nearly starved, having been unsuccessful
in our shots from the " coach," except, indeed, at the
snakes.
On Thursday we passed Big Timber, the only spot
on the plains where there are trees ; and there the In-
dians had counted the trunks and solemnly warned the
men against cutting more : " Fifty-two tree. You no
cut more tree no more cut. Grass ! You cut grass ;
grass make big fire. You good boy you clear out.
Fifteen day, we come: you no gone ugh!" The
"ugh" accompanied by an expressive pantomime.
On Thursday evening we got a meal of buffalo and
prairie dog, the former too strong for my failing stom-
ach, the latter wholesome nourishment, and fit for
kings as like our rabbit in flavor as he is in shape.
This was at the horse-station of "The Monuments," a
natural temple of awesome grandeur, rising from the
plains like a giant Stonehenge.
On Friday we " breakfasted " at Pond Creek sta-
94 GREATER BRITAIN.
tion, two miles from Fort Wallis. Here the people
had applied for a guard, and had been answered:
"Come into the fort; we can't spare a man." So
much for the value of the present forts ; and yet even
these Wallis and Ellsworth are 200 miles apart.
We were joined at breakfast by Bill Comstock, in-
terpreter to the fort, a long-haired, wild-eyed half-
breed, who gave us, in an hour's talk, the full history
of the Indian politics that have led to the present war.
The Indians, to the number of 20,000, have been in
council with the Washington Commissioners all this
summer at FortLaramie ; and, after being clothed, fed,
and armed, lately concluded a treaty, allowing the
running on the mail-roads. They now assert that this
treaty was intended to apply to the Platte road (from
Omaha and Atchison through Fort Kearney), and to
the Arkansas road, but not to the Smoky Hill road,
which lies between the others, and runs through the
buifalo country ; but their real opposition is to the rail-
road. The Cheyennes (pronounced Shians) have got the
Camanches, Appaches, and Arrapahoes from the south,
and the Sioux and Kiowas from the north, to join them
in a confederation, under the leadership of Spotted
Dog, the chief of the Little Dog section of the Chey-
ennes, and son of White Antelope, killed at Sand
Creek battle by the Kansas and Colorado Volunteers,
who has sworn to avenge his father.
Soon after leaving Pond Creek, we sighted at a dis-
tance three mounted "braves," leading some horses;
and when we reached the next station, we found that
they had been there openly proclaiming that their
mounts had been stolen from a team.
All this day we sat with our revolvers laid upon the
mart-bags in front of us, and our driver also had his
armory conspicuously displayed, while we swept the
LETTER FROM DENVER. 95
plains with many an anxious glance. We were on
lofty rolling downs, and to the south the eye often
ranged over much of the 130 miles which lay between
us and Texas. To the north the view was more
bounded ; still, our chief danger lay near the boulders,
which here and there covered the plains.
All Thursday and Friday we never lost sight of the
buffalo, in herds of about 300, and the " antelope"
the prong-horn, a kind of gazelle in flocks of six or
seven. Prairie dogs were abundant, and wolves and
black-tail deer in view at every turn.
The most singular of all the sights of the plains is
the constant presence every few yards of the skeletons of
buffalo and of horse, of mule and of ox; the former left
by the hunters, who take but the skin, and the latter
the losses of the mails and the wagon-trains through
sunstroke and thirst. We killed a horse on the- second
day of our journey.
When we came upon oxen that had not long been
dead, we found that the intense dryness of the air had
made mummies of them : there was no stench, no putre-
faction.
During the day I made some practice at antelope
with the driver's Ballard ; but an antelope at 500 yards
is not an easy target. The driver shot repeatedly at
buffalo at twenty yards, but this only to keep them
away from the horses ; the revolver balls did not seem
to go through their hair and skin, as they merely
shambled on in their usual happy sort of way, after
receiving a discharge or two.
The prairie dogs sat barking in thousands on the tops
of their mounds, but we were too grateful to them for
their gayety to dream of pistol-shots. They are no
"dogs" at all, but rabbits that bark, with all the co-
ney's tricks and turns, and the same odd way of rub-
96 GEE ATE E BEITAIN.
bing their face with their paws while they con you
from top to toe.
With wolves, buffalo, antelope, deer, skunks, dogs,
plover, curlew, dottrel, herons, vultures, ravens, snakes,
and locusts, we never seemed to be without a million
companions in our loneliness.
From Cheyenne Wells, where we changed mules in
the afternoon, we brought, on the ranchman's wife,
painfully making room for her at our own expense.
Her husband had been warned by the Cheyennes that
the place would be destroyed: he meant to stay, but
was in fear for her. The Cheyennes had made her
cook for them, and our supper had gone down Chey-
enne throats. ^
Soon after leaving the station, we encountered one
of the great " dirt-storms" of the plains. About 5 P.M.
I saw a little white cloud growing into a column, which
in half an hour turned black as night, and possessed
itself of half the skies. We then saw what seemed to
be a waterspout; and, though no rain reached us, I
think it was one. When the storm burst on us we
took it for rain, and halting, drew down our canvas
and held it against the hurricane. We soon found
that our eyes and mouths were full of dust ; and when
I put out my hand I felt that it was dirt, not rain, that
was falling. In a few minutes it was pitch dark, and
after the fall had continued for some time, there began
a series of flashes of blinding lightning, in the very
center and midst of which we seemed to be. Not-
withstanding this, there was no sound of thunder.
The " norther" lasted some three or four hours, and
when it ceased, it left us total darkness, and a wind
which froze our marrow as we again started on our
way. When Fremont explored this route, he reported
that the high ridge between the Platte and Arkansas
LET TEE FROM DENVER. 97
was notorious among the Indians for its tremendous
dirt-storms. Sheet lightning without thunder accom-
panies dust-storms in all great continents ; it is as com-
mon in the Punjab as in Australia, in South as in North
America.
On Saturday morning, at Lake station, we got be-
yond the Indians, and into a land of plenty, or at all
events a land of something, for we got milk from the
station cow, and preserved fruits that had come round
through Denver from Ohio and Kentucky. Not even
on Saturday, however, could we get dinner, and as I
missed the only antelope that came within reach, our
supper was not much heavier than our breakfast.
Rolling through the Arrapahoe country, where it is
proposed to make a reserve for the Cheyennes, at eight
o'clock on Saturday morning we caught sight of the
glittering snows of Pike's Peak, a hundred and fifty
miles away, and all the day we were galloping toward
it, through a country swarming with rattlesnakes and
vultures. Late in the evening, when we were drawing
near to the first of the Coloradan farms, we came on a
white wolf unconcernedly taking his evening prowl
about the stock-yards. He sneaked along without
taking any notice of us, and continued his thief-like
walk with a bravery that seemed only to show that he
had never seen man before ; this might well be the
case, if he came from the south, near the upper forks
of the Arkansas.
All this, and the frequency of buffalo, I was un-
prepared for. I imagined that though the plains were
uninhabited, the game had all been killed. On the
contrary, the " Smoky district" was never known so
thronged with buifalo as it is this year. The herds
resort to it because there they are close to the water
of the Platte River, and yet out of the reach of the
9
98 GEEATER BRITAIN.
traffic of the Platte road. The tracks they make in trav-
eling to and fro across the plains are visible for years
after they have ceased to use them. I have seen them
as broad and as straight as the finest of Roman roads.
On Sunday, at two in the morning, we dashed into
Denver ; and as we reeled and staggered from our late
prison, the ambulance, into the "cockroach corral"
which does duty for the bar-room of the " Planters'
House," we managed to find strength and words to
agree that we would fix no time for meeting the next
day. We expected to sleep for thirty hours ; as it was,
we met at breakfast at seven A.M., less than five hours
from the time we pai\ted. It is to-day that we feel ex-
hausted; the exhilaration of the mountain air, and the
excitement of frequent visits, carried us through yes-
terday. Dixon is suffering from strange blains and
boils, caused by the unwholesome food.
We have been called upon here by Governor Gilpin
and Governor Cummings, the opposition governors.
The former is the elected governor of the State of Col-
orado which is to be, and would have been but for the
fact that the President put his big toe (Western for veto)
upon the bill ; the latter, the Washington-sent governor
of the Territory. Gilpin is a typical pioneer man, and
the descendant of a line of such. He comes of one of
the original Quaker stocks of Maryland, and he and
his ancestors have ever been engaged in founding
States. He himself, after taking an active share in
the foundation of Kansas, commanded a regiment of
cavalry in the Mexican war. After this, he was at the
head of the pioneer army which explored the pares of
the Cordilleras and the Territory of Nevada. He it
was who hit upon the glorious idea of placing Colorado
half upon each side of the Sierra Madre. There never,
in the history of the world, was a grander idea than
LETTER FROM DENVER. 99
this. Any ordinary pioneer or politician would have
given Colorado the "natural" frontier, and have tried
for the glory of the foundation of two States instead of
one. The consequence would have been, lasting dis-
union between the Pacific and Atlantic States, and a
possible future break-up of the country. As it is,
this commonwealth, little as it at present is, links sea
to sea, and Liverpool to Hong Kong.
The city swarms with Indians of the bands com-
manded by the chiefs Nevara and Collorego. They
are at war with the six confederate tribes, and with
the Pawnees with all the plain Indians, in short.
Now, as the Pawnees are also at war with the six
tribes, there is a pretty triangular fight. They came
in to buy arms, and fearful scoundrels they look.
Short, flat-nosed, long-haired, painted in red and blue,
and dressed in a gaudy costume, half Spanish, half
Indian, which makes their filthiness appear more filthy
by contrast, and themselves carrying only their Ballard
and Smith-and- Wesson, but forcing the squaws to carry
all their other goods, and papooses in addition, they
present a spectacle of unmixed ruffianism which I
never expect to see surpassed. Dixon and I, both of
us, left London with "Lo! the poor Indian," in all his
dignity and hook-nosedness, elevated on a pedestal of
nobility in our hearts. Our views were shaken in the
East, but nothing revolutionized them so rapidly as our
three days' risk of scalping in the plains. John How-
ard and Mrs. Beecher Stowe themselves would go in
for the Western " disarm at any price, and exterminate
if necessary" policy if they lived long in Denver. One
of the braves oT Nevara's command brought in the
scalp of a Cheyenne chief taken by him last month,
and to-day it hangs outside the door of a pawnbroker's
shop, for sale, fingered by every passer-by.
100 GREATER BRITAIN.
Many of the band were engaged in putting on their
paint, which was bright vermilion, with a little indigo
round the eye. This, with the sort of pigtail which
they wear, gives them the look of the gnomes in the
introduction to a London pantomime. One of them
Nevara himself, I was told wore a sombrero with
three scarlet plumes, taken probably from a Mexican,
a crimson jacket, a dark-blue shawl, worn round the
loins and over the arm in Spanish dancer fashion, and
embroidered moccasins. His squaw was a vermilion-
faced bundle of rags, not more than four feet high,
staggering under buffalo hides, bow and arrows, and
papoose. They move everywhere on horseback, and
in the evening withdraw in military order, with ad-
vance and rear guard, to a camp at some distance from
the town.
I inclose some prairie flowers, gathered in my walks
round the city. Their names are not suited to their
beauty ; the large white one is " the morning blower,"
the most lovely of all, save one, of the flowers of the
plains. It grows with many branches to a height of
some eighteen inches, and bears from thirty to fifty
blooms. The blossoms are open up to a little after
sunrise, when they close, seldom to open even after
sunset. It is, therefore, peculiarly the early riser's
flower; and if it be true that Nature doesn't make
things in vain, it follows that Nature intended men
or, at all events, some men to get up early, which is a
point that I believe was doubtful hitherto.
For the one prairie flower which I think more beau-
tiful than the blower I cannot find a j^ame. It rises to
about six inches above ground, and spreads in a circle
of a foot across. Its leaf is thin and spare ; its flower-
bloom a white cup, about two inches in diameter ; and
its buds pink and pendulent.
LETTER FROM DENVER. 101
All our garden annuals are to be found in masses
acres in size upon the plains. Penstemon, coreopsis,
persecaria, yucca, dwarf sumach, marigold, and sun-
flower, all are flowering here at once, till the country
is ablaze with gold and red. The coreopsis of our
gardens they call the " rosin- weed," and say that it
forms excellent food for sheep.
The view of the " Cordillera della Sierra Madre,"
the Rocky Mountain main chain, from the outskirts of
Denver is sublime; that from the roof at Milan does
not approach it. Twelve miles from the city the mount-
ains rise abruptl} 7 from the plains. Piled range above
range with step-like regularity, they are topped by a
long white line, sharply relieved against the indigo of
the sky. Two hundred and fifty miles of the mother
Sierra are in sight from our veranda; to the south,
Pike's Peak and Spanish Peak ; Long's Peak to the
north ; Mount Lincoln towering above all. The views
are limited only by the curvature of the earth, such is
the marvelous purity of the Coloradan air, the effect
at once of the distance from the sea and of the bed of
limestone which underlies the plains.
The site of Denver is heaven-blessed in climate as
well as loveliness. The sky is brilliantly blue, and
cloudless from dawn till noon. In the mid-day heats,
cloud-making in the Sierra begins, and by sunset the
snowy chain is multiplied a hundred times in curves
of white and purple cumuli, while thunder rolls heavily
along the range. "This is a great country, sir," said
a Coloradan to me to-day. " We make clouds for the
whole universe." At dark there is dust or thunder-
storm at the mountain foot, and then the cold and
brilliant night. Summer and winter it is the same.
9*
102 GBEATEE BEITAIN.
CHAPTER XI
RED INDIA.
" THESE Red Indians are not red," was our first cry
when we saw the Utes in the streets of Denver. They
had come into the town to be painted as English ladies
go to London to shop; and we saw them engaged
within a short time after their arrival in daubing their
cheeks with vermilion and blue, and referring to
glasses which the squaws admiringly held. Still, when
we met them with peaceful paintless cheeks, we had
seen that their color was brown, copper, dirt, anything
you please except red.
The Hurons, with whom I had stayed at Indian Lo-
rette, were French in training if not in blood; the Pot-
tawatomies of St. Mary's Mission, the Delawares of
Leavenworth, are tame Indians: it is true that they
can hardly be called red; but still I had expected to
have found these wild prairie and mountain Indians of
the color from which they take their name. Save for
paint, I found them of a color wholly different from
that which we call red.
Low in stature, yellow-skinned, small-eyed, and Tar-
tar-faced, the Indians of the plains are a distinct peo-
ple from the tall, hook-nosed warriors of the Eastern
States. It is impossible to set eyes on their women
without being reminded of the dwarf skeletons found
in the mounds of Missouri and Iowa; but, men or
women, the Utes bear no resemblance to the bright-
eyed, graceful people with whom Penn traded and
BED INDIA. 103
Stan dish fought. They are not less inferior in mind
than in body. It was no Shoshone', no Ute, no Chey-
enne, who called the rainbow the " heaven of flowers,"
the moon "the night queen," or the stars " God's eyes."
The plain tribes are as deficient, too, in heroes as in
poetry: they have never even produced a general, and
White Antelope is their nearest approach to a Tecum-
seh. Their mode of life, the natural features of the
country in which they dwell, have nothing in them to
suggest a reason for their debased condition. The
reason must lie in the blood, the race.
All who have seen both the Indians and the Poly-
nesians at home must have been struck with innumer-
able resemblances. The Maori and Red Indian wakes
for the dead are identical ; the Californian Indians wear
the Maori mat; the "medicine" of the Mandan is but
the " tapu" of Polynesia; the New Zealand dance-song,
the Maori tribal scepter, were found alike by Strachey
in Virginia and Drake in California; the canoes of the
West Indies are the same as those of Polynesia.
Hundreds of arguments, best touched from the farther
side of the Pacific, concur to prove the Indians a Poly-
nesian race. The canoes that brought to Easter Island
the people who built their mounds and rock temples
there, may as easily have been carried on by the Chilian
breeze and current to the South American shore. The
wave from Malaya would have spent itself upon the
northern plains. The Utes would seem to be Kamt-
chatkans, or men of the Amoor, who, fighting their
way round by Behring Straits, and then down south,
drove a wedge between the Polynesians of Appalachia
and California. No theory but this will account for
the sharp contrast between the civilization of ancient
Peru and Mexico, and the degradation in which the
Utes have lived from the earliest recorded times.
104 GEE ATE E BEITA1N.
Mounds, rock temples, worship, all are alike unknown
to the Indians of the plains; to the Polynesian Indians,
these were things that had come down to them from
all time.
Curious as is the question of the descent of the
American tribes, it has no bearing on the future of
the country unless, indeed, in the eyes of those who
assert that Delawares and Utes, Hurons and Pawnees,
are all one race, with features modified by soil and cli-
mate. If this were so, the handsome, rollicking, frank-
faced Coloradan "boys" would have to look forward
to the time when their sons' sons should be as like the
Utes as many New Englanders of to-day are like the
Indians they expelled that, as the New Englanders
are tall, taciturn, and hatchet-faced, the Coloradans of
the next age should be flat-faced warriors, five feet
high. Confidence in the future of America must be
founded on a belief in the indestructible vitality of
race.
Kamtchatkans or Polynesians, Malays or sons of
the prairies on which they dwell, the Red Indians
have no future. In twenty years there will scarcely
be one of pure blood alive within the United States.
In La Plata, the Indians from the inland forests
gradually mingle with the whiter inhabitants of the
coast, and become indistinguishable from the re-
mainder of the population. In Canada and Tahiti,
the French intermingle with the native race: the.
Hurons are French in everything but name. In
Kansas, in Colorado, in New Mexico, miscegenation
will never be brought about. The pride of race,
strong in the English everywhere, in America and
Australia is an absolute bar to intermarriage, and
even to lasting connections with the aborigines. What
has happened in Tasmania and Victoria is happening
RED INDIA. 105
in New Zealand and on the plains. "When you ask
a Western man his views on the Indian question, he
says : " Well, sir, we can destroy them by the laws of
war, or thin 'em out by whisky; but the thinning
process is plaguy slow."
There are a good many Southerners out upon the
plains. One of them, describing to me how in Florida
they had hunted down the Seminoles with blood-
hounds, added, "And sarved the pesky sarpints right,
sah!" Southwestern volunteers, campaigning against
the Indians, have been known to hang up in their
tents the scalps of the slain, as we English used to
nail up the skins of the Danes.
There is in these matters less hypocrisy among the
Americans than with ourselves. In 1840, the British
government assumed the sovereignty of New Zealand
in a proclamation which set forth with great precision
that it did so for the sole purpose of protecting the
aborigines in the possession of their lands. The
Maories numbered 200,000 then; they number 20,000
now.
Among the Western men there is no difference of
opinion on the Indian question. Eifle and revolver
are their only policy. The New Englanders, who are
all for Christianity and kindliness in their dealings
with the red men, are not similarly united in one cry.
Those who are ignorant of the nature of the Indian,
call out for agricultural employment for the braves;
those who know nothing of the Indian's life demand
that "reserves" be set aside for him, forgetting that
no " reserve" can be large enough to hold the buffalo,
and that without the buffalo the red men must plow
or starve.
Indian civilization through the means of agricul-
ture is all but a total failure. The Shawnees are
106 GREATER BRITAIN.
thriving near Kansas City, the Pottawatomies living
at St. Mary's mission, the Del aw ares existing at
Leaven worth; but in all these cases there is a large
infusion of white blood. The Canadian Hurons are
completely civilized; but then they are completely
French. If you succeed with an Indian to all ap-
pearance, he will suddenly return to his untamed
state. An Indian girl, one of the most orderly of
the pupils at a ladies' school, has been known, on
feeling herself aggrieved, to withdraw to her room,
let down her back hair, paint her face, and howl. The
same tendency showed itself in the case of the Dela-
ware chief who built himself a white man's house,
and lived in it thirty years, but then suddenly set
up his old wigwam in the dining-room, in disgust.
Another bad case is that of the Pawnee who visited
Buchanan, and behaved so well that when a young
Englishman, who came out soon after, told the Presi-
dent that he was going West, he gave him a letter
to the chief, then with his tribe in Northern Kansas.
The Pawnee read the note, offered a pipe, gravely
protested eternal friendship, slept upon it, and next
morning scalped his visitor with his own hand.
The English everywhere attempt to introduce civili-
zation, or to modify that which exists, in a rough-and-
readj' manner which invariably ends in failure or in
the destruction of the native race. A hundred years
of absolute rule, mostly peaceable, have not, under
every advantage, seen the success of our repeated at-
tempts to establish trial by jury in Bengal. For twenty
years the Maories have mixed with the New Zealand
colonists on nearly equal terms, have almost univer-
sally professed themselves Christians, have attended
English schools, and learnt to speak the English lan-
guage, and to read and write their own ; in spite of all
RED INDIA. 107
this, a few weeks of fanatic outburst were enough to
reduce almost the whole race to a condition of degraded
savagery. The Indians of America have, within the
few last years, been caught and caged, given acres
where they once had leagues, and told to plow where
once they hunted. A pastoral race, with no concep-
tion of property in land, they have been manufactured
into freeholders and tenant farmers ; Western Ishmael-
ites, sprung of a race which has wandered since its
legendary life begins, they have been subjected to
homestead laws and title registrations. If our experi-
ments in New Zealand, in India, on the African coast
have failed, cautious and costly as they were, there can
be no great wonder in the unsuccess that has attended
the hurried American experiments. It is not for us,
who have the past of Tasmania and the present of
Queensland to account for, to do more than record the
fact that the Americans are not more successful with
the red men of Kansas than we with the black men of
Australia.
The Bosjesman is not a more unpromising subject
for civilization than the red man ; the Ute is not even
gifted with the birthright of most savages, the mimetic
power. The black man, in his dress, his farming, his
religion, his family life, is always trying to imitate the
white. In the Indian there is none of this: his ances-
tors roamed over the plains he will roam ; his ances-
tors hunted why should not he hunt? The American
savage, like his Asiatic cousins, is conservative; the
African changeable, and strong in imitative faculties
of the mind. Just as the Indian is less versatile than
the negro, so, if it were possible gradually to change
his mode of life, slowly to bring him to the agricul-
tural state, he would probably become a skillful and
laborious cultivator, and worthy inhabitant of the
108 GREATER BRITAIN.
Western soil ; as it is, he is exterminated before he has
time to learn. "Sculp 7 em fust, and then talk to 'em,"
the Coloradans say.
Peace commissioners are yearly sent from Wash-
ington to treat with hostile tribes upon the plains.
The Indians invariably continue to fight and rob till
winter is at hand ; but when the snows appear, they
send in runners to announce that they are prepared to
make submission. The commissioners appoint a place,
and the tribe, their relatives, allies, and friends, come
down thousands strong, and enter upon debates which
are purposely prolonged till spring. All this time the
Indians are kept in food and drink; whisky even is
illegally provided them, with the cognizance of the
authorities, under the name of " hatchets." Blankets,
and, it is said, powder and revolvers, are supplied to
them as necessary to their existence on the plains; but
when the first of the spring flowers begin to peep up
through the snow-drifts on the prairies, they take their
leave, and in a few weeks are out again upon the war-
path, plundering and scalping all the whites.
Judging from English experience in the north, and
Spanish in Mexico and South America, it would seem
as though the white man and the red cannot exist on
the same soil. Step by step the English have driven
back the braves, till New Englanders now remember
that there were Indians once in Massachusetts, as we
remember that once there were bears in Hampshire.
King Philip's defeat by the Connecticut volunteers
seems to form part of the early legendary history of
our race; yet there is still standing, and in good re-
pair, in Dorchester, a suburb of Boston, a frame-house
which in its time has been successfully defended against
Red Indians. On the other hand, step by step, since
the days of Cortez, the Indians and half-bloods have
RED INDIA. 109
driven out the Spaniards from Mexico and South
America. White men, Spaniards, received Maximilian
at Yera Cruz, but he was shot by full-blooded Indians
at Queretaro.
If any attempt is to be made to save the Indians
that remain, it must be worked out in the Eastern
States. Hitherto the whites have but pushed back the
Indians westward: if they would rescue the remnant
from starvation, they must bring them East, away
from Western men and Western hunting-grounds, and
let them intermingle with the whites, living, farming,
along with them, intermarrying, if possible. The
hunting Indian is too costly a being for our age ; but
we are bound to remember that ours is the blame of
having failed to teach him to be something better.
After all, if the Indian is mentally, morally, and
physically inferior to the white man, it is in every way
for the advantage of the world that the next genera-
tion that inhabits Colorado should consist of whites
instead of reds. That this result should not be brought
about by cruelty or fraud upon the now existing In-
dians is all that we need require. The gradual extinc-
tion of the inferior races is not only a law of nature,
but a blessing to mankind.
The Indian question is not likely to be one much
longer : before I reached England again, I learnt that
the Coloradan capital had offered "twenty dollars
a piece for Indian scalps with the ears on."
10
GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER XII.
COLORADO.
WHEN you have once set eyes upon the never-ending
sweep of the Great Plains, you no longer wonder that
America rejects Malthusianism. As Strachey says of
Virginia, "Here is ground enough to satisfy the most
covetous and wide affection." The freedom of these
grand countries was worth the tremendous conflict in
which it was, in reality, the foremost question ; their
future is of enormous moment to America.
Travelers soon learn, when making estimates of a
country's value, to despise no feature of the landscape;
that of the plains is full of life, full of charm lonely,
indeed, but never wearisome. Now great rolling up-
lands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains ;
there is all the grandeur of monotony, and yet con-
tinual change. Sometimes the grand distances are
broken by blue buttes or rugged bluffs. Over all there
is a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze ; the
air is bracing even when most hot ; the sky is cloud-
less, and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can
paint, and the boundless prairie swell, convey an idea
of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the
plains.
Maps do not remove the impression produced by
views. The Arkansas River, which is born and dies
within the limit of the plains, is two thousand miles
in length, and is navigable for eight hundred miles.
The Platte and Yellowstone are each of them as long.
COLORADO. Ill
Into the plains and plateau you could put all India
twice. The impression is not merely one of size.
There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the
lonely steppe; no patriotism, no love of home, can pre-
vent the -traveler wishing here to end his days.
To those who love the sea, there is a double charm.
Not only is the roll of the prairie as grand as that of
the Atlantic, but the crispness of the wind, the ab-
sence of trees, the multitude of tiny blooms upon the
sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the
ocean, the effect of which is we are always expecting
to hail it from off the top of the next hillock.
The resemblance to the Tartar plains has been re-
marked by Coloradan writers; it may be traced much
farther than they have carried it. Not only are the
earth, air, and water much alike, but in Colorado, as
in Bokhara, there are oil wells and mud volcanoes.
The color of the landscape is, in summer, green and
flowers; in fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers
ever.
The eastern and western portions of the plains are
not alike. In Kansas the grass is tall and rank; the
ravines are filled with cottonwood, hickory, and black
walnut; here and there are square miles of sunflowers,
from seven to nine feet high. As we came west, we
found that the sunflowers dwindled, and at Denver
they are only from three to nine inches in height, the
oddest little plants in nature, but thorough sunflowers
for all their smallness. We found the buffalo in the
eastern plains in the long bunch-grass, but in the win-
ter they work to the west in search of the sweet and
juicy "blue grass," which they rub out from under the
snow in the Coloradan plains. This grass is crisp as
hair, and so short that, as the story goes, you must
lather before you can mow it. The "blue grass" has
GREATER BRITAIN.
high vitality: if a wagon train is camped for a single
night among the sunflowers or tall weeds, this crisp
turf at once'springs up, and holds the ground forever.
The most astounding feature of these plains is
their capacity to receive millions, and, swallowing them
up, to wait open-mouthed for more. Vast and silent,
fertile yet waste, fieldlike yet untilled, they have
room for the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, for all
the teeming multitudes that have poured and can
pour from the plains of Asia and of Central Europe.
Twice as large as Hindostan, more temperate, more
habitable, nature has been placed here hedgeless,
gateless, free to all a green field for the support of
half the human race, unclaimed, untouched, awaiting
smiling, hands and plow.
There are two curses upon this land. Here, as in
India, the rivers depend on the melting of distant
snows for their supplies, and in the hot weather are
represented by beds of parched white sand. So hot
and dry is a great portion of the land, that crops
require irrigation. Water for drinking purposes is
scarce; artesian bores succeed, but they are some-
what costly for the Coloradan purse, and the supply
from common wells is brackish. This, perhaps, may
in part account for the Western mode of "prospect-
ing" after water, under which it is agreed that if none
be found at ten feet, a trial shall be made at a fresh
spot. The thriftless ranchman had sooner find bad
water at nine feet than good at eleven.
Irrigation by means of dams and reservoirs, such as
those we are building in Victoria, is but a question of
cost and time. The never-failing breezes of the plains
may be utilized for water-raising, and with water all
is possible. Even in the mountain plateau, overspread
as it is with soda, it has been found, as it has been by
COLORADO. 113
French farmers in Algeria, that, under irrigation, the
more alkali the better corn crop.
When fires are held in check by special enactments,
such as those which have been passed in Victoria and
South Australia, and the waters of the winter streams
retained for summer use by tanks and dams; when
artesian wells are frequent and irrigation general, belts
of timber will become possible upon the plains. Once
planted, these will in their turn mitigate the extremes
of climate, and keep alike in check the forces of evap-
oration, sun, and wind. Cultivation itself brings rain,
and steam will soon be available for pumping water
out of wells, for there is a great natural store of brown
coal and of oil-bearing shale near Denver, so that all
would be well were it not for the locusts the scourge
of the plains the second curse. The coming of the
chirping hordes is a real calamity in these far-western
countries. Their departure, whenever it occurs, is ofii-
cially announced by the governor of the State.
I have seen a field of indian-corn stripped bare of
every leaf and cob by the crickets ; but the owner told
me that he found consolation in the fact that they ate
up the weeds as well. For the locusts there is no cure.
The plovers may eat a few billions, but, as a rule, Colo-
radans must learn to expect that the locusts will in-
crease with the increase of the crops on which they
feed. The more corn, the more locusts the more
plovers, perhaps ; a clear gain to the locusts and plo-
vers, but a dead loss to the farmers and ranchmen.
The Coloradan "boys" are a handsome, intelligent
race. The mixture of Celtic and Saxon blood has here
produced a generous and noble manhood ; and the
freedom from wood, and consequent exposure to wind
and sun, has exterminated ague, and driven away the
hatchet-face ; but for all this, the Coloradans may have
10*
114 GREATER BRITAIN.
to succumb to the locusts. At present they affect to
despise them. "How may you get on in Colorado?"
said a Missourian one day to a " boy" that was up at
St. Louis. " Purty well, guess, if it warn't for the in-
sects." " "What insects? Crickets?" "Crickets! Wall,
guess not -jess insects like: rattlesnakes, panther, bar,
catamount, and sichlike."
" The march of empire stopped by a grasshopper"
would be a good heading for a Denver paper, but would
not represent a fact. The locusts may alter the step,
but not cause a halt. . If corn is impossible, cattle are
not; already thousands are pastured round Denver on
the natural grass. For horses, for merino sheep, these
rolling table-lands are peculiarly adapted. The New
Zealand paddock system may be applied to the whole
of this vast region Dutch clover, French lucern, could
replace the Indian grasses, and four sheep to the acre
would seem no extravagant estimate of the carrying
capability of the lands. The world must come here
for its tallow, its wool, its hides, its food.
In this seemingly happy conclusion there lurks a
danger. Flocks and herds are the main props of great
farming, the natural supporters of an aristocracy. Cat-
tle breeding is inconsistent, if not with republicanism,
at least with pure democracy. There are dangerous
classes of two kinds those who have too many acres,
as well as those who have too few. The danger at
least is real. Nothing short of violence or special
legislation can prevent the plains from continuing to
be forever that which under nature's farming they
have ever been the feeding ground for mighty flocks,
the cattle pasture of the world.
EOCKT MOUNTAINS. 115
CHAPTER XIII.
ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
"WHAT will I do for you if you stop here among us?
"Why, I'll name that peak after you in the next survey,"
said Governor Gilpin, pointing to a snowy mountain
towering to its 15,000 feet in the direction of Mount
Lincoln. I was not to be tempted, however; and as
for Dixon, there is already a county named after him
in Nebraska : so off we went along the foot of the
hills on our road to the Great Salt Lake, following the
"Cherokee Trail."
Striking north from Denver by Vasquez Fork and
Cache la Poudre called "Cash le Powder," just as
Mont Royal has become Montreal, and Sault de Ste
Marie, Soo we entered the Black Mountains, or East-
ern foot-hills, at Beaver Creek. On the second day, at
two in the afternoon, we reached Virginia Dale for
breakfast, without adventure, unless it were the shoot-
ing of a monster rattlesnake that lay " coiled in our
path upon the mountain side." Had we been but a
few minutes later, we should have made it a halt for
"supper" instead of breakfast, as the drivers had but
these two names for our daily meals, at whatever hour
they took place. Our " breakfasts" varied from 3.30
A.M. to 2 P.M.; our suppers from 3 P.M. to 2 A.M.
Here we found the weird red rocks that give to the
river and the territory their name of Colorado, and
came upon the mountain plateau at the spot where last
year the Utes scalped seven men only three hours after
116 GREATER BRITAIN.
Speaker Colfax and a Congressional party had passed
with their escort.
"While trundling over the sandy wastes of Laramie
Plains, we sighted the Wind River chain drawn by
Bierstadt in his great picture of the "Rocky Mount-
ains." The painter has caught the forms, but missed
the atmosphere of the range : the clouds and mists
are those of Maine and Massachusetts ; there is color
more vivid, darkness more lurid, in the storms of Col-
orado.
This was our first sight of the main range since we
entered the Black Hills, although we passed through
the gorges at the very foot of Long's Peak. It was
not till we had reached the rolling hills of "Medicine
Bow" a hundred miles beyond the peak that we
once more caught sight of it shining in the rear.
In the night between the second and third days the
frost was so bitter at the great altitude to which we
had attained, that we resorted to every expedient to
keep out the cold. While I was trying to peg down
one of the leathern flaps of our ambulance with the
pencil from my note-book, my eye caught the moon-
light on the ground, and I drew back saying, " We are
on the snow." The next time we halted, I found that
what I had seeu was an impalpable white dust,;the
much dreaded alkali.
In the morning of the third day we found ourselves
in a country of dazzling white, dotted with here and
there a tuft of sage-brush an Artemisia akin to that
of the Algerian highlands. At last we were in the
"American desert" the " Mauvaises terres."
Once only did we escape for a time from alkali and
sage to sweet waters and sweet grass. Near Bridger's
Pass and the "divide" between Atlantic and Pacific
floods, we came on a long valley swept by chilly
ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 117
breezes, and almost unfit for human habitation from
the rarefaction of the air, but blessed with pasture
ground on which domesticated herds of Himalayan
yk should one day feed. Settlers in Utah will find out
that this animal, which would flourish here at altitudes
of from 4000 to 14,000 feet, and which bears the most
useful of all furs, requires less herbage in proportion
to its weight and size than almost any animal we
know.
This Bridger's Pass route is that by which the tele-
graph line runs, and I was told by the drivers strange
stories of the Indians and their views on this great
Medicine. They never destroy out of mere wanton-
ness, but have been known to cut the wire and then
lie in ambush in the neighborhood, knowing that re-
pairing parties would arrive and fall an easy prey.
Having come one morning upon three armed over-
landers lying fast asleep, while a fourth kept guard by
a fire which coincided with a gap in the posts, but
which was far from any timber or even scrub, I have
my doubts as to whether "white Indians" have not
much to do with the destruction of the line.
From one of the uplands of the Artemisia barrens
we sighted at once Fremont's Peak on the north,
and another great snow-dome upon the south. The
unknown mountain was both the more distant and the
loftier of the two, yet the maps mark no chain within
eyeshot to the southward. The country on either side
of this well-worn track is still as little known as when
Captain Stansbury explored it in 1850 ; and when we
crossed the Green River, as the Upper Colorado is
called, it was strange to remember that the stream is
here lost in a thousand miles of undiscovered wilds, to
be found again flowing toward Mexico. Near the
ferry is the place where Albert S. Johnson's mule-
118 GREATER BRITAIN.
trains were captured by the Mormons under General
Lot Smith.
In the middle of the night we would come upon
mule-trains starting on their march in order to avoid
the mid-day sun, and thus save water, which they are
sometimes forced to carry with them for as much as
fifty miles. When we found them halted, they were
always camped on bluffs and in bends, far from rocks
and tufts, behind which the Indians might creep and
stampede the cattle : this they do by suddenly swoop-
ing down with fearful noises, and riding in among the
mules or oxen at full speed. The beasts break away
in their fright, and are driven off before the sentries
have time to turn out the camp.
On the fourth day from Denver, the scenery was
tame enough, but strange in the extreme. Its charac-
teristic feature was its breadth. No longer the rocky
defiles of Virginia Dale, no longer the glimpses of the
main range as from Laramie Plains and the foot-hills
of Medicine Bow, but great rolling downs like those
of the plains much magnified. We crossed one of the
highest passes in the world without seeing snow, but
looked back directly we were through it on snow-fields
behind us and all around.
At Elk Mountain we suffered greatly from the frost,
but by mid day we were taking oft' our coats, and the
mules hanging their heads in the sun once more, while
those which should have taken their places were, as
the ranchman expressed it, " kicking their heels in pure
cussedness" at a stream some ten miles away.
While walking before the "hack" through the
burning sand of Bitter Creek, I put up a bird as big
as a turkey, which must, I suppose, have been a vul-
ture. The sage-brush growing here as much as three
feet high, and as stout and gnarled as century-old
ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 119
heather, gave shelter to a few coveys of sage-hens, at
which we shot without much success, although they
seldom ran, and never rose. Their color is that of the
brush itself a yellowish gray and it is as hard to see
them as to pick up a partridge on a sun-dried fallow at
home in England. Of wolves and rattlesnakes there
were plenty, but of big game we saw but little, only a
few black-tails in -the day.
This track is more traveled by trains than is the
Smoky Hill route, which accounts for the absence of
game on the line; but that there is plenty close at
hand is clear from the way we were fed. Smoky Hill
starvation was forgotten in piles of steaks of elk and
antelope ; but still no fruit, no vegetable, no bread, no
drink save "sage-brush tea," and that half poisoned
with the water of the alkaline creeks.
Jerked buffalo had disappeared from our meals.
The droves never visit the Sierra Madre now, and sci-
entific books have said that in the mountains they were
ever unknown. In Bridger's Pass we saw the skulls of
not less than twenty buffalo, which is proof enough
that they once were here, though perhaps long ago.
The skin and bones will last about a year after the
beast has died, for the wolves tear them to pieces to
get at the marrow within, but the skull they never
touch ; and the oldest ranchman failed to give me an
answer as to how long skulls and horns might last.
We saw no buffalo roads like those across the plains.
From the absence of buffalo, absence of birds, ab-
sence of flowers, absence even of Indians, the Eocky
Mountain plateau is more of a solitude than are the
plains. It takes days to see this, for you naturally no-
tice it less. On the plains, the glorious climate, the
masses of rich blooming plants, the millions of beasts,
and insects, and birds, all seem prepared to the hand
120 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
of man, and for man you are continually searching.
Each time you round a hill, you look for the smoke of
the farm. Here on the mountains you feel as you do
on the sea: it is nature's own lone solitude, but from
no fault of ours the higher parts of the plateau were
not made for man.
Early on the fifth night we dashed suddenly out of
utter darkness into a mountain glen blazing with fifty
fires, and perfumed with the scent of burning cedar.
As many wagons as there were fires were corraled in
an ellipse about the road, and 600 cattle were pastured
within the fire-glow in rich grass that told of water.
Men and women were seated round the camp-fires
praying and singing hymns. As we drove in, they
rose and cheered us " on your way to Zion." Our Gen-
tile driver yelled back the warhoop "How! How!
How! How w! We'll give yer love to Brigham;"
and back went the poor travelers to their prayers
again. It was a bull train of the Mormon immigra-
tion.
Five minutes after we had passed the camp we were
back in civilization, and plunged into polygamous so-
ciety all at once, with Bishop Myers, the keeper of
Bear River Ranch, drawing water from the well, while
Mrs. Myers No. 1 cooked the chops, and Mrs. Myers
No. 2 laid the table neatly.
The kind bishop made us sit before the fire till we
were warm, and filled our "hack" with hay, that we
might continue so, and off we went, inclined to look
favorably on polygamy after such experience of polyg-
amists.
Leaving Bear Eiver about midnight, at two o'clock
in the morning of the sixth day we commenced the
descent of Echo Canyon, the grandest of all the gully
passes of the Wasatch Range. The night was so clear
ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 121
that I was able to make some outline sketches of the
cliffs from the ranch where we changed mules. Echo
Canyon is the Thermopylae of Utah, the pass that the
Mormons fortified against the United States forces
under Albeit S. Johnson at the time of " Buchanan's
raid." Twenty-six miles long, often not more than a
few yards wide at the bottom, and a few hundred feet
at the top, with an overhanging cliff on the north side,
and a mountain wall on the south, Echo Canyon would
be no easy pass to force. Government will do well to
prevent the Pacific Railroad from following this defile.
After breakfast at Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle,
situated in a smiling valley not unlike that between
Martigny and Saint Maurice, we dashed on past Kim-
ball's Ranch, where we once more hitched horses in-
stead of mules, and began our descent of seventeen
miles down Big Canyon, the best of all the passes of
the Wasatch. Rounding a spur at the end of our six-
hundredth mile from Denver, we first sighted the Mor-
mon promised land.
The sun was setting over the great dead lake to our
right, lighting up the valley with a silvery gleam from
Jordan River, and the hills with a golden glow from off
the snow-fields of the many mountain chains and peaks
around. In our front, the Oquirrh, or Western Range,
stood out in sharp purple outlines upon a sea-colored
sky. To our left were the Utah Mountains, blushing
rose, all about our heads the Wasatch glowing in
orange and gold. From the flat valley in the sunny
distance rose the smoke of many houses, the dust of
many droves ; on the bench-land of Ensign Peak, on
the lake side, white houses peeped from among the
peach-trees, modestly, and hinted the presence of the
city.
Here was Plato's table-land of the Atlantic isle one
11
122 GREATER BRITAIN.
great field of corn and wheat, where only twenty years
ago Fremont, the pathfinder, reported wheat and corn
impossible.
CHAPTER XIV.
BRIGHAM YOUNG.
" I LOOK upon Mohammed and Brigham as the very
best men that God could send as ministers to those
unto whom He sent them," wrote Elder Frederick
Evans, of the " Shaker" village of New Lebanon, in a
letter to us, inclosing another by way of introduction
to the Mormon president.
Credentials from the Shaker to the Mormon chief
from the great living exponent of the principle of celi-
bacy to the " most married" in all America were not
to be kept undelivered ; so the moment we had bathed
we posted off to a merchant to whom we had letters,
that we might inquire when his spiritual chief and
military ruler would be home again from his "trip
north." The answer was, " To-morrow."
After watching the last gleams fade from the snow-
fields upon the Wasatch, we parted for the night, as I
had to sleep in a private house, the hotel being filled
even to the balcony. As I entered the drawing-room
of my entertainer, I heard the voice of a lady reading,
and caught enough of what she said to be aware that
it was a defense of polygamy. She ceased when she
saw the stranger ; but I found that it was my host's
first wife reading Belinda Pratt's book to her daughters
girls just blooming into womanhood.
BRIGHAM YOUNG. 123
After an agreeable chat with the ladies, doubly
pleasant as it followed upon a long absence from
civilization, I went to my room, which I afterward
found to be that of the eldest son, a youth of sixteen
years. In one corner stood two Ballard rifles, and
two revolvers and a militia uniform hung from pegs
upon the wall. When I lay down with my hands under-
neath the pillow an attitude instinctively adopted to
escape the sand-flies, I touched something cold. I felt
it a full-sized Colt, and capped. Such was my first
introduction to Utah Mormonism.
On the morrow, we had the first and most formal
of our four interviews with the Mormon president, the
conversation lasting three hours, and all the leading
men of the church being present. When we rose to
leave, Brigham said: "Come to see me here again;
Brother Stenhouse will show you everything;" and
then blessed us in these words: "Peace be with you,
in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ/'
Elder Stenhouse followed us out of the presence,
and somewhat anxiously put the odd question : " Well,
is he a white man?" " White" is used in Utah as a
general term of praise : a white man is a man to use
our corresponding idiom not so black as he is painted.
A "white country" is a country with grass and trees;
just as a white man means a man who is morally not a
Ute, so a white country is a land in which others than
Utes can dwell.
We made some complimentary answer to Sten-
house's question; but it was impossible not to feel
that the real point was : Is Brigham sincere ?
Brigham's deeds have been those of a sincere man.
His bitterest opponents cannot dispute the fact that
in 1844, when Nauvoo was about to be deserted,
owing to the attacks of a ruffianly mob, Brigham
124 GREATER BRITAIN.
rushed to the front, and took the chief command
To be a Mormon leader then was to be a leader of
an outcast people, with a price set on his head, in
a Missourian county in which almost every man who
was not a Mormon was by profession an assassin. In
the sense, too, of believing that he is what he pro-
fesses to be, Brigham is undoubtedly sincere. In the
wider sense of being that which he professes to be
he comes oft' as well, if only we will read his words
in the way he speaks them. He tells us that he is
a prophet God's representative on earth ; but when
I asked him whether he was of a wholly different
spiritual rank to that held by other devout men, he
said: "By no means. I am a prophet one of many.
All good men are prophets ; but God has blessed me
with peculiar favor in revealing His will oftener and
more clearly through me than through other men."
Those who would understand Brigham's revelations
must read Bentham. The leading Mormons are utili-
tarian deists. "God's will b done," they, like other
deists, say is to be our rule ; and God's will they find
in written Revelation and in Utility. God has given
men, by the actual hand of angels, the Bible, the Book
of Mormon, the Book of Covenants, the revelation
upon Plural Marriage. When these are exhausted,
man, seeking for God's will, has to turn to the princi-
ple of Utility : that which is for the happiness of man-
kind that is of the church is God's will, and must be
done. While Utility is their only index to God's
pleasure, they admit that the church must be ruled
that opinions may differ as to what is the good of the
church, and therefore the will of God. They meet,
then, annually, in an assembly of the people, and elect-
ing church officers by popular will and acclamation,
they see God's finger in the ballot-box. They say,
BRIOHAM YOUNG. 125
like the Jews in the election of their judges, that the
choice of the people is the choice of God. This is
what men like John Taylor or Daniel Wells appear to
feel; the ignorant are permitted to look upon Brig-
ham as something more than man, and though Brig-
ham himself does nothing to confirm this view, the
leaders foster the delusion. When I asked Stenhouse,
"Has Brigham's re-election as prophet ever been op-
posed?" he answered sharply, "I should like to see
the man who'd do it."
Brigham's personal position is a strange one: he
calls himself prophet, and declares that he has reve-
lations from God himself, but when you ask him quietly
what all this means, you find that for prophet you
should read political philosopher. He sees that a canal
from Utah Lake to Salt Lake Valley would be of vast
utility to the church and people that a new settle-
ment is urgently required. He thinks about these
things till they dominate in his mind, and take
in his brain the shape of physical creations. He
dreams of the canal, the city; sees them before him
in his waking moments. That which is so clearly for
the good of God's people becomes God's will. Next
Sunday at the Tabernacle he steps to the front, and
says : " God has spoken ; He has said unto his prophet,
6 Get thee up, Brigham, and build Me a city in the
fertile valley to the South, where there is water, where
there are fish, where the sun is strong enough to ripen
the cotton plants, and give raiment as well as food to
My saints on earth.' Brethren willing to aid God's
work should come to me before the Bishops' meeting."
As the prophet takes his seat again, and puts on his
broad-brimmed hat, a hum of applause runs round the
bowery, and teams and barrows are freely promised.
Sometimes the canal, the bridge, the city may prove
11*
126 GREATER BRITAIN. .
a failure, but this is not concealed ; the prophet's hu-
man tongue may blunder even when he is communi-
cating holy things.
"After all," Brigham said to me the day before I
left, " the highest inspiration is good sense the know-
ing what to do, and how to do it."
In all this it is hard for us, with our English hatred
of casuistry and hair-splitting, to see sincerity ; still,
given his foundation, Brigham is sincere. Like other
political religionists, he must feel himself morally
bound to stick at nothing when the interests of the
church are at stake. To prefer man's life or property
to the service of God must be a crime in such a church.
The Mormons deny the truth of the murder-stories
alleged against the Danites, but they avoid doing so
in sweeping or even general terms though, if need
were, of course they would be bound to lie as well as
to kill in the name of God and His holy prophet.
The secret polity which I have sketched gives, evi-
dently, enormous power to some one man within the
church ; but the Mormon constitution does not very
clearly point out who that man shall be. With a view
to the possible future failure of leaders of great per-
sonal qualifications, the First Presidency consists of
three members with equal rank; but to his place in the
Trinity, Brigham unites the office of Trustee in Trust,
which gives him the control of the funds and tithing,
or church taxation.
All are not agreed as to what should be Brigham's
place in Utah. Stenhouse said one day.: " I am one of
those who think that our President should do every-
thing. He has made this church and this country, and
should have his way in all things; saying so gets me
into trouble with some." The writer of a report of
Brigham's tour which appeared in the Salt Lake Tele-
MORMONDOM. 127
graph the day we reached the city, used the words :
" God never spoke through man more clearly than
through President Young."
One day, when Stenhouse was speaking of the moral-
ity of the Mormon people, he said : "Our penalty for
adultery is death." Remembering the Danites, we
were down on him at once : " Do you inflict it ?" " ISTo ;
but well, not practically; but really it is so. A man
who commits adultery withers away and perishes.
A man sent away from his wives upon a mission that
may last for years, if he lives not purely if, when he
returns, he cannot meet the eye of Brigham, better for him
to be at once in hell. He withers."
Brigham himself has spoken in strong words of his
own power over the Mormon people: "Let the talking
folk at Washington say, if they please, that I am no
longer Governor of Utah. I am, and will be Governor,
until God Almighty says, ' Brigham, you need not be
Governor any more.' ' ;
Brigham' s head is that of a man who nowhere could
be second.
. CHAPTER XV.
MORMONDOM.
had been presented at court, and favorably re-
ceived ; asked to call again ; admitted to State secrets
of the presidency. From this moment our position in
the city was secured. Mormon seats in the theater
were placed at our disposal; the director of immigra-
tion, the presiding bishop, Colonel Hunter a grim,
128 GREATER BRITAIN.
weather-beaten Indian fighter and his coadjutors,
carried us off to see the reception of the bull-train at
the Elephant Corral ; we were offered a team to take
us to the Lake, which we refused only because we had
already accepted the loan of one from a Gentile mer-
chant; presents of peaches, and invitations to lunch,
dinner, and supper, came pouring in upon us from all
sides. In a single morning we were visited by four of
the apostles and nine other leading members of the
church. Ecclesiastical dignitaries sat upon our single
chair and wash-hand-stand ; and one bed groaned under
the weight of George A. Smith, "church historian,"
while the other bore ^Esop's load the peaches he had
brought. These growers of fruit from standard trees
think but small things of our English wall-fruit, "baked
on one side and frozen on the other," as they say. There
is a mellowness about the Mormon peaches that would
drive our gardeners to despair.
One of our callers was Captain Hooper, the Utah
delegate to Congress. He is an adept at the Western
plan of getting out of a fix by telling you a story.
When we laughingly alluded to his lack of wives, and
the absurdity of a monogamist representing Utah, he
said that the people at Washington all believed that
Utah had sent them a polygamist. There is a rule
that no one with the entry shall take more than one
lady to the White House receptions. A member of
Congress was urged by three ladies to take them with
him. He, as men do, said, "The thing is impossible"
and did it. Presenting himself with the bevy at
the door, the usher stopped him: " Can't pass; only
one friend admitted with each member." " Suppose,
sir, that I'm the delegate from Utah Territory?" said
the Congressman. " Oh, pass in, sir pass in," was
the instant answer of the usher. The story reminds
MORMONDOM. 129
me of poor Browne's "family" ticket to his lecture at
Salt Lake City: "Admit the bearer and one wife."
Hooper is said to be under pressure at this moment on
the question of polygamy, for he is a favorite with the
prophet, who cannot, however, with consistency pro-
mote him to office in the church on account of a saying
of his own: "A man with one wife is of less account
before God than a man with no wives at all."
Our best opportunity of judging of the Mormon
ladies was at the theater, which we attended regularly,
sitting now in Elder Stenhouse's " family" seats, now
with General Wells. Here we saw all the wives of the
leading churchmen of the city ; in their houses, we
saw only those they chose to show us : in no case but
that of the Clawson family did we meet in society all
the wives. We noticed at once that the leading ladies
were all alike full of taste, full of sense, but full, at
the same time, of a kind of unconscious melancholy.
Everywhere, as you looked round the house, you met
the sad eye which I had seen but once before among
the Shakers at New Lebanon. The women here, know-
ing no other state, seem to think themselves as happy
as the day is long: their eye alone is there to show the
Gentile that they are, if the expression may be allowed,
unhappy without knowing it. That these Mormon
women love their religion and reverence its priests is
but a consequence of its being "their religion" the
system in the midst of which they have been brought
up. Which of us is there who does not set up some
idol in his heart round which he weaves all that he has
of poetry and devotion in his character ? Art, hero-wor-
ship, patriotism are forms of this great tendency. That
the Mormon girls, who are educated as highly as those
of any country in the world who, like all American
girls, are allowed to wander where they please who
130 GREATER BRITAIN.
are certain of protection in any of the fifty Gentile
houses in the city, and absolutely safe in Camp Doug-
las at the distance of two miles from the city-wall
all consent deliberately to enter on polygamy shows
clearly enough that they can, as a rule, have no dislike
to it beyond such a feeling as public opinion will
speedily overcome.
Discussion of the institution of plural marriage in
Salt Lake City is fruitless; all that can be done is to
observe. In assaulting the Mormon citadel, you strike
against the air. "Polygamy degrades the women,"
you begin. " Morally or socially?" says the Mormon.
"Socially." "Granted," is the reply, "and that is a
most desirable consummation. By socially lowering,
it morally raises the woman. It makes her a servant,
but it makes her pure and good."
It is always well to remember that if we have one
argument against polygamy which from our Gentile
point of view is unanswerable, it is not necessary that
we should rack our brains for others. All our modern
experience is favorable to ranking woman as man's
equal ; polygamy assumes that she shall be his servant
loving, faithful, cheerful, willing, but still a servant.
The opposite poles upon the women question are
Utah polygamy and Kansas female suffrage.
WESTERN EDITORS. 131
CHAPTER XVI.
WESTERN EDITORS.
THE attack upon Mormondom has been system-
atized, and is conducted with military skill, by trench
and parallel. The New England papers having called
for "facts" whereon to base their homilies, General
Connor, of Fenian fame, set up the Union Vedette in
Salt Lake City, and publishes on Saturdays a sheet
expressly intended for Eastern reading. The mantle
of the Sangamo Journal has fallen on the Vedette, and
John C. Bennett is effaced by Connor. From this
source it is that come the whole of the paragraphs
against Brigham and all Mormondom which fill the
Eastern papers, and find their way to London. The
editor has to fill his paper with peppery leaders, well-
spiced telegrams, stinging " facts." Every w^ek there
must be something that can be used and quoted against
Brigham. The Eastern remarks upon quotations in
turn are quoted at Salt Lake. Under such circum-
stances, even telegrams can be made to take a flavor.
In to-day's Vedette we have one from St. Joseph, de-
scribing how above one thousand "of these dirty,
filthy dupes of the Great Salt Lake iniquity" are now
squatting round the packet depot, awaiting transport.
Another from Chicago tells us that the seven thousand
European Mormons who have this year passed up the
Missouri River " are of the lowest and most ignorant
classes." The leader is directed against Mormons in
general, and Stenhouse in particular, as editor of one of
132 GBEATER BRITAIN.
the Mormon papers, and ex-postmaster of the Territory.
He has already had cause to fear the Vedette, as it was
through the exertions of its editor that he lost his
office. This matter is referred to in the leader of to-
day : "When we found our letters scattered about the
streets in fragments, we succeeded in getting an honest
postmaster appointed in place of the editor of the Tele-
graph an organ where even carrots, pumpkins, and
potatoes are current funds directed by a clique of
foreign writers, who can hardly speak our language,
and who never drew a loyal breath since they came to
Utah." The Mormon tax frauds, and the Mormon
police, likewise come in for their share of abuse, and
the writer concludes with a pathetic plea against arrest
"for quietly indulging in a glass of wine in a private
room with a friend."
Attacks such as these make one understand the
suspiciousness of the Mormon leaders, and the slow-
ness of Stenhouse and his friends to take a joke if it
concerns the church. Poor Artemus Ward once wrote
to Stenhouse, "If you can't take a joke, you'll be
darned, and you oughter ;" but the jest at which he
can laugh has wrought no cure. Heber Kimball said
to me one day: "They're all alike. There was
came here to write a book, and we thought better of
him than of most. I showed him more kindness than
I ever showed a man before or since, and then he
called me a ' hoary reprobate.' I would advise him
not to pass this way next time."
The suspicion often takes odd shapes. One Sunday
morning, at the tabernacle, I remarked that the
Prophet's daughter, Zina, had on the same dress as
she had worn the evening before at the theater, in
playing "Mrs. Musket" in the farce of " My Husband's
Ghost." It was a black silk gown, with a van dyke
WESTERN EDITORS. 133
flounce of white, impossible to mistake. I pointed
it out in joke to a Mormon friend, when he denied my
assertion in the most emphatic way, although he could
not have known for certain that I was wrong, as he
sat next to rne in the theater during the whole play.
The Mormons will talk freely of their own sus-
piciousness. They say that the coldness with which
travelers are usually received at Salt Lake City is
the consequence of years of total misrepresentation.
They forget that they are arguing in a circle, and that
this misrepresentation is itself sometimes the result of
their reserve.
The news and advertisements are even more
amusing than the leaders in the Vedette. A paragraph
tells us, for instance, that "Mrs. Martha Stewart and
Mrs. Robertson, of San Antonio, lately had an im-
promptu fight with revolvers; Mrs. Stewart was badly
winged." Nor is this the only reference in the paper
to shooting by ladies, as another paragraph tells us
how a young girl, frightened by a sham ghost, drew
on the would-be apparition, and with six barrels shot
him twice through the head, and four times "in the
region of the heart." A quotation from the Oivyhee
Avalanche, speaking of gambling hells, tells us that
"one hurdy shebang" in Silver City shipped 8000
dollars as the net proceeds of its July business. " These
leeches corral more clear cash than most quartz mills,"
remonstrates the editor. "Corral" is the Mexican
cattle inclosure ; the yard where the team mules are
ranched; the kraal of Cape Colony, which, on the
plains and the plateau, serves as a fort for men as well
as a fold for oxen, and resembles the serai of the. East.
The word "to corral" means to shut. into one of these
pens; and thence "to pouch," "to pocket," "to bag,"
to get well into hand.
12
134 GREATER BRITAIN.
The advertisements are in keeping with the news.
"Everything, from a salamander safe to a Limerick
fish-hook," is offered by one firm. "Fifty-three and
a half and three and three-quarter thimble-skein
Schuttler wagons," is offered by another. An ad-
vertiser bids us "Spike the Guns of Humbug! and
Beware of Deleterious Dyes! Refuse to have your
Heads Baptized with Liquid Fire!" Another says,
"If you want a paper free from entanglements of
cliques, and antagonistic to the corrupting evils of
factionism, subscribe to the Montana Radiator." No-
thing beats the following: "Butcher's dead-shot for
bed-bugs! Curls them up as fire does a leaf ! Try
it, and sleep in peace ! Sold by all live druggists."
If we turn to the other Salt Lake papers, the Tele-
graph, an independent Mormon paper, and the Deseret
News, the official journal of the church, we find a con-
trast to the trash of the Vedette. Brigham's paper,
clearly printed and of a pleasant size, is filled with the
best and latest news from the outlying portions of the
Territory, and from Europe. The motto on its head is
a simple one " Truth and Liberty;" and twenty-eight
columns of solid news are given us. Among the items
is an account of a fight upon the Smoky Hill route,
which occurred on the day we reached this city, and in
which two teamsters George Hill and Luke West
were killed by the Kiowas and Cheyenues. A loyal
Union article from the pen of Albert Carrington, the
editor, is followed by one upon the natural advantages
of Utah, in which the writer complains that th'e very
men who ridiculed the Mormons for settling in a desert
are now declaiming against their being allowed to squat
upon one of the ."most fertile locations in the United
States." The paper asserts that Mormon success is
secured only by Mormon industry, and that as a merely
WESTERN EDITORS. 135
commercial speculation, apart from the religious im-
pulse, the cultivation of Utah would not pay: "Utah
is no place for the loafer or the lazy man." An official
report, like the Court Circular of England, is headed,
" President Brigham Young's trip North," and is
signed hy G. D. Watt, "Keporter" to the church.
The Old Testament is not spared. " From what we
saw of the timbered mountains," writes one reporter,
" we had no despondency of Israel ever failing for
material to build up, beautify, and adorn pleasant hab-
itations in that part of Zion." A theatrical criticism is
not wanting, and the church actors come in for " praise
all round." In another part of the paper are telegraphic
reports from the captains of the seven immigrant trains
not yet come in, giving their position, and details of
the number of days' march for which they have pro-
visions still in hand. One reports " thirty-eight head
of cattle stolen ;" another, " a good deal of mountain
fever;" but, on the whole, the telegrams look well.
The editor, speaking of the two English visitors now
in the city, says : " We greet them to our -mountain
habitation, and bid them welcome to our orchard ; and
that's considerable for an editor, especially if he has
plural responsibilities to look after." Bishop Harring-
ton reports from American Fork that everybody is
thriving there, and " doing as the Mormon creed
directs minding their own business." " That's good,
bishop," says the editor. The "Passenger List of
the 2d Ox-train, Captain J. D. Holladay," is given at
length ; about half the immigrants come with wife and
family, very many with five or six children. From
Liverpool, the chief office for Europe, comes a gazette
of "Releases and Appointments," signed "Brigham
Young, Jun., President of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles and Adjacent
136 GREATER BRITAIN.
Countries," accompanied by a dispatch, in which the
" President for England" gives details of his visits to
the Saints in Norway, and of his conversations with
the United States minister at St. Petersburg.
The Telegraph, like its editor, is practical, and does
not deal in extract. All the sheet, with the exception
of a few columns, is taken up with business advertise-
ments ; but these are not the least amusing part of the
paper. A gigantic figure of a man in high boots and
felt hat, standing on a ladder and pasting up Messrs.
Eldredge and Clawson's dry-goods advertisement, occu-
pies nearly half the back page. Mr. Birch informs
" parties hauling wheat from San Pete County" that
his mill at Fort Birch "is now running, and is pro-
tected by a stone-wall fortification, and is situate at the
mouth of Salt Canyon, just above JSTephi City, Juab
County, on the direct road to Pahranagat." A view of
the fort, with posterns, parapets, embrasures, and a
giant flag, heads the advertisement. The cuts are not
always so cheerful : one far-western paper fills three-
quarters of its front page w T ith an engraving of a coffin.
The editorial columns contain calls to the " brethren
with teams " to aid the immigrants, an account of a
"rather mixed case" of "double divorce" (Gentile),
and of a prosecution of a man " for violation of the
seventh commandment." A Mormon police report is
headed, "One drunk at the calaboose." Defending
himself against charges of "directing bishops" and
" steadying the ark," the editor calls on the bishops
to shorten their sermons: a we may get a crack for
this, but we can't help it ; we like variety, life, and
short meetings." In a paragraph about his visitors,
our friend, the editor of the Telegraph, said, a day or
two after our arrival in the city: "If a stranger can
escape the strychnine clique for three days after arri-
WESTERN EDITORS. 137
val, he is forever afterward safe. Generally the first
twenty-four hours are sufficient to prostrate even the
very robust." In a few words of regret at a change
in the Denver newspaper staff, our editor says : " How-
ever, a couple of sentences indicate that George has
no intention of abandoning the tripod. That's right :
keep at it, my boy; misery likes company."
The day after we reached Denver, the Gazette, com-
menting on this same u George," said: " Captain West
has left the Rocky Mountains News office. We are not
surprised, as we could never see how any respectable,
decent gentleman like George could get along with
Governor Evans's paid hireling and whelp who edits
that delectable sheet. " Of the two papers which exist
in every town in the Union, each is always at work at-
tempting to " use up" the other. I have seen the Dem-
ocratic print of Chicago call its Republican opponent
" a radical, disunion, disreputable, bankrupt, emascu-
lated evening newspaper concern of this city" a
string of terms by the side of which even Western
utterances pale.
A paragraph headed " The Millennium" tells us that
the editors of the Telegraph and Deseret News were seen
yesterday afternoon walking together toward the Twen-
tieth Ward. Another paragraph records the ill suc-
cess of an expedition against Indians who had been
" raiding" down in u Dixie," or South Utah. A general
order, signed "Lieut-General Daniel H. Wells," and
dated "headquarters ISTauvoo Legion," directs the as-
sembly, for a three days' "big drill," of the forces of
the various military districts of the Territory. The
name of " Territorial Militia," under which alone the
United States can permit the existence of the legion,
is carefully omitted. This is not the only warlike ad-
vertisement in the paper: fourteen cases of Ballard
12*
138 GREATER BRITAIN.
rifles are offered in exchange for cattle; and other
firms offer tents and side-arms to their friends. Amuse-
ments are not forgotten : a cricket match between two
Mormon settlements in Cache County is recorded :
" Wellsville whipping Brigham City with six wickets
to go down ;" and is followed by an article in which
the First President may have had a hand, pointing out
that the Salt Lake Theater is going to be the greatest
of theaters, and that the favor of its audience is a pass-
port beyond Wallack's, and equal to Drury Lane or the
Haymarket. In sharp contrast to these signs of pres-
ent prosperity, the First Presidency announce the an-
nual gathering of the surviving members of Zion's
camp, the association of the first immigrant band.
There is about the Mormon papers much that tells
of long settlement and prosperity. When I showed
Stenhouse the Denver Gazette of our second day in that
town, he said: "Well, Telegraph's better than that!"
The Denver sheet is a literary curiosity of the first
order. Printed on chocolate-colored paper, in ink of
a not much darker hue, it is in parts illegible to the
reader's regret, for what we were able to make out
was good enough to make us wish for more.
The difference between the Mormon and Gentile
papers is strongly marked in the advertisements. The
Denver Gazette is filled with puffs of quacks and
whisky shops. In the column headed " Business
Cards," Dr. Ermerins announces that he may be con-
sulted by his patients in the "French, German, and
English" tongues. Lower down we have the card of
"Dr. Treat, Eclectic Physician and Surgeon," which
is preceded by an advertisement of " sulkies made to
order," and followed by a leaded heading, "Know thy
Destiny ; Madame Thornton, the English Astrologist
and Psychometrician, has located herself at Hudson,
WESTERN EDITORS. 139
New York ; by the aid of an instrument of intense
power, known as the Psychomotrope, she guarantees
to produce a lifelike picture of the future husband or
wife of the applicant." There is a strange turning to-
ward the supernatural among this people. Astrology
is openly professed as a science throughout the United
States; the success of spiritualism is amazing. The
most sensible men are not exempt from the weakness :
the dupes of the astrologers are not the uneducated
Irish ; they are the strong-minded, half-educated West-
ern men, shrewd and keen in trade, brave in war, ma-
terial and cold in faith, it would be supposed, but cred-
ulous to folly, as we know, when personal revelation,
the supernaturalism of the present day, is set before
them in the crudest and least attractive forms. A little
lower, " Charley Eyser" and " Gus Fogus" advertise
their bars. The latter announces " Lager Beer at only
10 cents," in a "cool retreat," "fitted up with green-
growing trees." A returned warrior heads his an-
nouncement, in huge capitals, " Back Home Again,
An Old Hand at the Bellows, the Soldier Blacksmith :
S. M. Logan." In a country where weights and
measures are rather a matter of practice than of law,
Mr. O'Connell does well to add to "Lager beer 15
cents," " Glasses hold Two Bushels." John Morris,
of the " Little Giant" or " Theater Saloon," asks us to
"call and see him ;" while his rivals of the "Progres-
sive Saloon" offer the " finest liquors that the East can
command." Morris Sigi, whose "lager is pronounced
A No. 1 by all who have used it," bids us " give him a
fair trial, and satisfy ourselves as to the false reports in
circulation." Daniel Marsh, dealer in "breech-loading
guns and revolvers," adds, " and anything that may be
wanted, from a cradle to a coffin, both inclusive, made
to order. An Indian Lodge on view, for sale." This
140 GREATER BRITAIN.
is the man at whose shop scalps hang for sale ; but he
fails to name it in his advertisement ; the Utes brought
them in too late for insertion, perhaps.
Advertisements of freight-trains now starting to the
East, of mail-coaches to Buckskin Joe advertisements
slanting, topsy-turvy, and sideways turned complete
the outer sheet ; but some of them, through bad ink,
printer's errors, strange English, and wilder Latin, are
wholly unintelligible. It is hard to make much of this,
for instance : " Mr. ^Esculapiu's, no oifense, I hope, as
this is written extempore and ipso facto. But, per-
haps, I ought not to disregard ex unci disce omnes."
In an editorial on the English visitors then in Den-
ver, the chance of putting into their mouths a puff of
the Territory of Colorado was not lost. We were made
to " appreciate the native energy and wealth of industry
necessary in building up such a Star of Empire as Col-
orado." The next paragraph is communicated from
Conejos, in the south of the Territory, and says: " The
election has now passed off, and I am confident that
we can beat any ward in Denver, and give them two
in the game, for rascality in voting. 3 ' Another leader
calls on the people of Denver to remember that there
are two men in the calaboose for mule stealing, and
that the last man locked up for the offense was allowed
to escape : some cottonwood-trees still exist, it believes.
In former times, there was for the lynching here hinted
at a reason which no longer exists: a man shut up in
jail built of adobe, or sun-dried brick, could scratch
his way through the crumbling wall in two days, so
the citizens generally hanged him in one. Now that
the jails are in brick and stone, the job might safely
be left to the sheriff; but the people of Denver seem to
trust themselves better even than they do their dele-
gate, Bob Wilson.
WESTERN EDI TOES. 141
A year or two ago, the jails were so crazy that Col-
oradan criminals, when given their choice whether they
would be hanged in a week, or a as soon after breakfast
to-morrow as shall be convenient to the sheriff and
agreeable, Mr. Prisoner, to you," as the Texan formula
runs, used to elect for the quick delivery, on the ground
that otherwise they would catch their deaths of cold
at least so the Denver story runs. They have, how-
ever, a method of getting the jails inspected here which
might be found useful at home ; it consists in the simple
plan of giving the governor of a jail an opportunity of
seeing the practical working of the system by locking
him up inside for awhile.
These far- western papers are written or compiled
under difficulties almost overwhelming. Mr. Fred-
erick J. Stanton, at Denver, told me that often he had
been forced to "set up" and print as well as a edit"
the paper which he owns. Type is not always to be
found. In its early days, the Alta Californian once ap-
peared with a paragraph which ran: "I have no YV in
my type, as there is none in the Spanish alphabet. I
have sent to the Sandwich Islands for this letter; in
the mean time we must use two Vs."
Till I had seen the editors' rooms in Denver, Austin,
and Salt Lake City, I had no conception of the point
to which discomfort could be carried. For all these
hardships, payment is small and slow. It consists
often of little but the satisfaction which it is to the
editor's vanity to be "liquored" by the best man of
the place, treated to an occasional chat with the gov-
ernor of the Territory, to a chair in the overland mail
office whenever he walks in, to the hand of the hotel
proprietor whenever he comes near the bar, and to a
pistol-shot once or twice in a month.
It must not be supposed that the Vedette does the
142 GREATEE BRITAIN.
Mormons no harm; the perpetual reiteration in the
Eastern and English papers of three sets of stories
alone would suffice to break down a flourishing power.
The three lines that are invariably taken as founda-
tions for their stories are these that the Mormon
women are wretched, and would fain get away, but
are checked by the Danites; that the Mormons are
ready to fight with the Federal troops with the hope
of success; that robbery of the people by the apostles
and elders is at the bottom of Mormonism or, as the
Vedette puts it, "on tithing and loaning hang all the
law and the profits."
If the mere fact of the existence of the Vedette ef-
fectually refutes the stories of the acts of the Danites
in these modern days, and therefore disposes of the
first set of stories, the third is equally answered by a
glance at its pages. Columns of paragraphs, sheets of
advertisements, testify to the foundation by industry,
in the most frightful desert on earth, of an agri-
cultural community which California herself cannot
match. The Mormons may well call their country
"Deseret" "land of the bee." The process of
fertilization goes on day by day. Six or seven years
ago, Southern Utah was a desert bare as Salt Bush
Plains. Irrigation from the fresh-water lake was
carried out under episcopal direction, and the result
is the growth of fifty kinds of grapes alone. Cotton-
mills and vineyards are springing up on every side,
and "Dixie" begins to look down on its parent, the
Salt Lake Valley. Irrigation from the mountain rills
has done this miracle, we say, though the Saints un-
doubtedly believe that God's hand is in it, helping
miraculously "His peculiar people."
In face of Mormon prosperity, it is worthy of notice
that Utah was settled on the Wakefieldian system,
WESTERN EDITORS. 143
though Brigham knows nothing of Wakefield. Town
population and country population grew up side by
side in every valley, and the plow was not allowed
to gain on the machine-saw and the shuttle.
It is not only in water and verdure that Utah is
naturally poor. On the mining-map of the States,
the countries that lie around Utah Nevada, Arizona,
Colorado, Montana are one blaze of yellow, and blue,
and red, colored from end to end with the tints that
are used to denote the existence of precious metals.
Utah is blank at present blank, the Mormons say,
by nature ; Gentiles say, merely through the absence
of survey; and they do their best to circumvent
mother nature. Every fall the "strychnine" party
raise the cry of gold discoveries in Utah, in the hope
of bringing a rush of miners down to Salt Lake City,
too late for them to get away again before the snows
begin. The presence of some thousands of broad-
brimmed rowdies in Salt Lake City, for a winter,
would be the death of Mormonism, they believe.
Within the last few days, I am told that prospecting
parties have found "pay dirt" in City Canyon, which,
however, they had first themselves carefully "salted"
with gold dust. There is coal at the settlement at
which we breakfasted on our way from Weber River
to Salt Lake; and Stenhouse tells us that the only
difference between the Utah coal and that of Wales
is, that the latter will burn, and the former won't!
Poor as Utah is by nature, clear though it be that
whatever value the soil now possesses, represents only
the loving labor bestowed upon it by the Saints, it
is doubtful whether they are to continue to possess
it, even though the remaining string of Vedette-born
stories assert that Brigham "threatens hell" to the
Gentiles who would expel him.
144 GREATER BRITAIN.
The constant, teasing, wasp-like pertinacity of the
Vedette has done some harm to liberty of thought
throughout the world.
CHAPTER XVII.
UTAH.
" WHEN you are driven hence, where shall you go?"
"We take no thought for the morrow; the Lord
will guide his people," was my rebuke from Elder
Stenhouse, delivered in the half-solemn, half-laughing
manner characteristic of the Saints. " You say mira^
cles are passed and gone," he went on; "but if God
has ever interfered to protect a church, he has inter-
posed on our behalf. In 1857, when the whole army
of the United States was let slip at us under Albert S.
Johnson, we were given strength to turn them aside,
and defeat them without a blow. The Lord permitted
us to dictate our own terms of peace. Again, when
the locusts came in such swarms as to blacken the
whole valley, and fill the air with a living fog, God
sent millions of strange new gulls, and these devoured
the locusts, and saved us from destruction. The Lord
will guide his people."
Often as I discussed the future of Utah and the
church with Mormons, I could never get from them
any answer but this ; they would never even express
a belief, as will many Western Gentiles, that no at-
tempt will be made to expel them from the country
they now hold. They cannot help seeing how imme-
UTAH. 145
diate is the danger: from the American press there
comes a cry, " Let us have this polygamy put down ;
its existence is a disgrace to England from which it
springs, a shame to America in which it dwells, to the
Federal government whose laws it outrages and defies.
How long will you continue to tolerate this retrogres-
sion from Christianity, this insult to civilization?"
"With the New Englanders, the question is political
as well as theological, personal as well as political
political, mainly because there is a great likeness be-
tween Morm6n expressions of belief in the divine origin
of polygamy and the Southern answers to the Aboli-
tionists: "Abraham was a slaveowner, and father of
the faithful;" "David, the best-loved of God, was
a polygamist" " show us a biblical prohibition of
slavery ;" " show us a denunciation of polygamy, and
we'll believe you." It is this similarity of the defensive
positions of Mormonism and slavery which has led to
the present peril of the Salt Lake Church : the New
Englanders look on the Mormons, not only as heretics,
but as friends to the slaveowners ; on the other hand,
if you hear a man warmly praise the Mormons, you
may set him down as a Southerner, or at the least a
Democrat.
Another reason for the hostility of New England is,
that while the discredit of Mormonism falls upon
America, the American people have but little share in
its existence : a few of the leaders are New Englanders
and New Yorkers, but of the rank and file, not one.
In every ten immigrants, the missionaries count upon
finding that four come from England, two from Wales,
one from the Scotch Lowlands, one from Sweden, one
from Switzerland, and one from Prussia: from Catholic
countries, none ; from all America, none. It is through
this purely local and temporary association of ideas
13
146 GREATER BRITAIN.
that we see the strange sight of a party of tolerant,
large-hearted churchmen eager to march their armies
against a church.
If we put aside for a moment the question of the
moral right to crush Mormoriism in the name of truth,
we find that it is, at all events, easy enough to do it.
There is no difficulty in finding legal excuses for action
no danger in backing Federal legislation with mili-
tary force. The legal point is clear enough clear
upon a double issue. Congress can legislate for the
Territories in social matters has, in fact, 'already done
so. Polygamy is at this moment punishable in Utah,
but the law is, pending the completion of the railroad,
not enforced. Without extraordinary action, its en-
forcement would be impossible, for Mormon juries will
give no verdict antagonistic to their church ; but it is
not only in this matter that the Mormons have been
offenders. They have sinned also against the land
laws of America. The church, Brigham, Kimball, all
are landholders on a scale not contemplated by the
"Homestead" laws unless to be forbidden; doubly,
therefore, are the Mormons at the mercy of the Federal
Congress. There is a loophole open in the matter of
polygamy that adopted by the New York Commu-
nists when they chose each a woman to be his legal
wife, and so put themselves without the reach of law.
This method of escape, I have been assured by Mormon
elders, is one that nothing could force them to adopt.
Rather than indirectly destroy their church by any
such weak compliance, they would again renounce
their homes, and make their painful way across the
wilderness to some new Deseret.
It is not likely that New England interference will
hinge upon plurality. A " difficulty" can easily be
made to arise upon the land question, and no breach
UTAH. 147
of the principle of toleration will, on the surface at
least, be visible. No surveys have been held in the
Territory since 1857, no lands within the territorial
limits have been sold by the Federal land office. Not
only have the limitations of the " Homestead" and
"Pre-emption" laws been disregarded, but Salt Lake
City, with its palace, its theater, and hotels, is built
upon the public lands of the United States. On the
other hand, Mexican titles are respected in Arizona
and New Mexico; and as Utah was Mexican soil when,
before the treaty of G-uadalupe Hidalgo, the Mormons
settled on its wastes, it seems hard that their claims
should not be equally respected.
After all, the .theory of Spanish authority was a
ridiculous fiction. The Mormons were the first occu-
pants of the country which now forms the Territories
of Utah and Colorado and the State of Nevada, and
were thus annexed to the United States without being
in the least degree consulted. It is true that they
might be said to have occupied the country as Amer-
ican citizens, and so to have carried American sov-
ereignty with them into the wilderness; but this,
again, is a European, not an American theory. Amer-
ican citizens are such, not as men born upon a certain
soil, but as being citizens of a State of the Union, or
an organized Territory ; and though the Mormons may
be said to have accepted their position as citizens of
the Territory of Utah, still they did so on the under-
standing that it should continue a Mormon country,
where Gentiles should at the most be barely tol-
erated.
We need not go further into the mazes of public
law, or of ex post facto American enactments. The
Mormons themselves admit that the letter of the law
is against them ; but say that while it is claimed that
148 GREATER BRITAIN.
Boston and Philadelphia may fitly legislate for the
Mormons three thousand miles away, because Utah is
a Territory, not a State, men forget that it is .Boston
and Philadelphia themselves who force Utah to remain
a Territory, although they admitted the less populous
Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon to their rights as
States.
If, wholly excluding morals from the calculation,
there can be no doubt upon the points of law, there
can be as little upon the military question. Of the
fifteen hundred miles of waterless tract or desert tjiat
we crossed, seven hundred have been annihilated, and
1869 may see the railroad track in the streets of Salt
Lake City. This not only settles the military ques-
tion, but is meant to do so. "When men lay four miles
of railroad in a day, and average two miles a day for
a whole year, when a government bribes high enough
to secure so startling a rate of progress, there is some-
thing more than commerce or settlement in the wind.
The Pacific Railroad is not merely meant to be the
shortest line from New York to San Francisco ; it is
meant to put down Mormonism.
If the Federal government decides to attack these
peaceable citizens of a Territory that should long since
have been a State, they certainly will not fight, and
they no less surely will not disperse. Polynesia or
Mexico is their goal, and in the Marquesas or in Sonora
they may, perhaps, for a few years at least, be let alone,
again to prove the forerunners of English civilization
planters of Saxon institutions and the English
tongue ; once more to perform their mission, as they
performed it in Missouri and in Utah.
When we turn from the simple legal question, and
the still more simple military one, to the moral point
involved in the forcible suppression of plural marriage
UTAH. 149
in one State by the might of all the others, we find
the consideration of the matter confused by the appar-
ent analogy between the so-called crusade against
slavery and the proposed crusade against polygamy.
There is no real resemblance between the cases. In
the strictest sense there was no more a crusade against
slavery than there is a crusade against snakes on the
part of a man who strikes one" that bit him. The
purest republicans have never pretended that the abo-
lition of slavery was the justification of the war. The
South rose in rebellion, and in rising gave New Eng-
land an opportunity for the destruction in America of
an institution at variance with the republican form of
government, and aggressive in its tendencies. So far
is polygamy from being opposed in spirit to democ-
racy, that it is impossible here, in Salt Lake City, not
to see that it is the most leveling of all social institu-
tions Mormonism the most democratic of religions.
A rich man in New York leaves his two or three sons
a large property, and founds a family ; a rich Mormon
leaves his twenty or thirty sons each a miserable frac-
tion of his money, and each son must trudge out into
the world, and toil for himself. Brigham's sons
those of them who are not gratuitously employed in
hard service for the church in foreign parts are cattle-
drivers, small farmers, ranchmen. One of them was
the only poorly-clad boy I saw in Salt Lake City. A
system of polygamy, in which all the wives, and con-
sequently all the children, are equal before the law, is
a powerful engine of democracy.
The general moral question of whether Mormonism
is to be put down by the sword, because the Latter-
day Saints differ in certain social customs from other
Christians, is one for the preacher and the casuist, not
for a traveling observer of English-speaking countries
13*
150 GEE ATE E BEITAIN.
as they are. Mormonism comes under my observation
as the religious and social system of the most success-
ful of all pioneers of English civilization. From this
point of view it would be an immediate advantage to
the world that they should be driven out once more
into the wilderness, again to found an England in
Mexico, in Polynesia, or on Eed River. It may be an
immediate gain to civilization, but America herself
was founded by schismatics upon a basis of tolerance
to all ; and there are still to be found Americans who
think it would be the severest blow that has been
dealt to liberty since the St. Bartholomew, were she
to lend her enormous power to systematic persecution
at the cannon's mouth.
The question of where to draw the line is one of
interest. Great Britain draws it at black faces, and
would hardly tolerate the existence among her white
subjects in London of such a sect as that of the
Maharajas of Bombay. " If you draw the line at
black faces," say the Mormons, " why should you
not let the Americans draw it at two thousand miles
from Washington ?"
The moral question cannot be dissociated from
Mormon history. The Saints marched from Missouri
and Illinois, into no man's land, intending there to
live out of the reach of those who differed from them,
as do the Russian dissenters transported in past ages
to the provinces of Taurida and Kherson. It is by no
fault of theirs, they say, that they are citizens of the
United States.
There is in the far West a fast increasing party who
would leave people to be polygynists, polyandrists,
Free-lovers, Shakers, or monogamists, as they please ;
who would place the social relations as they have
placed religion out of the reach of the law. I need
UTAH. 151
hardly say that public opinion has such overwhelming
force in America that it is probable that even under a
system of perfect toleration by law, two forms of the
family relation would never be found existing side by
side. Polygamists would continue to migrate to Mor-
mon land, Free-lovers to New York, Shakers to New
England. Some will find in this a reason for, and
some a reason against, a change. In any case, a crusade
against Mormonism will hardly draw sympathy from
Nebraska, from Michigan, from Kansas.
Many are found who say: "Leave Mormonism to
itself, and it will die." The Pacific Railroad alone,
they think, will kill it. Those Americans who know
Utah best are not of this opinion. Mormonism is no
superstition of the past. There is huge vitality in the
polygamic church. Emerson once spoke to me of
Unitarianism, Buddhism, and Mormonism as three
religions which, right or wrong, are full of force.
"The Mormons only need to be persecuted," said
Elder Frederick to me, "to become as powerful as
the Mohammedans." It is, indeed, more than doubtful
whether polygamy can endure side by side with
American monogamy it is certain that Mormon
priestly power and Mormon mysteries cannot in the
long run withstand the presence of a large Gentile
population; but, if Mormon titles to land are re-
spected, and if great mineral wealth is not found
to exist in Utah, Mormonism will not be exposed to
any much larger Gentile intrusion than it has to cope
with now. Settlers who can go to California or to
Colorado "pares" will hardly fix themselves in the
Utah desert. The Mexican table-lands will be annexed
before Gentile immigrants seriously trouble Brigham.
Gold and New England are the most dreaded foes of
Mormondom. Nothing can save polygamy if lodes
152 GREATER BRITAIN.
and placers such as those of all the surrounding States
are found in Utah; nothing can save it if the New
Englanders determine to put it down.
Were Congress to enforce the Homestead laws in
Utah, and provide for the presence of an overwhelm-
ing Gentile population, polygamy would not only
die of itself, but drag Mormonism down in its fall.
Brigham knows more completely than we can the
necessity of isolation. He would not be likely to
await the blow which increased Gentile immigration
would deal his power.
If New England decides to act, the table-lands of
Mexico will see played once more the sad comedy of
Utah. Again the Mormons will march into Mexican
territory, again to wake some day, and find it Amer-
ican. Theirs, however, will once more be the pride of
having proved the pioneers of that English civilization
which is destined to overspread the temperate world.
The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexed Utah to the
United States, but Brigham Young annexed it to
Anglo-Saxondom.
CHAPTEE XVIII.
NAMELESS ALPS.
AT the post-office, in Main Street, I gave Mr. Dixon
a few last messages for home he one to me for some
Egyptian friends; and, with a shake and a wave, we
parted, to meet in London after between us completing
the circuit of the globe.
This time again I was not alone: an Irish miner
NAMELESS ALPS. 153
from Montana, with a bottle of whisky, a revolver and
pick, shared the back-seat with the mail-bags. Before
we had forded the Jordan, he had snug " The Wearing
of the Green," and told me the day and the hour at
which the republic was to be proclaimed at his native
village in Galway. Like a true Irishman of the South
or West, he was happy only when he could be gener-
ous ; and so much joy did he show when I discoyered
that the cork had slipped from my flask, and left me
dependent on him for my escape from the alkaline
poison, that I half believed he had drawn it himself
when we stopped to change horses for mules. Certain
it is that he pressed his whisky so fast upon me and
the various drivers, that the day we most needed its
aid there was none, and the bottle itself had ended its
career by serving as a target for a trial of breech-
loading pistols.
At the sixth ranch from the city, which stands on
the shores of the lake, and close to the foot of the
mountains, we found Porter Rockwell, accredited chief
of the Danites, the " Avenging Angels" of Utah, and
leader, it is said, of the "White Indians" at the
Mountain Meadows massacre.
Since 1840 there has been no name of greater terror
in the West than Rockwell's; but in 1860 his death
was reported in England, and the career of the great
Brother of Gideon was ended, as we thought. I was
told in Salt Lake City that he was still alive and well,
and his portrait was among those that I got from Mr.
Ottinger ; but I am not convinced that the man I saw,
and whose picture I possess, was in fact the Porter
Rockwell who murdered Stephenson in 1842. It may
be convenient to have two or three men to pass by the
one name; and I suspect that this is so in the Rock-
well case.
154 OEEATER BRITAIN.
Under the name of Porter Rockwell some man (or
men) has been the terror of the Mississippi Valley, of
plains and plateau, for thirty years. In 1841, Joe
Smith prophesied the death of Governor Boggs, of
Missouri, within six months: within that time he was
shot rumor said by Rockwell. When the Danite was
publicly charged with having done the deed for fifty
dollars and a wagon-team, he swore he'd shoot any
man who said he'd shot Boggs for gain; " but if I am
charged with shooting him, they'll have to prove it "
words that looked like guilt. In 1842 Stephenson died
by the same hand, it is believed. Rockwell was known
to be the working chief of the band organized in 1838
to defend the First Presidency by any means what-
ever, fair or foul, known at various times as the " Big
Fan" that should winnow the chaff from the wheat;
the " Daughter of Zion," the " Destructives," the "Fly-
ing Angels," the "Brother of Gideon," the "Destroy-
ing Angels." " Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion,
for I will make thy horn iron, and will make thy hoofs
brass; and thou shalt beat in pieces many people; and
I will consecrate their gain unto the Lord, and their
substance unto the lords of the whole earth" this
was the motto of the band.
Little was heard of the Danites from the time that
the Mormons were driven from Illinois and Missouri
until 1852, when murder after murder, massacre after
massacre, occurred in the Grand Plateau. Bands of
immigrants, of settlers on their road to California,
parties of United States officers, and escaping Mor-
mons, were attacked by "Indians," and found scalped
by the next whites who came upon their trail. It
was rumored in the Eastern States that the red men
were Mormons in disguise, following the tactics of
the Anti-Renters of JSTew York. In the case of Al-
PORl'LR ROCKWELL.-P. 154.
NAMELESS ALPS. 155
nion Babbitt, the "Indians" were proved to have been
white.
The atrocities culminated in the Mountain Meadows
massacre in 1857, when hundreds of men, women, and
children were murdered by men armed and clothed as
Indians, but sworn to by some who escaped as being
whites. Porter Rockwell has had the infamy of this
tremendous slaughter piled on to the huge mass of his
earlier deeds of blood whether rightly or wrongly,
who shall say? The man that I saw was the man that
Captain Burton saw in 1860. His death was solemnly
recorded in the autumn of tKat year, yet of the identity
of the person I saw r with the person described by Cap-
tain Burton there can be no question. The bald,
frowning forehead, the sinister smile, the long grizzly
curls falling upon the back, the red cheek, the coal
beard, the gray eye, are not to be mistaken. Rock-
well or not, he is a man capable of any deed. I had
his photograph in my pocket, and wanted to get him
to sign it; but when, in awe of his glittering bowie
and of his fame, I asked, by way of caution, the ranch-
man a new-come Paddy whether Rockwell could
write, the fellow told me with many an oath that "the
boss" was as innocent of letters as a babe. "As for
writing" he said, "cuss me if he's on it. You bet he's
not you bet."
Not far beyond Rockwell's, we drove close to the
bench-land ; and I was able to stop for a moment and
examine the rocks. From the veranda of the Mor-
mon poet Naisbitt's house in Salt Lake City, I had
remarked a double line of terrace running on one
even level round the whole of the great valley to the
south, cut by nature along the base alike of the
Oquirrh and the Wasatch.
I had thought it possible that the terrace was the
156 GREATER BRITAIN.
result of the varying hardness of the strata; but, near
Black Rock, on the overland track, I discovered that
where the terrace lines have crossed the mountain
precipices, they are continued merely by deep stains
upon the rocks. The inference is that within ex-
tremely recent, if not historic times, the water has
stood at these levels from two to three hundred feet
above the present Great Salt Lake City, itself 4500
feet above the sea. Three days' journey farther west,
on the Reese's River Range, I detected similar stains.
"Was the whole basin of the Rocky Mountains here
more than a thousand miles across once filled with a
huge sea, of which the two Sierras were the shores,
and the Wasatch, Goshoot, Waroja, Toi, Abbe*, Hum-
boldt, Washoe, and a hundred other ranges, the rocks
and isles? The Great Salt Lake is but the largest of
many such. I saw one on Mirage Plains that is salter
than its greater fellow. Carson Sink is evidently the
bed of a smaller bitter lake; and there are salt pools
in dozens scattered through Ruby and Smoky Valleys.
The Great Salt Lake itself is sinking year by year,
and the sage-brush is gaining upon the alkali desert
throughout the Grand Plateau. All these signs point
to the rapid drying-up of a great sea, owing to an
alteration of climatic conditions.
In the Odd Fellows' Library at San Francisco I
found a map of North America, signed " John Harris,
A.M.," and dated "1605," which shows a great lake
in the country now comprised in the Territories of
Utah and Dakota. It has a width of fifteen degrees,
and is named "Thongo, or Thoya." It is not likely
that this inland sea is a mere exaggeration of the
present Great Salt Lake, because the views of that
sheet of water are everywhere limited by islands in
such a way as to give to the eye the effect of exceed-
NAMELESS ALPS. 157
ing narrowness. It is possible that the Jesuit Fathers,
and other Spanish travelers from California, may have
looked from the Utah mountains on the dwindling
remnant of a great inland sea.
On we jogged and jolted, till we lost sight of the
American dead sea and of its lovely valley, and got
into a canyon floored with huge boulders and slabs of
roughened rock, where I expected each minute to un-
dergo the fate of that Indian traveler who received
such a jolt that he bit off the tip of his own tongue, or
of Horace Greeley, whose head was bumped, it is said,
through the roof of his conveyance. Here, as upon
the eastern side of the Wasatch, the track was marked
by never-ending lines of skeletons of mules and oxen.
On the first evening from Salt Lake, we escaped
once more from man at Stockton, a Gentile mining
settlement in Rush Valley, too small to be called a
village, though possessed of a municipality, and claim-
ing the title of "city." By night we crossed by Rey-
nolds' Pass the Parolom or Cedar Range, in a two-
horse "jerky," to which we had been shifted for speed
and safety. Upon the heights the frost was bitter;
and when we stopped at 3 A.M. for "supper," in which
breakfast was combined, we crawled into the stable
like flies in autumn, half killed by the sudden chill.
My miner spoke but once all night. "It's right cold,"
he said ; but fifty times at least he sang " The Wear-
ing of the Green." It was his only tune.
Soon after light, we passed the spot where Captain
Gunnison of the Federal Engineers, who had been in
1853 the first explorer of the Smoky Hill route, was
killed "by the Ute Indians." Gunnison was an old
enemy of the Mormons, and the spot is ominously near
to Rockwell's home. Here we came out once more
into the alkali, and our troubles from dust began. For
14
158 GREATER BRITAIN.
hours we were in a desert white as snow; but for re-
ward we gained a glorious view of the Goshoot Range,
which we crossed by night, climbing silently on foot
for hours in the moonlight. The walking saved us
from the cold.
The third day a Sunday morning we were at the
foot of the Waroja Mountains, with Egan Canyon for
our pass, hewn by nature through the living rock.
You dare swear you see the chisel-marks upon the
stone. A gold-mill had years ago been erected here,
and failed. The heavy machinery was lost upon the
road ; but the four stone walls contained between them
the wreck of the lighter "plant."
As we jolted and journeyed on across the succeeding
plain, we spied in the far distance a group of black
dots upon the alkali. Man seems very small in the in-
finite expanse of the Grand Plateau the roof, as it
were, of the world. At the end of an hour we were
upon them a company of " overlanders" u tracking"
across the continent with mules. First came two
mounted men, well armed with Deringers in the belt,
and Ballard breech-loaders on the thigh, prepared for
ambush ready for action against elk or red-skin. About
fifty yards behind these scowling fellows came the main
band of bearded, red-shirted diggers, in huge boots and
felt hats, each man riding one mule, and driving another
laden with packs and buckets. As we came up, the main
body halted, and an interchange of compliments began.
" Say, mister, thet's a slim horse of yourn." " Guess
not guess he's all sorts of a horse, he air. And how
far might it be to the State of Varmount?" "Wall,
guess the boys down to hum will be kinder joyed to
see us, howsomever that may be." Just at this mo-
ment a rattlesnake was spied, and every revolver dis-
charged with a shout, all hailing the successful shot
NAMELESS ALPS. 159
with a " Bully for you; thet hit him whar he lives/'
And on, without more ado, they went.
Even the roughest of these overlanders has in him
something more than roughness. As far as appearance
goes, every woman of the far West is a duchess, each
man a Coriolanus. The royal gait, the imperial glance
and frown, belong to every ranchman in Nevada.
Every fellow that you meet upon the track near Stock-
ton or Austin City, walks as though he were defying
lightning, yet this without silly strut or braggadocio.
Nothing can be more complete than the ranchman's
self-command, save in the one point of oaths; the
strongest, freshest, however, of their moral features is
a grand enthusiasm, amounting sometimes to insanity.
As for their oaths, they tell you it is nothing unless
the air is " blue with cusses." At one of the ranches
where there was a woman, she said quietly to me, in
the middle of an awful burst of swearing, " Guess Bill
swears steep;" to which I replied, "Guess so" the
only allusion I ever heard or hazarded to Western
swearing.
Leaving to our north a snowy range nameless
here, but marked on European maps as the East
Humboldt we reached the foot of the Ruby Valley
Mountains on the Sunday afternoon in glowing sun-
shine, and crossed them in a snow-storm. In the
night we journeyed up and down the Diamond or
Quartz Range, and morning found us at the foot of
the Pond Chain. At the ranch where, in the ab-
sence of elk, we ate "bacon," and dreamt we break-
fasted I chatted with an agent of the Mail Company
on the position of the ranchmen, divisible, as he told
me, into " cooks and hostlers." The cooks, my ex-
perience had taugnt me, were the aptest scholars, the
greatest politicians; the hostlers, men of war and
160 GREATER BRITAIN.
completest masters of the art of Western swearing.
The cooks had a New England cut ; the hostlers, like
Southerners, wore their hair all down their backs. I
begged an explanation of the reason for the marked
distinction. " They are picked," he said, "from dif-
ferent classes. When a boy comes to me and asks for
something to do, I give him a look, and see what kind
of stuff he's made of. If he's a gay duck out for a
six-weeks' spree, I send him down here, or to Bitter
Wells; but if he's a clerk or a poet, or any such sorter
fool as that, why then I set him cooking ; and plaguy
good cooks they make, as you must find."
The drivers on this portion of the route are as odd
fellows as are the ranchmen. Wearing huge jack-boots,
flannel shirts tucked into their trowsers, but no coat or
vest, and hats with enormous brims, they have their
hair long, and their beards un trimmed. Their oaths,
I need hardly say, are fearful. At night they wrap
themselves in an enormous cloak, drink as much
whisky as their passengers can spare them, crack
their whips, and yell strange yells. They are quarrel-
some and overbearing, honest probably, but eccentric
in their ways of showing it. They belong chiefly to
the mixed Irish and German race, and have all been
in Australia during the gold rush, and in California
before deep sinking replaced the surface diggings.
They will tell you how they often washed out and
gambled away a thousand ounces in a month, living
like Roman emperors, then started in digging-life-
again upon the charity of their wealthier friends.
They hate men dressed in "biled shirts," or in "store
clothes," and show their aversion in strange ways. I
had no objection myself to build fires and fetch wood;
but I drew the line at going into* the sage-brush to
catch the mules, that not being a business which I
NAMELESS ALPS. 161
felt competent to undertake. The season was ad-
vanced, the snows had not yet reached the valleys,
which were parched by the drought of all the sum-
mer, feed for the mules was scarce, and they wandered
a long way. Time after time we would drive into a
station, the driver saying, with strange oaths, " Guess
them mules is clared out from this here ranch ; guess
they is into this sage-brush;" and it would be an hour
before the mules would be discovered feeding in some
forgotten valley. Meanwhile the miner and myself
would have revolver practice at the skeletons and
telegraph-posts when sage fowl failed us, and rattle-
snakes grew scarce.
After all, it is easy to speak of the eccentricities of
dress and manner displayed by Western men, but
Eastern men and Europeans upon the plateau are not
the prim creatures of Fifth Avenue or Pall Mall. From
San Francisco I sent home an excellent photograph of
myself in the clothes in which I had crossed the plateau,
those being the only ones I had to wear till my baggage
came round from Panama. The result was, that my
oldest friends failed to recognize the portrait. At the
foot I had written " A Border Ruffian :" they believed
not the likeness, but the legend.
The difficulties of dress upon these mountain ranges
are great indeed. To sit one night exposed to keen
frost and biting wind, and the next day to toil for hours
up a mountain-side, beneath a blazing sun, are very
opposite conditions. I found my dress no bad one.
At night I wore a Canadian fox-fur cap, Mormon 'coon-
skin gloves, two coats, and the whole of my light silk
shirts. By day I took off the coats, the gloves, and
cap, and walked in my shirts, adding but a Panama
hat to my " fit-out."
As we began the ascent of the Pond River Range,
14*
162 GREATER BRITAIN.
we caught up a bullock-train, which there was not
room to'pass. The miner and myself turned out from
the jerky, and for hours climbed alongside the wagons.
I was struck by the freemasonry of this mountain
travel : Bryant, the miner, had come to the end of his
"solace," as the most famed chewing tobacco in these
parts is called. Going up to the nearest teamster, he
asked for some, and was at once presented with a huge
cake enough, I should have thought, to have lasted
a Channel pilot for ten years.
The climb was long enough to give me de,ep insight
into the inner mysteries of bullock-driving. Each of
the great two-storied Californian wagons was drawn by
twelve stout oxen ; still, the pace was not a mile an
hour, accomplished, as it seemed to me, not so much
by the aid as in spite of tremendous flogging. Each
teamster carried a short-handled whip with a twelve-
foot leathern lash, which was wielded with two hands,
and, after many a whirl, brought down along the whole
Jength of the back of each bullock of the team in turn,
the stroke being accompanied by a shout of the bul-
lock's name, and followed, as it was preceded, by a
string of the most explosive oaths. The favorite
names for bullocks were those of noted public charac-
ters and of Mormon elders, and cries were frequent of
"Ho, Brigham!" " Ho, Joseph!" " Ho, Grant!" the
blow falling with the accented syllable. The London
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would
find at Pond Eiver ranch an excellent opening for a
mission. The appointed officer should be supplied
with two Deringers and a well-filled whisky-barrel.
Through a gap in the mountain crest we sighted the
West Humboldt Range, across an open country dotted
here and there with stunted cedar, and, crossing Smoky
Valley, we plunged into a deep pass in the Toi Abbe
NAMELESS ALPS. 163
Kange, and reached Austin a mining town of import-
ance, rising two years old in the afternoon of the
fourth day from Salt Lake City.
After dining at an Italian digger's restaurant with
an amount of luxury that recalled our feasts at Salt
Lake City, I started on a stroll, in which I was stopped
at once by a shout from an open bar-room of " Say,
mister !" Pulling up sharply, I was surrounded by an
eager crowd, asking from all sides the one question :
" Might you be Professor Muller ?" Although flattered
to find that I looked less disreputable and ruffianly
than I felt, I nevertheless explained as best I could
that I was no professor only to be assured that if I
was any professor at all, Muller or other, I should do
just as well: a mule was ready for me to ride to the
mine, and " Jess kinder fix us up about this new lode."
If my new-found friends had not carried an overwhelm-
ing force of pistols, I might have gone to the mine
as Professor Muller, and given my opinion for what it
was worth : as it was, I escaped only by " liquoring
up " over the error. Cases of mistaken identity are
not always so pleasant in Austin. They told me that,
a few weeks before, a man riding down the street
heard a shot, saw his hat fall into the mud, and, pick-
ing it up, found a small round hole on each side. Look-
ing up, he saw a tall miner, revolver smoking in hand,
who smiled grimly, and said: " Guess thet's my muel."
Having politely explained when and where the mule
was bought, the miner professed himself satisfied with
a "Guess I was wrong let's liquor."
In the course of my walk through Austin I came
upon a row of neat huts, each with a board on which
was painted, " Sam Sing, washing and ironing," or
" Mangling by Ah Low." A few paces farther on was
a shop painted red, but adorned with cabalistic scrawls
164 GEE ATE E B El TAIN.
in black ink; and farther still was a tiny joss house.
Yellow men, in spotless clothes of dark-green and
blue, were busy at buying and selling, at cooking, at
washing. Some, at a short trot, were carrying bur-
dens at the end of a long bamboo pole. All were
quiet, quick, orderly, and clean. I had at last come
thoroughly among the Chinese people, not to lose sight
of them again until I left Geelong, or even Suez.
Eeturning to the room where I had dined, I parted
with Pat Bryant, quitting him, in Western fashion, after
a good "trade" or "swop." He had taken a fancy to
the bigger of my two revolvers. He was going to
breed cattle in Oregon, he told me, and thought it
might be useful for shooting his wildest beasts by
riding in the Indian manner, side by side with them,
and shooting at the heart. I answered by guessing
that I "was on the sell;" and traded the weapon
against one of his that matched my smaller tool.
When I reached Virginia City, I inquired prices, and
was almost disappointed to find that I had not been
cheated in the "trade."
A few minutes after leaving the " hotel " at Austin,
and calling at the post-office for the mails, I again
found myself in the desert indeed, Austin itself can
hardly be styled an oasis : it may have gold, but it has
no green thing within its limits. It is in canyons and on
plains like these, with the skeletons of oxen every few
yards along the track, that one comes to comprehend
the full significance of the terrible entry in the army
route-books "No grass; no water."
Descending a succession of tremendous "grades,"
as inclines upon roads and railroads are called out
West, we came on to the lava-covered plain of Reese's
River Valley, a wall of snowy mountain rising grandly
in our front. Close to the stream were a ranch or two,
NAMELESS ALPS. 165
and a double camp, of miners and of a company of
Federal troops. The diggers were playing with their
glistening knives as diggers only can; the soldiers
their huge sombreros worn loosely on one side were
lounging idly in the sun.
Within an hour, we w r ere again in snow and ice upon
the summit of another nameless range.
This evening, after five sleepless nights, I felt most
terribly the peculiar form of fatigue that we had ex-
perienced after six days and nights upon the plains.
Again the brain seemed divided into two parts, think-
ing independently, and one side putting questions
while the other answered them ; but this time there
was also a sort of half insanity, a not altogether dis-
agreeable wandering of the mind, a replacing of the
actual by an imagined ideal scene.
On and on we journeyed, avoiding the Shoshon6 and
West Humboldt Mountains, but picking our way along
the most fearful ledges that it has been my fate to cross,
and traversing from end to end the dreadful Mirage
Plains. At nightfall we sighted Mount Davidson and
the Washoe Range, and at 3 A.M. I was in bed once
more in Virginia City.
166 GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER XIX.
VIRGINIA CITY.
" GUESS the governor's consid'rable skeert."
" You bet, he's mad."
My sitting down to breakfast at the same small table
seemed to end the talk ; but I had not been out West
for nothing, so explaining that I was only four hours
in Virginia City, I inquired what had occurred to fill
the governor of Nevada with vexation and alarm.
"D'you tell now! only four hours in this great
young city. Wall, guess it's a bully business. You
see, some time back the governor pardoned a road
agent after the citizens had voted him a rope. Yes,
sir! But that ain't all : yesterday, cuss me if he didn't
refuse ter pardon one of the boys who had jess shot
another in play like. Guess he thinks hisself some
pumpkins." I duly expressed my horror, and my
informant went on: "Wall, guess the citizens paid
him off purty slick. They jess sent him a short thick
bit of rope with a label 'For his Excellency.' You
bet ef he ain't mad you bet ! Pass us those molasses,
mister."
I was not disappointed : I had not come to Nevada
for nothing. To see Virginia City and Carson, since
I first heard their fame in New York, had been with
me a passion, but the deed thus told me in the dining-
room of the " Empire" Hotel was worthy a place in the
annals of "Washoe." Under its former name, the
chief town of Nevada was ranked not only the highest,
VIRGINIA CITY. 167
but the "cussedest" town in the States, its citizens ex-
pecting a " dead man for breakfast" every day, and its
streets ranging from seven to eight thousand feet above
the sea. Its twofold fame is leaving it : the Coloradan
villages of North Empire and Black Hawk are nine or
ten thousand feet above sea level, and Austin, and
Virginia City in Montana beat it in playful pistoling
and vice. Nevertheless, in the point of " pure cussed-
ness" old Washoe still stands well, as my first intro-
duction to its ways will show. All the talk of Nevada
reformation applies only to the surface signs : when a
miner tells you that Washoe is turning pious, and that
he intends shortly to "vamose," he means that, unlike
Austin, which is still in its first state of mule-stealing
and monte*, Virginia City has passed through the sec-
ond period that of "vigilance committees" and "his-
toric trees" and is entering the third, the stage of
churches and "city officers," or police.
The population is still a shifting one. A by-law of
the municipality tells us that the "permanent popula-
tion" consists of those who reside more than a month
within the city. At this moment the miners are pour-
ing into Washoe from north and south and east, from
Montana, from Arizona, and from Utah, coming to
the gayeties of the largest mining city to spend their
money during the fierce short winter. When I saw
Virginia City, it was worse than Austin.
Every other house is a restaurant, a drinking-shop,
a gaming-hell, or worse. With no one to make beds,
to mend clothes, to cook food with no house, no
home men are almost certain to drink and gamble.
The Washoe bar-rooms are the most brilliant in the
States : as we drove in from Austin at 3 A.M., there
was blaze enough for us to see from the frozen street
the portraits of Lola Montez, Ada Menken, Heenan,
158 GREATER BRITAIN.
and the other Californian celebrities with which the
bar-rooms were adorned.
Although "petticoats," even Chinese, are scarce,
dancing was going on in every house; but there is a
rule in miners' balls that prevents all difficulties arising
from an over-supply of men : every one who has a patch
on the rear portion of his breeches does duty for a lady
in the dance, and as gentlemen are forced by the cus-
tom of the place to treat their partners at the bar,
patches are popular.
Up to eleven in the morning hardly a man was to be
seen : a community that sits up all night, begins its
work in the afternoon. For hours I had the blazing
hills called streets to myself for meditating ground;
but it did not need hours to bring me to think that a
Vermonter's description of the climate of the mount-
ains was not a bad one when he said: "You rise at
eight, and shiver in your cloak till nine, when you lay
it aside, and walk freely in your woolens. At twelve
you come in for your gauze coat and your Panama ; at
two you are in a hammock cursing the heat, but at
four you venture out again, and by five are in your
woolens. At six you begin to shake with cold, and
shiver on till bedtime, which you make darned early."
Even at this great height, the thermometer in the after-
noon touches 80 Fahr. in the shade, while from sunset
to sunrise there is a bitter frost. So it is throughout
the plateau. When morning after morning we reached
a ranch, and rushed out of the freezing ambulance
through the still colder outer air to the fragrant cedar
fire, there to roll with pain at the thawing of our joints,
it was hard to bear it in mind that by eight o'clock we
should be shutting out the sun, and by noon melting
even in the deepest shade.
As I sat at dinner in a miner's restaurant, my oppo-
VIRGINIA CITY. 169
site neighbor, finding that I was not long from Eng-
land, informed me he was " the independent editor of
the Nevada Union Gazette," and went on to ask: "And
how might you have left literatooral pursoots ? How
air Tennyson and Thomas T. Carlyle ?" I assured him
that to the best of my belief they were fairly well, to
which his reply was: " Guess them ther men ken sling
ink, they ken." When we parted, he gave me a copy
of his paper, in which I found that he called a rival
editor " a walking whisky-bottle" and " a Fenian imp."
The latter phrase reminded me that, of the two or
three dozen American editors that I had met, this New
Englander was the first who was " native born." Sten-
house, in Salt Lake City, is an Englishman, so is Stan-
ton, of Denver, and the whole of the remainder of the
band were Irishmen. As for the earlier assertion in
the "editorial," it was not a wild one, seeing that Vir-
ginia City has five hundred whisky- shops for a popula-
tion of ten thousand. Artemus Ward said of Vir-
ginia City, in a farewell speech to the inhabitants that
should have been published in his works: "I never,
gentlemen, was in a city where I was treated so wett,
nor, I will add, so often." Through every open door
the diggers can be seen tossing the whisky down their
throats with a scowl of resolve, as though they were
committing suicide which, indeed, except in the
point of speed, is probably the case.
The Union Gazette was not the only paper that I had
given me to read that morning. Not a bridge over a
" crick," not even a blacked pair of boots, made me so
thoroughly aware that I had in a measure returned to
civilization as did the gift of an Alia Calif ornian containing
a report of a debate in the English Parliament upon the
Bank Charter Act. The speeches were appropriate
to my feelings; I had just returned not only to civili-
15
170 GREATER BRITAIN.
zation, but to the European inconveniences of gold and
silver money. In Utah, gold and greenbacks circulate
indifferently, with a double set of prices always marked
and asked ; in Nevada and California, greenbacks are
as invisible as gold in New York or Kansas. Nothing
can persuade the Californians that the adoption by the
Eastern States of an inconvertible paper system is any-
thing but the result of a conspiracy against the Pacific
States one in which they at least are determined to
have no share. Strongly Unionist in feeling as were
California, Oregon, and Nevada during the rebellion,
to have forced greenbacks upon them would have been
almost more than their loyalty would have borne. In
the severest taxation they were prepared to acquiesce;
but paper money they believe to be downright robbery,
and the invention of the devil.
To me the reaching gold once more was far from
pleasant, for the advantages of paper money to the
traveler are enormous ; it is light, it wears no holes in
your pockets, it reveals its presence by no untimely
clinking; when you jump from a coach, every thief
within a mile is not at once aware that you have ten
dollars in your right-hand pocket. The Nevadans say
that forgeries are so common that their neighbors in
Colorado have been forced to agree that any decent
imitation shall be taken as good, it being too difficult
to examine into each case. For my part, though in
rapid travel a good deal of paper passed through my
hands in change, my only loss by forgery was one half-
dollar note ; my loss by wear and tear the same.
In spite of the gold currency, prices are higher in
Nevada than in Denver. A shave is half a dollar
gold ; in Washoe and in Atchison, but a paper quarter.
A boot-blacking is fifty cents in gold, instead of ten
cents paper, as in Chicago or St. Louis.
VIRGINIA CITY. 171
During the war, when fluctuations in the value of
the paper were great and sudden, prices changed from
day to day. Hotel proprietors in the West received
their guests at breakfast, it is said, with " Glorious
news; we've whipped at . Gold's 180; board's
down half a dollar." While I was in the country, gold
fluctuated between 140 and 163, but prices jremained
unaltered.
Paper money is of some use to a young country in
making the rate of wages appear enormous, and so at-
tracting immigration. If a Cork bog-trotter is told
that he can get two dollars a day for his work in Amer-
ica, but only one in Canada, no economic considera-
tions interfere to prevent him rushing to the nominally
higher rate. Whether the workirigmen of America
have been gainers by the inflation of the currency, or
the reverse, it is hard to say. It has been stated in the
Senate that wages have risen sixty per cent., and prices
ninety per cent ; but " prices" is a term of great width.
The men themselves believe that they have not been
losers, and no argument can be so strong as that.
My first afternoon upon Mount Davidson I spent
underground in the Gould and Curry Mine, the
wealthiest and largest of those that have tapped the
famous Comstock Lode. In this single vein of silver
lies the prosperity not only of the city, but of Nevada
State ; its discovery will have hastened the completion
of the overland railway itself by several years. It is
owing to the enormous yield of this one lode that the
United States now stands second only to Mexico as a
silver-producing land. In one year Nevada has given
the world as much silver as there came from the mines
of all Peru.
The rise of Nevada has been sudden. I was shown
in Virginia City a building block of land that rents
172 GREATER BRITAIN.
for ten times what it cost four years ago. Nothing
short of solid silver by the yard would have brought
twenty thousand men to live upon the summit of
Mount Davidson. It is easy here to understand the
mad rush and madder speculation that took place at
the time of the discovery. Every valley in the Washoe
Range was " prospected," and pronounced paved with
silver; every mountain was a solid mass. "Cities"
were laid out, and town lots sold, wherever room was
afforded by a flat piece of ground. The publication of
the Californian newspapers was suspended, as writers,
editors, proprietors, and devils, all had gone with the
rush. San Francisco went clean mad, and London
and Paris were not far behind. Of the hundred
"cities" founded, butsOne was built; of the thousand
claims registered, but a hundred were taken up and
worked; of the companies formed, but half a dozen
ever paid a dividend, except that obtained from the
sale of their plant. The silver of which the whole
base of Mount Davidson is composed has not been
traced in the surrounding hills, though they are
covered with a forest of posts, marking the limits of
forgotten "claims:"
"James Thompson, 130 feet KB. by K"
"Ezra Williams, 130 feet due E.;"
and so for miles. The Gould and Curry Company,
on the other hand, is said to have once paid a larger
half-yearly dividend than the sum of the original
capital, and its shares have been quoted at 1000 per
cent. Such are the differences of a hundred yards.
One of the oddities of mining life is, that the gold-
diggers profess a sublime contempt for silver-miners
and their trade. A Coloradan going West was asked
in Nevada if in his country they could beat the Corn-
stock lode. "Dear, no!" he said.' "The boys with
VIRGINIA CITY. 173
us are plaguy discouraged jess at present." The
Nevadans were down upon the word. " Discouraged,
air they!" "Why, yes! They've jess found they've
got ter dig through three feet of solid silver 'fore ever
they come ter gold."
Some of the Nevada companies have curious titles.
"The Union Lumber Association" is not bad; but
" The Segregated Belcher Mining Enterprise of Gold
Hill District, Storey County, Nevada State," is far
before it as an advertising name.
In a real "coach" at last a coach with windows
and a roof drawn by six "mustangs," we dashed
down Mount Davidson upon a real road, engineered
with grades and bridges m} 7 first since Junction City.
Through the Devil's Gate we burst out upon a chaotic
country. For a hundred miles the e} r e ranged over
humps and bumps of every size, from stones to mount-
ains, but no level ground, no field, no house, no tree,
no green. Not even the Sahara so thoroughly de-
serves the name of "desert." In Egypt there is the
oasis, in Arabia here and there a date and a sweet-
water well; here there is nothing, not even earth.
The ground is soda, and the water and air are full
of salt.
This road is notorious for the depredations of the
"road agents," as white highwaymen are politely
called, red or yellow robbers being still "darned
thieves." At Desert Wells, the coach had been
robbed, a week before I passed, by men who had
first tied up the ranchmen, and taken their places to
receive the driver and passengers when they arrived.
The prime object with the robbers is the treasury box
of "dust," but they generally "go through" the pas-
sengers, by way of pastime, after their more regular
work is done. As to firing, they have a rule a
15*
174 GREATER BRITAIN.
simple one. If a passenger shoots, every man is
killed. It need not be said that the armed driver
and armed guard never shoot; they know their busi-
ness far too well.
Close here we came on hot and cold springs in close
conjunction, flowing almost from the same " sink-hole"
the original twofold springs, I hinted to our driver,
that Poseidon planted in the Atlantic isle. He said
that "some one of that name" had a ranch near Car-
son, so I " concluded" to drop Poseidon, lest I should
say something that might offend.
From Desert Wells the alkali grew worse and worse,
but began to be alleviated at the ranches by irrigation
of the throat with delicious Californian wine. The
plain was strewn with erratic boulders, and here and
there I noticed sharp sand-cones, like those of the Elk
Mountain country in Utah.
At last we dashed into the "city" named after the
notorious Kit Carson, of which an old inhabitant has
lately said : " This here city is growing plaguy mean
there was only one man shot all yesterday." There
was what is here styled an " altercation" a day or two
ago. The sheriff tried to arrest a man in broad day-
light in the single street which Carson boasts. The
result was that each fired several shots at the other,
and that both were badly hurt.
The half- deserted mining village and wholly ruined
Mormon settlement stand grimly on the bare rock,
surrounded by weird-looking depressions of the earth,
the far-famed " sinks," the very bottom of the plateau,
and goal of all the plateau streams in summer dry,
and spread with sheets of salt ; in winter filled with
brine. The Sierra Nevada rises like a wall from the
salt pools, with a fringe of giant, leafless trees hanging
stiffly from its heights my first forest since I left the
VIRGINIA CITY. 175,
Missouri bottoms. The trees made me feel that I was
really across the continent, within reach at least of the
fogs of the Pacific on "the other side;" that there
was still rough, cold work to be done was clear from
the great snow-fields that showed through the pines
with that threatening blackness that the purest of
snows wear in the evening when they face the east.
As I gazed upon the tremendous battlements of the
Sierra, I not only ceased to marvel that for three hun-
dred years traffic had gone round by Panama rather
than through these frightful obstacles, but even won-
dered that they should be surmounted now. In this
hideous valley it was that the California!! immigrants
wintered in 1848, and killed their Indian guides for
food. For three months more the strongest of them
lived upon the bodies of those who died, incapable in
their weakness of making good their foothold upon the
slippery snows of the Sierra. After awhile, some
were cannibals by choice ; but the story is riot one that
can be told.
Galloping up the gentle grades of Johnson's Pass, we
began the ascent of the last of fifteen great mountain
ranges crossed or flanked since I had left Great Salt
Lake City. The thought recalled a passage of arms
that had occurred at Denver between Dixon and Gov-
ernor Gilpin. In his grand enthusiastic way, the gov-
ernor, pointing to the Cordillera, said: "Five hundred
snowy ranges lie between this and San Francisco."
" Peaks," said Dixon. " Ranges !" thundered Gilpin ;
I've seen them."
Of the fifteen greater ranges to the westward of Salt
Lake, eight at least are named from the rivers they
contain, or are wholly nameless. Trade has preceded
survey; the country is not yet thoroughly explored. *
The six paper maps by which I traveled the best and
%176 GREATER BRITAIN.
latest differed in essential points. The position and
length of the Great Salt Lake itself are not yet accu-
rately known; the height of Mount Hood has been
made anything between nine thousand and twenty
thousand feet; the southern boundary line of Nevada
State passes through untrodden wilds. A rectification
of the limits of California and Nevada was attempted
no great time ago, and the head-waters of some stream
which formed a starting-point had been found to be
erroneously laid down. At the flourishing young city
of Aurora, in Esmeralda County, a court of California
was sitting. A mounted messenger rode up at great
pace, and, throwing his bridle round the stump, dashed
in breathlessly, shouting, "What's this here court?"
Being told that it was a Californian court, he said,
"Wall, thet's all wrong: this here's Nevada. We've
been and rectified this boundary, an' California's a good
ten mile off here." "Wall, Mr. Judge, I move this
court adjourn," said the plaintiff's counsel. "How
can a court adjourn thet's not a court?" replied the
judge. "Guess I'll go." And off he went. So, if the
court of Aurora was a court, it must be sitting now.
The coaching on this line is beyond comparison the
best the world can show. Drawn by six half-bred
mustangs, driven by whips of the fame of the Hank
Monk "who drove Greeley," the mails arid passengers
have been conveyed from Virginia City to the rail at
Placerville, 154 miles, in 15 hours and 20 minutes, in-"
eluding a stoppage of half an hour for supper, and six-
teen shorter stays to change horses. In this distance,
the Sierra Nevada has to be traversed in a rapid rise of
three thousand feet, a fall of a thousand feet, another
rise of the same, and then a descent of five thousand
feet on the Californian side.
Before the road was made, the passage was one of
VIRGINIA CITY. 177
extraordinary difficulty. A wagon once started, they
say, from Folsom, bearing " Carson or bust" in large
letters upon the tilt. After ten days, it returned lamely
enough, with four of the twelve oxen gone, and bear-
ing the label "Busted."
When we were nearing Hank Monk's "piece," I
became impatient to see the hero of the famous ride.
What was my disgust when the driver of the earlier
portion of the road appeared again upon the box in
charge of six magnificent iron-grays. The peremptory
cry of " All aboard" brought me without remonstrance
to the coach, but I took care to get upon the box, al-
though, as we were starting before the break of day,
the frost was terrible. To my relief, when I inquired
after Hank, the driver said that he was at a ball at a
timber ranch in the forest " six mile on." At early
light we reached the spot the summit of the more
eastern of the twin ranges of the Sierra. Out came
Hank, amid the cheers of the half dozen men and
women of the timber ranch who formed the " ball,"
wrapped up to the eyes in furs, and took the reins
without a word. For miles he drove steadily and
moodily along. I knew these drivers top well to ven-
ture upon speaking first when they were in the sulks ;
at last, however, I lost all patience, and silently offered
him a cigar. He took it without thanking me, but
after a few minutes said : " Thet last driver, how did
he drive ?" I made some shuffling answer, when he
cut in: "Drove as ef he were skeert; and so he was.
Look at them mustangs. Yoo ou !" As he yelled,
the horses started at what out here they style " the
run ;" and when, after ten minutes, he pulled up, we
must have done three miles, round most violent and
narrow turns, with only the bare precipice at the side,
and a fall of often a hundred feet to the stream at the
178 GEE ATE E BRITAIN.
bottom of the ravine the Simplon without its wall.
Dropping into the talking mood, he asked me the usual
questions as to my business, and whither I was bound.
When I told him I thought of visiting Australia, he
said, "D'you tell now! Jess give my love at Bendigo
to Gumption Dick." Not another word about Aus-
tralia or Gumption Dick could I draw from him. I
asked at Bendigo for Dick ; but not even the officer in
command of the police had ever heard of Hank Monk's
friend.
The sun rose as we dashed through the grand land-
scapes of 'Lake Tahoe. On we went, through gloomy
snow-drifts and still sadder forests of gigantic pines
nearly three hundred feet in height, and down the can-
yon of the American River from the second range.
Suddenly we left the snows, and burst through the
pine woods into an open scene. From gloom there
was a change to light ; from somber green to glowing
red and gold. The trees, no longer hung with icicles,
were draped with Spanish moss. In ten yards we had
come from winter into summer. Alkali was left be-
hind forever ; we were in El Dorado, on the Pacific
shores in sunny, dreamy California.
EL DORADO. 179
CHAPTER XX.
EL DORADO.
THE city of the high priest clothed in robes of gold
figures largely in the story of Spanish discovery in
America. The hardy soldiers who crossed the Atlantic
in caravels and cockboats, and toiled in leathern doub-
lets and plate armor through the jungle swamp of
Panama, were lured on through years of plague and
famine by the dream of a country whose rivers flowed
with gold. Diego de Mendoza found the land in 1532,
but it was not till January, 1848, that James Marshall
washed the golden sands of El Dorado.
The Spaniards were not the first to place the earthly
paradise in America. Not to speak of New Atlantis,
the Canadian Indians have never ceased to hand down
to their sous a legend of western abodes of bliss, to
which their souls journey after death, through frightful
glens and forests. In their mystic chants they describe
minutely the obstacles over which the souls must toil
to reach the regions of perpetual spring. These stories
are no mere dreams, but records of the great Indian
migration from the West: the liquid-eyed Hurons, not
sprung from the Canadian snows, may be Californian
if they are not Malay, the Pacific shores their happy
hunting-ground, the climate of Los Angeles their
never-ending spring.
The names The Golden State and El Dorado are
doubly applicable to California; her light and land-
scape, as well as her soil, are golden. Here, on the
180 GREATER BRITAIN.
Pacific side, nature wears a robe of deep rich yellow:
even the distant hills, no longer purple, are wrapt in
golden haze. No more cliffs and canyons all is
rounded, soft, and warm. The Sierra, which faces
eastward, with four thousand feet of wall-like rock, on
the west descends gently in vine-clad slopes into the
Californian vales, and trends away in spurs toward the
sea. The scenery of the Nevada side was weird, but
these western foot-hills are unlike anything in the
world. Drake, who never left the Pacific shores,
named the country New Albion, from the whiteness
of a headland on the coast ; but the first viceroys were
less ridiculously misled by patriotic vanity when they
christened it New Spain.
In the warm dry sunlight, we rolled down hills of
rich red loam, and through forests of noble redwood
the Sequoia sempervirens, brother to the Sequoia gigan-
tea, or Wellingtonia of our lawns. Dashing at full gallop
through the American River, just below its falls, where,
in 1848, the Mormons first dug that Californian gold
which in the interests of their church they had better
have let alone, we came upon great gangs of Indians
working by proxy upon the Continental railroad. The
Indian's plan for living happily is a simple one: he sits
and smokes in silence while his women work, and he
thus lives upon the earnings of the squaws. Unlike
a Mormon patriarch, he contrives that polygamy shall
pay, and says with the New Zealand Maori: "A man
with one wife may starve, but a man with many wives
grows fat." These fellows were Shoshone's from the
other side of the plateau; for the Pacific Indians, who
are black, not red, will not even force their wives to
work, which, in the opinion of the "Western men, is
the ultimate form of degradation in a race. Higher
up the hills, Chinamen alone are employed ; but their
* ~~ Ls^** 1 ^?
VIEW ON THE AMERICAN RIVER-THE PLACE WHERE GOLD WAS FIRST FOUND.-P. 180
EL DORADO. 181
labor is too costly to be thrown away upon the easier
work.
In El Dorado City we stayed not long enough for
the exploration of the once famous surface gold mines,
now forming one long vineyard, but, rolling on, were
soon among the tents of Placerville, which had been
swept with fire a few months before. All these valley
diggings have been deserted for deep-sinking not
that they are exhausted yet, but that the yield has
ceased to be sufficient to tempt the gambling digger.
The men who lived in Placerville and made it in-
famous throughout the world some years ago are scat-
tered now through Nevada, Arizona, Montana, and
the Frazer country, and Chinamen and Digger Indians
have the old workings to themselves, settling their
rights as against each other by daily battle and per-
petual feud. The Digger Indians are the most de-
graded of all the aborigines of North America out-
casts from the other tribes men under a ban " tapu,"
as their Maori cousins say weaponless, naked savages
who live on roots, and pester the industrious Chinese.
It is not with all their foes that the yellow men can
cope so easily. In a tiny Chinese theater in their
camp near Placerville, I saw a farce which to the re-
mainder of the audience was no doubt a very solemn
drama, in which the adventures of two Celestials on
the diggings were given to the world. The only scene
in which the pantomime was sufficiently clear for me
to read it without the possibility of error was one in
which a white man "Melican man" came to ask
for taxes. The Chinamen had paid their taxes once
before, but the fellow said that didn't matter. The
yellow men consulted together, and at last agreed that
the stranger was a humbug, so the play ended with
a big fight, in which they drove him off their ground.
16
182 GREATER BRITAIN.
A Chinaman played the over-'cute Yankee, and did
it well.
Perhaps the tax-collectors in the remoter districts
of the States count on the Chinese to make up the
deficiencies in their accounts caused by the non-pay-
ment of their- taxes by the whites ; for even in these
days of comparative quiet and civilization, taxes are
not gathered to their full amount in any of the Terri-
tories, and the justice of the collector is in Montana
tempered by many a threat of instant lynching if he
proceeds with his assessment. Even in Utah, the
returns are far from satisfactory: the three great
merchants of Salt Lake City should, if their incomes
are correctly stated, contribute a heavier sum than
that returned for the whole of the population of the
Territory.
The white diggers who preceded the Chinese have
left their traces in the names of lodes and places.
There is no town in California with such a title as the
Coloradan City of Buckskin Joe, but Yankee Jim
comes near it. Placerville itself was formerly known
as Hangtown, on account of its being the city in which
"lynch-law was inaugurated." Dead Shot Flat is not
far from here, and within easy distance are Hell's De-
light, Jackass Gulch, and Loafer's Hill. The once
famous Plug-ugly Gulch has now another name; but
of Chucklehead Diggings and Puppy town I could not
find the whereabouts in my walks and rides. Grave-
yard Canyon, Gospel Gulch, and Paint-pot Hill are
other Californiaii names. It is to be hoped that the
English and Spanish names will live unmutiJated in
California and Nevada, to hand down in liquid syl-
lables the history of a half-forgotten conquest, an
already perished race. San Francisco has become
"Frisco" in speech if not on paper, and Sacramento
EL DOE ADO. 183
will hardly bear the wear and tear of Californian life ;
but the use of the Spanish tongue has spread among
the Americans who have dealings with the Mexican
country folk of California State, and, except in mining
districts, the local names will stand.
It is not places only that have strange designations
in America. Out of the Puritan fashion of naming
children from the Old Testament patriarchs has grown,
by a sort of recoil, the custom of following the heroes
of the classics, and when they fail, inventing strange
titles for children. Mahonri Cahoon lives in Salt Lake
City ; Attila Harding was secretary to one of the gov-
ernors of Utah ; Michigan University has for president
Erastus Haven ; for superintendent, Oramel Hosford ;
for professors, Abram Sanger, Silas Douglas, Moses
Gunn, Zina Pitcher, Alonzo Pitman, De Yolson Wood,
Lucius Chapin, ahd Corydon Ford. Luman Stevens,
Bolivar Barnum, Wyllys Ransom, Ozora Stearnes, and
Buel Derby were Michigan officers during the war, and
Epaphroditus Ransom was formerly governor of the
State. Theron Rockwell, Gershon Weston, and Bela
Kellogg are well-known politicians in Massachusetts,
and Colonel Liberty Billings is equally prominent in
Florida. In New England school-lists it is hard to
pick boys from girls. Who shall tell the sex of Lois
Lombard, Asahel Morton, Ginery French, Royal Mil-
ler, Thankful Poyne? A Chicago man, who was
lynched in Central Illinois while I was in the neigh-
borhood, was named Alonza Tibbets. Eliphalet Ar-
nould and Yelenus Sherman are ranchmen on the
overland road ; Sereno Burt is an editor in Montana ;
Persis Boynton a merchant in Chicago. Zelotes Terry,
Datus Darner, Zeryiah Rainforth, Barzellai Stanton,
Sardis Clark, Ozias Williams, Xenas Phelps, Converse
Hopkins, and Hirodshai Blake are names with which I
184 GREATER BRITAIN.
have met. Zilpah, Huldah, Nabby, Basetha, Minne-
sota, and Semantha are New England ladies; while one
gentleman of Springfield, lately married, caught a Tar-
tia. One of the earliest enemies of the Mormons was
Palatiah Allen ; one of their first converts Preserved
Harris. Taking the pedigree of Joe Smith, the Mor-
mon prophet, as that of a representative New England
family, we shall find that his aunts were Lovisa and
Lovina Mack, Dolly Smith, Eunice and Miranda
Pearce ; his uncles, Royal, Ira, and Bushrod Smith.
His grandfather's name was Asael ; of his great aunts
one was Hephzibah, another Hypsebeth, and another
Vasta. The prophet's eldest brother's name was Al-
vin ; his youngest Don Carlos ; his sister, Sophronia ;
and his sister-in-law, Jerusha Smith ; while a nephew
was christened Chilon. One of the nieces was Levira,
and another Rizpah. The first wife of George A.
Smith, the prophet's cousin, is Bathsheba, and his eld-
est daughter also bears this name.
In the smaller towns near Placerville, there is still a
wide field for the discovery of character as well as
gold ; but eccentricity among the diggers here seems
chiefly to waste itself on food. The luxury of this
Pacific country is amazing. The restaurants and cafe's
of each petty digging-town put forth bills-of-fare which
the "Trios Freres" could not equal for ingenuity;
wine lists such as Delmonico's cannot beat. The facili-
ties are great : except in the far interior or on the hills,
one even spring reigns unchangeably summer in all
except the heat ; every fruit and vegetable of the world
is perpetually in season. Fruit is not named in the
hotel bills-of-fare, but all the day long there are piled
in strange confusion on the tables, Mission grapes, the
Californian Bartlet pears, Empire apples from Oregon,
melons English, Spanish, American and Musk;
EL DORADO. 185
peaches, nectarines, and fresh almonds. All comers
may help themselves, and wash down the fruit with
excellent Californian-made Sauterne. If dancing, gam-
bling, drinking, and still shorter cuts to the devil have
their votaries among the diggers, there is no employ-
ment upon which they so freely spend their cash as on
dishes cunningly prepared by cooks Chinese, Italian,
Bordelais who follow every "rush." After the doc-
tor and the coroner, no one makes money at the dig-
gings like the cook. The dishes smell of the Califor-
nian soil ; baked rock-cod a la Buena Yista, broiled
Californian quail with Russian River bacon, Sacra-
mento snipes on toast, Oregon ham with champagne
sauce, and a dozen other toothsome things these were
the dishes on the Placerville bill-of-fare in an hotel
which had escaped the fire, but whose only guests were
diggers and their friends. A few Atlantic States dishes
were down upon the list : hominy, cod chowder
hardly equal, I fear, to that of Salem sassafras candy,
and squash tart, but never a mention of pork and
molasses, dear to the Massachusetts boy. All these
good things the diggers, when "dirt -is plenty,"
moisten with Clicquot, or Heidsick cabinet ; when re-
turns are small, with their excellent Sonoma wine.
Even earthquakes fail to interrupt the triumphs of
the cooks. The last " bad shake" was fourteen days
ago, but it is forgotten in the joy called forth by the
discovery of a thirteenth way to cook fresh oysters,
which are brought here from the coast by train.
There is still a something in Placerville that smacks
of the time when tin-tacks were selling for their weight
in gold.
Wandering through the only remaining street of
Placerville before I left for the Southern country, I
saw that grapes were marked "three cents a pound;"
16*
186 GREATER BRITAIN.
but as the lowest coin known on the Pacific shores is
the ten-cent bit, the price exists but upon paper. Three
pounds of grapes, however, for "a bit" is a practica-
ble purchase, in which I indulged when starting on my
journey South : in the towns you have always the hotel
supply. If the value of the smallest coin be a test of
the prosperity of a country, California must stand
high. Not only is nothing less than the bit, or five-
pence, known, but when fivepence is deducted from a
"quarter," or shilling, fivepence is all you get or give
for change a gain or loss upon which California!! shop-
keepers look with profound indifference.
Hearing a greater jingling of glasses from one bar-
room than from all the other hundred whisky-shops
of Placerville, I turned into it to seek the cause, and
found a Vermonter lecturing on Lincoln and the war
to an audience of some fifty diggers. The lecturer and
bar-keeper stood together within the sacred inclosure,
the one mixing his drinks, while the other rounded off
his periods in the inflated Western style. The au-
dience was critical and cold till near the close of the
oration, when the " corpse revivers" they were drink-
ing seemed to take effect, and to be at the bottom
of the stentorian shout, " Thet's bully," with which
the peroration was rewarded. The Vermonter told
me that he had come round from Panama, and was on
his way to Austin, as Placerville was "played out"
since its "claims" had "fizzled."
They have no lecture-room here at present, av it
seems ; but that there are churches, however small,
appears from a paragraph in the Placerville news-sheet
of to-day, which chronicles the removal of a Methodist
meeting-house from Block A to Block C, vice a Cath-
olic chapel retired, " having obtained a superior loca-
tion/'
EL DORADO. 187
A few days were all that I could spend in the val-
leys that lie between the Sierra and the Contra Costa
Range, basking in a rich sunlight, and unsurpassed in
the world for climate, scenery, and soil. This single
State one of forty-five has twice the area of Great
Britain, the most fertile of known soils, and the sun
and sea-breeze of Greece. Western rhapsodies are the
expression of the intoxication produced by such a spec-
tacle ; but they are outdone by facts.
For mere charm to the eye, it is hard to give the
palm between the cracks and canyons of the Sierra
and the softer vales of the Coast Range, where the
hot sun is tempered by the cool Pacific breeze, and
thunder and lightning are unknown. To one coming
from the wilds of the Carson Desert and of Mirage
Plains, the more sensuous beauty of the lower dells
has for the eye the relief that travelers from the coast
must seek in the loftier heights and precipices of the
Yos^mite. The oak-filled valleys of the Contra Costa
Range have all the pensive repose of the sheltered
vales that lie between the Apennines and the Adriatic
from Rimini to Ancona ; but California has the advant-
age in her skies. Italy has the blue, but not the golden
haze.
Nothing can be more singular than the variety of
beauty that lies hid in these Pacific slopes; all that is
best in Canada and the Eastern States finds more than
its equal here. The terrible grandeur of Cape Trinite'
on the Saguenay, and the panorama of loveliness from
the terra-ce at Quebec, are alike outdone.
Americans certainly need not go to Europe to find
scenery ; but neither need they go to California, or even
Colorado. Those who tell us that there is no such
thing us natural beauty west of the Atlantic can
scarcely know the Eastern, while they ignore the West-
188 GEEATEE BEITAIN.
era and Central States. The world can show few
scenes more winning than Israel's River Valley in the
White Mountains of New Hampshire, or North Con-
way in the southern slopes of the same range. Nothing
can be more full of grandeur than the passage of the
James at Balcony Falls, where the river rushes through
a crack in the Appalachian chain ; the wilderness of
Northern New York is unequaled of its kind, and
there are delicious landscapes in the Adirondacks. As
for river scenery, the Hudson is grander than the
Rhine; the Susquehanna is lovelier than the Meuse;
the Schuylkill prettier than the Seine; the Mohawk
more enchanting than the Dart. Of the rivers of
North Europe, the Neckar alone is not beaten in the
States.
Americans admit that their scenery is tine, but pre-
tend that it is wholly wanting in the interest that his-
toric memories bestow. So-called republicans affect
to find a charm in Bishop Hatto's Tower which is
wanting in Irving's "Sunnyside;" the ten thousand vir-
gins of Cologne live in their fancy, while Constitution
Island and Fort Washington are forgotten names.
Americans or Britishers, we Saxons are all alike a
wandering, discontented race ; we go 4000 miles to find
us Sleepy Hollow, or Kilian Van Rensselaer's Castle,
or Hiawatha's great red pipe-stone quarry; and the
Americans, who live in the castle, picnic yearly in the
Hollow, and flood the quarry for a skating-rink, come
here to England to visit Burns's house, or to sit in Pope's
arm-chair.
Down South I saw clearly the truth of a thought that
struck me before I had been ten minutes west of the
Sierra Pass. California is Saxon only in the looks and
language of the people of its towns. In Pennsylvania,
you may sometimes fancy yourself in Sussex; while in
EL DORADO. 189
New England, you seem only to be in some part of
Europe that you have never happened to light upon
before ; in California, you are at last in a new world.
The hills are weirdly peaked or flattened, the skies are
new, the birds and plants are new; the atmosphere,
crisp though warm, is unlike any in the world but that
of South Australia. It will be strange if the Pacific
coast does not produce a new school of Saxon poets
painters it has already given to the world.
Returning to Placerville, after an eventless explora-
tion of the exquisite scenery to the south, I took the
railway once again, for the first time since I had left
Manhattan City 1800 miles away and was soon in
Sacramento, the State capital, now recovering slowly
from the flood of 1862. Near the city I made out Oak
Grove famed for duels between well-known Califor-
nians. Here it was that General Denver, State Sena-
tor, shot Mr. Gilbert, the representative in Congress,
in a duel fought with rifles. Here, too, it was that
Mr. Thomas, district attorney for Placer County, killed
Dr. Dickson, of the Marine Hospital, in a duel with
pistols in 1854. Records of duels form a serious part
of the State history. At Lone Mountain Cemetery
near San Francisco, there is a great marble monument
to the Hon. David Broderick, shot by Chief Justice
Terry, of the Supreme Court, in 1859.
A few hours' quiet steaming in the sunlight down
the Sacramento River, past Rio Vista and Montezuma,
through the gap in the Contra Costa Range, at which
the grand volcanic peak of Monte Diablo stands sen-
tinel watching over the Martinez Straits, and there
opened to the south and west a vast mountain-sur-
rounded bay. Volumes of cloud were rolling in un-
ceasingly from the ocean, through the Golden Gate,
past the fortified island of Alcatras, and spending
190 GEEATEE BEITAIN.
themselves in the opposite shores of Sati Rafael, Be-
nicia, and Vallejo. At last I was across the continent,
and face to face with the Pacific.
CHAPTER XXL
LYNCH LAW.
" CALIFORNIANS are called the scum of the earth, yet
their great city is the best policed in the world," said
a New York friend to me, when he heard that I
thought of crossing the continent to San Francisco.
" Them New Yorkers is a sight too fond of looking
after other people's morals," replied an old " Forty-
niner," to whom I repeated this phrase, having first
toned it down however. u Still," he went on, "our
history's baddish, but it ain't for us to play showman
to our own worst pints : let every man skin his own
skunk !"
The story of the early days of San Francisco, as to
which my curiosity was thus excited, is so curious an
instance of the development of an English community
under the most inauspicious circumstances, that the
whole time which I spent in the city itself I devoted
to hearing the tale from those who knew the actors.
Not only is the history of the two Vigilance Commit-
tees in itself characteristic, but it works in with what
I had gathered in Kansas, and Illinois, and Colorado
as to the operation of the claim-clubs; and the stories,
taken together, form a typical picture of the rise of a
New English country.
LYNCH LAW. 191
The discovery of gold in 1848 brought down on
luckless California the idle, the reckless, the vaga-
bonds first of Polynesia, then of all the world. Street
fighting, public gaming, masked balls given by un-
known women and paid for nobody knew how, but
^attended by governor, supervisors, and alcalde all
these were minor matters by the side of the general
undefined ruffianism of the place. Before the end of
1849, San Francisco presented on a gigantic scale
much the same appearance that Helena in Montana
wears in 1866.
Desperadoes poured in from all sides, the best of
the bad flocking off to the mines, while the worst
among the villains those who lacked energy as well
as moral sense remained in the city, to raise by
thieving or in the gambling-booth the "pile" that
they were too indolent to earn by pick and pan.
Hundreds of " emancipists " from Sydney, "old lags"
from Norfolk Island, the pick of the criminals of Eng-
land, still further trained and confirmed in vice and
crime by the experiences of Macquarie Harbor and
Port Arthur, rushed to San Francisco to continue a
career which the vigilance of the police made hope-
less in Tasmania and New South Wales. The floating
vice of the Pacific ports of South America soon gath-
ered to a spot where there were not only men to
fleece, but men who, being fleeced, could pay. The
police were necessarily few, for, appoint a man to-day,
and to-morrow he was gone to the placers with some
new friend; those who could be prevailed upon to
remain a fortnight in the force were accessible to
bribes from the men they were set to watch. They
themselves admitted their inaction, but ascribed it to
the continual change of place among the criminals,
which prevented the slightest knowledge of their
192 GREATER BRITAIN.
characters and haunts. The Australian jail -birds
formed a quarter known as "Sydney Town," which
soon became what the Bay of Islands had been ten
years before the Alsatia of the Pacific. In spite of
daily murders, not a single criminal was hanged.
The ruffians did not all agree: there were jealousies
among the various bands; feuds between the Aus-
tralians and Chilians ; between the Mexicans and the
New Yorkers. Under the various names of "Hounds,"
"Regulators," "Sydney ducks," and "Sydney coves,"
the English convict party organized themselves in op-
position to the Chileuos as well as to the police and
law-abiding citizens. Gangs of villains, whose sole
bond of union was robbery or murder, marched,
armed with 'bludgeons and revolvers, every Sunday
afternoon, to the sound of music, unhindered through
the streets, professing that they were "guardians of
the community" against the Spaniards, Mexicans, and
South Americans.
At last a movement took place among the mer-
chants and reputable inhabitants which resulted in
the break-up of the Australian gangs. By an upris-
ing of the American citizens of San Francisco, in
response to a proclamation by T. M. Leavenworth,
the alcalde, twenty of the most notorious among the
"Hounds" were seized and shipped to China: it is
believed that some were taken south in irons, and
landed near Cape Horn. "Anywhere so that they
could not come back," as my informant said.
For a week or two things went well, but a fresh im-
pour of rogues and villains soon swamped the volun-
teer police by sheer force of numbers ; and in Febru-
ary, 1851, occurred an instance of united action among
the citizens which is noticeable as the forerunner of
the Vigilance Committees. A Mr. Jansen had been
LYNCH LAW. 193
stunned by a blow from a slung-shot, and his person
and premises rifled by Australian thieves. During the
examination of two prisoners arrested on suspicion,
five thousand citizens gathered round the City Hall,
and handbills were circulated in which it was proposed
that the prisoners should be lynched. In the afternoon
an attempt to seize the men was made, but repulsed by
another section of the citizens the Washington Guard.
A meeting was held on the plaza, and a committee ap-
pointed to watch the authorities, and prevent a release.
A well-known citizen, Mr. Brarman, made a speech,
in which he said: "We, the people, are the mayor,
the recorder, and the laws." The alcalde addressed
the crowd, and suggested, by way of compromise, that
they should elect a jury, which should sit in the regu-
lar court, and try the prisoners. This was refused, and
the people elected not only a jury, but three judges, a
sheriff, a clerk, a public prosecutor, and two counsel
for the defense. This court then tried the prisoners
in their absence, and the jury failed to agree nine
were for conviction, and three were doubtful. " Hang
'em, anyhow; majority rules," was the shout, but the
popular judges stood firm, and discharged their jury,
while the people acquiesced. The next day the pris-
oners were tried and convicted by the regular court, al-
though they were ultimately found to be innocent men.
Matters now went from bad to worse : five times
San Francisco was swept from end to end by fires
known to have been helped on, if not originally kin-
dled, by incendiaries in the hope of plunder ; and when,
by the fires of May and June, 1851, hardly a house
was left untouched, the pious Bostonians held up their
hands, and cried " Gomorrah!"
Immediately after the discovery that the June fire
was not an accident, the Vigilance Committee was
17
194 GREATER BRITAIN.
formed, being self-appointed, and consisting of the
foremost merchants in the place. This was on the 7th
of June, according to my friend; on the 9th, accord-
ing to the Californian histories. It was rumored that
the committee consisted of two hundred citizens ; it
was known that they were supported by the whole of
the city press. They published a declaration, in which
they stated that there is "no security for life or prop-
erty under the . . . law as now administered." This
they ascribed to the " quibbles of the law," the " cor-
ruption of the police," the "insecurity of prisons,"
the " laxity of those who pretend to administer jus-
tice." The secret instructions to the committee
contained a direction that the members should at
once assemble at the committee-room whenever sig-
nals, consisting of two taps on a bell, were heard at in-
tervals of one minute. The committee was organized
with president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, ser-
geant-at-arms, standing committee on qualifications,
and standing committee of finance. No one was to be ad-
mitted a member unless he were a " respectable citizen,
and approved by the Committee on Qualifications."
The very night of their organization, according to the
histories, or three nights later, according to my friend
Mr. A , the work of the committee began. Some
boatmen at Central Wharf saw something which led
them to follow out into the Yerba Buena cove a man,
whom they captured after a sharp row. As they over-
hauled him, he threw overboard a safe, just stolen from
a bank, but this was soon fished out. He was at once
carried off to the committee-room of the Vigilants,
and the bell of the Monumental Engine Company
struck at intervals, as the rule prescribed. Not only
the committee, but a vast surging crowd collected,
although midnight was now past. A was on the
LYNCH LAW. 195
plaza, and says that every man was armed, and evi-
dently disposed to back up the committee. Accord-
ing to the Alta Californian, the chief of the police came
up a little before 1 A.M., and tried to force an entrance
to the room ; but he was met, politely enough, with a
show of revolvers sufficient to annihilate his men, so
he judged it prudent to retreat.
At one o'clock, the bell of the engine-house began
to toll, and the crowd became excited. Mr. Brannan
came out of the committee-room, and, standing on a
mound of sand, addressed the citizens. As well as my
friend could remember, his words were these : " Gen-
tlemen, the man Jenkins by name a Sydney con-
vict, whose supposed offense you know, has had a fair
trial before eighty gentlemen, and been unanimously
found guilty by them. I have been deputed by the com-
mittee to ask whether it is your pleasure that he be
hanged." " Ay !" from every man in the crowd.
" He will be given an hour to prepare for death, and
the Rev. Mr. Mines has been already sent for to min-
ister to him. Is this your pleasure ?" Again a storm
of " Ay !" Nothing was known in the crowd of the
details of the trial, except that counsel had been heard
on the prisoner's behalf. For another hour the excite-
ment of the crowd was permitted to continue, but at
two o'clock the doors of the committee-room were
thrown open, and Jenkins was seen smoking a cigar.
Mr. A said that he did not believe the prisoner ex-
pected a rescue, but thought that an exhibition of pluck
might make popular with the crowd, and save him. A
procession of Vigilants with drawn Colts was then
formed, and set off in the moonlight across the four
chief streets to the plaza. Some of the people shouted
" To the flagstaff!" but there came a cry, " Don't dese-
crate the Liberty Pole. To the old adobe ! the old
196 GREATER BRITAIN.
adobe !" and to the old adobe custom-house the prisoner
was dragged. In five minutes he was hanging from
the roof, three hundred citizens lending a hand at the
rope. At six in the morning, A went home, but
he heard that the police cut down the body about that
time, and carried it to the coroner's house.
An inquest was held next day. The city officers
swore that they had done all they could to prevent the
execution, but they refused to give up the names
of the Vigilance Committee. The members them-
selves were less cautious. Mr. Brannan and others
came forward of their own proper motion, and dis-
closed all the circumstances of the trial : 140 of the
committee backed them up by a written protestation
against interference with the Vigilants, to which their
signatures were appended. Protest and evidence have
been published, not only in the newspapers of the time,
but in the San Francisco "Annals." The coroner's
jury found a verdict of " Strangulation, consequent on
the concerted action of a body of citizens calling them-
selves a Committee of Vigilance." An hour after the
verdict was given, a mass meeting of the whole of the
respectable inhabitants was held in the plaza, and a
resolution approving of the action of the committee
passed by acclamation.
In July, 1851, the committee hanged another man on
the Market Street wharf, and appointed a sub-commit-
tee of thirty to board every ship that crossed the bar,
seize all persons suspected of being " Sydney Coves,"
and reship them to New South Wales.
In August came the great struggle between the
Vigilants and constituted authority. It was sharp and
decisive. Whittaker and McKenzie, two Sydney
Coves, were arrested by the committee for various
crimes, and sentenced to death. The next day, Sheriff
LYNCH LAW. 197
Hays seized them on a writ of habeas corpus, in the
rooms of the committee. The bell was tolled: the
citizens assembled, the Vigilants told their story, the
men were seized once more, and by noon they were
hanging from the loft of the committee-house, by the
ordinary lifting tackle for heavy goods. Fifteen thou-
sand people were present, and approved. "After this,"
said A , "there could be no mistake about the cit-
izens supporting the committee."
By September, the Vigilants had transported all the
"Coves" on whom they could lay hands; so they issued
a proclamation, declaring that for the future they would
confine themselves to aiding the law by tracing out
and guarding criminals; and in pursuance of their de-
cision, they soon afterward helped the authorities in
preventing the lynching of a ship-captain for cruelty to
his men.
After the great sweep of 1851, things became steadily
worse again till they culminated in 1855, a year to
which my friend looked backed with horror. Not
counting Indians, there were four hundred persons
died by violence in California in that single year.
Fifty of these were lynched, a dozen were hanged by
law, a couple of dozen shot by the sheriffs and tax-col-
lectors in the course of their duty. The officers did
not escape scot free. The under-sheriff of San Fran-
cisco was shot in Mission Street, in broad daylight, by
a man upon whom he was trying to execute a writ of
ejectment.
Judges, mayors, supervisors, politicians, all were bad
alike. The merchants of the city were, from New
England, New York, and foreign lands; but the men
who assumed the direction of public affairs, and espe-
cially of public funds, were Southerners, many of them
"Border Ruffians" of the most savage stamp "Pikes,"
n*
198 GREATER BRITAIN.
as they were called, from Pike's County in Missouri,
from which their leaders came. Instead of banding
themselves together to oppose the laws, these rogues
and ruffians found it easier to control the making of
them. Their favorite method of defeating their New
England foes was by the simple plan of " stuffing," or
filling the ballot-box with forged tickets when the elec-
tions were concluded. Two Irishmen Casey and Sul-
livan were their tools in this shameful work. Werth,
a Southerner, the leader of Casey's gang, had been de-
nounced in the San Francisco Bulletin as the murderer
of a man named Kittering; and Casey, meeting James
King, editor of the Bulletin, shot him dead in Mont-
gomery Street in the middle of the day. Casey and
one of his assistants a man named Cora were hanged
by the people as Mr. King's body was being carried to
the grave, and Sullivan committed suicide the same
day.
Books were opened for the enrollment of the names
of those who were prepared to support the committee :
nine thousand grown white males inscribed themselves
within four days. Governor Johnson at once declared
that he should suppress the committee, but the City of
Sacramento prevented war by offering a thousand men
for the Vigilants' support, the other California!! cities
following suit. The committee got together 6000
stand of arms and thirty cannon, and fortified their
rooms with earthworks and barricades. The gov-
ernor, having called on the general commanding the
Federal forces at Benicia, who wisely refused to inter-
fere, marched upon the city, was surrounded, and
taken prisoner with all his forces without the striking
of a blow.
Having now obtained the control of the State gov-
ernment, the committee proceeded to banish all the
LYNCH LAW. 199
"Pikes" and " Pukes." Four were hanged, forty
transported, and many ran away. This done, the
committee prepared an elaborate report upon the prop-
erty and finances of the State, and then, after a great
parade, ten regiments strong, upon the plaza and
through the streets, they adjourned forever, and "the
thirty-three" and their ten thousand backers retired
into private life once more, and put an end to this sin-
gular spectacle of the rebellion of a free people against
rulers nominally elected by itself. As my friend said,
when he finished his long yarn, " This has more than
archseologic interest: we may live too see a similar
Vigilance Committee in New York."
For my own part, I do not believe that an uprising
against bad government is possible in New York City,
because there the supporters of bad government are a
majority of the people. Their interest is the other
way : in increased city taxes they evidently lose far
more than, as a class, they gain by what is spent among
them in corruption ; but when they come to see this,
they will not rebel against their corrupt leaders, but
elect those whom they can trust. In San Francisco,
the case was widely different : through the ballot frauds,
a majority of the citizens were being infamously mis-
governed by a contemptible minority, and the events
of 1856 were only the necessary acts of the majority to
regain their power, coupled with certain exceptional
acts in the shape of arbitrary transportation of " Pikes"
and Southern rowdies, justified by the exceptional cir-
cumstances of the young community. At Melbourne,
under circumstances somewhat similar, our English
colonists, instead of setting up a committee, built Pent-
ridge Stockade with walls some thirty feet high, and
created a military police, with almost arbitrary power.
The difference is one of words. The whirl of life in a
200 GREATER BRITAIN.
young gold country not only prevents the best men en-
tering the political field, and so forces citizens to exer-
cise their right of choice only between candidates of
equal badness, but so engrosses the members of the
community who exercise the ballot as to prevent the
detection of fraud till it has ruled for years. Through-
out young countries generally you find men say : i ' Yes !
we're robbed, we know; but no one has time to go into
that." "I'm for the old men," said a Californian elector
once, " for they've plundered us so long that they're
gorged, and can't swallow any more." "No," said
another, " let's have fresh blood. Give every man a
chance of robbing the State. Shape and share alike."
The wonder is, not that in such a State as California
was till lately the machinery of government should work
unevenly, but that it should work at all. Democracy
has never endured so rough a test as that from which
it has triumphantly emerged in the Golden State and
City.
The public spirit with which the merchants came for-
ward and gave time and money to the cause of order is
worthy of all praise, and the rapidity with which the
organization of a new government was carried through
is an instance of the singular power of our race for
building up the machinery of self-government under
conditions the most unpromising. Instead of the events
of 1856 having been a case of opposition to law and
order, they will stand in history as a remarkable proof
of the 1 aw-abiding character of a people who vindicated
justice by a demonstration of overwhelming force, laid
down their arms, and returned in a few weeks to the
peaceable routine of business life.
If, in the merchant founders of the Vigilance Com-
mittees of San Francisco we can see the descendants of
the justice-loving Germans of the time of Tacitus, I
LYNCH LAW. 201
found in another class of vigilants the moral offspring
of Alfred's village aldermen of our own Saxon age.
From Mr. William M. Byers, now editor of the Rocky
Mountain News, I had heard the story of the early set-
tlers' land-law in Missouri ; in Stanton's office in Den-
ver City, I had seen the records of the Arrapahoe
County Claim-club, with which he had been connected
at the first settlement of Colorado ; but at San Jose*, I
heard details of the settlers' custom-law the Califor-
nian "grand-coutumier," it might be called which
convinced me that, in order to find the rudiments of
all that, politically speaking, is best and. most vigorous
in the Saxon mind, you must seek countries in which
Saxon civilization itself is in its infancy. The greater
the difficulties of the situation, the more racy the cus-
tom, the more national the law.
When a new State began to be "settled up"
that is, its lands entered upon by actual settlers, not
landsharks the inhabitants often found themselves
in the wilderness, far in advance of attorneys, courts,
and judges. It was their custom when this occurred
to divide the territory into districts of fifteen or
twenty miles square, and form for each a "claim-
club" to protect the land-claims, or property of the
members. Whenever a question of title arose, a judge
and jury were chosen from among the members to
hear and determine the case. The occupancy title
was invariably protected up to a certain number of
acres, which was differently fixed by different clubs,
and varied in those of which I have heard the rules
from 100 to 250 acres, averaging 150. The United
States " Homestead" and "Pre-emption" laws were
founded on the practice of these clubs. The claim-
clubs interfered only for the protection of their mem-
bers, but they never scrupled to hang willful offenders
202 GEE ATE E BEITA1N.
against their rules, whether members or outsiders.
Execution of the decrees of the club 'was generally
left to the county sheriff, if he was a member, and in
this case a certain air of legality was given to the local
action. It is perhaps not too much to say that a
Western sheriff is an irresponsible official, possessed
of gigantic powers, but seldom known to abuse them.
He is a Caesar, chosen for his honesty, fearlessness,
clean shooting, and quick loading, by men who know
him well: if he breaks down, he is soon deposed, and
a better man chosen for dictator. I have known a
Western paper say: "Frank is our man for sheriff,
next October. See the way he shot one of the fellows
who robbed his store, and followed up the other, and
shot him too the next day. Frank is the boy for us."
In such a state of society as this, the distinction be-
tween law and lynch-law can scarcely be said to exist,
and in the eyes of every Western settler the claim-
club backed by the sheriff's name was as strong and
as full of the majesty of the law as the Supreme Court
of the United States. Mr. Byers told me of a case of
the infliction of death-punishment by a claim-club
which occurred in Kansas after the "Homestead" law
was passed allowing the occupant when he had tilled
and improved the land for five years, to purchase it at
one and a quarter dollars an acre. A man settled on
a piece of land, and labored on it for some years. He
then "sold it," which he had, of course, no power to
do, the land being still the property of the United
States. Having done this, he went and "pre-empted"
it under the Homestead Act, at the government price.
When he attempted to eject the man to whom he had
assumed to sell, the club ordered the sheriff to "put
the man away," and he was never seen again. Perhaps
Mr. Byers was the sheriff; he seemed to have the de-
LYNCH LAW. 203
tails at his fingers' ends, and his later history in Denver,
where he once had the lynching rope round his neck
for exposing gamblers, testifies to his boldness.
Some of the rascalities which the claim-clubs were
expected to put down were ingenious enough. Some-
times a man would build a dozen houses on a block of
land, and, going there to enter on possession after they
were complete, would find that in the night the whole
of them had disappeared. Frauds under the Home-
stead Act were both many and strange. Men were re-
quired to prove that they had on the land a house of
at least ten feet square. They have been known to
whittle out a toy-house with their bowie, and, carrying
it to the land, to measure it in the presence of a friend
twelve inches by thirteen. In court the pre-emptor,
examining his own witness, would say, " What are the
dimensions of that house of mine ?" " Twelve by thir-
teen." " That w r ill do." In Kansas a log-house of the
regulation size was fitted up on wheels, and let at ten
dollars a day, in order that it might be wheeled on to
different lots, to be sworn to as a house upon the land.
Men have been known to make a window-sash and
frame, and keep them inside of their windowless huts,
to swear that they had a window in their house an*
other of the requirements of the act. It is a singular
mark of deference to the traditions of a Puritan an-
cestry that such accomplished liars as the Western land-
sharks should feel it necessary to have any foundation
whatever for their lies; but not only in this respect
are they a curious race. One of their peculiarities is
that, however wealthy they may be, they will never
place their money out at interest, never sink it in a
speculation, however tempting, when there is no pros-
pect of almost immediate realization. To turn their
money over often, at whatever risk, is with these men
204 GREATER BRITAIN.
an axiom. The advanced-guard of civilization, they
push out into an unknown wilderness, and seize upon
the available lots, the streams, the springs, the river
bottoms, the falls or "water-privileges," and then,
using their interest in the territorial legislature using,
perhaps, direct corruption in some cases they procure
the location of the State capital upon their lands, or
the passage of the railroads through their valleys.
The capital of Nebraska has been fixed in this manner
at a place two hundred and fifty miles from the near-
est settlement. A newspaper appeared suddenly, dated
from "Lincoln City, center of Nebraska Territory,"
but published in reality in Omaha. To cope with such
fellows, Western sheriffs must be no ordinary men.
Thanks to the Vigilance Committees, California
stands now before the other far-western States. Row-
dyism is being put down as the God-fearing Northern-
ers gain ground. It may still be dangerous to stroke
your beard in a bar-room at Placerville or El Dorado ;
"a gentleman in the loafing and chancing line" may
still be met with in Sacramento ; here and there a
Missourian "Pike," as yet unhung, may boast that he
can whip his weight in wild cats, but San Francisco
fcas at least reached the age of outward decorum, has
shut up public gaming-houses, and supports four church
papers.
In Colorado lynch law is not as yet forgotten : the
day we entered Denver the editor of the Gazette ex-
pressed, " on historical grounds," his deep regret at the
cutting down of two fine cottonwood-trees that stood
on Cherry Creek. When we came to talk to him we
found that the "history" alluded to was that of the
" escape up " these trees of many an early inhabitant
of Denver City. " There's the tree we used to put the
jury under, and that's the one we hanged 'em on. Put
LYNCH LAW. 205
a cart under the tree, and the boy standing on it, with
the rope around him ; give him time for a pray, then
smack the whip, and ther' you air."
In Denver we were reserved upon the subject of
Vigilance Committees, for it is dangerous sometimes
to make close inquiries as to their constitution. While
I was in Leavenworth a man was hanged by the mob
at Council Bluffs for asking the names of the Vigilants
who had hanged a friend of his the year before. We
learned enough, however, at Denver to show that the
committee in that city still exists; and in Virginia and
Carson I know that the organizations are continued ;
but offenders are oftener shot quietly than publicly
hanged, in order to prevent an outcry, and avoid the
vengeance of the relatives. The verdict of the jury
never fails to be respected, but acquittal is almost as
unknown as mercy to those convicted. Innocent men
are seldom tried before such juries, for the case must
be clear before the sheriff will run the risk of being
shot in making the arrest. When the man's fate is
settled, the sheriff drives out quietly in his buggy, and
next day men say when they meet, "Poor 's es-
caped ;" or else it is, " The sheriff's shot. Who'll run
for office?" *
It will be seen from the history of the Vigilance
Committees, as I heard their stories from Kansas to
California, that they are to be divided into two classes,
with sharply-marked characteristics those where com-
mittee hangings, transportations, warnings, are alike
open to the light of day, such as the committees of
San Francisco in 1856, and the Sandwich Islands in
1866, and those unhappily the vast majority where
all is secret and irresponsible. Here, in San Francisco,
the committee was the government; elsewhere, the
organization was less wide, and the members, though
* 18
206 GREATER BRITAIN.
always shrewdly guessed at, never known. Neither
class should be necessary, unless when a gold rush
brings down upon a State the desperadoes of the world;
but there is this encouragement even in the history of
lynch law: that, although English settlements often
start wild, they never have been known to go wild.
The men who formed the second Vigilance Commit-
tee of San Francisco are now the governor, Senators,
and Congressmen of California, the mayors and sheriffs
of her towns. Nowadays the citizens are remarkable,
even among Americans, for their love of law and order.
Their city, though still subject to a yearly deluge from
the outpourings of all the overcrowded slums of Eu-
rope, is, as the New Yorker said, the best policed in
all America. In politics, too, it is remarked that
party organizations have no power in this State from
the moment that they attempt to nominate corrupt or
time-serving men. The people break loose from their
caucuses and conventions, and vote in a body for their
honest enemies, rather than for corrupt friends. They
have the advantage of singular ability, for there is not
an average man in California.
GOLDEN CITY. 207
CHAPTER XXII.
GOLDEN CITY.
THE first letter which I delivered in San Francisco
was from a Mormon gentleman to a merchant, who, as
he read it, exclaimed: "Ah! so you want to see the
lions? I'll pick you up at three, and take you there."
I wondered, but went, as travelers do.
At the end of a pleasant drive along the best road
in all America, I found myself upon a cliff overhanging
the Pacific, with a glorious outlook, seaward toward
the Farallones, and northward to Cape Benita and the
Golden Gate. Beneath, a few hundred yards from
shore, was a conical rock, covered with shapeless mon-
sters, plashing the water and roaring ceaselessly, while
others swam around. These were "the lions," my
acquaintance said the sea-lions. I did not enter upon
an explanation of our slang phrase, "the lions" which
the Mormon, himself an Englishman, no doubt had
used, but took the first opportunity of seeing the re-
mainder of " the lions" of the Golden City.
The most remarkable spot in all America is Mission
Dolores, in the outskirts of San Francisco City once
a settlement of the Society of Jesus, and now partly
blanket factory and partly church. Nowhere has the
conflict between the Saxon and Latin races been so
sharp and so decisive. For eighty or ninety years
California was first Spanish, then Mexican, then a half
independent Spanish-American republic. The pro-
gress of those ninety years was shown in the founda-
208 GREATER BRITAIN.
tion of half a dozen Jesuit "missions," which held
each of them a thousand or two tame Indians as slaves,
while a few military settlers and their friends divided
the interior with the savage tribes. Gold, which had
been discovered here by Drake, was never sought : the
fathers, like the Mormon chiefs, discouraged mining;
it interfered with their tame Indians. Here and there,
in four cases, perhaps, in all, a presidio, or castle, had
been built for the protection of the mission, and a
puebla, or tiny free town, had been suffered to grow
up, not without remonstrance from the fathers. Los
Angeles had thus sprung from the mission of that
name, the fishing village of Yerba Bueua, from Mis-
sion Dolores on the bay of San Francisco, and San Jose*,
from Santa Clara. In 1846, Fremont the Pathfinder
conquered the country with forty-two men, and now it
.has a settled population of nearly half a million ; San
Francisco is as large as Newcastle or Hull, as flourish-
ing as Liverpool, and the Saxon blanket factory has
replaced the Spanish mission. The story might have
served as a warning to the French Emperor, when he
sent ships and men to found a " Latin empire in
America."
Between the presidio and the Mission Dolores lies
Lone Mountain Cemetery, in that solitary calm and
majesty of beauty which befits a home for the dead,
the most lovely of all the cemeteries of America.
Queen Emma, of the Sandwich Islands, who is here at
present, said of it yesterday to a Californian merchant :
" How comes it that you Americans, who live so fast,
find time to bury your dead so beautifully ?"
Lone Mountain is not the only delicious spot that is
given to the American dead. Laurel Hill, Mount Au-
burn, Greenwood, Cypress Grove, Hollywood, Oak
Hill, are names not more full of poetry than are the
GOLDEN CITY. 209
places to which they belong ; but Lone Mountain has
over all an advantage in its giant fuchsias, and scarlet
geraniums of the size and shape of trees; in the distant
glimpses, too, of the still Pacific.
San Francisco is ill placed, so far as mere building
facilities are concerned. When the first houses were
built in 1845 and 1846, they, stood on a strip of beach
surrounding the sheltered cove of Yerba' Buena, and
at the foot of the steep and lofty sand-hills. Dunes
and cove have disappeared together; the hills have been
shot bodily into the bay, and the former harbor is now
the business quarter of the city. Not a street can be
built without cutting down a hill, or filling up a glen.
Never was a great town built under heavier difficulties;
but trade requires it to be exactly where it is, and there
it will remain and grow. Its former rivals, Vallejo
and Benicia, are grass-grown villages, in spite of their
having had the advantage of " a perfect situation."
While the spot on which the Golden City stands was
still occupied by the struggling village of Yerba Buena,
Francisca was a rising city, where corner lots were
worth their ten or twenty thousand dollars. When
the gold rush came, the village, shooting to the front,
voted itself the name of its great bay, and Francisca
had to change its title to Benicia, in order not to be
thought a mere suburb of San Francisco. The mouth
of the Columbia was once looked to as the future
haven of Western America, and point of convergence
of the railroad lines; but the " center of the universe"
has not more completely removed from Independence
to Fort Riley than Astoria has yielded to San Fran-
cisco the claim to be the port of the Pacific.
The one great danger of this coast all its cities share
in common. Three times within the present century,
the spot on which San Francisco stands has been vio-
18*
210 ORE ATE E BRITAIN.
lently disturbed by subterranean forces. The earth-
quake of last year has left its mark upon Montgomery
Street and the plaza, for it frightened the San Fran-
ciscans into putting up light wooden cornices to hotels
and banks, instead of the massive stone projections
that are common in the States ; otherwise, though
lesser shocks are daily matters, the San Franciscans
have forgotten the "great scare." A year is along
time in California. There is little of the earliest San
Francisco left, though the city is only eighteen years
old. Fires have done good work as well as harm, and
it is worth a walk up to the plaza to see how prim and
starched are the houses which now occupy a square
three sides of which were, in 1850, given up to the
public gaming-hells.
One of the few remaining bits of old Golden City
life is to be found in the neighborhood of the " What
Cheer House," the resting-place of diggers on their way
from the interior to take ship for New York or Europe.
Here there is no lack of coin, no want of oaths, no
scarcity of drinks. " Juleps" are as plentiful as in Bal-
timore itself; Yerba Buena, the old name for San
Francisco, means "mint."
If the old character of the city is gone, there are still
odd scenes to be met with in its streets. To-day I saw
a master builder of great wealth with his coat and
waistcoat off, and his hat stowed away on one side,
carefully teaching a raw Irish lad how to lay a brick.
He told me that the acquisition of the art would bring
the man an immediate rise in his wages from five to
ten shillings a day. Unskilled labor, Mexican and
Chinese, is plentiful enough, but white artisans are
scarce. The want of servants is such, that even the
wealthiest inhabitants live with their wives arid families
in hotels, to avoid the cost and trouble of an establish-
GOLDEN CITY. 211
ment. Those who have houses pay rough unkempt
Irish girls from 6 to 8 a month, with board, "out-
ings" when they please, and " followers" unlimited.
The hotel boarding has much to do with the some-
what unwomanly manner of a few among the ladies of
the newest States, but the effect upon the children is
more marked than it is upon their mothers. To a
woman of wealth, it matters, perhaps, but little whether
she rules a household of her own, or boards in the first
floor of some gigantic hostelry ; but it does matter a
great deal to her children, who, in the one case, have
a home to play and work in, and who, in the other,
play on the stairs or in the corridors, to the annoyance
of every sojourner in the hotel, and never dream of
work out of school-hours, or of solid reading that is not
compulsory. The only one of the common charges
brought against America in English society and
in English books and papers that is thoroughly
true, is the statement that American children, as
a rule, are "forward," ill mannered, and immoral.
An American can scarcely be found who does not
admit and deplore the fact. With the self-exposing
honesty that is a characteristic of their nation, Ameri-
can gentlemen will talk by the hour of the terrible
profligacy of the young New Yorkers. Boys, they tell
you, who in England would be safe in the lower school
at Eton or in well-managed houses, in New York or
New Orleans are deep gamesters and God-defying row-
dies. In New England, things are better; in the West,
there is yet time to prevent the ill arising; but even in
the most old-fashioned of American States, the children
are far too full of self-assurance. Their faults are
chiefly faults of manner, but such in children have a
tendency to become so many vices. On my way home
from Egypt, I crossed the Simplon with a Southerner
212 GREATER BRITAIN.
and a Pennsylvania!! boy of fourteen or fifteen. An
English boy would have expressed his opinion, and
been silent : this lad's attacks upon the poor Southerner
were unceasing and unfeeling ; yet I could see that he
was good at bottom. I watched my chance to give him
my view of his conduct, and when we parted, he came
up and shook hands, saying : " You're not a bad fellow
for a Britisher, after all."
In my walks through the city I found its climate
agreeable rather for work than idleness. Sauntering
or lounging is as little possible as it is in London. The
summer is not yet ended; and in the summer at San
Francisco it is cold after eleven in the day strangely
cold for the latitude of Athens. The fierce sun
scorches up the valleys of the San Joaquin and the
Sacramento in the early morning; and the heated air,
rising from off the ground, leaves its place to be filled
by the cold breeze from the Pacific. The Contra Costa
Range is unbroken but by the single gap of the Golden
Gate, and through this opening the cold winds rush in
a never-ceasing gale, spreading fanlike as soon as they
have passed the narrows. Hence it is that the Golden
Gate is called "The Keyhole," and the wind "The
Keyhole Breeze." Up country they make it raise the
water for irrigation. In winter there is a calm, and
then the city is as sunny as the rest of California.
So purely local is the bitter gale that at Benicia, ten
miles from San Francisco, the mean temperature is
ten degrees higher for the year, and nearly twenty for
the summer. I have stood on the shore at Benicia
when the thermometer was at a hundred in the shade,
and seen the clouds pouring in from the Pacific, and
hiding San Francisco in a murky pall, while the tem-
perature there was under seventy degrees. This fog
retarded by a hundred years the discovery of San Fran-
GOLDEN CITY. 213
cisco Bay. The entrance to the Golden Gate is nar-
row, and the mists hang there all day. Cabrillo, Drake,
Yiscaino, sailed past it without seeing that there was
a bay, and the great land-locked sea was first beheld
by white men when the missionaries came upon its
arms and creeks, far away inland.
The peculiarity of climate carries with it great ad-
vantages. It is never too hot, never too cold, to work
a fact which of itself secures a grand future for San
Francisco. The effect upon national type is marked.
At a San Franciscan ball you see English faces, not
American. Even the lean Western men and hungry
Yankees become plump and rosy in this temple of the
winds. The high metallic ring of the New England
voice is not found in San Francisco, As for old men,
California must have been that fabled province of
Cathay, the virtues of which were such that, whatever
a man's age when he entered it, he never grew older
by a day. To dogs and strangers there are drawbacks
in the absence of winter: dogs are muzzled all the
year round, and musquitoes are perennial upon the
coast.
The city is gay with flags ; every house supports a
liberty pole upon its roof, for when the Union senti-
ment sprang up in San Francisco, at the beginning
of the war, public opinion forced the citizens to make
a conspicuous exhibition of the stars and stripes, by
way of showing that it was from no want of loyalty
that they refused to permit the circulation of the Fed-
eral greenbacks. In this matter of flags the sea-gale
is of service, for were it not for its friendly assistance,
a short house between two tall ones could not sport a
huge flag with much effect. As it is, the wind always
blowing across the chief streets, and never up or down,
the narrowest and lowest house can flaunt a large
214 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
ensign without fear of its ever flapping against the
walls of its proud neighbors.
It is not only in rosy cheeks that the Californian
English have the old-world type. With less ingenuity
than the New England Yankees, they have far more
depth and solidity in their enterprise; they do not
rack their braki at inventing machines to peel apples
and milk cows, but they intend to tunnel through the
mo'untains to Lake Tahoe, tap it, and with its waters
irrigate the Californian plains. They share our British
love for cash payments and good roads; they one arid
all set their faces against repudiation in any shape, and
are strongly for what they call "rolling-up" the debt.
Throughout the war they quoted paper as depreciated,
not gold as risen. Indeed, there is here the same un-
reasoning prejudice against paper money that I met
with in Nevada. After all, what can be expected of a
State which still produces three-eighths of all the gold
raised yearly in the world ?
San Francisco is inhabited, as all American cities
bid fair to be, by a mixed throng of men of all lands
beneath the sun. New Englanders and Englishmen
predominate in energy, Chinese in numbers. The
French and Italians are stronger here than in any other
city in the States; and the red-skinned Mexicans, who
own the land, supply the market people and a small
portion of the townsfolk. Australians, Polynesians,
and Chilians are numerous; the Germans and Scan-
dinavians alone are few; they prefer to go where they
have already friends to Philadelphia or Milwaukee.
In this city already a microcosm of the world the
English, British, and American are in possession
have distanced the Irish, beaten down the Chinese by
force, and are destined to physically preponderate in
the cross-breed, and give the tone, political and moral,
GOLDEN CITY. 215
to the Pacific shore. New York is Irish, Philadelphia
German, Milwaukee Norwegian, Chicago Canadian,
Sault de Ste Marie French; but in San Francisco
where all the foreign races are strong none is domi-
nant; whence the singular result that California, the
most mixed in population, is also the most English of
the States.
In this strange community, starting more free from
the Puritan influence of New England than has hitherto
done any State within the Union, it is doubtful what
religion will predominate. Catholicism is " not fash-
ionable" in America it is the creed of the Irish, and
that is enough for most Americans; so Anglicanism,
its critics say, is popular as being " very proper."
"Whatever the cause, the Episcopalian Church is flour-
ishing in California, and it seems probable that the
church which gains the day in California will event-
ually be that of the whole Pacific.
On Montgomery Street are some of the finest build-
ings in all America; the " Occidental Hotel," the "Ma-
sonic Hall," the " Union Club," and others. The club
has only just been rebuilt after its destruction by a
nitro-glycerin explosion which occurred in the express
office next door. A case, of which no one knew the
contents, was being lifted by two clerks, when it ex-
ploded, blowing down a portion of the club, and break-
ing half the windows in the city. On examination it
was found to be nitro-glycerin on its way to the mines.
Another accident occurred here yesterday with this
same compound. A sharp report was heard on board
a ship lying in the docks, and the cook was found
dead, below; pieces of a flask had been driven into his
heart and lungs. The deposit on the broken glass was
examined, and found to be common oil; but this morn-
ing, I read in the Alta a report from a chemist that
216 GREATER BRITAIN.
traces of nitro-glycerin have been discovered by him
upon the glass, and a statement from one of the hands
says that the ship on her way up had called at Manza-
nilla, where the cook had taken the flask from a mer-
chant's office, emptied it of its contents, the character
of which was unknown to him, and tilled it with com-
mon vegetable oil.
Since the great explosion at Aspinwall, nitro-glycerin
has been the nightmare of Californians. For earth-
quakes they care little, but the freaks of the devilish
oil, which is brought here secretly, for use in the Nevada
mines, have made them ready to swear that it is itself
a demon. They tell you that it freezes every night, and
then the slightest friction will explode it that, on the
other hand, it goes off if heated. If you leave it stand-
ing in ordinary temperatures, the odds are that it un-
dergoes decomposition, and then, if you touch it, it
explodes ; and no lapse of time has on its power the
smallest deteriorating effect, but, on the contrary, the
oil will crystallize, and then its strength for harm is
multiplied by ten. If San Francisco is ever destroyed
by earthquake, old Californians will certainly be found
to ascribe the shock to nitro-glycerin.
A day or two after my return from Benicia, I escaped
from the city, and again went south, halting at San
Jose, " The Garden City," and chief town of the fer-
tile Guadalupe district, on my way to the quicksilver
mines of New Almaden, now the greatest in the world
since they have beaten the Spanish mines and Idria.
From San Jose*, I drove myself to Almaden along a
sun-dried valley with a fertile tawny soil, reaching the
delicious mountain stream and the groves it feeds in
time to join my friends at lunch in the shady hacienda.
The director took me through the refining works, in
which the quicksilver may be seen running in streams
GOLDEN CITY. 217
down gutters from the furnaces, but he was unable to
go with me up the mountain to the mines from which
the cinnabar comes shooting down by its weight. The
superintendent engineer a meerschaum-equipped Ba-
varian and myself mounted, at the Hacienda Gate,
upon our savage-looking beasts, and I found myself
for the first time lost in the depths of a Mexican sad-
dle, and my feet plunged into the boot-stirrups that I
had seen used by the Utes in Denver. The riding feats
of the Mexicans and the Californian boys are explained
when you find that their saddle puts it out of the ques-
tion that they should be thrown ; but the fatigue that
its size and shape cause to man and horse, when the
man is a stranger to New Spain, and the horse knows
that he is so, outweighs any possible advantages that
it may possess. With their huge gilt spurs, attached
to the stirrup, not to the boot, the double peak, and
the embroidered trappings, the Mexican saddles are
the perfection at once of the cumbersome and the
picturesque.
Silently we half scrambled, half rode, up a break-neck
path which forms a short cut to the mine, till all at
once a charge of our horses at an almost perpendicular
wall of rock was followed by their simultaneously com-
mencing to kick and back toward the cliff. Spring-
ing off, we found that the girths had been slackened
by the Mexican groom, and that the steep bit of mount-
ain had caused the saddles to slip. This broke the
ice, and we speedily found ourselves discussing miners
and mining in French, my German not being much
worse than my Bavarian's English.
After viewing the mines, the walls of which, com-
posed of crimson cinnabar, show bravely in the torch-
glare, we worked our way through the tunnels to the
topmost lode and open air.
19
218 GREATER BRITAIN.
Bidding good-by to what I could see of niy German
in the fog from his meerschaum, I turned to ride down
by the road instead of the path. I had not gone a
furlong, when, turning a corner, there burst upon me
a view of the whole valley of tawny California, now
richly golden in the colors of the fall. Looking from
this spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with the Contra
Costa Range before me, and Mount Hamilton tower-
ing from the plain, apart, I could discern below me
the gleam of the Coyote Creek, and of the windows in
the church of Santa Clara in the distance, the mount-
ains and waters of San Francisco Bay, from San Mateo
to Alameda and San Pablo, basking in unhindered
sun. The wild oats dried by the heat made of the
plain a field of gold, dotted here and there with groups
of black oak and bay, and darkened at the mountain
foot with " chapparal. ' ' The volcanic hills were rounded
into softness in the delicious haze, and all nature over-
spread with a poetic calm. As I lost the view, the
mighty fog was beginning to pour in through the
Golden Gate to refresh America with dews from the
Pacific.
CHAPTER XXIII.
LITTLE CHINA.
"THE Indians begin to be troublesome again in
Trinity County. One man and a Chinaman have been
killed, and a lady crippled for life."
That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the
English to colored races was not less strong in Cali-
LITTLE CHINA. 219
fornia than in the Carolinas I had suspected, but I was
hardly prepared for the deliberate distinction between
men and yellow men drawn in this paragraph from the
Alta Calif ornian of the day of my return to San Francisco.
A determination to explore Little China, as the
celestial quarter of the city is termed, already arrived
at, was only strengthened by the unconscious humor
of the Alta, and I at once set off in search of two of
the detectives, Edes and Saulsbury, to whom I had
some sort of introduction, and put myself under their
charge for the night.
We had not been half an hour in the Chinese theater
or opera house before my detectives must have re-
pented of their offer to "show me around," for, incom-
prehensible as it must have seemed to them with their
New England gravity and American contempt for the
Chinese, I was amused beyond measure with the per-
formance, and fairly lost myself in the longest laugh
that I had enjoyed since I had left the plantations of
Virginia.
When we entered the house, which is the size of the
Strand Theater of London, it may have been ten or
eleven o'clock. The performance had begun at seven,
and was likely to last till two A.M. By the "perform-
ance" was meant this particular act or scene, for the
piece had been going on every evening for a month,
and would be still in progress during the best part of
another, it being the principle of the Chinese drama
to take up the hero at an early age, and conduct him
to the grave, which he reaches full of years and of
honor.
The house was crammed with a grinning crowd of
happy "yellow boys," while the "China ladies" had a
long gallery to themselves. No sound of applause is
to be heard in a Chinese place of amusement, but the
220 GREATER BRITAIN.
crowd grin delight at the actors, who, for their part,
grin back at the crowd.
The feature of the performance which struck me at
once was the hearty interest the actors took in the
play, and the chaff that went on between them and
the pit; it is not only from their numbers and the
nature of their trades that the Chinese may be called
the Irish of the Pacific : there was soul in every ges-
ture.
On the stage, behind the actors, was a band, which
played unceasingly, and so loud that the performers,
who clearly had not the smallest intention of subordi-
nating their parts to the music, had to talk in shrieks
in order to be heard. The audience, too, all talked in
their loudest natural tones.
As for the play, a lady made love to an old gentle-
man (probably the hero, as this was the second month
or third act of the play), and, bawling at him fiercely,
was indignantly rejected by him in a piercing shriek.
Relatives, male and female, coming with many howls
to the assistance of the lady, were ignominiously put
to flight, in a high falsetto key, by the old fellow's
footmen, who were in turn routed by a force of yelling
spearmen, apparently the county posse. The soldiers
wore paint in rings of various colors, put on so deftly,
that of nose, of eyes, of mouth, no trace could be dis-
covered; the front face resembled a target for archery.
All this time, a steady, unceasing uproar was continued
by four gongs and a harp, with various cymbals, pavil-
ions, triangles, and guitars.
Scenery there was none, but boards were put up in
the Elizabethan way, with hieroglyphics denoting the
supposed locality ; and another archaic point is, that
all the female parts were played by boys. For this I
have the words of the detectives ; my eyes, had I not
LITTLE CHINA. 221
long since ceased to believe them, would have given
me proof to the contrary.
The acting, as far as I could judge by the grimace,
was excellent. Nowhere could be found greater
spirit, or equal power of facial expression. The stage
fight was full of pantomimic force; the leading soldier
would make his fortune as a London pantaloon.
When the detectives could no longer contain their
distaste for the performance, we changed our quarters
for a restaurant the "Hang Heong," the wood of
which was brought from China.
The street along which we had to pass was decorated
rather than lit by paper lanterns hung over every door;
but the "Hang Heong" was brilliantly illuminated,
with a view, no doubt, to attracting the crowd as they
poured out from the theater at a later hour. The
ground-floor was occupied by shop and kitchen, the
dining-rooms being up stairs. The counter, which
is on the plan of that in the houses of the Palais
Royal, was presided over, not by a smiling woman,
but by grave and pig-tailed gentlemen in black, who
received our order from the detective with the decor-
ous solemnity of the head waiter in an English country
inn.
The rooms up stairs were nearly full; and as the
Chinese by no means follow the Americans in silent
eating, the babel was tremendous. A saucer and a
pair of chopsticks were given each of us, but at our
request a spoon was furnished as a special favor to the
" Melicans."
Tiny cups of a sweet spirit were handed us before
supper was brought up. The liquor was a kind of
shrub, but white, made, I was told, from sugar-canes.
For first course, we had roast duck cut in pieces, and
served in an oil-filled bowl, and some sort of fish ; tea
19*
222 GEEATEE BEITAIN.
was then brought in, and followed by shark's fin, for
which I had given a special order; the result might
have been gum arabic for any flavor I could find. Dog
was not to be obtained, and birds'-nest soup was be-
yond the purse of a traveler seven thousand miles
from home, and twelve thousand from his next sup-
plies. A dish of some strange, black fungus stewed
in rice, followed by preserves and cakes, concluded
our supper, and were washed down by our third cups
of tea.
After paying our respects and our money to the
gentleman in black, who grunted a lugubrious some-
thing that answered to "good night," we paid a visit
to the Chinese "bad quarter," which differs only in
degree of badness from the " quartier Mexicain," the
bad pre-eminence being ascribed, even by the preju-
diced detectives, to the Spaniards and Chilenos.
Hurrying on, we reached the Chinese gaming-houses
just before they closed. Some difficulty was made
about admitting us by the "yellow loafers" who hung
around the gate, as the houses are prohibited by law;
but as soon as the detectives, who were known, ex-
plained that they came not on business, but on pleasure,
we were suffered to pass in among the silent, melan-
choly gamblers. Not a word was heard, beyond every
now and then a grunt from the croupier. Each man
knew what he was about, and won or lost his money
in the stillness of a dead-house. The game appeared
to be a sort of loto ; but a few minutes of it was enough,
and the detectives pretended to no deep acquaintance
with its principles.
The San Francisco Chinese are not all mere theater-
goers, loafers, gamblers; as a body they are frugal,
industrious, contented men. I soon grew to think it
a pleasure to meet a Chinese-American, so clean and
LITTLE CHINA. 223
happy is his look: not a speck is to be seen upon the
blue cloth of his long coat or baggy trowsers. His
hair is combed with care; the bamboo on which he
and his mate together carry their enormous load seems
as though cleansed a dozen times a day.
It is said to be a peculiarity of the Chinese that they
are all alike: no European can, without he has deal-
ings with them, distinguish one Celestial from another.
The same, however, may be said of the Sikhs, the
Australian natives, of most colored races, in short.
The points of difference which distinguish the yellow
men, the red men, the black men with straight hair,
the negroes, from any other race whatever, are so much
more prominent than the minor distinctions between
Ah Sing and Chi Long, or between Uncle Ned and
Uncle Tom, that the individual are sunk and lost in
the national distinctions. To the Chinese in turn all
Europeans are alike; but beneath these obvious facts
there lies a grain of solid truth that is worth the hunt-
ing out, and which is connected with the change-of-
type question in America and Australasia. Men of
similar habits of mind and body are alike among our-
selves in Europe ; noted instances are the close resem-
blance of Pere Enfantin, the St. Simonian chief, to the
busts of Epicurus; of Bismarck to Cardinal Ximenes.
Irish laborers men who for the most part work hard,
feed little, and leave their minds entirely unplowed
are all alike ; Chinamen, who all work hard, and work
alike, who live alike, and who go further, and all think
alike, are, by a mere law of nature, indistinguishable
one from the other.
In the course of my wanderings in the Golden City,
I lighted on the house of the Canton Company, one of
the Chinese benevolent societies, the others being those
of Hong Kong, Macao, and Amoy. They are like the
224 GREATER BRITAIN.
New York Immigration Commission, and the London
" Society Frai^aise de Bienfaisance," combined; added
to a theater and joss-house, or temple, and governed on
the principles of such clubs as those of the "whites"
or " greens " at Heidelberg, they are, in short, Chinese
trades unions, sheltering the sick, succoring the dis-
tressed, finding work for the unemployed, receiving
the immigrants from China when they land, and ship-
ping their bones back to China, ticketed with name
and address, when they die. " Hong Kong, with dead
Chinamen," is said to be a common answer from out-
ward-bounders to a hail from the guard-ship at the
Golden Gate.
Some of the Chinese are wealthy : Tung Yu & Co.,
Chi Sing Tong & Co., Wing Wo Lang & Co., Chy
Lung & Co., stand high among the merchants of the
Golden City. Honest and wealthy as these men are
allowed to be, they are despised by every white Cali-
fornian, from the governor of the State to the Mexican
boy who cleans his shoes.
In America, as in Australia, there is a violent preju-
dice against John Chinaman. He pilfers, we are told;
he lies, he is dirty, he smokes opium, is full of bestial
vices a pagan, and what is far more important
yellow! All his sins are to be pardoned but the last.
Californians, when in good humor, will admit that John
is sober, patient, peaceable, and hard working, that his
clothes at least are scrupulously clean ; but he is yellow !
Even, the Mexicans, themselves despised, look down
upon the Chinamen, just as the New York Irish affect
to have no dealings with "the naygurs." The Chinese
themselves pander to the feeling. Their famous ap-
peal to the Californian Democrats may or may not be
true: "What for Democlat allee timee talkee dam
Chinaman ? Chinaman allee samee Democlat; no likee
LITTLE CHINA. 225
nigger, no likeeinjun." "Infernals," " Celestials," and
" Greasers " or black men, yellow men, and Mexicans
it is hard to say which are most despised by the
American whites in California.
The Chinaman is hated by the rough fellows for his
cowardice. Had the Chinese stood to their rights
against the Americans, they would long since have
been driven from California. As it is, here and in
Victoria they invariably give way, and never work at
diggings which are occupied by whites. Yet in both
countries they take out mining licenses from the State,
which is bound to protect them in the possession of the
rights thus gained, but which is powerless against the
rioters of Ballarat, or the " Anti- Chinese mob " of El
Dorado.
The Chinese in California are practically confined by
public opinion, violence, or threats, to inferior kinds ot
work, which the "meanest" of the whites of the Pa-
cific States refuse to perform. Politically, this is slav-
ery. All the evils to which slavery has given rise in
the cotton States are produced here by violence, in a
less degree only because the Chinese are fewer than
were the negroes.
In spite of a prejudice which recalls the time when
the British government forbade the American colo-
nist to employ negroes in the manufacture of hats,
on the ground that white laborers could not stand the
competition, the yellow men continue to flock to the
" Gold Hills," as they call San Francisco. Already
they are the washermen, sweepers, and porters of
three States, two Territories, and British Columbia.
They are denied civil rights ; their word is not taken
in cases where white men are concerned; a heavy tax
is set upon them on their entry to the State ; a second
tax when they commence to mine still their numbers
226 GREATER BRITAIN.
steadily increase. In 1852, Governor Bigler, in his
message, recommended the prohibition of the immi-
gration of the Chinese, but they now number one-
tenth of the population.
The Irish of Asia, the Chinese have commenced to
flow over on to the outer world. Who shall say where
the flood will stop ? Ireland, with now five millions
of people, has, in twenty years, poured an equal num-
ber out into the world. What is to prevent the next
fifty years seeing an emigration of a couple of hundreds
of millions from the rebellion-torn provinces of Cathay?
Three Chinamen in a temperate climate will do as
much arm- work as two Englishmen, and will eat or
cost less. It looks as though the cheaper would starve
out the dearer race, as rabbits drive out stronger but
hungrier hares. This tendency is already plainly visi-
ble in our mercantile marine: the ships are manned
with motley crews of Bombay lascars, Maories, Ne-
groes, Arabs, Chinamen, Kroomen, and Malays. There
are no British or American seamen now, except boys
who are to be quartermasters some day, and experi-
enced hands who are quartermasters already. But
there is nothing to regret in this: Anglo-Saxons are
too valuable to be used as ordinary seamen where las-
cars will do nearly, and Maories quite as well. Nature
seems to intend the English for a race of officers, to
direct and guide the cheap labor of the Eastern peo-
ples.
The serious side of the Chinese problem just
touched on here will force itself rudely upon our
notice in Australia.
THE BRIDAL VEIL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY.-P. 228
CALIFORNIA. 227
CHAPTER XXIV.
CALIFORNIA.
"!N front of San Francisco are 745 millions of hungry
Asiatics, who have spices to exchange for meat and
grain."
The words are Governor Gilpin's, made use of by
him in discussing the future of overland trade, and
worthy of notice as showing why it is that, in making
forecasts of the future of California, we have to look
more to her facilities for trade than to her natural pro-
ductions. San Francisco aims at being, not so much
the port of California as one of the main stations on
the Anglo-Saxon highway round the globe.
Although the chief claim of California to consider-
ation is her position on the Pacific, her fertility and
size alone entitle her to notice. This single State is
750 miles in length would stretch from Chamouni to
the southernmost point of Malta. There are two capes
in California one nearly in the latitude of Jerusalem,
the other nearly in the latitude of Rome. The State
has twice the area of Great Britain ; -the single valley
of the Joaquin and Sacramento, from Tulare Lake to
the great snow-peak of Shasta, is as large as the three
kingdoms. Every useful mineral, every kind of fertile
soil, every variety of helpful climate, are to be found
within the State. There are in the Union forty-five
such States or Territories, with an average area equal
to that of Britain.
Between the Pacific and the snows of the Sierra are
228 GREATER BRITAIN.
three great tracts, each with its soil and character.
On the slopes of the Sierra are the forests of giant
timber, the sheltered valleys, and the gold fields in
which I spent my first week in California. Next comes
the great hot plain of Sacramento, where, with irriga-
tion, all the best fruits of the tropics grow luxuriantly,
where water for irrigation is plentiful, and the Pacific
breeze will raise it. Round the valley are vast tracts
for sheep and wheat, and on the Contra Costas are
millions of acres of wild oats growing on the best of
lands for cattle, while the slopes are covered with
young vines. Between the Contra Costa Range and
the sea is a winterless strip, possessing for table vege-
tables and flowers the finest soil and climate in the
world. The story goes that Californian boys, when
asked if they believe in a future state, reply: "Guess
so; California."
Whether San Francisco will grow to be a second
Liverpool or New York is an all-absorbing question to
those who live on the Pacific shores, and one not with-
out an interest and a moral for ourselves. New York
has waxed rich and huge mainly because she is so
placed as to command one of the best harbors on the
coast of a country which exports enormously of bread-
stuffs. Liverpool has thrived as one of the shipping
ports for the manufactures of the northern coal counties
of England. San Francisco Bay, as the best harbor
south of Puget Sound, is, and will remain, the center
of the export trade of the Pacific States in wool and
cereals. If coal is found in plenty in the Golden State,
population will increase, manufactures spring up, and
the export of wrought articles take the place of that of
raw produce. If coal is found in the Contra Costa
Range, San Francisco will continue, in spite of earth-
quakes, to be the foremost port on the Pacific side ; if,
---
CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY.-P. 228.
CALIFORNIA. 229
as is more probable, the find of coal is confined to the
Monte Diablo district, and is of trifling value, still the
future of San Francisco, as the meeting point of the
railways, and center of the import of manufactured
goods, and of the export of the produce of an agricul-
tural and pastoral interior, is as certain as it must in-
evitably be brilliant. Whether the chief town of the
Pacific States will in time develop into one of the com-
mercial capitals of the world is a wider and a harder
question. That it will be the converging point of the
Pacific railroads, both of Chicago and St. Louis, there
can be no doubt. That all the new overland trade
from China and Japan will pass through it seems as
clear; it is the extent of this trade that is in question.
For the moment, land transit cannot compete on equal
terms with water carriage; but assuming that, in the
long run, this will cease to be the case, it will be the
overland route across Russia, and not that through the
United States, that, will convey the silks and teas of
China to Central and Western Europe. The very argu-
ments of which the Californian merchants make use
to show that the delicate goods of China need land
transport, go to prove that shipping and unshipping in
the Pacific, and a repetition in the Atlantic of each
process, cannot be good for them. The political im-
portance to America of the Pacific railroads does not
admit of overstatement; but the Russian or English
Pacific routes must, commercially speaking, win the
day. For rare and costly Eastern goods, the English
railway through Southern China, Upper India, the
Persian coast, and the Euphrates is no longer now a
dream. If Russian bureaucracy takes too long to move,
trade will be diverted by the Gulf route; coarser goods
and food will long continue to come by sea, but in no
20
230 GREATER BRITAIN.
case can the City of San Francisco become a western
outpost of Europe.
The luster of the future of San Francisco is not
dimmed by considerations such as these ; as the port of
entry for the trade of America, with all the East, its
wealth must become enormous ; and if, as is probable,
Japan, New Zealand, and New South Wales become
great manufacturing communities, San Francisco must
needs in time take rank as a second, if not a greater,
London. This, however, is the more distant future.
With cheaper labor than the Pacific States and the
British colonies possess, with a more settled govern-
ment than Japan Pennsylvania andr Ohio, from the
time that the Pacific railroad is completed, will take,
and for years will keep, the China trade. As for the
colonies, the voyage from San Francisco to Australia
is almost as long and difficult as that from England,
and there is every probability that Lancaster and Bel-
gium will continue to supply the colonists with clothes
and tools, until they themselves, possessed as they are
of coal, become competent to make them. The mer-
chants of San Francisco will be limited in the main to
the trade with China and Japan. In this direction the
future has no bounds: through California and the
Sandwich Islands, through Japan, fast becoming
American, and China, the coast of which is already
British, o*ur race seems marching westward to univer-
sal rule. The Russian empire itself, with all its passive
strength, cannot stand against the English horde, ever
pushing with burning energy toward the setting sun.
Russia and England are said to be nearing each other
upon the Indus ; but long before they can meet there,
they will be face to face upon the Amoor.
For a time, the flood may be diverted south or north :
Mexico will doubtless, and British Columbia will pro-
CALIFORNIA. 231
bably, carry off a portion of the thousands who are
pouring West from the bleak rocks of New England.
The Californian expedition of 1853 against Sonora and
Lower California will be repeated with success, but the
tide will be but momentarily stayed. So entirely are
English countries now the motherlands of energy and
adventure throughout the world, that no one who has
watched what has happened in California, in British
Columbia, and on the west coast of New Zealand, can
doubt that the discovery of placer gold fields on any
coast or in any sea-girt country in the world, must now
be followed by the speedy rise there of an English gov-
ernment : were gold, for instance, found in surface dig-
gings in Japan, Japan would be English in five years.
We know enough of Chili, of the new Russian country
on the Amoor, of Japan, to be aware that such dis-
coveries are more than likely to occur.
In the face of facts like these, men are to be found
who ask whether a break-up of the Union is not still
probable whether the Pacific States are not likely to
secede from the Atlantic ; some even contend for the
general principle that "America must go to pieces
she is to big." It is small powers, not great ones, that
have become impossible : the unification of Germany
is in this respect but the dawn of a new era. The great
countries of to-day are smaller than were the smallest
of a hundred years ago. Lewes was farther from Lon-
don in 1700 than Edinburgh is now. New York and
San Francisco will in 1870 be nearer to each other than
Canton and Pekin. From the point of view of mere
size, there is more likelihood of England entering the
Union than of California seceding from it.
The material interests of the Pacific States will al-
ways lie in union. The West, sympathizing in the
main with the Southerners upon the slavery question,.
232 GREATER BRITAIN.
threw herself into the war, and crushed them, because
she saw the necessity of keeping her outlets under her
own control. The same policy would hold good for
the Pacific States in the case of the continental rail-
road. America, of all countries, alone shares the fu-
ture of both Atlantic and Pacific, and she knows her
interests too well to allow such an advantage to be
thrown away. Uncalcu latin g rebellion of the Pacific
States upon some sudden heat, is the only danger to be
apprehended, and such a rising could be put down with
ease, owing to the manner in which these States are
commanded from the sea. Throughout the late rebel-
lion, the Federal navy, though officered almost entirely
by Southerners, was loyal to the flag, and it would be
so again. In these days, loyalty may be said to be
peculiarly the sailor's passion : perhaps he loves his
country because he sees so little of it.
The single danger that looms in the more distant fu-
ture is the eventual control of Congress by the Irish,
while the English retain their hold on the Pacific shores.
*******
California is too British to be typically American :
it would seem that nowhere in the United States have
we found the true America or the real American.
Except as abstractions, they do not exist ; it is only
by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular
America at Irish New York, at Puritan New Eng-
land, at the rowdy South, at the rough and swaggering
far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States that we
come to reject the anomalous features, and to find
America in the points they possess in common. It is
when the country is left that there rises in the mind
an image that soars above all local prejudice that of
the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are
imposing English institutions on the world.
MEXICO. 233
CHAPTER XXV.
MEXICO.
IN company with a throng of men of all races, all
tongues, and all trades, such as a Californian steamer
can alone collect, I came coasting southward under the
cliffs of Lower California. Of the thousand passen-
gers who sought refuge from the stifling heat upon the
upper and hurricane decks, more than half were dig-
gers returning with a "pile" to their homes in the At-
lantic States. While we hung over the bulwarks
watching the bonitos and the whales, the diggers threw
"bolas"- at the boobies that flew out to us from the
blazing rocks, and brought them down screaming upon
the decks. Threading our way through the reefs off
the lovely Island of Margarita, where the "Independ-
ence" was lost with three hundred human beings, we
lay-to at Cape St. Lucas, and landed his Excellency
Don Antonio Pedrin, Mexican Governor of Lower Cali-
fornia, arid a Juarez man, in the very bay where Caven-
dish lay in wait for months for the "great Manilla
ship" the Acapulco galleon.
When Grirolamo Benzoni visited the Mexican Pacific
coast, he confused the turtle with the " crocodile," de-
scribing the former under the latter's name ; but at
Manzanilla, the two may be seen lying almost side
by side upon the sands. Separated from the blue
waters of the harbor by a narrow strand there is a fes-
tering lagoon, the banks of which swarm with the
20*
234 GREATER BRITAIN.
smaller alligators ; but a few yards off, upon the other
slope, the townsfolk and the turtles they had brought
down for sale to our ship's purser were lying, when I
saw them, in a confused heap under an awning of sail-
cloth nailed up to the palm-trees. Alligator, turtle,
Mexican, it was hard to say which was the superior
being. A French corvette was in possession of the
port one of the last of the holding-places through
which the remnants of the army of occupation were
dribbling back to France.
In the land-locked bay of Acapulco, one of the dozen
"hottest places in the world," we found two French
frigates, whose officers boarded us at once. They told
us that they landed their marines every morning after
breakfast, and re-embarked them before sunset ; they
could get nothing from the shore but water ; the Mex-
icans, under Alvarez, occupied the town at night, and
carried off even the fruit. When I asked about sup-
plies, the answer was sweeping: "Ah, mon Dieu, mon-
sieur, cette ssacrrreeee canaille de Alvarez nous vole
tout. Nous n'avons que de 1'eau fraiche, et Alvarez
va nous emporter la fontaine aussi quelque nuit Ce
sont des voleurs, voyez-vous, ces Me'chicanos." When
they granted us leave to land, it was with the proviso
that we should not blame them if we were shot at by
the Mexicans as we went ashore, and by themselves as
we came off again. Firing often takes place at night
between Alvarez and the French, but with a total loss
in many months of only two men killed.
The day of my visit to Acapulco was the anniver-
sary of the issue, one year before, of Marshal Bazaine's
famous order of the day, directing the instant execu-
tion, as red-handed rebels, of Mexican prisoners taken
by the French. It is a strange commentary upon the
Marshal's circular that in a year from its issue the
MEXICO. 235
"Latin empire in America" should have had a term
set to it by the President of the United States. In
Canada, in India, in Egypt, in 'New Zealand, the Eng-
lish have met the French abroad, and in this Mexican
affair history does but repeat itself. There is nothing
more singular to the Londoner than the contempt of
the Americans for France. All Europe seems small
when seen from the United States; but the opinion of
Great Britain and the strength of Russia are still looked
on with some respect: France alone completely van-
ishes, and instead of every one asking, as with us,
"What does the Emperor say?" no one cares in the
least what 'Napoleon does or thinks. In a Chicago
paper Ihave seen a column of Washington news headed,
" Seward orders Lewis Napoleon to leave Mexico right
away! Nap. lies badly to get out of the fix!" While
the Americans are still, in a high degree, susceptible
of affront from England, and would never, if they con-
ceived themselves purposely insulted, stop to weigh
the cost of war, toward France they only feel, as a
Californian said to me, "Is it worth our while to set to
work to whip her?" The effect of Gettysburg and
Sadowa will be that, except Great Britain, Italy, and
Spain, no nations will care much for the threats or
praises of Imperial France.
The true character of the struggle in Mexico has not
been pointed out. It was not a mere conflict between
the majority of the people and a minority supported
by foreign aid, but an uprising of the Indians of the
country against the whites of the chief town. The
Spaniards of the capital were Maximilian's supporters,
and upon them the Indians and Mestizos have visited
their revenge for the deeds of Cortez and Pizarro. On
the west coast there is to be seen no trace of Spanish
blood : in dress, in language, in religion the people
236 GREATER BRITAIN.
are Iberian ; in features, in idleness, and in ferocity,
undoubtedly Red Indian.
In the reports of the Argentine Confederation it is
stated that the Caucasian blood comes to the front in
the mixed race ; a few hundred Spanish families in La
Plata are said to have absorbed several hundred thou-
sand Indians, without suffering in their whiteness or
other national characteristics. There is something of
the frog that swallowed the ox in this ; and the theories
of the Argentine officials, themselves of the mixed
race, cannot outweigh the evidence of our own eyes in
the seaport towns of Mexico. There at least it is the
Spaniards, not the Indians, who have disappeared ; and
the only mixture of blood that can be traced is that of
Red Indian and negro in the fisher boys about the
ports. They are lithe lads, with eyes full of art and
fire.
The Spaniards of Mexico have become Red Indians,
as the Turks of Europe have become Albanians or
Circassians. Where the conquering marries into the
conquered race it ends by being absorbed, and the
mixed breed gradually becomes pure again in the type
of the more numerous race. It would seem that the
North American continent will soon be divided be-
tween the Saxon and the Aztec republics.
In California I once met with a caricature in which
Uncle Sam or Brother Jonathan is lying on his back
upon Canada and the United States, with his head in
Russian America, and his feet against a tumble-down
fence, behind which is Mexico. His knees are bent,
and his position cramped. He says, "Guess I shall
soon have to stretch my legs some!" There is not in
the United States any strong feeling in favor of the
annexation of the remainder of the continent, but there
is a solemn determination that no foreign country shall
MEXICO. 237
in any way gain fresh footing or influence upon Amer-
ican soil, and that monarchy shall not be established
in Mexico or Canada. Further than this, there is a
belief that, as the south central portions of the States
become fully peopled up, population will pour over
into the Mexican provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora,
and that the annexation of these and some other por-
tions of Mexico to the United States cannot long be
prevented. For such acquisitions of territory America
would pay as she paid in the case of Texas, which she
first conquered, and then bought at a fair price.
In annexing the whole of Mexico, Protestant Ameri-
cans would feel that they were losing more than they
could gain. In California and New Mexico, they have
already to deal with a population of Mexican Catho-
lics, and difficulties have arisen in the matter of the
church lands. The Catholic vote is powerful not
only in California and New York, but in Maryland,
in Louisiana, in" Kansas, and even in Massachusetts.
The sons of the Pilgrim Fathers would scarcely look
with pleasure on the admission to the Union of ten
millions of Mexican Catholics, and, on the other hand,
the day-dreams of Leonard Calvert would not be re-
alized in the triumph of such a Catholicism as theirs
any more than in the success of that of the Philadel-
phia Academy, or New York Tammany Hall.
With the exception of the Irish, the great majority
of Catholic emigrants avoid the United States, but the
migration of European Catholics to South America is
increasing year by year. Just as the Germans, the
Norwegians, and the Irish flow toward the States, the
French, the Spanish, and the Italians flock into La
Plata, Chili, and Brazil. The European population
of La Plata has already reached three hundred thou-
sand, and is growing fast. The French " mission " in
238 GREATER BRITAIN.
Mexico was the making of that great country a further
field for the Latin immigration ; and when the Cali-
fornians marched to Juarez's help, it was to save Mexico
to North America.
In all history, nothing can be found more dignified
than the action of America upon the Monroe doctrine.
Since the principle was first laid down in words, in
1823, the national behavior has been courteous, con-
sistent, firm ; and the language used now that America
is all-powerful, is the same that her statesmen made
use of during the rebellion in the hour of her most
instant peril. It will be hard for political philosophers
of the future to assert that a democratic republic can
have no foreign policy.
The Pacific coast of Mexico is wonderfully full of
beauties of a peculiar kind; the sea is always calm,
and of a deep dull blue, with turtles lying basking on
the surface, and flying-fish skimming lightly over its
expanse, while the shores supply a fringe of bright
yellow sand at once to the ocean blue and to the rich
green of the cactus groves. On every spit or sand-bar
there grows the feathery palm. A low range of jungle-
covered hills is cut by gullies, through which we get
glimpses of lagoons bluer than the sea itself, and be-
hind them the sharp volcanic peaks rise through and
into cloud. Once in awhile, Colima, or other giant
hill, towering above the rest in blue-black gloom,
serves to show that the shores belong to some mistier
continent than Calypso's isle.
EEPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 239
CHAPTER XXVI.
REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT.
AMONG our Californian passengers, we had many
strong party men, and political conversation never
flagged throughout the voyage. In every discussion
it became more and more clear that the Democratic is
the Constitutional, the Republican the Utilitarian
party rightly called "Radical," from its habit of
going to the root of things, to see whether they are
good or bad. Such, however, is the misfortune of
America in the possession of a written Constitution,
such the reverence paid to that document on account
of the character of the men who penned it, that
even the extremest radicals dare not admit in public
that they aim at essential change, and the party loses,
in consequence, a portion of the strength that attaches
to outspoken honesty.
The President's party at their convention known
as the "Wigwam " which met while I was in Phila-
delphia, maintained that the war had but restored the
" Union as it was," with State rights unimpaired. The
Republicans say that they gave their blood, as they
are ready again to shed it, for the " Union as it was
not;" for one nation, and not for thirty-six, or forty-
five. The Wigwam declared that the Washington
gove nment had no constitutional right to deny rep-
resentation in Congress to any State. The Republicans
ask how, if this constitutional provision is to be ob-
served, the government of the country is to be carried
240 GREATER BRITAIN.
on. The Wigwam laid it down as a principle, that
Congress has no power to interfere with the right pos-
sessed by each State to prescribe qualifications for the
elective franchise. The Radicals say that State sover-
eignty should have vanished when slavery went down,
and ask how the South is to be governed consistently
with republicanism unless by negro suffrage, and how
this is to be maintained except by Federal control over
the various States by abolition, in short, of the old
Union, and creation of a new. The more honest
among the Republicans admit that for the position
which they have taken up, they can find no warrant in
the Constitution ; that, according to the doctrine which
the " continental statesmen" and the authors of "The
Federalist" would lay down, were they living, thirty-
five of the States, even if they were unanimous, could
have no right to tamper with the constitution of the
thirty-sixth. The answer to all this can only be that,
were the Constitution to be closely followed, the result
would be the ruin of the land.
The Republican party have been blamed because
their theory and practice alike tend toward a consoli-
dation of power, and a strengthening of the hands of
the government at Washington. It is in this that lies
their chief claim to support. Local government is an
excellent thing; it is the greatest of the inventions of
our inventive race, the chief security for continued
freedom possessed by a people already free. This
local government is consistent with a powerful execu-
tive; between the village municipality and Congress,
between the cabinet and the district council of select-
men, there can be no conflict: it is State sovereignty,
and the pernicious heresy of primary allegiance to the
State, that have already proved as costly to the Repub-
lic as they are dangerous to her future.
REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 241
It has been said that America, under the Federal
system, unites the freedom of the small State with the
power of the great ; but though this is true, it is brought
about, not through the federation of the States, but
through that of the townships and districts. The latter
are the true units to which the consistent Republican
owes his secondary allegiance. It is, perhaps, only in
the tiny New England States that Northern men care
much about their co.mmonwealth ; a citizen of Penn-
sylvania or New York never talks of his State, unless
to criticise its legislature. After all, where intelligence
and education are all but universal, where a spirit of
freedom has struck its roots into the national heart of
a great race, there can be no danger in centralization,
for the power that you strengthen is that of the whole
people, and a nation can have nothing to fear from
itself.
In watching the measures of the Radicals, we must
remember that they have still to guard their country
against great dangers. The war did not last long
enough to destroy anti-republicanism along with
slavery. The social system of the Carolinas was up-
set ; but the political fabric built upon a slavery foun-
dation in such "free" States as New York and Mary-
land is scarcely shaken.
If we look to the record of the Republican party with
a view to making a forecast of its future conduct, we
find that at the end of the war the party had before it
the choice between military rule and negro rule for the
South between a government carried on through
generals and provost-marshals, unknown to the Consti-
tution and to the courts, and destined to prolong for
ages the disruption of the Union and disquiet of the
nation, and, on the other hand, a rule founded upon
the principles of equity and self-government, dear to
21
242 GREATER BRITAIN.
our race, and supported by local majorities, not by for-
eign bayonets. Although possessed of the whole mili-
tary power of the nation, the Republicans refuse to en-
danger their country, and established a system intended
to lead by gradual steps to equal suffrage in the South.
The immediate interest of the party, as distinguished
from that of the country at large, was the other way.
The Republican majority of the presidential elections
of 1860 and 1864 had been increased by the success of
the Federal arms, borne mainly by the Republicans of
Few England and the West, in a war conducted to a
triumphant issue under the leadership of Republican
Congressmen and generals. The apparent magna-
nimity of the admission of a portion of the rebels,
warm-handed, to the poll, would still further have
strengthened the Republicans in the "Western and Bor-
der States; and while the extreme wing would not
have dared to desert the party, the moderate men
would have been conciliated by the refusal of the fran-
chise to the blacks. A foresight of the future of the
nation happily prevailed over a more taking policy,
and, to the honor of the Republican leaders, equal fran-
chise was the result.
The one great issue between the Radicals and the
Democrats since the conclusion of the war is this : the
''Democracy" deny that the readmission to Congress
of the representatives of the Southern States is a mat-
ter of expediency at all ; to them they declare that it
is a matter of right. There was a rebellion in certain
States which temporarily prevented their sending rep-
resentatives ; it is over, and their men must come.
Either the Union is or is not dissolved ; the Radicals
admit that it is not, that all their endeavors were to
prevent the Union being destroyed by rebels, and that
thev succeeded in so doing. The States, as States, were
REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 243
never in rebellion ; there was only a powerful rebel-
lion localized in certain States. " If you admit, then,"
say the Democrats, " that the Union is not dissolved,
how can you govern a number of States by major-
generals?" Meanwhile the Radicals go on, not wast-
ing their time in words, but passing through the House
and over the President's veto the legislation necessary
for the reconstruction of free government with their
illogical, but thoroughly English, good sense, avoiding
all talk about constitutions that are obsolete, and laws
that it is impossible to enforce, and pressing on steadily
to the end that they have in view : equal rights for all
men, free government as soon as may be. The one
thing to regret is, that the Republicans have not the
courage to appeal to the national exigencies merely,
but that their leaders are forced by public opinion to
keep up the sham of constitutionalism. No one in
America seems to dream that there can be anything
to alter in the " matchless Constitution," which was
framed by a body of slaveowners filled with the nar-
rowest aristocratic prejudices, for a country which has
since abolished slavery, and become as democratic as
any nation in the world.
The system of presidential election and the constitu-
tion of the Senate are matters to which the Republi-
cans will turn their attention as soon as the country is
rested from the war. It is not impossible that a life-
time may see the abolition of the Presidency proposed,
and carried by the vote of the whole nation. If this
be not done, the election will come to be made directly
by the people, without the intervention of the electoral
college. The Senate, as now constituted, rests upon
the States, and that State rights are doomed no one
can doubt who remembers that of the population of
New York State less than half are native-born New
244 GREATER BRITAIN.
Yorkers. What concern can the cosmopolitan moiety
of her people have with the State rights of New York?
When a system becomes purely artificial, it is on the
road to death; when State rights represented the various
sovereign powers which the old States had allowed to
sleep while they entered a federal union, State rights
were historical ; but now that Congress by a single
vote cuts and carves territories as large as all the old
States put together, and founds new commonwealths
in the wilderness, the doctrine is worn out.
It is not likely that the Republicans will carry all
before them without a check; but though one Con-
servative reaction may follow another, although time
after time the Democrats may return victorious from
the fall elections, in the end Radicalism must inevit-
ably win the day. A party which takes for its watch-
word, "The national good," will always beat the Con-
stitutionalists.
Except during some great crisis, the questions which
come most home at election times in a democratic
country are minor points, in which the party not in
power has always the advantage over the office-holders:
it is on these petty matters that a cry of jobbery and
corruption can be got up, and nothing in American
politics is more taking than such a cry. " We are a
liberal people, sir," said a Californian to me, "but
among ourselves we don't care to see some men get
more than their share of Uncle Sam's money. It
doesn't go down at election time to say that the Demo-
crats are spoiling the country; but it's a mighty strong
plank that you've got if you prove that Hank Andrews
has made a million of dollars by the last Congressional
job. We say, < Smart boy, Hank Andrews;' but we
generally vote for the other man." It is these small
questions, or "side issues," as they are termed, which
REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 245
cause the position of parties to fluctuate frequently in
certain States.
The first reaction against the now triumphant Radi-
cals will probahly be based upon the indignation ex-
cited by the extension of Maine liquor laws throughout
the whole of the States in which the New Englanders
have the mastery. Prohibitive laws are not supported
in America by the arguments with which all of us in
Britain are familiar. The New England Radicals con-
cede that, so far as the effects of the use of alcohol are
strictly personal, there is no ground for the interfer-
ence of society. They go even further, and say that
no ground for general and indiscriminate interference
with the sale of liquor is to be found in the fact that
drink maddens certain men, and causes them to com-
mit crime. They are willing to admit that, were the
evils confined to individuals, it would be their own
affair; but they attempt to show that the use of alco-
hol affects the condition, moral and physical, of the
drinker's offspring, and that this is a matter so bound
up with the general weal that public interference may
be necessary. It is the belief of a majority of the
thinkers of New England that the taint of alcoholic
poison is hereditary; that the children of drunkards
will furnish more than the ordinary proportion of great
criminals; that the descendants of habitual tipplers
will be found to lack vital force, and will fall into the
ranks of pauperism and dependence: not only are the
results of morbid appetites, they say, transmitted to
the children, but the appetites themselves descend to
the offspring with the blood. If this be true, the New
England Radicals urge, the use of alcohol becomes a
moral wrong, a crime even, of which the law might
well take cognizance.
We are often told that party organization has be-
21*
246 GEE ATE E BEITAIN.
come so dictatorial, so despotic, in America, that no
one not chosen by the preliminary convention, no one,
in short, whose name is not upon the party ticket, has
any chance of election to an office. To those who
reflect upon the matter, it would seem as though this
is but a consequence of the existence of party and of
the system of local representation : in England itself
the like abuse is not unknown. "Where neither party
possesses overwhelming strength, division is failure;
and some knot or other of pushing men must be per-
mitted to make the selection of a candidate, to which,
when made, the party must adhere, or suffer a defeat.
As to the composition of the nominating conventions,
the grossest misstatements have been made to us in
England, for we have been gravely assured that a na-
tion which is admitted to present the greatest mass of
education and intelligence with the smallest intermix-
ture of ignorance and vice of which the world has
knowledge, allows itself to be dictated to in the matter
of the choice of its rulers by caucuses and conventions
composed of the idlest and most worthless of its popu-
lation. Bribery, we ha^e been told, reigns supreme
in these assemblies; the nation's interest is but a
phrase; individual sefishness the true dictator of each
choice; the name of party is but a cloak for private
ends, and the wire-pullers are equaled in rascality
only by their nominees.
It need hardly be shown that, were these stories
true, a people so full pf patriotic sentiment as that
which lately furnished a million and a half of volun-
teers for a national war, would without doubt be led
to see its safety in the destruction of conventions and
their wire-pullers of party government itself, if neces-
sary. It cannot be conceived that the American people
would allow its institutions to be stultified and law
REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 247
itself insulted to secure the temporary triumph of this
party or of that, on any mere question of the day.
The secret of the power of caucus and convention
is, general want of time on the part of the community.
Your honest and shrewd Western farmer, riot having
himself the leisure to select his candidate, is fain to
let caucus or convention choose for him. In practice,
however, the evil is far from great : the party caucus,
for its own interest, will, on the whole, select the fittest
candidate available, and, in any case, dares not, except
perhaps in New York City, fix its choice upon a man
of known bad character. Even where party is most
despotic, a serious mistake committed by one of the
nominating conventions will seldom fall to lose its side
so many votes as to secure a triumph for the opponents.
King Caucus is a great monarch, however; it would
be a mistake to despise him, and conventions are dear
to the American people at least it would seem so, to
judge from their number. Since I have been in Amer-
ica there have been sitting, besides doubtless a hundred
others, the names of which I have not noticed, the
Philadelphia " Copper Johnson Wigwam," or assembly
of the Presidential party (of which the Radicals say
that it is but "the Copperhead organization with a
fresh snout"), a dentists' convention, a phrenological
convention, a pomological congress, a school-teachers'
convention, a Fenian convention, an eight-hour con-
vention, an insurance companies' convention, and a
loyal soldiers' convention. One is tempted to think
of the assemblies of '48 in Paris, and of the caricatures
representing the young bloods of the Paris Jockey
Club being addressed by their President as "Citoyens
Vicomtes," whereas, when the cafe waiters met in their
congress, it was "Messieurs les Gargons-limonadiers."
The pomological convention was an extremely jovial
248 GEE ATE E BEITAIN.
one, all the horticulturists being whisky-growers them-
selves, and having a proper wish to compare their
own with their neighbors' "Bourbon 7 ' or " old Rye."
Caucuses (or cauci : which is it ?) of this kind suggest
a derivation of this name for what many consider a low
American proceeding, from an equally low Latin word
of similar sound and spelling. In spite of the phrase
" a dry caucus" being not unknown in the temper-
ance State of Maine, many might be inclined to think
that caucuses, if not exactly vessels of grace, were de-
cidedly "drinking vessels;" but Americans tell you
that the word is derived from the phrase a " caulker's
meeting," caulkers being peculiarly given to noise.
The cry against conventions is only a branch of that
against "politicians," which is continually being raised
by the adherents of the side which happens at the mo-
ment to be the weaker, and which evidently helps to
create the evils against which its authors are protest-
ing. It is now the New York Democrats who tell such
stories as that of the Columbia District census- taker
going to the Washington house of a wealthy Boston
man to find out his religious tenets. The door was
opened by a black boy, to whom the white man began :
"What's your name?" "Sambo, sah, am my Chris-
tian name." " Wall, Sambo, is your master a Chris-
tian?" To which Sambo's indignant answer was:
" No, sah ! Mass member ob Congress, sah !" When
the Democrats were in power, it was the Republicans
of Boston and the Cambridge professors who threw out
sly hints, and violent invectives too, against the whole
tribe of "politicians." Such unreasoning outcries are
to be met only by bare facts ; but were a jury of read-
ers of the debates in Parliament and in Congress to
be impaneled to decide whether political immorality
were not more rife in England than in America, I
BROTHERS. 249
should, for my part, look forward with anxiety to the
result.
The organization of tlio Republican party is hugely
powerful ; it has its branches in every township and
district in the Union ; but it is strong, not in the wiles
of crafty plotters, not in the devices of unknown
politicians, but in the hearts of the loyal people of
the country. If there were nothing else to be said
to Englishmen on the state of parties in America, it
should be sufficient to point out that, while the " De-
mocracy" claim the Mozart faction of New York and
the shoddy aristocracy, the pious New Englanders and
their sons in the Northwest are, by a vast majority,
Republicans ; and no " side issues" should be allowed
to disguise the fact that the Democratic is the party of
New York, the Republican the party of America.
CHAPTER XXVII.
BROTHERS.
I HAD landed in America at the moment of what is
known in Canada as " the great scare" that is, the
Fenian invasion at Fort Erie. Before going South, I
had attended at New York a Fenian meeting held to
protest against the conduct of the President and Mr.
Seward, who, it was asserted, after deluding the Irish
with promises of aid, had abandoned them, and even
seized their supplies and arms, 'the chief speaker of
the evening was Mr. Gibbons, of Philadelphia, " Vice-
President of the Irish Republic," a grave and vener-
250 GREATER BRITAIN.
able man ; no rogue or schemer, but an enthusiast as
evidently convinced of the justice as of the certainty of
the ultimate triumph of the cause.
At Chicago, I went to the monster meeting at which
Speaker Colfax addressed the Brotherhood ; at Buffalo,
I was present at the " armed picnic" which gave the
Canadian government so much trouble. On Lake
Michigan, I went on board a Fenian ship ; in New
York, I had a conversation with an ex-rebel officer, a
long-haired Georgian, who was wearing the Fenian
uniform of green-and-gold in the public streets. The
conclusion to which I came was, that the Brotherhood
has the support of ninety-nine hundredths of the Irish
in the States. As we are dealing not with British, but
with English politics and life, this is rather a fact to be
borne in mind than a text upon which to found a
homily; still, the nature of the Irish antipathy to
Britain is worth a moment's consideration; and the
probable effect of it upon the future of the race is a
matter of the gravest import.
The Fenians, according to a Chicago member of the
Roberts' wing, seek to return to the ancient state of
Ireland, of which we find the history in the Brehori
laws a communistic tenure of land (resembling, no
doubt, that of the Don Cossacks), and a republic or
elective kingship. Such are their objects; nothing
else will in the least conciliate the Irish in America.
No abolition of the Establishment, no reform of land-
laws, no Parliament on College Green, nothing that
England can grant while preserving the shadow of
union, can dissolve the Fenian league.
All this is true, and yet there is another great Irish
nation to which, if you turn, you find that conciliation
may still avail us. The Irish in Ireland are not Fenians
in the American sense : they hate us, perhaps, but they
BROTHERS. 251
may be mollified ; they are discontented, but they may
be satisfied ; customs and principles of law, the natural
growth of the Irish mind and the Irish soil, can be
recognized, and made the basis of legislation, without
bringing about the disruption of the empire.
The first Irish question that we shall have to set our-
selves to understand is that of land. Permanent tenure
is as natural to the Irish as freeholding to the English
people. All that is needed of our statesmen is, that
they recognize in legislation that which they cannot
but admit in private talk namely, that there may be
essential differences between race and race.
The results of legislation which proceeds upon this
basis may follow very slowly upon the change of sys-
tem, for there is at present no nucleus whatever for the
feeling of amity which we would create. Even the
alliance of the Irish politicians with the English Radi-
cals is merely temporary; the Irish antipathy to the
English does not distinguish between Conservative
and Radical. Years of good government will be needed
to create an alliance against which centuries of oppres-
sion and wrong-doing protest. We may forget, but
the Irish will hardly find themselves able to forget at
present that, while we make New Zealand savages
British citizens as well as subjects, protect them in the
possession of their lands, and encourage them to vote
at our polling-booths, and take their place as constables
and officers of the law, our fathers "planted" Ireland,
and declared it no felony to kill an Irishman on his
mother-soil.
In spite of their possession of much political power,
and of the entire city government of several great
towns, the Irish in America are neither physically nor
morally well off". Whatever may be the case at some
future day, they still find themselves politically in
252 GREATER BRITAIN.
English hands. The very language that they are com-
pelled to $peak is hateful, even to men who know no
other. With an impotent spite which would be amus-
ing were it not very sad, a resolution was carried by
acclamation through both houses of the Fenian con-
gress, at Philadelphia, this year, "that the word < Eng-
lish' be unanimously dropped, and that the words
'American language' be used in the future."
From the Cabinet, from Congress, from every office,
high or low, not controlled by the Fenian vote, the
Irish are systematically excluded ; but it cannot be
American public opinion which has prevented the
Catholic Irish from rising as merchants and traders,
even in New York. Yet, while there are Belfast names
high up on the Atlantic side and in San Francisco,
there are none from Cork, none from the southern
counties. It would seem as though the true Irishman
wants the perseverance to become a successful mer-
chant, and thrives best at pure brain-work, or upon
land. Three-fourths of the Irish in America remain
in towns, losing the attachment to the soil which is the
strongest characteristic of the Irish in Ireland, and
finding no new home : disgusted at their exclusion in
America from political life and power, it is these men
who turn to Fenianism as a relief. Through drink,
through gambling, and the other vices of homeless,
thriftless men, they are soon reduced to beggary; and,
moral as they are by nature, the Irish are neverthejess
supplying America with that which she never before
possessed a criminal and pauper class. Of ten thou-
sand people sent to jail each year in Massachusetts, six
thousand are Irish born ; in Chicago, out of the 3598
convicts of last year, only eighty-four were native born
Americans.
To the Americans, Fenianism has many aspects.
BROTHERS. 253
The greater number hate the Irish, but sympathize
profoundly with Ireland. Many are so desirous of
seeing republicanism prevail throughout the world
that they support the Irish republic in any way, ex-
cept, indeed, by taking its paper money, and look upon
its establishment as a first step toward the erection of
a free government that shall include England and Scot-
land as well. Some think the Fenians will burn the
Capitol and rob the banks; some regard them with
satisfaction, or the reverse, from the religious point of
view. One of the latter kind of lookers-on said to me:
"I was glad to see the Fenian movement, not that I
wish success to the Brotherhood as against you Eng-
lish, but because I rejoice to see among Irishmen a
powerful center of resistance to the Catholic Church.
We, in this country, were being delivered over, bound
hand and foot, to the Eoman Church, and these Fenians,
by their power and their violence against the priests,
have divided the Irish camp and rescued us." The
unfortunate Canadians, for their part, ask why they
should be shot and robbed because Britain maltreats
the Irish ; but we must not forget that the Fenian raid
on Canada was an exact repetition, almost on the same
ground, of the St. Alban's raid into the American ter-
ritory during the rebellion.
The Fenians would be as absolutely without strength
in America as they are without credit were it not for
the anti-British traditions of the Democratic party, and
the rankling of the Alabama question, or rather of the
remembrance of our general conduct during the rebel-
lion, in the hearts of the Republicans. It is impossi-
ble to spend much time in New England without be-
coming aware that the people of the six Northeastern
States love us from the heart. Nothing but this can
explain the character of their feeling toward us on
22
254 GREATER BRITAIN.
these Alabama claims. That we should refuse an ar-
bitration upon the whole question is to them inexpli-
cable, and they grieve with wondering sorrow at our
perversity.
It is not here that the legal question need be raised;
for observers of the present position of the English
race it is enough that there exists between Britain and
America a bar to perfect friendship a ground for fu-
ture quarrel upon which we refuse to allow an all-
embracing arbitration. We allege that we are the
best judges of a certain portion of the case, that our
dignity would be compromised by arbitration upon
these points ; but such dignity must always be com-
promised by arbitration, for common friends are called
in only when each party to the dispute has a case, in
the justice of which his dignity is bound up. Arbitra-
tion is resorted to as a means of avoiding wars ; and,
dignity or no dignity, everything that can cause war is
proper matter for arbitration. What even if some
little dignity be lost by the affair, in addition to that
which has been lost already? No such loss can be set
against the frightful hurtfulness to the race and to the
cause of freedom, of war between Britain and America.
The question comes plainly enough to this point; we
say we are right; America says we are wrong; they
offer arbitration, which we refuse upon a point of eti-
quette fbr on that ground we decline to refer to arbi-
tration a point which to America appeals essential. It
looks to the world as though we offer to submit to the
umpire chosen those points only on which we are al-
ready prepared to admit that we are in the wrong.
America asks us to submit, as we should do in private
life, the whole correspondence on which the quarrel
stands. Even if we, better instructed in the precedents
of international law than were the Americans, could
BROTHERS. 255
not but be in the right, still, as we know that intelligent
and able men in the United States think otherwise, and
would fancy their cause the just one in a war which
might arise upon the difficulty, surely there is ground
for arbitration. It would be to the eternal disgrace of
civilization that we should set to work to cut our
brothers' throats upon a point of etiquette ; and, by
declining on the ground of honor to discuss these
claims, we are compromising that honor in the eyes of
all the world.
In democracies such as America or France, every
citizen feels an insult to his country as an insult to
himself. The Alabama question is in the mouth or
in the heart which is worse of every American
who talks with an Englishman in England or America.
All nations commit, at times, the error of acting as
though they think that every people on earth, except
themselves, are unanimous in their policy. Neglecting
the race distinctions and the class distinctions which
in England are added to the universal essential differ-
ences of minds, the Americans are convinced that,
during the late war, we thought as one man, and that,
in this present matter of the Alabama claims, we stand
out and act as a united people.
A New Yorker with whom I stayed at Quebec a
shrewd but kindly fellow was an odd instance of the
American incapacity to understand the British nation,
which almost equals our own inability to comprehend
America. Kind and hospitable to me, as is any Amer-
ican to every Englishman in all times and places, he
detested British policy, and obstinately refused to see
that there is an England larger than Downing Street,
a nation outside Pall Mall. "England was with the
rebels throughout the war." "Excuse me; our ruling
classes were so, perhaps, but our rulers don't represent
256 GREATER BRITAIN.
us any more than your 39th Congress represents George
Washington." In America, where Congress does fairly
represent the nation, and where there has never been
less than a quarter of the body favorable to any policy
which half the nation supported, men cannot under-
stand that there should exist a country which thinks
one way, but, through her rulers, speaks another. We
may disown the national policy, but we suffer for it.
The hospitality to Englishmen of the American
England-hater is extraordinary. An old Southerner
in Richmond said to me in a breath, " Fd go and live
in England if I didn't hate it as I do. England, sir,
betrayed us in the most scoundrelly way talked of
sympathy with the South, and stood by to see us swal-
lowed up. I hate England, sir ! Come and stay a week
with me at my place in County. Going South
to-day? Well, then, you return this way next week.
Come then ! Come on Saturday week."
When we ask, "Why do you press the Alabama
claims against us, and not the Florida, the Georgia,
and the Rappahannock claims against the French?' 7
the answer is: "Because we don't care about the
French, and what they do and think ; besides, we owe
them some courtesy after bundling them out of Mexico
in the way we did." In truth there is among Amer-
icans an exaggerated estimate of the offensive powers
of Great Britain ; and such is the jealousy of young
nations that this exaggeration becomes of itself a cause
of danger. Were the Americans as fully convinced,
as we ourselves are, of our total incapacity to carry
on a land war with the United States on the western
side of the Atlantic, the bolder spirits among them
would cease to feel themselves under an assumed
necessity to show us our own weakness and their
strength.
BROTHERS. 257
X
The chief reason why America finds much to offend
her in our conduct is, that she cares for the opinion of
no other people than the English. America, before
the terrible blow to her confidence and love that our
conduct during the rebellion gave, used morally to
lean on England. Happily for herself she is now
emancipated from the mental thraldom ; but she still
yearns toward our kindly friendship. A Napoleonic
Senator harangues, a French paper declaims, against
America and Americans; who cares? But a Times'
leader, or a speech in Parliament from a minister of
the Crown, cuts to the heart, wounding terribly. A na-
tion, like an individual, never quarrels with a stranger;
there must be love at bottom for even querulousness
to arise. While I was in Boston, one of the foremost
writers of America said to me in conversation: "I
have no son, but I had a nephew of my own name ; a
grand fellow; young, handsome, winning in his ways,
full of family affections, an ardent student. He felt it
his duty to go to the front as a private in one of our
regiments of Massachusetts volunteers, and was pro-
moted for bravery to a captaincy. All of us here
looked on him as a New England Philip Sidney, the
type of all that was manly, chivalrous, and noble. The
very day that I received news of his being killed in
leading his company against a regiment, I was forced
by my duties here to read a leader in one of your chief
papers upon the officering of our army, in which it was
more than hinted that our troops consisted of German
cut- throats and pot-house Irish, led by sharpers and
broken politicians. Can you wonder at my being
bitter?"
That there must be in America a profound feeling
of affection for our country is shown by the avoidance
of war when we recognized the rebels as belligerents ;
22*
258 GREATER BRITAIN.
and, again, at the time of the Trent affair, when the
surface cry was overwhelmingly for battle, and the
cabinet only able to tide it over by promising the West
war with England as soon as the rebellion was put
down. " One war at a time, gentlemen," said Lincoln.
The man who, of all in America, had most to lose by
war with England, said to me of the Trent affair: "I
was written to by C to do all I could for peace. I
wrote him back that if our attorney-general decided
that our seizure of the men was lawful, I would spend
my last dollar in the cause."
The Americans, everywhere affectionate toward the
individual Englishman, make no secret of their feeling
that the first advances toward a renewal of the national
friendship ought to come from us. They might remind
us that our Maori subjects have a proverb, " Let friends
settle their disputes as friends."
CHAPTER XXVIII.
AMERICA.
WE are coasting again, gliding through calm blue
waters, watching the dolphins as they play, and the
boobies as they fly stroke and stroke with the paddles
of the ship. Mountains rise through the warm misty
air, and form a long towering line upon the upper
skies. Hanging high above us are the Volcano of Fire
and that of Water twin menacers of Guatamala City.
In the sixteenth century, the water-mountain drowned
it; in the eighteenth, it was burnt by the fire-hill.
AMERICA. 259
Since then, the city has been shaken to pieces by earth-
quakes, and of sixty thousand men and women, hardly
one escaped. Down the valley, between the peaks, we
have through the mahogany groves an exquisite distant
view toward the city. Once more passing on, we get
peeps, now of West Honduras, and now of the island
coffee plantations of Costa llica. The heat is terrible.
It was just here, if we are to believe Drake, that he
fell in with a shower so hot and scalding, that each
drop burnt its hole through his men's clothes as they
hung up Jo dry. " Steep stories," it is clear, were known
before the plantation of America.
Now that the time has come for a leave-taking of the
continent, we can begin to reflect upon facts gleaned
during visits to twenty-nine of the forty-five Territories
and States twenty-nine empires the size of Spain.
A man may see American countries, from the pine-
wastes of Maine to the slopes of the Sierra ; may talk
with American men and women, from the sober citizens
of Boston to Digger Indians in California; may eat of
American dishes, from jerked buffalo in Colorado to
clambakes on the shores near Salem ; and yet, from the
time he first " smells the molasses" at Nantucket light-
ship to the moment when the pilot quits him at the
Golden Gate, may have no idea of an American. You
may have seen the East, the South, the West, the
Pacific States, and yet have failed to find America. It
is not till you have left her shores that her image grows
up in the mind.
The first thing that strikes the Englishman just
landed in New York is the apparent Latinization of
the English in America ; but before he leaves the
country, he conies to see that this is at most a local
fact, and that the true moral of America is the vigor
of the English race the defeat of the cheaper by the
260 GREATER BRITAIN.
dearer peoples, the victory of the man whose food costs
four shillings a day over the man whose food costs four
pence. Excluding the Atlantic cities, the English in
America are absorbing the Germans and the Celts, de-
stroying the Red Indians, and checking the advance of
the Chinese.
The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on
earth. Up to the commencement of the now inevitable
destruction of the Red Indians of Central North
America, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the
English colonists, no numerous race had ever been
blotted out by an invader. The Danes and Saxons
amalgamated with the Britons, the Normans with the
English, the Tartars with the Chinese, the Goths and
Burgundians with the Gauls : the Spaniards not only
never annihilated a people, but have themselves been
all but completely expelled by the Indians, in Mexico
and South America. The Portuguese in Ceylon, the
Dutch in Java, the French in Canada and Algeria,
have conquered but not killed off the native peoples.
Hitherto it has been nature's rule, that the race that
peopled a country in the earliest historic days should
people it to the end of time. The American problem
is this: does the law, in a modified shape, Hold good,
in spite of the destruction of the native population ?
Is it true that the negroes, now that they are free, are
commencing slowly to die out? that the New Eng-
landers are dying fast, and their places being supplied
by immigrants ? Can the English in America, in the
long run, survive the common fate of all migrating
races ? Is it true that, if the American settlers con-
tinue to exist, it will be at the price of being no longer
English, but Red Indian ? It is certain that the Eng-
lish families long in the land have the features of the
extirpated race; on the other hand, in the negroes
AMERICA. 261
there is at present no trace of any change, save in their
becoming dark brown instead of black.
The Maories an immigrant race were dying off
in New Zealand when we landed there. The Indians
of Mexico another immigrant people had themselves
undergone decline, numerical and moral, when we first
became acquainted with them. Are we English in
turn to degenerate abroad, under pressure of a great
natural law forbidding change ? It is easy to say that
the English in Old England are not a native but an im-
migrant race ; that they show no symptoms of decline.
There, however, the change was slight, the distance
short, the difference of climate small.
The rapidity of the disappearance of physical type
is equaled at least, if not exceeded, by that of the total
alteration of the moral characteristics of the immigrant
races the entire destruction of eccentricity, in short.
The change that comes over those among the Irish who
do not remain in the great towns is not greater than
that which overtakes the English handworkers, of
whom some thousands reach America each year.
Gradually settling down on land, and finding them-
selves lost in a sea of intelligence, and freed from the
inspiring obstacles of antiquated institutions and class
prejudice, the English handicraftsman, ceasing to be
roused to aggressive Radicalism by the opposition of
sinister interests, merges into the contented homestead
settler, or adventurous backwoodsman. Greater even
than this revolution of character is that which falls
upon the Celt. Not only is it a fact known alike to
physiologists and statisticians, that the children of Irish
parents born in America are, physically, not Irish,
Americans, but the like is true of the moral type : the
change in this is at least as sweeping. The son of
Fenian Pat and bright-eyed Biddy is the normal gaunt
262 GREATER BRITAIN.
American, quick of thought, but slow of speech, whom
we have begun to recognize as the latest product of the
Saxon race, when housed upon the Western prairies,
or in the pine-woods of New England.
For the moral change in the British workman it is
not difficult to account : the man who will leave coun-
try, home, and friends, to seek new fortunes in Amer-
ica, is essentially not an ordinary man. As a rule, he
is above the average in intelligence, or, if defective in
this point, he makes up for lack of wit by the posses-
sion of concentrativeness and energy. Such a man
will have pushed himself to the front in his club, his
union, or his shop, before he emigrates. In England
he is somebody; in America he finds all hands con-
tented; or, if not this, at all events too busy to com-
plain of such ills as they profess to labor under. Among
contented men, his equals both in intelligence arid
ambition, in a country of perfect freedom of speech,
of manners, of laws, and of society, the occupation of
his mind is gone, and he comes to think himself what
others seem to think a nobody; a man who no longer
is a living force. He settles upon land; and when the
world knows him no more, his children are happy
corn-growers in his stead.
The shape of North America makes the existence
of distinct peoples within her limits almost impossible.
An upturned bowl, with a mountain rim, from which
the streams run inward toward the center, she must
fuse together all the races that settle within her borders,
and the fusion must now be in an English mould.
There are homogeneous foreign populations in sev-
eral portions of the United States; not only the Irish
and Chinese, at whose prospects we have already
glanced, but also Germans in Pennsylvania, Spanish
in Florida, French in Louisiana and at Sault de Ste
AMERICA. 263
Marie. In Wisconsin there is a Norwegian popula-
tion of over a hundred thousand, retaining their own
language and their- own architecture, and presenting
the appearance of a tough morsel for the English to
digest; at the same time, the Swedes were the first
settlers of Delaware and New Jersey, and there they
have disappeared.
Milwaukee is a Norwegian town. The houses are
narrow and high, the windows many, with circular
tops ornamented in wood or dark-brown stone, and a
heavy wooden cornice crowns the front. The churches
have the wooden bulb and spire which are character-
istic of the Scandinavian public buildings. The Nor-
wegians will not mix with other races, and invariably
flock to spots where there is already a large population
speaking their own tongue. Those who enter Canada
generally become dissatisfied with the country, and
pass on into Wisconsin, or Minnesota, but the Canadian
government has now under its consideration a plan
for founding a Norwegian colony on Lake Huron.
The numbers of this people are not so great as to make
it important to inquire whether they will ever merge
into the general population. Analogy would lead us
to expect that they will be absorbed; their existence is
not historical, like that of the French in Lower Canada.
From Burlington, in Iowa, I had visited a spot the
history of which is typical of the development of Amer-
ica Nauvoo. Founded in 1840 by Joe Smith, the
Mormon city stood upon a bluff overhanging the Des'
Moines rapids of the Mississippi, presenting on the
land side the aspect of a gentle, graceful slope, sur-
mounted by a plain. After the fanatical pioneers of
English civilization had been driven from the city, and
their temple burnt, there came Cabet's Icarian band,
tried to found a new France in the desert; but in
264 GREATER BRITAIN.
1856 the leader died, and his people dispersed them-
selves about the States of Iowa and Missouri. Next
came the English settlers, active, thriving, regardless
of tradition, and Nauvoo is entering on a new life as
the capital of a Wine-growing country. I found Cabet
and the Mormons alike forgotten. The ruins of the
temple have disappeared, and the huge stones have
been used up in cellars, built to contain the Hock a
pleasant wine, like Zeltinger.
The bearing upon religion of tjie gradual destruc-
tion of race is of great moment to the world. Chris-
tianity will gain by the change; but which of its many
branches will receive support is a question which only
admits of an imperfect answer. Arguing a priori, we
should expect to find that, on the one hand, a tendency
toward unity would manifest itself, taking the shape,
perhaps, of a gain of strength by the Catholic and
Anglican Churches; on the other hand, there would
be a contrary and still stronger tendency toward an
infinite multiplication of beliefs, till millions of men
and women would become each of them his own
church. Coming to the actual cases in which we can
trace the tendencies that commence to manifest them-
selves, we find that in America the Anglican Church
is gaining ground, especially on the Pacific side, and
that the Catholics do not seem to meet with any such
success as we should have looked for; retaining, in-
deed, their hold over the Irish women and a portion
of the men, and having their historic French branches
in Louisiana and in Canada, but not, unless it be in
the Cities of New York and Philadelphia, making
much way among the English.
Between San Francisco and Chicago, for religious
purposes the most cosmopolitan ^of cities, we have to
draw distinctions. In the Pacific city the disturbing
AMERICA. 265
cause is the presence of New Yorkers; in the metrop-
olis of the Northwestern States it is the dominance of
New England ideas : still, we shall find no two cities
so free from local color, and from the influence of race.
The result of an examination is not encouraging : in
both cities there is much external show in the shape
of church attendance; in neither does religion strike
its roots deeply into the hearts of the citizens, except
so far as it is alien and imported.
The Spiritualist and Unitarian churches are both of
them in Chicago extremely strong: they support news-
papers and periodicals of their own, and are led by men
and women of remarkable ability, but they are not the
less Cambridge Unitarianism, Boston Spiritualism;
there is nothing of the Northwest about them. In San
Francisco, on the other hand, Anglicanism is prosper-
ing, but it is New York Episcopalianism, sustained by
immigrants and money from the East ; in no sense is
it a Californian church.
Throughout America the multiplication of churches
is rapid, but among the native-born Americans, Super-
naturalism is advancing with great strides. The Shakers
are strong in thought, the Spiritualists in wealth and
numbers ; Communism gains ground, but not Polyg-
amy the Mormon is a purely European church.
There is just now progressing in America a great
movement, headed by the " Radical Unitarians,"
toward "free religion," or church without creed.
The leaders deny that there is sufficient security for
the spread of religion in each man's individual action:
they desire collective work by all free-thinkers and
liberal religionists in the direction of truth and purity
of life. Christianity is higher than dogma, we are
told ; there is no waj out of infinite multiplication oi
creeds but by their total extirpation. Oneness of pur-
23
266 GREATER BRITAIN.
pose and a common love for truth form the members'
only tie. Elder Frederick Evans said to me : " All
truth forms part of Shakerism;" but these free relig-
ionists assure us that in all truth consists their sole re-
ligion.
The distinctive feature of these American philo-
sophical and religious systems is their gigantic width :
for instance, every human being who admits that dis-
embodied spirits may in any way hold intercourse with
dwellers upon earth, whatever else he may believe or
disbelieve, is claimed by the Spiritualists as a member
of their church. They tell us that by " Spiritualism they
understand whatever bears relation to spirit;" their
system embraces all existence, brute, human, and
divine; in fact, "the real man is a spirit." Accord-
ing to these ardent proselytizers, every poet, every man
with a grain of imagination in his nature, is a " Spirit-
ualist." They claim Plato, Socrates, Milton, Shak-
speare, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Luther,
Joseph Addison, Melancthon, Paul, Stephen, the whole
of the Hebrew prophets, Homer, and John Wesley,
among the members of their Church. They have
lately canonized new 'saints: St. Confucius, St. Theo-
dore (Parker), St. Ralph (Waldo Emerson), St. Emma
(Hardinge), all figure in their calendar. It is a note-
worthy fact that the saints are mostly resident in New
England.
The tracts published at the Spiritual Clarion office,
Auburn, ISTew York, put forward Spiritualism as a re-
ligion which is to stand toward existing churches as
did Christianity toward Judaism, and announce a new
dispensation to the peoples of the earth " who have
sown their wild oats in Christianity," but they spell
supersede with a "c."
This strange religion has long since left behind the
AMERICA. 267
rappings and table-turnings in which it took its birth.
The secret of its success is that it supplies to every man
the satisfaction of the universal craving for the super-
natural, in any form in which he will receive it. The
Spiritualists claim two millions of active believers and
five million "favorers" in America.
The presence of a large German population is thought
by some to have an important bearing on the religious
future of America, but the Germans have hitherto
kept themselves apart from the intellectual progress of
the nation. They, as a rule, withdraw from towns,
and, retaining their language and supporting local
papers of their own, live out of the world of American
literature and politics; taking, however, at rare inter-
vals, a patriotic part in national affairs, as was notably
the case at the time of the late rebellion. Living thus
by themselves, they have even less influence upon
American religious thought than have the Irish, who,
speaking the English tongue, and dwelling almost
exclusively in towns, are brought more into contact
with the daily life of the republic. The Germans in
America are in the main pure materialists under a
certain show of deism, but hitherto there has been no
alliance between them and the powerful Chicago Radi-
cal Unitarians, difference of language having thus far
proved a bar to the formation of a league which would
otherwise have been inevitable.
On the whole, it would seem that for the moment
religious prospects are not bright; the tendency is
rather toward intense and unhealthily-developed feel-
ing in the few, and subscription to some one of the
Episcopalian churches Catholic, Anglican, or Meth-
odist among the many, coupled with real indifference.
Neither the tendency to unity of creeds nor that toward
infinite multiplication of beliefs has yet made that
268 GREATER BRITAIN.
progress which abstract speculation would have led us
to expect, but so far as we can judge from the few facts
before us, there is much likelihood that multiplication
will in the future prove too strong for unity.
After all there is not in America a greater wonder
than the Englishman himself, for it is to this continent
that you must come to find him in full possession of
his powers. Two hundred and fifty millions of people
speak or are ruled by those who speak the English
tongue, and inhabit a third of the habitable globe;
but, at the present rate of increase, in sixty years there
will be two hundred and fifty millions of Englishmen
dwelling in the United States alone. America has
somewhat grown since the time when it was gravely
proposed to call her Alleghania, after a chain of mount-
ains which, looking from this western side, may be
said to skirt her eastern border, and the loftiest peaks
of which are but half the height of the very passes of
the Rocky Mountains.
America is becoming not English merely, but world-
embracing in the variety of its type ; and, as the Eng-
lish element has given language and history to that
land, America offers the English race the moral direct-
orship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon
institutions and the English tongue. Through Amer-
ica, England is speaking to the world.
II.
POLYNESIA.
23* ( 269 )
CHAPTER I.
PITCAIRN ISLAND.
PANAMA is a picturesque time-worn Spanish city, that
rises abruptly from the sea in a confused pile of decay-
ing bastions and decayed cathedrals, while a dense
jungle of mangrove and bamboo threatens to bury it in
rich greenery. The forest is tilled with baboons and
lizards of gigantic size, and is gay with the bright
plumage of the toucans and macaws, while, within the
walls, every housetop bears its living load of hideous
turkey-buzzards, foul-winged and bloodshot-eyed.
It was the rainy season (which here, indeed, lasts for
three-quarters of the year), and each day was an alter-
nation of shower-bath, and vapor-bath with sickly sun.
On the first night of my stay, there was a lunar rain-
bow, which I went on to the roof of the hotel to watch.
The misty sky was white with the reflected light of the
hidden moon, which was obscured by an inky cloud,
that seemed a tunnel through the heavens. In a few
minutes I was driven from my post by the tropical
rain.
At the railway station, I parted from my Californian
friends, who were bound for Aspinwall, and thence by
steamer to New York. A stranger scene it has not
often been my fortune to behold. There cannot have
been less than a thousand natives, wearing enormous
hats and little else, and selling everything, from linen
suits to the last French novel. A tame jaguar, a peli-
can, parrots, monkeys, pearls, shells, flowers, green
(211)
272 GREATER BRITAIN.
cocoa-nuts and turtles, mangoes and wild dogs, were
among the things for sale. The station was guarded
by the army of the Republic of New Granada, consist-
ing of five officers, a bugler, a drummer, and nineteen
privates. Six of the men wore red trowsers and dirty
shirts for uniform ; the rest dressed as they pleased,
which was generally in Adamic style. Not even the
officers had shoes; and of the twenty-one men, one was
a full-blooded Indian, some ten were negroes, and the
remainder nondescripts, but among them was of course
an Irishman from Cork or Kilkenny. After the train
had started, the troops formed, and marched briskly
through the town, the drummer trotting along some
twenty yards before the company, French-fashion, and
beating the retraite. The French invalids from Aca-
pulco, who were awaiting in Panama the arrival of an
Imperial frigate at Aspinwall, stood in the streets to
see the New Granadans pass, twirling their moustaches,
and smiling grimly. One old drum-major, lean and
worn with fever, turned to me, and, shrugging his
shoulders, pointed to his side : the Granadans had their
bayonets tied on with string.
Whether Panama will continue to hold its present
position as the "gate of the Pacific" is somewhat
doubtful : Nicaragua offers greater advantages to the
English, Tehuantepec to the American traders. The
Gulf of Panama and the ocean for a great distance to
the westward from its mouth are notorious for their
freedom from all breezes ; the gulf lies, indeed, in the
equatorial belt of calms, and sailing-vessels can never
make much use of the port of Panama. Aspinwall or
Colon, on the Atlantic side, has no true port whatever.
As long, however, as the question is merely one of rail-
road and steamship traffic, Panama may hold its own
against the other isthmus cities ; but when the canal is
PIT CAIRN ISLAND. 273
cut, the selected spot must be one that shall be beyond
the reach of calms in Nicaragua or Mexico.
From Panama I sailed in one of the ships of the
new Colonial Line, for Wellington, in New Zealand
the longest steam-voyage in the world. Our course
was to be a "great circle" to Pitcairn Island, and
another great circle thence to Cape Palliser, near Wel-
lington a distance in all of some 6600 miles ; but our
actual course was nearer 7000. When off the Gala-
pagos Islands, we met the cold southerly wind and
water, known as the Chilian current, and crossed the
equator in a breeze which forced us all to wear great-
coats, and to dream that, instead of entering the
southern hemisphere, we had come by mistake within
the arctic circle.
After traversing lonely and hitherto unknown seas
and looking in vain for a new guano island, on the
sixteenth day we worked out the ship's position at
noon with more than usual care, if that were possible,
and found that in four hours we ought to be at Pit-
cairn Island. At half-past two o'clock, land was
sighted right ahead ; and by four o'clock, we were in
the bay, such as it is, at Pitcairn.
Although at sea there was a calm, the surf from the
ground-swell beat heavily upon the shore, and we
were faint to content ourselves with the view of the
island from our decks. It consists of a single volcanic
peak, hung with an arras of green creeping plants,
passion-flowers, and trumpet-vines. As for the people,
they came off to us dancing over the seas in their
canoes, and bringing us green oranges and bananas,
while a huge Union Jack was run up on their flagstaff
by those who remained on shore.
As the first man came on deck, he rushed to the
captain, and, shaking hands violently, cried, in pure
274 GREATER BRITAIN.
English, entirely free from accent, " How do you do,
captain? How's Victoria?" There was no disrespect
in the omission of the title "Queen;" the question
seemed to come from the heart. The bright-eyed lads,
Adams and Young, descendants of the Bounty muti-
neers, who had been the first to climb our sides, an-
nounced the coming of Moses Young, the " magistrate"
of the isle, who presently boarded us in state. He was
a grave and gentlemanly man, English in appearance,
but somewhat slightly built, as were, indeed, the lads.
The magistrate came off to lay before the captain the
facts relating to a feud which exists between two par-
ties of the islanders, and upon which they require arbi-
tration. He had been under the impression that we
were a man-of-war, as we had fired two guns on enter-
ing the bay, and being received by our officers, who
wore the cap of the Naval Reserve, he continued in
the belief till the captain explained what the " Rakaia"
was, and why she had called at Pitcairn.
The case which the captain was to have heard judi-
cially was laid before us for our advice while the flues
of the ship were being cleaned. When the British
government removed the Pitcairn Islanders to Norfolk
Island, no return to the old home was contemplated,
but the indolent half-castes found the task of keeping
the Norfolk Island convict roads in good repair one
heavier than they cared to perform, and fifty-two of
them have lately come back to Pitcairn. A widow
who returned with the others claims a third of the
whole island as having been the property of her late
husband, and is supported in her demand by half the
islanders, while Moses Young and the remainder of
the people admit the facts, but assert that the desertion
of the island was complete, and operated as an entire
abandonment of titles, which the reoccupation cannot
PITCAIEN ISLAND. 275
revive. The success of the woman's claim, they say,
would be the destruction of the prosperity of Pitcairn.
The case would be an extremely curious one if it
had to be decided upon legal grounds, for it would
raise complicated questions both on the nature of Brit-
ish citizenship and the character of the "occupation"
title; but it is probable that the islanders will abide
by the decision of the Governor of New South Wales,
to which colony they consider themselves in some
degree attached.
When we had drawn up a case to be submitted to
Sir John Young, at Sydney, our captain made a com-
mercial treaty with the magistrate, who agreed to sup-
ply the ships of the new line, whenever daylight allowed
them to call at Pitcairn, with oranges, bananas, ducks,
and fowls, for which he was to receive cloth and to-
bacco in exchange, tobacco being the money of the
Polynesian Archipelago. Mr. Young told us that his
people had thirty sheep, which were owned by each of
the families in turn, the household taking care of them,
and receiving the profits for one year. Water, he said,
sometimes falls short in the island, but they then make
use of the juice of the green cocoa-nut. Their school
is excellent ; all the children can read and write, and
in the election of magistrates they have female suffrage.
When we went on deck again to talk to the younger
men, Adams asked us a new question: "Have you a
Sunday at Home, or a British Workman?" Our books
and papers having been ransacked, Moses Young pre-
pared to leave the ship, taking with him presents from
the stores. Besides the cloth, tobacco, hats, and linen,
there was a bottle of brandy; given for medicine, as
the islanders are strict teetotalers. While Young held
the bottle in his hand, afraid to trust the lads with it,
Adams read the label and cried out, "Brandy? How
276 GREATER BRITAIN.
much for a dose ? . . . . Oh, yes! all right I know:
it's good for the women!" When they at last left the
ship's side, one of the canoes was filled with a crino-
line and blue silk dress for Mrs. Young, and another
with a red and brown tartan for Mrs. Adams, both
given by lady passengers, while the lads went ashore
in dust-coats and smoking-caps.
Now that the French, with their singular habit of
everywhere annexing countries which other colonizing
nations have rejected, are rapidly occupying all the
Polynesian groups except the only ones that are of
value namely, the Sandwich Islands and New Zealand
Pitcairn becomes of some interest as a solitary Brit-
ish post on the very border of the French dominions,
and it has for us the stronger claim to notice which is
raised by the fact that it has figured for the last few
years on the wrong side of our British budget.
As we stood out from the bay into the lonely seas,
the island peak showed a black outline against a pale-
green sky, but in the west the heavy clouds that in the
Pacific never fail to cumber the horizon were glowing
with a crimson cast by the now-set sun, and the dancing
wavelets were tinted with reflected hues.
The "scarlet shafts," which poets have ascribed to
the tropical sunrise, are common at sunset in the South
Pacific. Almost every night the declining sun, sink-
ing behind the clouds, throws rays across the sky not
yellow, as in Europe and America, but red or rosy
pink. On the night after leaving Pitcairn, I saw a
still grander effect of light and color. The sun had
set, and in the west the clear greenish sky was hidden
by pitch-black thunder-clouds. Through these were
crimson caves.
On the twenty-ninth day of our voyage, we sighted
the frowning cliffs of Palliser, where the bold bluff,
PITCAIEN ISLAND. 277
coming sheer down three thousand feet, receives the
full shock of the South Seas a fitting introduction to
the grand scenery of New Zealand; and within a few
hours we were running up the great sea-lake of Port
Nicholson toward long lines of steamers at a wharf,
behind which were the cottages of Wellington, the
capital.
To me, coming from San Francisco and the Nevadan
towns, Wellington appeared very English and ex-
tremely quiet ; the town is sunny and still, but with a
holiday look; indeed, I could not help fancying that it
was Sunday. A certain haziness as to what was the
day of the week prevailed among the passengers and
crew, for we had arrived upon our Wednesday, the
New Zealand Thursday, and so, without losing an
hour, lost a day, which, unless by going round the
world the other way, can never be regained. The
bright colors of the painted wooden houses, the clear
air, the rose-beds, and the emerald-green grass, are the
true cause of the holiday look of the New Zealand
towns, and Wellington is the gayest of them all ; for,
owing to the frequency of earthquakes, the townsfolk
are not allowed to build in brick or stone. The natives
say that once in every month " Ruaimoko turns him-
self," and sad things follow to the shaken earth.
It was now November, the New Zealand spring, and
the outskirts of Wellington were gay with the cherry-
trees in full fruiting and English dog-roses in full
bloom, while on every road-side bank the gorse blazed
in its coat of yellow : there was, too, to me, a singular
charm in the bright green turf, after the tawny grass
of California.
Without making a long halt, I started for the South
Island, first steaming across Cook's Straits, and up
Queen Charlotte Sound to Picton, and then through
24
278 GREATER BRITAIN.
the French Pass a narrow passage filled with fearful
whirlpools t o Nelson, a gemlike little Cornish village.
After a day's " cattle- branding" with an old college
friend at his farm in the valley of the Maitai, I sailed
again for the south, laying for a night in Massacre
Bay, to avoid the worst of a tremendous gale, and then
coasting down to The Buller and Hokitika the new
gold-fields of the colonies.
CHAPTER II.
HOKITIKA.
PLACED in the very track of storms, and open to the
sweep of rolling seas from every quarter, exposed to
waves that run from pole to pole, or from South Africa,
to Cape Horn, the shores of New Zealand are famed
for swell and surf, and her western rivers for the danger
of their bars. Insurances at Melbourne are five times
as high for the voyage to Hokitika as for the longer
cruise to Brisbane.
In our little steamer of a hundred tons, built to cross
the bars, we had reached the mouth of the Hokitika
River soon after dark, but lay all night some ten miles
to the southwest of the port. As we steamed in the
early morning from our anchorage, there rose up on
the east the finest sunrise view on which it has been
my fortune to set eyes.
A hundred miles of the Southern Alps stood out
upon a pale-blue sky in curves of a gloomy white that
were just beginning to blush with pink, but ended to
NEW ZEALAND
168EGr 170
172
176 178
HOKITIKA. 279
the southward in a cone of fire that stood up from the
ocean : it was the snow-dome of Mount Cook struck
by the rising sun. The evergreen bush, flaming with
the crimson of the rata-blooms, hung upon the mount-
ain-side, and covered the plain to the very margin of
the narrow sands with a dense jungle. It was one of
those sights that haunt men for years, like the eyes of
Mary in Bellini's Milan picture.
On the bar, three ranks of waves appeared to stand
fixed in walls of surf. These huge rollers are sad de-
stroyers of the New Zealand coasting ships : a steamer
was lost here a week before my visit, and the harbor-
master's whale-boat dashed in pieces, and two men
drowned.
Lashing everything that was on deck, and battening
down the hatches in case we should ground in crossing,
we prepared to run the gauntlet. The steamers often
ground for an instant while in the trough between the
waves, and the second sea, pooping them, sweeps them
from end to end, but carries them into the still water.
Watching our time, we were borne on a great rolling
white-capped wave into the quiet lakelet that forms
the harbor, just as the sun, coming slowly up behind
the range, was firing the Alps from north to south;
but it was not till we had lain some minutes at the
wharf that the sun rose to us poor mortals of the sea
and plain. Hokitika Bay is strangely like the lower
portion of the Lago Maggiore, but Mount Rosa is in-
ferior to Mount Cook.
As I walked up from the quay to the town, looking
for the "Empire" Hotel, which I had heard was the
best in Hokitika, I spied a boy carrying a bundle of
some newspaper. It was the early edition for the up-
country coaches, but I asked if he could spare me a
copy. He put one into my hand. " How much ?" I
280 GREATER BRITAIN.
asked. "A snapper." "A snapper?"" Ay a tizzy."
Understanding this more familiar term, I gave him a
shilling. Instead of " change," he cocked up his knee,
slapt the shilling down on it, and said "Cry!" I ac-
cordingly cried "Woman !" and won, he loyally re-
turning the coin, and walking off minus a paper.
When I reached that particular gin-palace which
was known as the hotel, I found that all the rooms
were occupied, but that I could, if I pleased, lie down
on a deal side-table in the billiard-room. In our voy-
age down the coast from Nelson, we had brought for
The Buller and for Hokitika a cabin full of cut flowers
for bouquets, of which the diggers are extremely fond.
The fact was pretty enough : the store set upon a sin-
gle rose "an English rosebud" culled from a plant
that had been brought from the Old Country in a clip-
per ship, was still more touching, but the flowers made
sleep below impossible, and it had been blowing too
hard for me to sleep on deck, so that I was glad to lie
down upon my- table for an hour's rest. The boards
were rough and full of cracks, and I began to dream
that, walking on the landing-stage, I ran against a
man, who drew his revolver upon me. In wrenching
it from him, I hurt my hand in the lock, and woke to
find my fingers pinched in one of the chinks of the
long table. Despairing of further sleep, I started to
walk through Hokitika, and to explore the " clearings"
which the settlers are making in the bush.
At Pakihi and The Buller, I had already seen the
places to which the latest gold-digging "rush" had
taken place, with the result of planting there some
thousands of men with nothing to eat but gold for
diggers, however shrewd, fall an easy prey to those
who tell them of spots where gold may be had for the
digging, and never stop to think how they shall live.
HOKITIKA. 281
No attempt is at present made to grow even vegetables
for the diggers' food: every one is engrossed in the
search for gold. It is true that the dense jungle is
being driven back from the diggers' camps by fire and
sword, but the clearing is only made to give room for
tents and houses. At The Buller, I had found the
forest, which comes down at present to the water's
edge, and crowds upon the twenty shanties and hun-
dred tents and boweries which form the town, smoking
with fires on every side, and the parrots chattering
with fright. The fires obstinately refused to spread,
but the tall feathery trees were falling fast under the
axes of some ^Lundred diggers, who seemed not to have
much romantic sympathy for the sufferings of the tree-
ferns they had uprooted, or of the passion-flowers they
were tearing from the evergreens they had embraced.
The soil about The Fox, The Buller, The Okitiki,
and the other west-coast rivers on which gold is found,
is a black leaf-mould of extraordinary depth and rich-
ness ; but in New Zealand, as in America, the poor
lands are first occupied by the settlers, because the fat
soils will pay for the clearing only when there is already
a considerable population on the land. On this west
coast it rains nearly all the year, and vegetation has
such power, that " rainy Hokitika" must long continue
to be fed from Christchurch and from Nelson, for it
is as hard to keep the land clear as it is at the first to
clear it.
The profits realized upon ventures from Nelson to
the Gold Coast are enormous ; nothing less than fifty
per cent, will compensate the owners for losses on the
bars. The first cattle imported from Nelson to The
Buller fetched at the latter place double the price they
had cost only two days earlier. One result of this
maritime usury that was told me by the steward of the
24*
282 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
steamer in which I came down from Nelson is worth re-
cording for the benefit of the Economists. They had
on board, he said, a stock of spirits, sufficient for several
trips, but they altered their prices according to local-
ity ; from Nelson to The Buller, they charged 6d. a
drink, but, once in the river, the price rose to Is., at
which it remained until the ship left port upon her re-
turn to Nelson, when it fell again to 6d. A drover
coming down in charge of cattle was a great friend of
this steward, and the latter confirmed the story which
he had told me by waking the drover when we were
off The Buller bar : " Say, mister, if you want a drink,
you'd better take it. It'll be shilling drinks in five
minutes."
The Hokitikians flatter themselves that their city is
the "most rising place" on earth, and it must be con-
fessed that if population alone is to be regarded, the
rapidity of its growth has been amazing. At the time
of my visit, one year and a half had passed since the
settlement was formed by a few diggers, and it already
had a permanent population of ten thousand, while no
less than sixty thousand diggers and their friends
claimed it for their headquarters. San Francisco
itself did not rise so fast, Melbourne not much faster ;
but Hokitika, it must be remembered, is not only a
gold field port, but itself upon the gold field. It is
San Francisco and Placerville in one Ballarat and
Melbourne.
Inferior in its banks and theaters to Virginia City,
or even Austin, there is one point in which Hokitika
surpasses every American mining town that I have
seen- the goodness, namely, of its roads. Working
upon them in the bright morning sun which this day
graced "rainy Hokitika" with its presence, were a
gang of diggers and sailors, dressed in the clothes
HOKITIKA. 281
which every one must wear in a digging town, unless
he wishes to be stared at by passers-by. Even sailors
on shore " for a run " here wear cord breeches and high
tight-fitting boots, often armed with spurs, though, as
there are no horses except those of the Gold Coast
Police, they cannot enjoy much riding. The gang
working on the roads were like the people I met about
the town rough, but not ill-looking fellows. To my
astonishment I saw, conspicuous among their red shirts
and "jumpers," the blue and white uniform of the
mounted police ; and from the way in which the con-
stables handled their loaded rifles, I came to the con-
clusion that the road-menders must be a gang of pris-
oners. On inquiry, I found that all the New Zealand
"convicts," including under this sweeping title men
convicted for mere petty offenses, and sentenced to
hard labor for a month, are made to do good practical
work upon the roads: so much resistance to the police,
so much new road made or old road mended. I was
reminded of the Missourian practice of setting pris-
oners to dig out the stumps that cumber the streets of
the younger towns : the sentence on a man for being
drunk is said to be that he pull up a black walnut
stump; drunk and disorderly; a large buck-eye; as-
saulting the sheriff, a tough old hickory root, and so on.
The hair and beard of the short-sentence "convicts"
in New Zealand is never cut, and there is nothing
hang-dog in their looks ; but their faces are often
bright, and even happy. These cheerful prisoners are
for the most part " runners " sailors who have broken
their agreements in order to get upon the diggings,
and Avho bear their punishment philosophically, with
the hope of future "finds" before them.
When the great rush to Melbourne occurred in 1848,
ships by the hundred were left in the Yarra without a
284 GREATER BRITAIN.
single hand to navigate them. Nuggets in the hand
would not tempt sailors away from the hunt after the
nuggets in the bush. Ships left Hobson's Bay for
Chili with half a dozen hands ; and in one case that
came within my knowledge, a captain, his mate, and
three Maories took a brig across the Pacific to San
Francisco.
As the morning wore on, I came near seeing some-
thing of more serious crime than that for which these
"runners" were convicted. " Sticking-up," as high-
way robbery is called in the colonies, has always been
common in Australia and New Zealand, but of late
the bush-rangers, deserting their old tactics, have com-
menced to murder as well as rob. In three months of
1866, no less than fifty or sixty murders took place in
the South Island of New Zealand, all of them com-
mitted, it was believed, by a gang known as "The
Thugs." Mr. George Dobson, the government sur-
veyor, was murdered near Hokitika in May, but it was
not till November that the gang was broken up by the
police and volunteers. Levy, Kelly, and Burgess,
three of the most notorious of the villains, were on
their trial at Hokitika while I was there, and Sullivan,
also a member of the band, who had been taken at
Nelson, had volunteered to give evidence against them.
Sullivan was to come by steamer from the North, with-
out touching at The Buller or The Grey; and when
the ship was signaled, the excitement of the popula-
tion became considerable, the diggers asserting that
Sullivan was not only the basest, but the most guilty
of all the gang. As the vessel ran across the bar and
into the bay, the police were marched down to the
landing-place, and a yelling crowd surrounded them,
threatening to lynch the informer. When the steamer
came alongside the wharf, Sullivan was not to be seen,
HOKITIKA. 285
and it was soon discovered- that he had been landed in
a whale-boat upon the outer beach. Off rushed the
crowd to intercept the party in the town ; but they
found the jail gates already shut and barred.
It was hard to say whether it was for Thuggism or
for turning Queen's evidence that Sullivan was to be
lynched : crime is looked at here as leniently as it is
in Texas. I once met a man who had been a coroner
at one of the digging towns, who, talking of " old
times," said, quietly enough: " Oh, yes, plenty of
work ; we used to make a good deal of it. You see I
was paid by fees, so I used generally to manage to
hold four or five inquests on each body. Awful rogues
my assistants were: I shouldn't like to have some of
those men's sins to answer for."
The Gold Coast Police Force, which has been formed
to put a stop to Thuggism and bush-ranging, is a splendid
body of cavalry, about which many good stories are
told. One digger said to me : " Seen our policemen ?
We don't have no younger sons of British peers among
'em." Another account says that none but members
of the older English universities are admitted to the
force.
There are here, upon the diggings, many military
men and university graduates, who generally retain
their polish of manner, though outwardly they are
often the roughest of the rough. Some of them tell
strange stories. One Cambridge man, who was acting
as a post-office clerk (not at Hokitika), told me that in
1862, shortly after taking his degree, he went out to
British Columbia to settle upon land. He soon spent
his capital at billiards in Victoria City, and went as a
digger to the Frazer River. There he made a "pile,"
which he gambled away on his road back, and he
struggled through the winter of 1863-4 by shooting
286 GREATER BRITAIN.
and selling game. In 1864 he was attached as a hunter
to the Vancouver's Exploring Expedition, and in 1865
started with a small sum of money for Australia. He
was wrecked, lost all he had, and was forced to work
his passage down to Melbourne. From there he went
into South Australia as the driver of a reaping ma-
chine, and was finally, through the efforts of his friends
in England, appointed to a post-office clerkship in New
Zealand, which colony he intended to quit for Cali-
fornia or Chili. This was not the only man of educa-
tion whom I myself found upon the diggings, as I met
with a Christchurch man, who, however, had left Ox-
ford without a degree, actually working as a digger in
a surface mine.
In the outskirts of Hokitika, I came upon a palpable
Life Guardsman, cooking for a roadside station, with
his smock worn like a soldier's tunic, and his cap
stuck on one ear in Windsor fashion. A " squatter"
from near Christchurch, who was at The Buller, selling
sheep, told me that he had an ex-captain in the Guards
at work for weekly wages on his " sheep-run," and
that a neighbor had a lieutenant of lancers rail-split-
ting at his " station."
Neither the habits nor the morals of this strange
community are of the best. You never see a drunken
man, but drinking is apparently the chief occupation
of that portion of the town population which is not
actually employed in digging. The mail-coaches
which run across the island on the great new road,
and along the sands to the other mining settlements,
have singularly short stages, made so, it would seem,
for the benefit of the keepers of the " saloons," for at
every halt one or other of the passengers is expected
to "shout," or " stand," as it would be called at home,
"drinks all round." "What'll yer shout?" is the only
HOKITIKA. 287
question ; and want of coined money need be no hinder-
ance, for " gold-dust is taken at the bar." One of the
favorite amusements of the diggers at Pakihi, on the
days when the store-schooner arrives from Nelson, is
to fill a bucket with champagne, and drink till they
feel "comfortable." This done, they seat themselves
in the road, with their feet on the window-sill of the
shanty, and, calling to the first passer, ask him to
drink from the bucket. If he consents good : if not,
up they jump, and duck his head in the wine, which
remains for the next comer.
When I left Hokitika, it was by the new road, 1TO
miles in length, which crosses the Alps and the island,
and connects Christchurch, the capital of Canterbury,
with the western parts of the province. The bush be-
tween the sea and mountains is extremely lovely. The
highway is "corduroyed" with trunks of the tree-fern,
and, in the swamps, the sleepers have commenced to
grow at each end, so that a close-set double row of
young tree-ferns is rising along portions of the road.
The bush is densely matted with an undergrowth of
supple-jack and all kinds of creepers, but here and
there one finds a grove of tree-ferns twenty feet in
height, and grown so thickly as to prevent the exist-
ence of underwood and ground plants.
The peculiarity which makes the New Zealand west-
coast scenery the most beautiful in the world to those
who like more green than California has to show, is
that here alone can you find semi-tropical vegetation
growing close up to the eternal snows. The latitude
and the great moisture of the climate bring the long
glaciers very low into the valleys ; and the absence of
all true winter, coupled with the rain-fall, causes the
growth of palmlike ferns upon the ice-river's very
edge. The glaciers of Mount Cook are the longest in
288 GREATEE BRITAIN.
the world, except those at the sources of the Indus,
but close about them have been found tree-ferns of
thirty and forty v feet in height. It is not till you enter
the mountains that you escape the moisture of the
coast, and quit for the scenery of the Alps the scenery
of fairy-land.
Bumping and tumbling in the mail-cart through the
rushing blue-gray waters of the Taramakao, I found
myself within the mountains of the Snowy Range. In
the Otira Gorge, also know as Arthur's Pass from
Arthur Dobson, brother to the surveyor murdered by
the Thugs six small glaciers were in sight at once.
The Rocky Mountains opposite to Denver are loftier
and not less snowy than the New Zealand Alps, but in
the Rockies there are no glaciers south of about 50
N.; while in New Zealand a winterless country they
are common at eight degrees nearer to the line. The
varying amount of moisture has doubtless caused this
difference.
As we journeyed through the pass, there was one
grand view and only one: the glimpse of the ravine
to the eastward of Mount Rollestone, caught from the
desert shore of Lake Misery a tarn near the " divide"
of waters. About its banks there grows a plant, un-
known, they say, except at this lonely spot the Rock-
wood lily a bushy plant, with a round, polished, con-
cave leaf, and a cup-shaped flower of virgin white, that
seems to take its tint from the encircling snows.
In the evening, we had a view that for gloomy gran-
deur cannot well be matched that from near Bealey
township, where we struck the Waimakiriri Valley.
The river bed is half a mile in width, the stream itself
not more than ten yards across, but, like all New Zea-
land rivers, subjects to freshets, which fill its bed to a
great depth with a surging, foaming flood. Some of
HOKITIKA. 289
the victims of the Wairuakiriri are buried alongside the
road. Dark evergreen bush shuts in the river bed,
and is topped on the one side by dreary frozen peaks,
and on the other by still gloomier mountains of bare
rock.
Our road, next morning, from The Cass, where we
had spent the night, lay through the eastern foot-hills
and down to Canterbury Plains by way of Porter's
Pass a narrow track on the top of a tremendous
precipice, but soon to be changed for a road cut along
its face. The plains are one great sheep-run, open,
almost flat, and upon which you lose all sense of size.
Kt the mountain- foot they are covered with tall, coarse,
native grass, and are dry, like the Kansas prairie; about
Christchurch, the English clover and English grasses
have usurped the soil, and all is fresh and green.
New Zealand is at present divided into nine semi-
independent provinces, of which three are large and
powerful, and the remainder comparatively small and
poor. Six of the nine are true States, having each its
history as an independent settlement; the remaining
three are creations of the Federal government or of
the crown.
These are not the only difficulties in the way of New
Zealand statesmen, for the provinces themselves are
far from being homogeneous units. Two of the
wealthiest of all the States, which were settled as col-
onies with a religious tinge Otago, Presbyterian ; and
Canterbury, Episcopalian have been blessed or cursed
with the presence of a vast horde of diggers, of no par-
ticular religion, and free from any reverence for things
established. Canterbury Province is not only politi-
cally divided against" itself, but geographically split in
twain by the Snowy Range, and the diggers hold the
25
290 GREATER BRITAIN.
west-coast bush, the old settlers the east-coast plain.
East and west, each cries out that the other side is
robbing it. The Christchurch people say that their
money is being spent on Westland, and the Westland
diggers cry out against the foppery and aristocratic
pretense of Christchurch. A division of the province
seems inevitable, unless, indeed, the " Centralists" gain
the day, and bring about either a closer union of the
whole of the provinces, coupled with a grant of local
self-government to their subdivisions, or else the entire
destruction of the provincial system.
The division into provinces was at one time neces-
sary, from the fact that the settlements were histor-
ically distinct, and physically cut off from each other
by the impenetrability of the bush and the absence of
all roads; but the barriers are now surmounted, and
no sufficient reason can be found for keeping up ten
cabinets arid ten legislatures for a population of only
200,000 souls. Such is the costliness of the provincial
system and of Maori wars, that the taxation of the
New Zealanders is nine times as heavy as that of their
brother colonists in Canada.
It is not probable that so costly and so inefficient a
system of government as that which now obtains in
New Zealand can long continue to exist. It is not
only dear and bad, but dangerous in addition; and
during my visit to Port Chalmers, the province of
Otago was loudly threatening secession. Like all
other federal constitutions, that of 'New Zealand fails
to provide a sufficiently strong central power to meet
a divergence of interests between the several States.
The system which failed in Greece, which failed in
Germany, which failed in America, has failed here in
the antipodes; and it may be said that, in these days
of improved communications, wherever federation is
HOKITIKA. 291
possible, a still closer union is at least as likely to prove
lasting.
New Zealand suffers, not only by the artificial di-
vision into provinces, but also by the physical division
of the country into two great islands, too far apart to
be ever thoroughly homogeneous, too near together to
be wholly independent of each other. The difficulty
has been hitherto increased by the existence in the
North of a powerful and warlike native race, all but
extinct in the South Island. Not only have the
Southern people no native wars, but they have no
native claimants from whom every acre for the settler
must be bought, and they naturally decline to submit
to ruinous taxation to purchase Parewanui from, or to
defend Taranaki against, the Maories. Having been
thwarted by the Home government in the agitation for
the "separation" of the islands, the Southern people
now aim at " Ultra-Provincialism," declaring for a sys-
tem under which the provinces would virtually be in-
dependent colonies, connected only by a confederation
of the loosest kind.
The jealousies of the great towns, here as in Italy,
have much bearing upon the political situation. Auck-
land is for separation, because in that event it would
of necessity become the seat of the government of the
North Island. In the South, Christchurch and Dun-
edin have similar claims ; and each of them, ignoring
the other, begs for separation in the hope of becoming
the Southern capital. Wellington and Nelson alone
are for the continuance of the federation Wellington
because it is already the capital, and Nelson because
it is intriguing to supplant its neighbor. Although
the difficulties of the moment mainly arise out of the
war expenditure, and will terminate with the extinc-
tion of the Maori race, her geographical shape almost
292 GREATER BRITAIN.
forbids us to hope that New Zealand will ever form a
single country under a strong central government.
To obtain an adequate idea of the difficulty of his
task, a new governor, on landing in New Zealand,
could not do better than cross the Southern Island.
On the west side of the mountains he would find a
restless digger-democracy, likely to be succeeded in
the future by small manufacturers, and spade-farmers
growing root-crops upon small holdings of fertile loam;
on the east, gentlemen sheep-farmers, holding their
twenty thousand acres each ; supporters by their posi-
tion of the existing state of things, or of an aristocratic
republic, in which men of their own caste'would rule.
Christchurch Episcopalian, dignified the first set-
tlement in the province, and still the capital, affects to
despise Hokitika, already more wealthy and more
populous. Christchurch imports English rooks to caw
in the elm-trees of her cathedral close ; Hokitika im-
ports men. Christchurch has not fallen away from her
traditions : every street is named from an English
bishopric, and the society is taat of an English country
town.
Returning northward, along the coast, in the shade
of the cold and gloomy mountains of the Kaikoura
Eange, I found at Wellington two invitations awaiting
me to be present at great gatherings of the native
tribes.
The next day I started for the Manawatu River and
Parewanui Pah.
POLYNESIANS. 293
CHAPTER III.
POLYNESIANS.
THE name "Maori" is said to mean "native," but
the boast on the part of the Maori race contained in
the title "Natives of the Soil" is one which conflicts
with their traditions. These make them out to be
mere interlopers Tahitians, they themselves say
who, within historic ages, sailed down island by island
in their war canoes, massacring the inhabitants, and,
finally landing in Few Zealand, found a numerous
horde of blacks of the Australian race living in the
forests of the South Island. Favored by a year of
exceptional drought, they set fire to the woods, and
burnt to the last man, or drove into the sea the aborig-
inal possessors of the soil. Some ethnologists believe
that this account is in the main correct, but hold that
the Maori race is Malay, and not originally Tahitian :
others have tried to show that the conflict between
blacks and browns was not confined to these two
islands, but raged throughout the whole of Polynesia;
and that it was terminated in New Zealand itself, not
by the destruction of the blacks, but by the amalga-
mation of the opposing races.
The legends allege war as the cause for the flight to
New Zealand. The accounts of some of the migrations
are circumstantial in the extreme, and describe the
first planting of the yams, the astonishment of the
people at the new flowers and trees of the islands, and
many such details of the landing. The names of the
25*
294 GREATER BRITAIN.
chiefs and of the canoes are given in a sort of "cata-
logue of ships," and the wars of the settlers are nar-
rated at length, with the heroic exaggeration common
to the legends of all lands.
The canoe fleet reached New Zealand in the fifteenth
century it is believed, and the people landed chanting
a chorus-speech, which is still preserved:
" We come at last to this fair land a resting-place ;
Spirit of the Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our
hearts for food."
That the Maories are Polynesians there can be no
doubt: a bird with them is " manu," a fish "ika" (the
Greek I'xOvs, become with the digamma "piscis" and
"poisson;" and connected with "fisch," and "fish"),
as they are throughout the Malayan archipelago and
Polynesian isles ; the Maori " atua," a god, is the
"hotua" of the Friendly Islanders; the "wahre's," or
native huts, are identical in all the islands ; the names
of the chief deities are the same throughout Polynesia,
and the practice of tattooing, the custom of carving
grotesque squatting figures on tombs, canoes, and
" pahs," and that of tabooing things, places, times, and
persons, prevail from Hawaii to Stewart's Land, though
not everywhere so strictly read as in the Tonga Isles,
where the very ducks are muzzled to keep them from
disturbing by their quacking the sacred stillness of
"tapu time."
Polynesian traditions mostly point to the Malay
peninsula as the cradle of the race, and the personal
resemblance of the Maories to the Malays is very
strong, except in the setting of the eyes; while the
figures on the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs have
eyes more oblique than are now found among the
Maori people. Strangely enough, the New Zealand
POLYNESIANS. 295
"pah" is identical with the Burmese " stockade," but
the word u pah" stands both for the palisade and for
the village of wahre's which it contains. The Poly-
nesian and Malay tongues have not much in common ;
but that variations of language sufficiently great to
leave no apparent tie spring up in a few centuries,
cannot be denied by us who know for certain that
" visible" and "optician" come from a common root,
and can trace the steps through which "jour" is de-
rived from "dies."
The tradition of the Polynesians is that they came
from Paradise, which they place, in the southern
islands, to the north ; in the northern islands, to the
westward. This legend indicates a migration from
Asia to the northern islands, and thence southward to
New Zealand, and accounts for the non-colonization of
Australia by the Polynesians. The sea between New
Zealand, and Australia is too rough and wide to be
traversed by canoes, and the wind-chart shows that the
track of the Malays must have been eastward along
the equatorial belt of calms, and then back to the south-
west with the southeast trade-wind right abeam to their
canoes.
The wanderings of the Polynesian race were, pro-
bably, not confined to the Pacific. Ethnology is as
yet in its infancy : we know nothing of the Tudas of
the Neilgherries ; we ask in vain who are the Gonds ;
we are in doubt about the Japanese ; we are lost in
perplexity as to who we may be ourselves ; but there
is at least as much ground for the statement that the
Red Indians are Malays as for the assertion that we are
Saxons.
The resemblances between the Red Indians and the
Pacific Islanders are innumerable. Strachey's account
of the Indians of Virginia, written in 1612, needs but a
296 GREATER BRITAIN.
change in the names to fit the Maories: Powh&tan's
house is that of "William Thompson. Cannibalism
prevailed in Brazil and along the Pacific coast of North
America at the time of their discovery, and even the
Indians of Chili ate many an early navigator ; the
aborigines of Vancouver Island are tattooed; their
canoes resemble those of the Malays, and the mode of
paddling is the same from New Zealand to Hudson's
Bay from Florida to Singapore. Jade ornaments of
the shape of the Maori " Heitiki" (the charm worn
about the neck) have been found by the French in
Guadaloupe ; the giant masonry of Central America
is identical with that of Cambodia and Siam. Small-
legged squatting figures, like those of the idols of China
and Japan, not only surmount the gate-posts of the New
Zealand pahs, but are found eastward to Honduras,
westward to Burmah, to Tartary, and to Ceylon. The
fiber mats, common to Polynesia and Red India, are
unknown to savages elsewhere, and the feather head-
dresses of the Maories are almost identical with those
of the Delawares or Hurons.
In the Indians of America and of Polynesia there
is the same hatred of continued toil, and the same
readiness to engage in violent exertion for a time. Siir
perstition and witchcraft are common to all untaught
peoples, but in the Malays and red men they take
similar shapes; and the Indians of Mexico and Peru
had, like all the Polynesians, a sacred language, un-
derstood only by the priests. The American altars
were one with the temples of the Pacific, and were not
confined to Mexico, for they form the '" mounds" of
Ohio and Illinois. There is great likeness between
the legend of Maui, the Maori hero, and that of Hia-
watha, especially in the history of how the sun was
noosed, and made to move more slowly through the
POLYNESIANS. 297
skies, so as to give men long days for toil. The re-
semblance of the Maori "runanga," or assembly for
debate, to the Indian council is extremely close, and
throughout America and Polynesia a singular blending
of poetry and ferocity is characteristic of the Malays.
In color, the Indians and Polynesians are not alike ;
but color does not seem to be, ethnologically speaking,
of much account. The Hindoos of Calcutta have the
same features as those of Delhi ; but the former are
black, the latter brown, or, if high-caste men, almost
white. Exposure to sun, in a damp, hot climate,
seems to blacken every race that it does not destroy.
The races that it will finally destroy, tropical heat first
whitens. The English planters of Mississippi and Flor-
ida are extremely dark, yet there is not a suspicion of
black blood in their veins : it is the white blood of the
slaves to which the Abolitionists refer in their philip-
pics. The Jews at Bombay and Aden are of a deep
brown ; in Morocco they are swarthy ; in England,
nearly white.
Religious rites and social customs outlast both phys-
ical type and language ; but even were it otherwise,
there is great resemblance in build and feature be-
tween the Polynesians and many of the "Bed-Indian"
tribes. The aboriginal people of New York State are
described by the early navigators not as tall, grave,
hooked-nose men, but as copper colored, pleasant look-
ing, and with quick, shrewd eyes; and the Mexican
Indian bears more likeness to the Sandwich Islander
than to the Delaware or Cherokee.
In reaching South America, there were no distances
to be overcome such as to present insurmountable dif-
ficulties to the Malays. Their canoes have frequently,
within the years that we have had our missionary
stations in the islands, made involuntary voyages of
298 GREATER BRITAIN.
six or seven hundred miles. A Western editor has
said of Columbus that he deserves no praise for dis-
covering America, as it is so large that he could not
well have missed it; but Easter Island is so small, that
the chances must have been thousands to one against
its being reached by canoes sailing even from the near-
est land; yet it is an ascertained fact that Easter Island
was peopled by the Polynesians. Whatever drove
canoes to Easter Island would have driven them from
the island to Chili and Peru. The Polynesian Malays
would sometimes be taken out to sea by sudden storms,
by war, by hunger, by love of change. In war time,
whole tribes have, within historic days, been clapped
into their boats, and sent to sea by a merciful con-
queror who had dined: this occurs, however, only
when the market is already surfeited with human
joints.
In sailing from America to New Zealand, we met
strong westerly winds before we had gone half way
across the seas, and, south of the trade-wind region,
these blow constantly to within a short distance of the
American coast, where they are lost upon the edge of
the Chilian current. A canoe blown off from the
southern islands, and running steadily before the wind,
would be cast on the Peruvian coast near Quito.
When Columbus landed in the Atlantic islands, he
was, perhaps, not mistaken in his belief that it was
" The Indies" that he had found an India peopled by
the Malay race, till lately the most widely-scattered of
all the nations of the world, but one which the English
seem destined to supplant.
The Maories, without doubt, were originally Malays,
emigrants from the winterless climate of the Malay
peninsula and Polynesian archipelago; and, although
the northernmost portions of New Zealand suited them
PAREWANUI PAH. 299
not ill, the cold winters of the South Island prevented
the spread of the bands they planted there. At all
times it has been remarked by ethnologists and accli-
matizers that it is easier by far to carry men and beasts
from the poles toward the tropics than from the tropics
to the colder regions. The Malays, in coming to New
Zealand, unknowingly broke one of Nature's laws, and
their descendants ,are paying the penalty in extinction.
CHAPTER IV.
PAREWANUI PAH.
"HERE is Petatone.
This is the 10th of December;
The sun shines, and the birds sing;
Clear is the water in rivers and streams ;
Bright is the sky, and the sun is high in the air.
This is the 10th of December ;
But where is the money ?
Three years has this matter in many debates been discussed,
And here at last is Petatone;
But where is the money?"
A band of Maori women, slowly chanting in a high,
strained key, stood at the gate of a pah, and met with
this song a few Englishmen who were driving rapidly
on to their land.
Our track lay through a swamp of the New Zealand
flax. Huge swordlike leaves and giant flower-stalks
all but hid from view the Maori stockades. To the
left was a village of low wahres, fenced round with a
double row of lofty posts, carved with rude images of
gods and men, and having posterns here and there.
300 GREATER BRITAIN.
On the right were groves of karakas, children of Tane-
mahuta, the New Zealand sacred trees under their
shade, on a hill, a camp and another and larger pah.
In startling contrast to the dense masses of the oily
leaves, there stretched a great extent of light-green
sward, where there were other camps and a tall flag-
staff, from which floated the white flag and the Union
Jack, emblems of British sovereignty and peace.
A thousand kilted Maories dotted the green land-
scape with patches of brilliant tartans and scarlet cloth.
Women lounged about, whiling away the time with
dance and song; and from all the corners of the glade
the soft cadence of the Maori cry of welcome came
floating to UK on the breeze, sweet as the sound of dis-
tant bells.
As we drove quickly on, we found ourselves in the
midst of a thronging crowd of square-built men, brown
in color, and for the most part not much darker than
Spaniards, but with here and there a woolly negro in
their ranks. Glancing at them as we were hurried
past, we saw that the men were robust, well limbed,
and tall. They greeted us pleasantly with many a
cheerful, open smile, but the faces of the older people
were horribly tattooed in spiral curves. The chiefs
carried battle-clubs of jade and bone ; the women wore
strange ornaments. At the flagstaff we pulled up,
and, while the preliminaries of the council were ar-
ranged, had time to discuss with Maori and with
"Pakha" (white man) the questions that had brought
us thither.
The purchase of an enormous block of land that
of the Manawatu had long been an object wished for
and worked for by the Provincial Government of Wel-
lington. The completion of the sale it was that had
brought the Superintendent, Dr. Featherston, and
PAEEWANUI PAH. 301
humbler Pakehas to Parewanui Pah. It was not only
that the land was wanted by way of room for the flood
of settlers, but purchase by government was, more-
over, the only means whereby war between the various
native claimants of the land could be prevented. The
Pake'ha and Maori had agreed upon a price ; the ques-
tion that remained for settlement was how the money
should be shared. One tribe had owned the land from
the earliest times; another had conquered some miles
of it; a third had had one of its chiefs cooked and
eaten upon the ground. In the eye of the Maori law,
the last of these titles was the best: the blood of a
chief overrides all mere historic claims. The two
strongest human motives concurred to make war prob-
able, for avarice and jealousy alike prevented agree-
ment as to the division of the spoil. Each of the three
tribes claiming had half a dozen allied and related
nations upon the ground ; every man was there who
had a claim, direct or indirect, or thought he had, to
any portion of the block. Individual ownership and
tribal ownership conflicted. The Ngatiapa were well
armed; the JSTgatiraukawa had their rifles; the Wang-
anuis had sent for theirs. The greatest tact on the
part of Dr. Featherston was needed to prevent a flght
such as would have roused New Zealand from Auck-
land to Port Nicholson.
On a signal from the Superintendent, the heralds
went round the camps and pahs to call the tribes to
council. The summons was a long-drawn minor-
descending-scale : a plaintiff cadence, which at a dis-
tance blends into a bell-like chord. The words mean:
"Come hither! Come hither! Come! come! Maories!
Come !" and men, women, and children soon came
thronging in from every side, the chiefs bearing scepters
and spears of ceremony, and their women wearing
26
302 GEEATEE BEITAIN.
round their necks the symbol of nobility, the Heitiki,
or greenstone god. These images, we were told, have
pedigrees, and names like those of men.
We, with the resident magistrate of Wanganui,
seated ourselves beneath the flagstaff. A chief, meet-
ing the people as they came up, stayed them with the
gesture that Homer ascribes to Hector, and bade them
sit in a huge circle round the spar.
No sooner were we seated on our mat than there
ran slowly into the center of the ring a plumed and
kilted chief, with sparkling eyes, the perfection of a
savage. Halting suddenly, he raised himself upon his
toes, frowned, and stood brandishing his short feathered
spear. It was Hunia t4 Hake'ke', the young chief of
the ISTgatiapa.
Throwing off his plaid, he commenced to speak,
springing hither and thither with leopard-like freedom
of gait, and sometimes leaping high into the air to
emphasize a word. Fierce as were the gestures, his
speech was conciliatory, and the Maori flowed from
his lips a soft Tuscan tongue. As, with a movement
full of vigorous grace, he sprang back to the ranks, to
take his seat, there ran round the ring a hum and buzz
of popular applause.
" Governor" Hunia was followed by a young Wan-
ganui chief, who wore hunting breeches and high
boots, and a long black mantle over his European
clothes. There was something odd in the shape of the
cloak ; and when we came to look closely at it, we
found that it was the skirt of the riding-habit of his
half-caste wife. The great chiefs paid so little heed to
this flippant fellow, as to stand up and harangue their
tribes in the middle of his speech, which came thus to
an untimely end.
A funny old graybeard, Waite> Maru Mara, next
PAREWANUI PAH. 303
rose, and, smothering down the jocularity of his face,
turned toward us for a moment the typical head of
Peter, as you see it on the windows of every modern
church for a moment only, for, as he raised his hand
to wave his tribal scepter, his apostolic drapery began
to slip from off his shoulders, and he had to clutch at
it with the energy of a topman taking-in a reef in a
whole gale. His speech was full of Nestorian proverbs
and wise saws, but he wandered off into a history of
the Wanganui lands, by which he soon became as
wearied as we ourselves were ; for he stopped short,
and, with a twinkle of the eye, said : " Ah ! Waite>e*
is no longer young: he is climbing the snow-clad
mountain Ruahin ; he is becoming an old man;" and
down he sat.
Karanama, a small Ngatiraukawa chief with a white
moustache, who looked like an old French concierge,
followed Maru Maru, and, with much use of his scepter,
related a dream foretelling the happy issue of the
negotiations; for the little man was one of those
" dreamers of dreams" against whom Moses warned
the Israelites.
Karanama's was not the only trance and vision of
which we heard in the course of these debates. The
Maories believe that in their dreams the seers hear
great bands of spirits singing chants : these when they
wake the prophets reveal to all the people; but it is
remarked that the vision is generally to the advantage
of the seer's tribe.
Karanama's speech was answered by the head chief
of the Rangitan^ Maories, Te Peeti Te Awe Awe, who,
throwing off his upper clothing as he warmed to his
subject, and strutting pompously round and round the
ring, challenged Karanama to immediate battle, or his
tribe to general encounter ; but he cooled down as he
304 GREATER BRITAIN.
went on, and in his last sentence showed us that Maori
oratory, however ornate usually, can be made extremely
terse. " It is hot," he said " it is hot, and the very
birds are loath to sing. We have talked for a week,
and are therefore dry. Let us take our share ,10,000,
or whatever we can get, and then we shall be dry no
more."
The Maori custom of walking about, dancing, leaping,
undressing, running, and brandishing spears during
the delivery of a speech is convenient for all parties :
to the speaker, because it gives him time to think of
what he shall say next; to the listener, because it allows
him to weigh the speaker's words ; to the European
hearer, because it permits the interpreter to keep pace
with the orator without an effort. On this occasion,
the resident magistrate of Wanganui, Mr. Buller, a
Maori scholar of eminence, and the attached friend of
some of the chiefs, interpreted for Dr. Featherston ;
and we were allowed to lean over him in such a way as
to hear every word that passed. That the able Super-
intendent of Wellington the great protector of the
Maories, the man to whom they look as to Queen Vic-
toria's second in command, should be wholly depend-
ent upon interpreters, however skilled, seems almost
too singular to be believed ; but it is possible that Dr.
Featherston may find in pretended want of knowledge
much advantage to the government. He is able to
collect his thoughts before he replies to a difficult
question ; he can allow an epithet to escape his notice
in the filter of translation ; he can listen and speak
with greater dignity.
The day was wearing on before T Peeti's speech
was done, and, as the Maories say, our waistbands be-
gan to slip down low; so all now went to lunch, both
Maori and Pakdha, they sitting in circles, each with
PAEEWANUI PAH. 305
his bowl, or flax-blade dish, and wooden spoon, we
having a table and a chair or two in the Mission-
house ; but we were so tempted by Hori Kingi's white-
bait that we begged some of him as we passed. The
Maories boil the little fish in milk, and flavor them
with leeks. Great fish, meat, vegetables, almost all
they eat, in short, save whitebait, is "steamed" in the
underground native oven. A hole is dug, and filled
with wood, and stones are piled upon the wood, a
small opening being left for draught. While the wood
is burning, the stones become red-hot, and fall through
into the hole. They are then covered with damp fern,
or else with wet mats of flax, plaited at the moment; the
meat is put in, and covered with more mats; the whole
is sprinkled with water, and then earth is heaped on
till the vapor ceases to escape. The joint takes about
an hour, and is delicious. Fish is wrapped in a kind
of dock-leaf, and so steamed.
While the men's eating was thus going on, many of
the women stood idly round, and we were enabled to
judge of Maori beauty. A profusion of long, crisp
curls, a short black pipe thrust between stained lips, a
pair of black eyes gleaming from a tattooed face, de-
note the Maori belle, who wears for her only robe a
long bedgown of dirty calico, but whose ears and neck
are tricked out with greenstone ornaments, the signs
of birth and wealth. Here and there you find a girl
with long, smooth tresses, and almond-shaped black
eyes : these charms often go along with prominent, thin
features, and suggest at once the Jewess and the gipsy
girl. The women smoke continually; the men, not
much.
When at four o'clock we returned to the flagstaff,
we found that the temperature, which during the
morning had been too hot, had become that of a fine
26*
306 GREATER BRITAIN.
English June the air light, the trees and grass lit by
a gleaming yellow sunshine that reminded me of the
Californian haze.
During luncheon we had heard that Dr. Featherston's
proposals as to the division of the purchase-money had
been accepted by the Ngatiapa, but not by Hunia him-
self, whose vanity w r ould brook no scheme not of his
own conception. We were no sooner returned to the
ring than he burst in upon us with a defiant speech.
"Unjust," he declared, " as was the proposition of
great 'Pe'tatone'' (Featherston), he would have ac-
cepted it for the sake of peace had he been allowed to
divide the tribal share ; but as the Wanganuis insisted
on having a third of his .15,000, and as Pe'taton^
seemed to support them in their claim, he should have
nothing more to do with the sale." "The Wangenuis
claim as our relatives," he said: "verily, the pumpkin-
shoots spread far."
Karanama, the seer, stood up to answer Hunia, and
began his speech in a tone of ridicule. " Hunia is like
the ti-tree : if you cut him down he sprouts again."
Hunia sat quietly through a good deal of this kind of
wit, till at last some epithet provoked him to interrupt
the speaker. " What a fine fellow you are, Karanama;
you'll tell us soon that you've two pair of legs." " Sit
down !" shrieked Karanama, and a word- war ensued,
but the abuse was too full of native raciness and
vigor to be fit for English ears. The chiefs kept danc-
ing round the ring, threatening each other with their
spears. "Why do you not hurl at me, Karanama?"
said Hunia; "it is easier to parry spears than lies."
At last Huuia sat down.
Karanama, feinting and making at him with his
spear, reproached Hunia with a serious flaw in his
pedigree a blot which is said to account for Hunia's
PAREWANUI PAH. 307
hatred to the Ngatiraukawa, to whom his mother was
for years a slave. Hunia, without rising from the
ground, shrieked "Liar!" Karanama again spoke the
obnoxious word. Springing from the ground, Hunia
snatched his spear from where it stood, and ran at his
enemy as though to strike him. Karanama stood stock-
still. Coming up to him at a charge, Hunia suddenly
stopped, raised himself on tiptoe, shaking his spear,
and flung out some contemptuous epithet; then turned,
and stalked slowly, with a springing gait, back to his
own corner of the ring. There he stood, haranguing
his people in a bitter undertone. Karanama did the
like with his. The interpreters could not keep pace
with what was said. We understood that the chiefs
were calling 'each upon his tribe to support him, if need
were, in war. After a few minutes of this pause they
wheeled round, as though by a common impulse, and
again began to pour out torrents of abuse. The ap-
plause became frequent, hums quickened into shouts,
cheer followed cheer, till at last the ring was alive with
men and women springing from the ground, and cry-
ing out on the opposing leader for a dastard.
We had previously been told to have no fear that
resort would be had to blows. The Maories never fight
upon a sudden quarrel : war is with them a solemn act,
entered upon only after much deliberation. Those of
us who were strangers to New Zealand were neverthe-
less not without our doubts, while for half an hour we
lay upon the grass watching the armed champions
running round the ring, challenging each other to
mortal combat on the spot.
The chieftains at last became exhausted, and the
Mission-bell beginning to toll for evening chapel, Hunia
broke off hi the middle of his abuse : "Ah ! I hear the
bell!" and, turning, stalked out of the ring toward his
308 GREATER BRITAIN.
pah, leaving it to be inferred, by those who did not
know him, that he was going to attend the service.
The meeting broke up in confusion, and the Upper
Wanganui tribes at once began their march toward
the mountains, leaving behind them only a delegation
of their chiefs.
As we drove down to the coast, we talked over the
close resemblance of the Maori runangato the Homeric
council; it had struck us all. Here, as in the Greek
camp, we had the ring of people, into which advanced
the lance-bearing or scepter-bearing chiefs, they alone
speaking, and the people backing them only by a hum :
" The block of wood dictates not to the carver, neither
the people to their chiefs," is a Maori proverb. The
boasting of ancestry, and bragging of deeds and mili-
tary exploits, to which modern wind-bags would only
casually allude, was also thoroughly Homeric. In
Hunia we had our Achilles; the retreat of Hunia to
his wahre' was that of Achilles to his tent ; the cause of
quarrel alone was different, though in both cases it
arose out of the division of spoil, in the one case the
result of lucky wars, in the other of the Pakdha's weak-
ness. The Argive and Maori leaders are one in fire,
figure, port, and mien; alike, too, even in their sulki-
ness. In Waiter^ and Aperahama Tipai we had two
Nestors; our Thersites was Porea, the jester, a half-
mad buffoon, continually mimicking the chiefs or in-
terrupting them, and being by them or their messen-
gers as often kicked and cuffed. In the frequency of
repetition, the use of proverbs and of simile, the Mao-
ries resemble not Homer's Greeks so much as Homer's
self; but the calling together of the people by the
heralds, the secret conclave of the chiefs, the feast, the
conduct of the assembly all were the exact repetition
of the events recorded in the first and second books ot
PAREWANUI PAH. 309
the " Iliad" as having happened on the Trojan plains.
The single point of difference was not in favor of the
Greeks ; the Maori women took their place in council
with the men.
As we drove home, a storm came on, and hung
about the coast so long, that it was not till near eleven
at night that we were able to take our swim in the
heated waters of the Manawatu River, and frighten off
every duck and heron in the district.
In the morning, we rose to alarming news. Upon
the pretext of the presence in the neighborhood of
the Hau-Hau chief Wi Hapi, with a war party of
200 men, the unarmed Parewanui natives had sent
to Wanganui for their guns, and it was only by a
conciliatory speech at the midnight runanga that Mr.
Buller had succeeded in preventing a complete break-
up of all the camps, if not an intertribal war. There
seemed to be white men behind the scenes who were
not friendly to the sale, and the debate had lasted
from dark till dawn.
While we were at breakfast, a Ngatiapa officer of
the native contingent brought down a letter to Dr.
Featherston from Hunia and Hori Kingi, calling us to
a general meeting of the tribes convened for noon, to
be held in the Ngatiapa Pah. The letter was addressed,
"Kia te Petatone te Huperintene " " To the Feather-
ston, the Superintendent" the alterations in the chief
words being made to bring them within the grasp of
Maori tongues, which cannot sound /'s, th's, nor sibi-
lants of any kind. The absence of harsh sounds, and
the rule which makes every word end with a vowel,'
give a peculiar softness and charm to the Maroi lan-
guage. Sugar becomes huka ; scissors, hikiri ; sheep,
hipi; and so with all English words adopted into
Maori. The rendering of the Hebrew names of the
310 GREATER BRITAIN.
Old Testament is often singular: Genesis becomes
Kenehi ; Exodus is altered into Ekoruhe ; Leviticus is
hardly recognizable in Rewitikuha ; Tiuteronomi reads
strangely for Deuteronomy, and Hohua for Joshua;
Jacob, Isaac, Moses, become Hakopa, Ihaka, and
Mohi ; Egypt is softened into Ihipa, Jordan into Ho-
ramo. The list of the nations of Canaan seems to have
been a stumbling-block in the missionaries' way. The
success obtained with Girgashites has not been great ;
it stands Rirekahi ; Gaash is transmuted into Kaaha,
and Eleazar into Ereatara.
When we drove on to the ground all was at a dead-
lock the flagstaff bare, the chiefs sleeping in their
wahres, and the common folk whiling away the hours
with haka songs. Dr. Featherston retired from the
ground, declaring that till the Queen's flag was hoisted
he would attend no debate ; but he permitted us to
wander in among the Maories.
We were introduced to Tamiana te Rauparaha, chief
of the Ngatitoa branch of the Ngatiraukawa, and son
of the great cannibal chief of the same name, who
murdered Captain Wakefield. Old Rauparaha it was
who hired an English ship to carry him and his nation
to the South Island, where they ate several tribes, boil-
ing the chiefs, by the captain's consent, in the ship's
coppers, and salting down for future use the common
people. When the captain, on return to port, claimed
his price, Rauparaha told him to go about his business,
or he should be salted too. The captain took, the hint,
but he did not escape for long, as he was finally eaten
by the Sandwich Islanders in Hawaii.
In answer to our request for a dance-song, Tamiana
and Horomona Toremi replied, through an interpreter,
that "the hands of the singers should beat time as fast
as the pinions of the wild duck;" and in a minute we
PAEEWANUI PAH. 311
were in the middle of an animated crowd of boys and
women collected by Porea, the buffoon.
As soon as the singers had squatted upon the grass,
the jester began to run slowly up and down between
their ranks as they sat swinging backward and for-
ward in regular time, groaning in chorus, and looking
upward with distorted faces.
In a second dance, a girl standing out upon the
grass chanted the air a kind of capstan song and
then the "dancers," who were seated in one long row,
joined in chorus, breathing violently in perfect time,
half forming words, but not notes, swinging from side
to side like the howling dervishes, and using frightful
gestures. This strange whisper- roaring went on in-
creasing in rapidity and fierceness, till at last the
singers worked themselves into a frenzy, in which they
rolled their eyes, stiffened the arms and legs, clutched
and clawed with the fingers, and snorted like mad-
dened horses. Stripping off their clothes, they looked
more like the Maories of thirty years ago than those
who see them only at the mission-stations would be-
lieve. Other song-dances, in which the singers stood
striking their heels at measured intervals upon the
earth, were taken up with equal vigor by the boys and
women, the grown men in their dignity keeping them-
selves aloof, although in his heart every Maori loves
mimetic dance and song. We remarked that in the
"haka" the old women seemed more in earnest than
the young, who were always bursting into laughter,
and forgetting words and time.
The savage love for semitones makes Maori music
somewhat wearisome to the English ear; so after a
time we began to walk through the pahs and sketch
the Maories, to their great delight. I was drawing
the grand old head of a venerable dame Oriuhia t6
312 GREATER BRITAIN.
Aka when she asked to see what I was about. As
soon as I showed her the sketch, she began to call me
names, and from her gestures I saw that the insult was
in the omission of the tattooing on her chin. When I
inserted the stripes and curves, her delight was such
that I greatly feared she would have embraced me.
Strplling into the karaka groves, we came upon a
Maori wooden tomb, of which the front was carved
with figures three feet high, grotesque and obscene.
Gigantic eyes, hands bearing clubs, limbs without
bodies, and bodies without limbs, were figured here
and there among more perfect carvings, and the whole
was of a character which the Maories of to-day disown
as they do cannibalism, wishing to have these horrid
things forgotten. -The sudden rise of the Hau-Hau
fanaticism within the last few years has shown us that
the layer of civilization by which the old Maori habits
are overlaid is thin indeed.
The flags remained down all day, and in the after-
noon we returned to the coast to shoot duck and
puke'ko, a sort of moor-hen. It was not easy work, for
the birds fell in the flax swamp, and the giant sword-
like leaves of the Phormium tenax cut our hands as we
pushed our way through its dense clumps and bushes,
while some of the party suffered badly from the sun:
Maui, the Maories say, must have chained him up too
near the earth. After dark, we could see the glare of
the fires in the karaka groves, where the Maories were
in council, and a government surveyor came in to
report that he had met the dissentient Wanganuis
riding fast toward the hills.
In the morning, we were allowed to stay upon the
coast till ten or eleven o'clock, when a messenger came
down from Mr. Buller to call us to the pah : the coun-
cil of the chiefs had again sat all night for the Mao-
PAEEWANUI PAH. 313
ries act upon their proverb that the eyes of great chiefs
should know no rest and Hunia had carried every-
thing before him in the debate.
As soon as the ring was formed, Hunia apologized
for the pulling down of the Queen's flag; it had been
done, he said, as a sign that the sale was broken off,
not as an act of disrespect. Having, in short, had
things entirely his own way, he was disposed to be
extremely friendly both to whites and Maories. The
sale, he said, must be brought about, or the "world
would be on fire with an intertribal war. What is the
good of the mountain-land ? There is nothing to eat
but stones; granite is a hard but not a strengthening
food ; and women and land are the ruin of men."
After congratulatory speeches from other chiefs,
some of the older men treated us to histories of the
deeds that had been wrought upon the block of land.
Some of their speeches notably those of Aperahama
and Ihakara were' largely built up of legendary
poems ; but the orators quoted the poetry as such only
when in doubt how far the sentiments were those of
the assembled people : when they were backed by the
hum which denotes applause, they at one commenced
with singular art to weave the poetry into that which
was their own.
As soon as the speeches were over, Hunia and Iha-
kara marched up to the flagstaff carrying between
them the deed-of-sale. Putting it down before Dr.
Featherston, they shook hands with each other and
with him, and swore that for the future there should
be eternal friendship between their tribes. The
deed was then signed by many hundred men and
women, and Dr. Featherston started with Captain te
Kepa, of the native contingent, to fetch the 25,000
27
314 GREATER BRITAIN.
from Wanganui town, the Maories firing their rifles
into the air as a salute.
The Superintendent was no sooner gone than a kind
of solemn grief seemed to come over the assembled
people. After all, they were selling the graves of
their ancestors, they argued. The wife of Hamuera,
seizing her husband's greenstone club, ran out from
the ranks of the women, and began to intone an im-
promptu song, which was echoed by the women, in a
pathetic chorus- chant :
" The sun shines, but we quit our land : we abandon forever its forests,
its mountains, its groves, its lakes, its shores.
All its fair fisheries, here, under the bright sun, forever we re-
nounce.
It is a lovely day ; fair will be the children that are born to-day ; but
we quit our land.
In some parts there is forest; in others, the ground is skimmed over
by the birds in their flight.
Upon the trees there is fruit; in the streams, fish; in the fields,
potatoes ; fern-roots in the bush ;' but we quit our land."
It is in chorus-speeches of this kind that David's
psalms must have been recited by the Jews ; but on
this occasion there was a good deal of mere acting in
the grief, for the tribes had never occupied the land
that they now sold.
The next day, Dr. Featherston drove into camp sur-
rounded by a brilliant cavalcade of Maori cavalry,
amid much yelling and firing of pieces skyward.
Hunia, in receiving him, declared that he would not
have the money paid till the morrow, as the sun must
shine upon the transfer of the lands. It would take
his people all the night, he said, to work themselves
up to the right pitch for a war-dance; so he sent down
a strong guard to watch the money-chests, which had
been conveyed to the missionary hut. The JSgatiapa
PAREWANUI PAH. 315
sentry posted inside the room was an odd cross between
savagery and civilization ; he wore the cap of the native
contingent; and nothing else but a red kilt. He was
armed with a short Wilkinson rifle, for which he had,
however, not a round of ammunition, his cartridges
being Enfield and his piece unloaded. Barbarian or
not, he seemed to like raw gin, with which some Eng-
lishman had unlawfully and unfairly tempted him.
In the morning, the money was handed over in the
runanga-house, and a signet-ring presented to Hunia
by Dr. Featherston in pledge of peace, and memory of
the sale; but owing to the heat, we soon adjourned to
the karaka grove, where Hunia made a congratulatory
and somewhat boastful speech, offering his friendship
and alliance to Dr. Featherston.
The assembly was soon dismissed, and the chiefs
withdrew to prepare for the grandest war-dance that
had been seen for years, while a party went off to catch
and kill the oxen that were to be "steamed" whole,
just as our friends' fathers would have steamed us.
A chief was detached by Hunia to guide us to a hill
whence we commanded the whole glade. No sooner
had we taken our seats than the Ngatiraukawa to the
number of a hundred fighting-men, armed with spears
and led by a dozen women bearing clubs, marched out
from their camp, and formed in column, their chiefs
making speeches of exhortation from the ranks. After
a pause, we heard the measured groaning of a distant
haka, and looking up the glade, at the distance of a
mile saw some twoscore Wanganui warriors jump-
ing in perfect time, now to one side, now to the other,
grasping their rifles by the barrel, and raising them as
one man each time they jumped. Presently, bending
one knee, but stiffening the other leg, they advanced,
stepping together with a hopping movement, slapping
316 GREATER BRITAIN.
their hips and thighs, and shouting from the palate,
"Hough! Hough!" with fearful emphasis.
A shout from the Ngatiraukawa hailed the approach
of the Ngatiapa, who deployed from the woods some
two hundred strong, all armed with Enfield rifles.
They united with the Wanganuis, and marched slowly
down with their rifles at the " charge," steadily singing
war-songs. When within a hundred yards of the op-
posing ranks, they halted, and sent in their challenge.
The Ngatiraukawa and Ngatiapa heralds passed each
other in silence, and each delivered his message to the
hostile chief.
We could see that the allies were led by Hunia in
all the bravery of his war-costume. In his hair he
wore a heron plume, and another was fastened near
the muzzle of his short carbine ; his limbs were bare,
but about his shoulders he had a pure white scarf of
satin. His kilt was gauze-silk, of three colors pink,
emerald, and cherry arranged in such a way as to
show as much of the green as of the two other colors.
The contrast, which upon a white skin would have
been glaring in its ugliness, was perfect when backed
by the nut-brown of Hunia's chest and legs. As he
ran before his tribe, he was the ideal savage.
The instant that the heralds had returned, a charge
took place, the forces passing through each other's
ranks as they do upon the stage, but with frightful
yells. After this they formed two deep, in three com-
panies, and danced the "musket-exercise war-dance"
in wonderful time, the women leading, thrusting out
their tongues, and shaking their long pendant breasts.
Among them was Hamue'ra's wife, standing drawn up .
to her full height, her limbs stiffened, her head thrown
back, her mouth wide open and tongue protruding,
her eyes rolled so as to show the white, and her arms
PAEEWANUI PAH. 317
stretched out in front of her, as she slowly chanted.
The illusion was perfect : she became* for the time a
mad prophetess ; yet all the frenzy was assumed at a
whim, to be cast aside in half an hour. The shouts
were of the same under-breath kind as in the haka,
but they were aided by the sounds of horns and conch-
shells, and from the number of men engaged the noise
was this time terrible. After much fierce singing the
musket-dance was repeated, with furious leaps and
gestures, till the men became utterly exhausted, when
the review was closed by a general discharge of rifles.
Running with nimble feet, the dancers were soon back
within their pahs, and the feast, beginning now, was,
like a Russian banquet, prolonged till morning.
It is riot hard to understand the conduct of Lord
Durham's settlers, who landed here in 1837. The
friendly natives received the party with a war-dance,
which had upon them such an effect that they imme-
diately took ship for Australia, where they remained.
The next day, when we called on Governor Hunia
at his wahre to bid him farewell, before our departure
for the capital, he made two speeches to us, which are
worth recording as specimens of Maori oratory. Speak-
ing through Mr. Buller, who had been kind enough to
escort us to the Kgatiapa's wahre, Hunia said :
"Hail, guests ! You have just now seen the settle-
ment of a great dispute the greatest of modern time.
" This was a weighty trouble a grave difficulty.
" Many Pakehas have tried to settle it in vain. For
Petatone was it reserved to end it. I have said that
great is our gratitude to Petatone.
"If Petatone hath need of me in the future, I shall
be there. If he climbs the lofty tree, I will climb it
with him. If he scales high cliffs, I will scale them
27*
318 GREATER BRITAIN.
too. If Petatone needeth help, he shall have it ; and
where he leads," there will I follow.
"Such are the words of Hunia."
To this speech one of us replied, explaining our
position as guests from Britain.
Hunia then began again to speak :
" O my guests, a few days since when asked for a
war-dance, I refused. I refused because my people
were sad at heart.
" We were loath to refuse our guests, but the tribes
were grieved ; the peeple were sorrowful at heart.
" To-day we are happy, and the war-dance has taken
place.
" O my guests, when ye return to our great Queen,
tell her that we will fight for her again as we have
fought before.
" She is our Queen as well as your Queen Queen
of Maories and Queen of Pake'ha.
" Should wars arise, we will take up our rifles, and
march whithersoever she shall direct.
" You have heard of the King movement. I was a
Kingite ; but that did not prevent me fighting for the
Queen I and my chiefs.
" My cousin, Wiremu, went to England, and saw
our Queen. He returned. . . .
"When you landed in this island, he was already
dead. . . .
" He died fighting for our Queen.
"As he died, ice will die, if need be I and all. my
chiefs. This do you tell our Queen.
"I have said."
This passage, spoken as Hunia spoke it, was one of
noble eloquence and singular rhetoric art. The few
first words about Wiremu were spoken in a half indif-
ferent way; but there was a long pause before and
THE MAORIES. 319
after the statement that he was dead, and a sinking of
the voice when he related how Wiremu had died, fol-
lowed by a burst of sudden fire in the "As he died,
we will die I and all my chiefs."
After a minute or two, Hunia resumed :
" This is another word.
" We are all of us glad to see you.
" When we wrote to Petatone, we asked him that
he would bring with him Pakehas from England and
from Australia Pakehas from all parts of the Queen's
broad lands.
" Pakehas who should return to tell the Queen that
the Ngatiapa are her liegemen.
"We are much rejoiced that you are here. May
your heart rest here among us ; but if you go once
more to your English home, tell the people that we are
Petatone's faithful subjects and the Queen's.
"I have said."
After pledging Hunia in a cup of wine, we returned
to our temporary home.
CHAPTER V.
THE MAORIES.
PARTING with my companions (who were going north-
ward) in order that I might return to Wellington,
and thence take ship to Taranaki, I started at day-
break on a lovely morning to walk by the sea- shore to
Otaki. As I left the bank of the Manawatu River for
the sands, Mount Egmont near Taranaki, and Mounts
Ruapehu and Tongariro, in the center of the island,
320 GREATER BRITAIN.
hung their great snow domes in the soft blue of the
sky behind me, and seemed to have parted from their
bases.
I soon passed through the flax-swamp where we for
days had shot the pukeko, and coming out upon the
wet sands, which here are glittering and full of the
Taranaki steel, I took off boots and socks, and trudged
the whole distance barefoot, regardless of the morrow.
It was hard to walk without crunching with the heel
shells which would be thought rare at home, and here
and there charming little tern and other tiny sea-fowl
flew at me, and all but pecked my eyes out for coming
near their nests.
During the day, I forded two large rivers and small
streams innumerable, and swam the Ohau, where Dr.
Featherston last week lost his dog-cart in the quick-
sands, but I managed to reach Otaki before sunset, in
time to revel in a typical New Zealand view. The
foreground was composed of ancient sand-hills, covered
with the native flax, with the deliciously-scented
Manuka ti-tree, brilliant in white flower, and with
giant fern, tuft-grass, and tussac. Farther inland was
the bush, evergreen, bunchlike in its foliage, and so
overladen with parasitic vegetation, that the true leaves
were hidden by usurpers, or crushed to death in the
folds of snakelike creepers. The view was bounded
by bush-clad mountains, rosy with the sunset tints.
Otaki is Archdeacon Hadn'eld's church-settlement
of Christian Maories; but of late there have been signs
of wavering in the tribes, and I found Major Edwardes,
who had been with us at Parewanui, engaged in hold-
ing, for the government, a runanga of Hau-Haus, or
Antichristian Maories, in the Otaki Pah. Some of
these fellows had lately held a meeting, and had them-
selves rebaptized, but this time out of instead of into
THE MAORIES. 321
the church. They received fresh names, and are said
to have politely invited the archdeacon to perform the
ceremony.
Maori Church of Englandism has proved a failure.
A dozen native clergymen are, it is true, supported in
comfort by their countrymen, but the tribes would
support a hundred such, if necessary, rather than give
up the fertile "reservations," such as that of Otaki,
which their pretended Christianity has secured. There
is much in the Maori that is tiger-like, and it is in the
blood, not to be drawn out of it by a fewyears of play-
ing at Christianity.
The labors of the missionaries have been great, their
earnestness and devotion unsurpassed. Up to the day
of the outbreak of Hau-Hauism, their influence with
the natives was thought to be enormous. The entire
Maori race Jiad been baptized, thousands of natives
had attended the schools, hundreds had become com-
municants and catechists. In a day the number of
native Christians was reduced from thirty thousand to
some hundreds. Right and left the tribes flocked to
the bush, deserting mission stations, villages, herds,
and fields. Those few who dared not go were there in
spirit ; all sympathized, if not with the Hau-Hau move-
ment, at least with Kingism. The archdeacon and
his brethren of the holy calling were at their wits'
ends. Not only did Christianity disappear : civilization
itself accompanied religion in her flight, and habits of
bloodshed and barbarity, unknown since the nominal
renunciation of idolatry, in a day returned. The fall
was terrible, but it went to show that the apparent
success had been fictitious. The natives had built mills
and owned ships; they had learnt husbandry and cat-
tle-breeding; they had invested money, and put acre
to acre, and house to house; but their moral could
322 GREATER BRITAIN.
hardly have kept pace with their material, or even with
their mental gains.
A magistrate, who knows the Maories well, told me
that their Christianity is only on the surface. lie one
day asked Matene te Whiwhi, a Ngatiraukawa chief,
"Which would you soonest eat, Matene pork, beef,
or Ngatiapa?" Matene answered, with a turn up of
his eyes, "Ah ! I'm a Christian !" " Never mind that
to me, you know," said the Englishman. " The flesh
of the Ngatiapa is sweet," said Matene, with a smack
of the lips that was distinctly audible. The settlers
tell you that when the Maories go to war, they use up
their Bibles for gun-wadding, and then come on the
missionaries for a fresh supply.
The Polynesians, when Christianity is first presented
to them, embrace it with excitement and enthusiasm;
the " new religion " spreads like wildfire ; the success
of the teachers is amazing. A few years, however,
show a terrible change. The natives find that all white
men are not missionaries; that if one set of English-
men deplore their licentiousness, there are others to
back them in it; that Christianity requires self-re-
straint. As soon as the first flare of the new religion
is over it commences to decline, and in some cases it
expires. The story of Christianity in Hawaii, in Ota-
heite, and in New Zealand, has been much the same :
among the Tahitians it was crushed by the relapse of
the converts into extreme licentiousness; among the
Maories it was put down by the sudden rise of the
Hau-Hau fanaticism. A return to a better state of
things has in each case followed, but the missionaries
work now in a depressed and saddened way, which
contrasts sternly with the exultation that inspired them
before the fresh outbreak of the demon which they
believed they had exorcised. They reluctantly admit
THE MAORIES. 323
that the Polynesians are fickle as well as gross; not
only licentious, but untrustworthy. There is, they
will tell you, no country where it is so easy to plant or
so hard to maintain Christianity.
The Maori religion is that of all the Polynesians a
vague polytheism, which in their poems seems now
and then to approach to pantheism. The forest glades,
the mountain rocks, the stormy shores, all swarm with
fairy singers, and with throngs of gnomes and elves.
The happy laughing islanders have a heaven, but no
hell in their mythology; of "sin" they have no con-
ception. Hau-Hauism is not a Polynesian creed, but
a political and religious system based upon the earlier
books of the Old Testament; even the cannibalism
which was added was not of the Maori kind. The
Indians of Chili ate human flesh for pleasure and va-
riety ; those of Virginia were cannibals only on state
occasions, or in religious ceremonials; but the Maories
seem originally to have been driven to man-eating by
sheer want of food. Since Cook left pigs upon the
islands, the excuse has been wanting, and the practice
has consequently ceased. As revived by the Hau-
Haus, the man-eating was of a ceremonial nature, and,
like the whole of the observances of the Hau-Hau
fanaticism, an inroad upon ancient Maori customs.
There is one great difference which severs the Maories
from the other Polynesians. In New Zealand caste is
unknown ; every Maori is a gentleman or a slave.
Chiefs are elected by the popular voice, not, indeed,
by a show of hands, but by a sort of general agreement
of the tribe ; but the chief is a political, not a social
superior. In the windy climate of New Zealand men
can push themselves to the front too surely by their
energy and toil, to remain socially in an inferior class.
Caste is impossible where the climate necessitates ac-
324 GREATER BRITAIN.
tivity and work. The Maories, too, we should remem-
ber, are an immigrant race ; probably no high-caste
men came with them all started from equal rank.
Like the Tongans, the Maories pay great reverence
to their well-born women ; slave women are of no ac-
count. The Friendly Islanders exclude both man and
woman slave from the Future Life ; but the Maori
Rangatira not only admits his followers to heaven, but
his wife to council. A Maori chief is as obedient to
the warlike biddings, and as grateful for the praising
glance or smile of his betrothed, as a planter-cavalier
of Carolina, or a Cretan volunteer ; and even the ladies
of New Orleans cannot have gone further than the
wives of Hunia and Ihakara in spurring on the men to
war. The Maori Andromaches outdo their European
sisters, for they themselves proceed to battle, and ani-
mate their Hectors by songs and shouts. Even the
scepter of tribal rule the greenstone mm', or royal
club is often intrusted- to them by their warrior
husbands, and used to lead the war- dance or the
charge.
The delicacy of treatment shown by the Maories
toward their women may go far to account for the ab-
sence of contempt for the native race among the Eng-
lish population. An Englishman's respect for the sex
is terribly shocked when he sees a woman staggering
under the weight of the wigwam and the children of a
" brave," who stalks behind her through the streets of
Austin, carrying his rifles and his pistols, but not
another ounce, unless in the shape of a thong with
which to hasten the squaw's steps. What wonder if
the men who sit by smoking while their' wives totter
under basketsful of mould on the boulevard works at
Delhi are called lazy scoundrels by the press of the
Northwest, or if the Shoshones, who eat the bread of
THE MAOEIES. 325
idleness themselves, and hire out their wives to the
Pacific Railroad Company, are looked upon as worse
than dogs in Nevada, where the thing is done? It is
the New Zealand native's treatment of his wife that
makes it possible for an honest Englishman to respect
or love an honest Maori.
In general, the newspaper editors and idle talkers of
the frontier districts of a colony in savage lands speak
with mingled ridicule and contempt of the men with
whom they daily struggle ; at best, they see in them
no virtue but ferocious bravery. The Kansas and
Colorado papers call Indians "fiends," "devils," or
dismiss them laughingly in peaceful times as " bucks,"
whose lives are worth, perhaps, a buffalo's, but who
are worthy of notice only as potential murderers or
thieves. Such, too, is the tone of the Australian press
concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of Queensland
or Tasmania. Far otherwise do the New Zealand
papers speak of the Maori warriors. They may some-
times call them grasping, overreaching traders, or un-
derrate their capability of receiving civilization of a
European kind, but never do they affect to think them
less than men, or to advocate the employment toward
them of measures which would be repressed as infamous
if applied to brutes. We should, I think, see in this
peculiarity of conduct, not evidence of the existence in
New Zealand of a spirit more catholic and tolerant
toward savage neighbors than that which the English
race displays in Australia or America, but rather a
tribute to the superiority in virtue, intelligence, and
nobility of mind possessed by the Maori over the Red
Indian or the Australian Black.
It is not only in their treatment of their women that
the Maories show their chivalry. One of the most
noble traits of this great people is their habit of "pro-
28
326 GREATER BRITAIN.
claiming" the districts in which lies the cause of war
as the sole fighting-ground, and never touching their
enemies, however defenseless, when found elsewhere.
European nations might take a lesson from New Zea-
land Maories in this and other points.
The Maories are apt at learning, merry, and, unlike
other Polynesians, trustworthy, but also, unlike them,
mercenary. At the time of the Manawatu sale, old
Aperahama used to write to Dr. Featherston almost
every day: "O Petatone, let the price of the block be
9,999,999 195. 9<i," the mysteries of eleven pence.three
farthings being far beyond his comprehension. The
Maories have, too, a royal magnificence in their ideas
of gifts and grants witness te Heke's bid of 100,000
acres of land for Governor Fitzroy's head, in answer
to the offer, by the governor, of a small price for his.
The praises of the Maories have been sung by so
many writers, and in so many keys, that it is necessary
to keep it distinctly before us that they are mere sav-
ages, though brave, shrewd men. There is an Eastern
civilization that of China and Hindostan distinct
from that of Europe, and ancient beyond all count ; in
this the Maories have no share. No true Hindoo, no
Arab, no Chinaman, has suffered change in one tittle
of his dress or manners from contact with the Western
races; of this essential conservatism there is in the
New Zealand savage not a trace. William Thompson,
the Maori " king-maker,'' used to dress as any English-
man; Maories on board our ships wear the uniform of
the able-bodied seamen; Governor Hunia has ridden
as a gentleman-rider in a steeple-chase, equipped in
jockey dress.
Savages though they be, in irregular warfare we are
not their match. At the end of 1865, we had of regu-
lars and militia seventeen thousand men under arms
THE MAORIES. 327
in the North Island of New Zealand, including no less
than twelve regiments of the line at their " war
strength," and yet our generals were despondent as to
their chance of finally defeating the warriors of a people
which men, women, and children numbered but
thirty thousand souls.
Men have sought far and wide for the reasons which
led to our defeats in the New Zealand wars. We were
defeated by the Maories, as the Austrians by the
Prussians, and the French by the English in old times
because the victors were the better men. Not the
braver men, when both sides were brave alike ; not
the stronger ; not, perhaps, taking the average of our
officers and men, the more intelligent; but capable of
quicker movement, able to subsist on less, more crafty,
more skilled in the thousand tactics of the bush.
Aided by their women, who, when need was, them-
selves would lead the charge, and who at all times dug
their fern-root and caught their fish ; marching where
our regiments could not follow, they had, as have the
Indians in America, the choice of time and place for
their attacks, and while we were crawling about our
military roads upon the coast, incapable of traversing
a mile of bush, the Maories moved securely and secretly
from one end to the other of the island. Arms they had,
ammunition they could steal, and blockade was useless
with enemies who live on fern-root. When they found
that we burnt their pahs, they ceased to build them;
that was all. When we brought up howitzers, they
went where no howitzers could follow. It should not
be hard even for our pride to allow that such enemies
were, man for man, in their own lands our betters.
All nations fond of horses, it has been said, flourish
and succeed. The Maories love horses and ride well.
All races that delight in sea are equally certain to pros-
328 GREATER BRITAIN.
per, empirical philosophers will tell us. The Maories
own ships by the score, and serve as sailors whenever
they get a chance : as deep-sea fishermen they have no
equals. Their fondness for draughts shows mathe-
matical capacity ; in truthfulness they possess the first
of virtues. They are shrewd, thrifty ; devoted friends,
brave men. With all this, they die.
" Can you stay the surf which beats on "Wanganui
shore ?" say the Maories of our progress; and, of them-
selves : " We are gone like the moa."
- CHAPTER VI.
THE TWO FLIES.
" As the Pakeha fly has driven out the Maori fly;
As the Pakeha grass has killed the Maori grass ;
As the Pakeha rat has slain the Maori rat ;
As the Pakeha clover has starved the Maori fern,
So will the Pakeha destroy the Maori."
THESE are the mournful words of a well-known
Maori song.
That the English daisy, the white clover, the common
thistle, the chamomile, the oat, should make their way
rapidly in New Zealand, and put down the native
plants, is in no way strange. If the Maori grasses
that have till lately held undisturbed possession of the
New Zealand soil, require for their nourishment the
substances A, B, and C, while the English clover
needs A, B, and D ; from the nature of things A and
B will be the coarser earths or salts, existing in larger
THE TWO FLIES. 329
quantities, not easily losing vigor and nourishing force,
and recruiting their energies from the decay of the
very plant that feeds on them ; but C and D will be the
more ethereal, the more easily destroyed or wasted
substances. The Maori grass, having sucked nearly
the whole of C from the soil, is in a weakly state, when
in comes the English plant, and, finding an abundant
store of untouched D, thrives accordingly, and crushes
down the Maori.
The positions of flies and grasses, of plants and in-
sects, are, however, not the same. Adapted by nature
to the infinite variety of soils and climates, there are
an infinite number of different plants and animals;
but whereas the plant depends upon both soil and
climate, the animal depends chiefly upon climate, and
little upon soil except so far as his home or his food
themselves depend on soil. Now, while soil wears out,
climate does not. The climate in the long run remains
the same, but certain apparently trifling constituents
of the soil will wholly disappear. The result of this
is, that while pigs may continue to thrive in New Zea-
land forever and a day, Dutch clover (without manure)
will only last a given and calculable time.
The case of the flies is plain enough. The Maori
and the English fly live on the same food, and require
about the same amount of warmth and moisture : the
one which is best fitted to the common conditions will
gain the day, and drive out the other. The English
fly has had to contend not only against other English
flies, but against every fly of temperate climates : we
having traded with every land, and brought the flies
of every clime to England. The English fly is the
best possible fly of the whole world, and will naturally
beat down and exterminate, or else starve out, the
merely provincial Maori fly. If a great singer to find
28*
330 GREATER BRITAIN.
whom for the London stage the world has been ran-
sacked should be led by the foible of the moment to
sing for gain in an unknown village, where on the
same night a rustic tenor was attempting to sing his
best, the London tenor would send the provincial sup-
perless to bed. So it is with the English and Maori fly.
Natural selection is being conducted by nature in
New Zealand on a grander scale than any we have
contemplated, for the object of it here is man. In
America, in Australia, the white man shoots or poisons
his red or black fellow, and exterminates him through
the workings of superior knowledge ; but in New Zea-
land it is peacefully, and without extraordinary advant-
ages, that the Pak^ha beats his Maori brother.
That which is true of our animal and vegetable pro-
ductions is true also of our man. The English fly,
grass, and man, they and their progenitors before them,
have had to fight for life against their fellows. The
Englishman, bringing into his country from the parts
to which he trades all manner of men, of grass seeds,
and of insect germs, has filled his land with every kind
of living thing to which his soil or climate will afford
support. Both old inhabitants and interlopers have to
maintain a struggle which at once crushes and starves
out of life every weakly plant, man, or insect, and for-
tifies the race by continual buffetings. The plants of
civilized man are generally those which will grow best
in the greatest variety of soils and climates; but in
any case, the English fauna and flora are peculiarly
fitted to succeed at our antipodes, because the climates
of Great Britain and New Zealand are almost the same,
and our men, flies, and plants the "pick" of the
whole world have not even to encounter the diffi-
culties of acclimatization in their struggle against
the weaker growths indigenous to the soil.
THE TWO FLIES. 331
Nature's work in New Zealand is not the same as
that which she is quickly doing in North America, in
Tasmania, in Queensland. It is not merely that a
hunting and fighting people is being replaced by an
agricultural and pastoral people, and must farm or
die : the Maori does farm ; Maori chiefs own villages,
build houses, which they let to European settlers ; we
have here Maori sheep-farmers, Maori ship-owners,
Maori mechanics, Maori soldiers, Maori rough-riders,
Maori sailors, and even Maori traders. There is no-
thing which the average Englishman can do which the
average Maori cannqt be taught to do as cheaply and
as well. Nevertheless, the race dies out. The Red
Indian dies because he cannot farm ; the Maori farms,
and dies.
There are certain special features about this advance
of the birds, beasts, and men of Western civilization.
When the first white man landed in New Zealand, all
the native quadrupeds save one, and nearly all the
birds and river-fishes, were extinct, though we have
their bones, and traditions of their existence. The
Maories themselves were dying out. The rnoa and
dinoris were both gone ; there were few insects, and
no reptiles. "The birds die because the Maories, their
companions, die,' 7 is the native saying. Yet the climate
is singularly good, and food for beast arid bird so plen-
tiful that Captain Cook's pigs have planted colonies of
"wild boars" in every part of the islands, and English
pheasants have no sooner been imported than they
have commenced to swarm in every jungle. Even the
Pakeha flea has come over in the ships, and wonder-
fully has he thriven.
The terrible want of food for men that formerly char-
acterized New Zealand has had its effects upon the
habits of the Maori race. Australia has no native
332 GREATER BRITAIN.
fruit trees worthy cultivation, although in the whole
world there is no such climate and soil for fruits; still,
Australia has kangaroos and other quadrupeds. The
Ladrones were destitute of quadrupeds, and of birds,
except the turtle-dove ; but in the warm damp climate
fruits grew, sufficient to support in comfort a dense
population. In New Zealand the windy cold of the
winters causes a need for something of a tougher fiber
than the banana or the fern-root. There being no
native beasts, the want was supplied by human flesh,
and war, furnishing at once food and the excitement
which the chase supplies to peoples that have animals
to hunt, became the occupation of the Maories. Hence
in some degree the depopulation of the land; but
other causes exist, by the side of which cannibalism is
as nothing.
The British government has been less guilty than
is commonly believed as regards the destruction of the
Maories. Since the original misdeed of the annexation
of the isles, we have done the Maories no serious
wrong. We recognized the claim of a handful of na-
tives to the soil of a country as large as Great Britain,
of not one-hundredth part of which had they ever
made the smallest use ; and, disregarding the fact that
our occupation of the coast was the very event that
gave the land its" value, we have insisted on buying
every acre from the tribe. Allowing title by conquest
to the Ngatiraukawa, as I saw at Pare wan ui Pah, we
refuse to claim even the lands we conquered from the
"Kingites."
The Maories have always been a village people, till-
ing a little land round their pahs, but incapable of
making any use of the great pastures and wheat coun-
tries which they "own." Had we at first constituted
native reserves, on the American system, we might,
THE TWO FLIES. 333
without any fighting, and without any more rapid de-
struction of the natives than that which is taking place,
have gradually cleared and brought into the market
nearly the whole country, which now has to be pur-
chased at enormous prices, and at the continual risk
of war.
As it is, the record of our dealings with the Queen's
native subjects in New Zealand has been almost free
from stain, but if we have not committed crimes, we
have certainly not failed to blunder : our treatment of
William Thompson was at the best a grave mistake.
If ever there lived a patriot he was one, and through
him we might have ruled in peace the Maori race.
Instead of receiving the simplest courtesy from a people
which in India showers honors upon its puppet kings
and rajahs, he underwent fresh insults each time that
he entered an English town or met a white magistrate
or subaltern, and he died, while I was in the colonies
according to Pakdha physicians, of liver complaint;
according to the Maories, of a broken heart.
At Parewanui and Otaki, I remarked that the half-
breeds are fine fellows, possessed of much of the no-
bility of both the ancestral races, while the women are
famed for grace and loveliness. In miscegenation it
would have seemed that there was a chance for the
Maori, who, if destined to die, would at least have left
many of his best features of body and mind to live in
the mixed race, but here comes in the prejudice of
blood, with which we have already met in the case of
the negroes and Chinese. Morality has so far gained
ground as greatly to check the spread of permanent
illegitimate connections with native women, while
pride prevents intermarriage. The numbers of the
half-breeds are not upon the increase : a few fresh mar-
riages supply the vacancies that come of death, but
334 GREATER BRITAIN.
there is no progress, no sign of the creation of a vig-
orous mixed race. There is something more in this
than foolish pride, however ; there is a secret at the
bottom at once of the cessation of mixed marriages
and of the dwindling of the pure Maori race, and it is
the utter viciousness of the native girls. The universal
unchastity of the unmarried women, " Christian" as
well as heathen, would be sufficient to destroy a race
of gods. The story of the Maories is that of the Tahi-
tians, and is written in the decorations of every gate-
post or rafter in their pahs.
We are more distressed at the present and future of
the Maories than they are themselves. For all our
greatness, we pity not the Maories more profoundly
than they do us when, ascribing our morality to calcu-
lation, they bask in the sunlight, arid are happy in
their gracelessness. After all, virtue and arithmetic
come from one Greek root.
CHAPTER VII.
THE PACIFIC.
CLOSELY resembling Great Britain in situation, size,
and climate, New Zealand is often styled by the col-
onists "The Britain of the South," and many affect to
believe that her future is destined to be as brilliant as
has been the past of her mother country. With the
exaggeration of phrase to which the English New Zea-
landers are prone, they prophesy a marvelous here-
after for the whole Pacific, in which New Zealand, as
THE PACIFIC. 335
the carrying and manufacturing country, is to play the
foremost part, the Australias following obediently in
her train.
Even if the differences of Separatists, Provincialists,
and Centralists should be healed, the future prosperity
of New Zealand is by no means secure. Her gold
yield is only about a fifth of that of California or Vic-
toria. Her area is not sufficient to make her powerful
as an agricultural or pastoral country, unless she comes
to attract manufactures and carrying trade from afar,
and the prospect of New Zealand succeeding in this
effort is but small. Her rivers are almost useless for
manufacturing purposes owing to their floods; the
timber supply of all her forests is not equal to that of
a single county in the State of Oregon; her coal is
inferior in quality to that of Vancouver Island, in quan-
tity to that of Chili, in both respects to that of New
South Wales. The harbors of New Zealand are upon
the eastern coasts, but the coal is chiefly upon the
other side, where the river bars make trade impos-
sible.
The coal that has been found at the Bay of Islands
is said to be plentiful and of good quality, and may be
made largely available for steamers on the coast ; the
steel sand of Taranaki, smelted by the use of petro-
leum, also found within the province, may become of
value ; her own wool, too, New Zealand will doubtless
one day manufacture into cloth and blankets; but
these are comparatively trifling matters : New Zealand
may become rich and populous without being the great
power of the Pacific, or even of the South.
The climate of the North Island is winterless, moist,
and warm, and its effects are already seen in a certain
want of enterprise shown by the government and set-
tlers. I remarked that the mail steamers which leave
336 GREATER BRITAIN.
Wellington almost everyday are invariably "detained
for dispatches :" it looks as though the officers of the
colonial or imperial government commence to write
their letters only when the hour for the sailing of the
ship has come. An Englishman visiting New Zealand
was asked in my presence how long his business at
Wanganui would keep him in the town. His answer
was : " In London it would take me half an hour ; so
I suppose about a week about a week!"
In Java, and the other islands of the Indian archi-
pelago, we find examples of the effect of the supine-
ness of dwellers in the tropics upon the economic
position of their countries. Many of the Indian isles
possess both coal and cheap labor, but have failed to
become manufacturing communities on a large scale
only because the natives have not the energy requisite
for the direction of factories and workshops, while
European foremen have to be paid enormous wages,
and, losing their spirit in the damp, unchanging cli-
mate of the islands, soon become more indolent than
the natives.
The position of the various stores of coal in the
Pacific is of extreme importance as an index to the
future distribution of power in that portion of the
world ; but it is not enough to know where coal is to
be found without looking also to the quantity, quality,
cheapness of labor, and facility for transport. In China
(in the Si Shan district) and in Borneo, there are ex-
tensive coal fields, but they lie "the wrong way" for
trade. On the other hand, the Californian coal at
Monte Diablo, San Diego, and Monterey lies well,
but is bad in quality. The Talcahuano bed in Chili
is not good enough for ocean steamers, but might be
made use of for manufactures, although Chili has but
little iron. Tasmania has good coal, but in no great
THE PACIFIC. 337
quantit} r , and the beds nearest to the coast are formed
of inferior anthracite. The three countries of the Pa-
cific which must, for a time at least, rise to manufac-
turing greatness, are Japan, Vancouver Island, and
New South Wales, but which of these will become
wealthiest and most powerful depends mainly on the
amount of coal which they respectively possess so
situated as to be cheaply raised. The dearness of labor
under which Vancouver suffers will be removed by the
opening of the Pacific Railroad, but for the present
New South Wales has the cheaper labor; and upon
her shores at Newcastle are abundant stores of a coal
of good quality for manufacturing purposes, although
for sea use it burns "dirtily," and too fast, the colony
possesses also ample beds of iron, copper, and lead.
Japan, as far as can be at present seen, stands before
Vancouver and New South Wales in almost every
point: she has cheap labor, good climate, excellent
harbors, and abundant coal ; cotton can be grown upon
her soil, and this, and that of Queensland, she can
manufacture and export to America and to the East.
Wool from California and from the Australias might
be carried to her to be worked, and her rise to com-
mercial greatness has already commenced with the
passage of a law allowing Japanese workmen to take
service with European capitalists in the "treaty-ports."
Whether Japan or New South Wales is destined to
become the great wool-manufacturing country, it is
certain that fleeces will not long continue to be sent
half round the world from Australia to England to
be worked, and then round the other half back from
England to Australia, to be sold as blankets.
The future of the Pacific shores is inevitably bril-
liant ; but it is not New Zealand, the center of the
water hemisphere, which will occupy the position that
338 GREATER BRITAIN.
England has taken in the Atlantic, but some country
such as Japan or Vancouver, jutting out into the ocean
from Asia or from America, as England juts out from
Europe. If New South Wales usurps the position, it
will be not from her geographical situation, but from
the manufacturing advantages she gains by the posses-
sion of vast mineral wealth.
The political power of America in the Pacific ap-
pears predominant : the Sandwich Islands are all but
annexed, Japan all but ruled by her, while the occupa-
tion of British Columbia is but a matter of time, and
a Mormon descent upon the Marquesas is already
planned. The relations of America and Australia will
be the key to the future of the South.
******
On the 26th of December I left New Zealand for
Australia.
APPENDIX.
A MAORI DINNER.
FOR those who would make trial of Maori dishes, here is a
native bill-of-fare, such as can be imitated in the South of
England :
HAKARI MAORI A MAORI FEAST.
BILL-OF-FARE.
SOUP.
KOTA KOTA Any shell-fish.
FISH.
INANQA .... Whitebait (boiled in milk, with leeks).
PIHARAU . . . Lamprey (stewed).
TUNA .... Eels (steamed).
MADE-DISHES.
PUKEKO Moor-hen (steamed).
KOURA Craw-fish (boiled).
Tui Tui Thrush (roast).
KERERU Pigeon (baked in clay).
ROAST.
POOKA Pork (short pig).
(339)
340 APPENDIX.
GAME.
PARERA .... Wild Duck (roasted on embers).
VEGETABLES.
PAUKENA Pumpkin.
KAMU KAMU Vegetable Marrow.
KAPUTI Cabbage (steamed).
KUMATA Sweet Potatoes.
SWEETS.
TATARAMOA . . Cranberries (steamed).
TANA .... Damsons (steamed with sugar).
DESSERT.
KARAMU Currants.
PIKAKARIKA, Dec. 1866.
END OF VOL. I.
GREATER BRITAIN,
A EECOED OF TRAVEL
ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES
DURING 1866-7.
BY
CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE.
VOL. II.
WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO.
1869.
III.
AUSTRALIA.
VOL. II.
1* (6)
GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER I.
SYDNEY.
AT early light on Christmas-day, I put off from
shore in one of those squalls for which Port Nichol-
son, the harbor of Wellington, is famed. A boat which
started from the ship at the same time as mine from
the land, was upset, but in such shallow water that
the passengers were saved, though they lost a portion
of their baggage. As we flew toward the mail steamer,
the Kaikoura, the harbor was one vast sheet of foam,
and columns of spray were being whirled in the air,
and borne away far inland upon the gale. We had
placed at the helm a post-office clerk, who said that he
could steer, but, as we reached the steamer's side,
instead of luffing-up, he suddenly put the helm hard
a-weather, and we shot astern of her, running violently
before the wind, although our. treble-reefed sail was
by this time altogether down. A rope was thrown us
from a coal hulk, and, catching it, we were soon on
board, and spent our Christmas walking up and down
her deck on the slippery black dust, and watching the
effects of the gale. After some hours the wind mod-
erated, and I reached the Kaikoura just before she
sailed. While we were steaming out of the harbor
8 GREATER BRITAIN.
through the boil of waters that marks the position of
the submarine crater, I found that there was but one
other passenger for Australia to share with me the
services of ten officers and ninety men, and the accom-
modations of a ship of 1500 tons. " Serious prepara-
tions and a large ship for a mere voyage from one Aus-
tralasian colony to another," I felt inclined to say, but
during the voyage and my first week in New South
Wales I began to discover that in England we 'are
given over to a singular delusion as to the connection
of New Zealand and Australia.
Australasia is a term much used at home to express
the whole of our Antipodean possessions ; in the col-
onies themselves the name is almost unknown, or, if
used, is meant to embrace Australia and Tasmania,
not Australia and New Zealand. The only reference
to New Zealand, except in the way of foreign news,
that I ever found in an Australian paper, was a con-
gratulatory paragraph on the amount of the New Zea-
land debt; the only allusion to Australia that I ever
detected in the Wellington Independent was in a glance
at the future of the colony, in which the editor pre-
dicted the advent of a time when New Zealand would
be a great naval nation, and her fleet engaged in bom-
barding Melbourne, or levying a contribution upon
Sydney.
New Zealand, though a change for the better is at
hand, has hitherto been mainly an aristocratic country;
New South Wales and Victoria mainly democratic.
Had Australia and New Zealand been close together,
instead of as far apart as Africa and South America,
there could have been no political connection between
them so long as the traditions of their first settlement
endured?.
Not only is the name "Australasia" politically mean-
SYDNEY. 9
ingless, but geographically incorrect, for New Zealand
and Australia are as completely separated from each
other as Great Britain and Massachusetts. No prom-
ontory of Australia runs out to within 1000 miles of
any New Zealand cape ; the distance between Sydney
and Wellington is 1400 miles ; from Sydney to Auck-
land about the same. The distance from the nearest
point of New Zealand of Tasman's peninsula, which
itself projects somewhat from Tasmania, is greater than
that of London from Algiers: from Wellington to
Sydney, opposite ports, is as far as from Manchester
to Iceland, or from Africa to Brazil.
The sea that lies between the two great countries of
the south is not, like the Central or North Pacific, a
sea bridged with islands, ruffled with trade winds,
favorable to sailing ships, or overspread with a calm
that permits the presence of light-draught paddle
steamers. The seas which separate Australia from
New Zealand are cold, bottomless, without islands,
torn by Arctic currents, swept by polar gales, and trav-
ersed in all weathers by a mountainous swell. After
the gale of Christmas-day we were blessed with a con-
tinuance of light breezes on our way to Sydney, but
never did we escape the long rolling hills of seas that
seemed to surge up from the Antarctic pole: our screw
was as often out of as in the water ; and in a fast new
ship we could scarcely average nine knots an hour
throughout the day. The ship which had brought the
last Australian mail to Wellington before we sailed
was struck by a sea which swept her from stem to
stern, and filled her cabin two feet deep, and this in
December, which here is midsummer, and answers to
our July. Not only is the intervening ocean wide and
cold, but New Zealand presents to Australia a rugged
coast guarded by reefs and bars, and backed by a
10 GREATER BRITAIN.
snowy range, while she turns toward Polynesia and
America all her ports and bays.
No two countries in the world are so wholly distinct
as Australia and New Zealand. The islands of New
Zealand are inhabited by Polynesians, the Australian
continent by negroes. New Zealand is ethnologically
nearer to America, Australia to Africa, than New Zea-
land to Australia.
If we turn from ethnology to scenery and climate,
the countries are still more distinct. New Zealand is
one of the groups of volcanic islands that stud the
Pacific throughout its whole extent ; tremendous cliffs
surround it on almost every side; a great mountain
chain runs through both islands from north to south ;
hot springs abound, often close to glaciers and eternal
snows; earthquakes are common, and active volcanoes
not unknown. The New Zealand climate is damp and
windy; the land is covered in most parts with a tangled
jungle of tree-ferns, creepers, and parasitic plants;
water never fails, and, though winter is unknown, the
summer heat is never great; the islands are always
green. Australia has for the most part flat, yellow,
sun-burnt shores; the soil may be rich, the country
good for wheat and sheep, but to the eye it is an arid
plain ; the winters are pleasant, but in the hot weather
the thermometer rises higher in the interior than it
does in India, and dust storms and hot winds sweep
the land from end to end. It is impossible to conceive
countries more unlike each other than are our two
great dominions of the south. Their very fossils are
as dissimilar as are their flora and fauna of our time.
At the dawn of the first day of the new year, we
sighted the rocks where the Duncan Dunbar was lost
with all hands, and a few minutes afterward were
boarded by the crew engaged by the Sydney Morning
SYDNEY. 11
Herald, who had been lying at "The Heads" all night,
to intercept and telegraph our news into the city. The
pilot and regular news-bout hailed us a little later, when
we had fired a gun. The contrast between this Aus-
tralian energy and the supineness of the New Zealand-
ers was striking, but not more so than that between
my first view of Australia and my last view of New
Zealand. Six days earlier I had lost sight of the snowy
peak of Mount Egmont, graceful as the Cretan Iva,
while we ran before a strong breeze, in the bright Eng-
lish sunlight of the New Zealand afternoon ; the al-
batrosses screaming around our stern : to-day, as we
steamed up Port Jackson, toward Sydney Cove, in the
dead stillness that follows a night of oven-like heat,
the sun rose flaming red in a lurid sky, and struck down
upon brown earth, yellow grass, and the thin shadeless
foliage of the Australian bush ; while, as we anchored,
the ceaseless chirping of the crickets in the grass and
trees struck harshly on the ear.
The harbor, commercially the finest in the world, is
not without a singular beauty if seen at the best time.
By the "hot-wind sunrise," as I first saw it, the heat
and glare destroy the feeling of repose which the end-
less succession of deep, sheltered coves would other-
wise convey; but seen from shore in the afternoon,
when the sea-breeze has sprung up, turning the sky
from red to blue, all is changed. From a neck of land
that leads out to the Government House, you catch a
glimpse of an arm of the bay on either side, rippled
with the cool wind, intensely blue, and dotted with
white sails ; the brightness of the colors that the sea-
breeze brings almost atones for the wind's unhealthi-
ness.
In the upper portion of the town the scene is less
picturesque; the houses are of the commonplace Eng-
12 GREATER BRITAIN.
lish ugliness, worst of all possible forms of architect-
ural imbecility, and built, too, as though for English
fogs, instead of semi-tropical heat and sun. Water is
not to be had, and the streets are given up to clouds
of dust, while not a single shade-tree breaks the rays of
the almost vertical sun.
The afternoon of New Year's day I spent at the
" Midsummer Meeting" of the Sydney Jockey Club,
on the race-course near the city, and found a vast
crowd of holiday-makers assembled on the bare red
earth that did duty for "turf," although there was a
hot wind blowing, and the thermometer stood at 103
in the shade. For my conveyance to the race-course I
trusted to one of the Australian hansom cabs, made
with open fixed Venetian blinds on either side, so as
to allow a free draught of air.
The ladies in the grand stand were scarcely to be
distinguished from Englishwomen in dress or coun-
tenance, but the crowd presented several curious types.
The fitness of the term "cornstalks," applied to the
Australian-born boys, was made evident by a glance
at their height and slender build; they have plenty of
activity and health, but are wanting in power and
weight. The girls, too, are slight and thin; delicate,
without being sickly. Grown men who have emigrated
as lads and lived ten or fifteen years in New Zealand,
eating much meat, spending their days in the open air,
constantly in the saddle, are burly, bearded, strapping
fellows, physically the perfection of the English race,
but wanting in refinement and grace of mind, and this
apparently constitutionally, not through the accident
of occupation or position. In Australia there is promise
of a more intellectual nation: the young Australians
ride as well, shoot as well, swim as well, as the New
Zealanders, are as little given to book-learning, but
SYDNEY. 13
there is more shrewd intelligence, more wit and quick-
ness, in the sons of the larger continent. The Aus-
tralians boast that they possess the Grecian climate,
and every young face in the Sydney crowd showed me
that their sky is not more like that of the Pelopon-
nesus than they are like the old Athenians. The eager
burning democracy that is springing up in the Austra-
lian great towns is as widely different from the repub-
licanism of the older States of the American Union as
it is from the good-natured conservatism of New Zea-
land, and their high capacity for personal enjoyment
would of itself suffice to distinguish the Australians
from both Americans and British. Large as must be
the amount of convict blood in New South Wales,
there was no trace of it in the faces of the persons
present upon the race-course. The inhabitants of col-
onies which have never received felon immigrants often
cry out that Sydney is a convict city, but the prejudice
is not borne out by the countenances of the inhabitants,
nor by the records of local crime. The black stain
has not yet wholly disappeared : the streets of Sydney
are still a greater disgrace to civilization than are even
those of London ; but, putting the lighter immoralities
aside, security for life and property is not more perfect
in England than in New South "Wales. The last of
the bushrangers were taken while I was in Sydney.
The race-day was followed by a succession of hot
winds, during which only the excellence of the fruit-
market made Sydney endurable. Not only are the
English fruits to be found, but plantains, guavas,
oranges, loquats, pomegranates, pine-apples from Bris-
bane, figs of every kind, aod the delicious passion-
fruit; and if the gum-tree forests yield no shady spots
for picnics, they are not wanting among the rocks at
Botany, or in the luxuriant orange-groves of Paramatta.
VOL. II. 2
14 GREATER BRITAIN.
A Christmas week of heat such as Sydney has sel-
dom known was brought to a close by one of the
heaviest southerly storms on record. During the
stifling morning, the telegraph had announced the ap-
proach of a gale from the far south, but in the early
afternoon the heat was more terrible than before, when
suddenly the sky was dark with whirling clouds, and
a cold blast swept through the streets, carrying a fog
of sand, breaking roofs and windows, and dashing to
pieces many boats. When the gale ceased, some three
hours later, the sand was so deep in houses that here
and there men's feet left footprints on the stairs.
Storms of this kind, differing only one from another
in violence, are common in the hot weather: they are
known as "southerly bursters;" but the earlier settlers
called them "brickfielders," in the belief that the dust
they brought was whirled up from the kilns and brick-
fields to the south of % Sydney. The fact is that the
sand is carried along for one or two hundred miles,
from the plains in Dampier and Auckland counties ;
for the Australian "burster" is one with the Punjaub
dust-storm, and the dirt-storm of Colorado.
RIVAL COLONIES. 15
CHAPTER IT.
RIVAL COLONIES.
SOUTH WALES, born in 1788, and Queensland
in 1859, the oldest and youngest of our Australian
colonies, stand side by side upon the map, and have a
common frontier of 700 miles.
The New South Welsh look with some jealousy upon
the more recently founded States. Upon the brilliant
prosperity of Victoria they look doubtingly, and, as-
cribing it merely to the gold fields, talk of "shoddy;"
but of Queensland an agricultural country, with
larger tracts of rich lands than they themselves pos-
sess the Sydney folks are not without reason envious.
A terrible depression is at present pervading trade
and agriculture in New South Wales. Much land
near Sydney has gone out of cultivation; labor is
scarce, and the gold discoveries in the neighboring
colonies, by drawing off the surplus population, have
made harvest labor unattainable. Many properties
have fallen to one-third their former value, and the
colony a wheat-growing country is now importing
wheat and flour to the value of half a million sterling
every year.
The depressed condition of affairs is the result,
partly of commercial panics following a period of in-
flation, partly of bad seasons, now bringing floods, now
drought and rust, and partly of the discouragement of
immigration by the colonial democrats a policy which,
however beneficial to Australia it may in the long run
It GREATER BRITAIN.
prove, is for the moment ruinous to the sheep-farmers
and to the merchants in the towns. On the other hand,
the laborers for their part assert that the arrivals of
strangers at all events, of skilled artisans are still
excessive, and that all the ills of the colony are due to
over-immigration and free trade.
To a stranger, the rush of population and outpour
of capital from Sydney, first toward Victoria, but now
to Queensland and New Zealand, appear to be the chief
among the causes of the momentary decline of New
South Wales. Of immigrants there is at once an in-
sufficient and an over-great supply. Respectable serv-
ant-girls, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, plasterers,
and the like, do well in the colonies, and are always
wanted ; of clerks, governesses, iron-workers, and the
skilled hands of manufacturers, there is almost always
an over-supply. By a perverse fate, these latter are
just the immigrants of whom thousands seek the col-
onies every year, in spite of the daily publication in
England of dissuading letters.
As the rivalry of the neighbor-colonies lessens in
the lapse of time, the jealousy that exists between
them will doubtless die away, but it seems as though
it will be replaced by a political divergence, and con-
sequent aversion, which will form a fruitful source of
danger to the Australian confederation.
In Queensland the great tenants of crown lands,
" squatters," as they are called, sheep-farmers holding
vast tracts of inland country, are in possession of the
government, and administer the laws to their own
advantage. In IsTew South Wales power is divided
between the pastoral tenants on the one hand, and the
democracy of the towns upon the other. In Victoria
the democrats have beaten down the squatters, and in
the interests of the people put an end to their reign;
RIVAL COLONIES. 17
but the sheep-farmers of Queensland and of the interior
districts of New South Wales, ignoring wells, assert
that the " up-country desert" or "un watered tracts"
can never be made available for agriculture, while the
democracy of the coast point to the fact that the same
statements were made only a few years back of lands
now bearing a prosperous population of agricultural
settlers.
The struggle between the great crown tenants and
the agricultural democracy in Victoria, already almost
over, in New South Wales can be decided only in one
way, but in Queensland the character of the country is
not entirely the same : the coast and river tracts are
tropical bush-lands, in which sheep-farming is impos-
sible, and in which sugar, cotton, and spices alone can
be made to pay. To the copper, gold, hides, tallow,
wool, which have hitherto formed the stereotyped list
of Australian exports, the Northern colony has already
added ginger, arrowroot, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton,
cinnamon, and quinine.
The Queenslanders have not yet solved the problem
of the settlement of a tropical country by Englishmen,
and of its cultivation by English hands. The future,
not of Queensland merely, but of Mexico, of Ceylon, of
every tropical country, of our race, of free government
itself, are all at stake ; but the success of the experi-
ment that has been tried between Brisbane and Rock-
ampton has not been great. The colony, indeed, has
prospered much, quadrupling its population and treb-
ling its exports and revenue in six years, but it is the
Darling Downs, and other table-land sheep countries,
or, on the other hand, the Northern gold fields, which
are the main cause of the prosperity; and in the sugar
and cotton culture of the coast, colored labor is now
2*
18 GREATER BRITAIN.
almost exclusively employed, with the usual effect of
degrading field-work in the eyes of European settlers,
and of forcing upon the country a form of society of
the aristocratic type.
It is possible that just as New England has of late
forbidden to Louisiana the importation of Chinamen
to work her sugar fields, just as the Kansas radicals
have declared that they will not recognize the Bombay
Hammal as a brother, just as the Victorians have re-
fused to allow the further reception of convicts by
West Australia, separated from their territories by
1000 miles of desert, so the New South Welsh and
Victorians combined may at least protest against the
introduction of a mixed multitude of Bengalees, China-
men, South Sea Islanders, an^Malays, to cultivate the
Queensland coast plantations. If, however, the other
colonies permit their Northern sister to continue in her
course of importing dark-skinned laborers, to form a
peon population, a few years will see her a wealthy
cotton and sugar-growing country, with all the vices of
a slaveholding government, though without the name
of slavery. The planters of the coast and villages, united
with the squatters of the table-lands or "Downs," will
govern Queensland, and render union with the free
colonies impossible, unless great gold discoveries take
place, and save the country to Australia.
Were it not for the pride of race that everywhere
shows itself in the acts of English settlers, there might
be a bright side to the political future of Queensland
colony. The colored laborers at present introduced,
industrious Tongans, and active Hill-coolies from Hin-
dostan, laborious, sober, and free from superstition,
should not only be able to advance the commercial
fortunes of Queensland as they have those of the Mau-
ritius, but eventually to take an equal share in free
EIVAL COLONIES. 19
government with their white employers. To avoid the
gigantic evil of the degradation of hand labor, which
has ruined morally as well as economically the South-
ern States of the American republic, the Indian, Malay,
and Chinese laborers should be tempted to become
members of landholding associations. A large spice
and sugar-growing population in Northern Queensland
would require a vast agricultural population in the
south to feed it, and the two colonies, hitherto rivals,
might grow up as sister countries, each depending
upon the other for the supply of half its needs. It is,
however, worthy of notice that the agreements of the
Queensland planters with the imported dark-skinned
field-hands provide only for the payment of wages m
goods, at the rates of 6s. to 10s. a month. The " goods"
consist of pipes, tobacco, knives, and beads. Judging
from the experience of California and Ceylon, there
can be little hope of the general admission of colored
men to equal rights by English settlers, and the Pacific
islands offer so tempting a field to the kidnapping com-
manders of colonial " island schooners," that there is
much fear that Queensland may come to show us not
merely semi-slavery, but peonage of that worst of kinds,
in which it is cheaper to work the laborer to death
than to "breed" him.
Such is the present rapidity of the growth and rise
to power of tropical Queensland, such the apparent
poverty of New South Wales, that were the question
merely one between the Sydney wheat-growers and the
cotton-planters of Brisbane and Rockampton, the sub-
tropical settlers would be as certain of the foremost
position in any future confederation as they were in
America when the struggle lay only between the Caro-
linas and New England. As it is, just as America was
first saved by the coal of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Aus-
20 GREATER BRITAIN.
tralia will be saved by the coal of New South Wales.
Queensland possesses some small stores of coal, but the
vast preponderance of acreage of the great power of
the future is on the side of the free settlers of the
cooler climate, at Newcastle, in New South Wales.
On my return from a short voyage to the north, I
visited the coal field of New South Wales at Newcastle,
on the Hunter. The beds are of vast extent, they lie
upon the banks of a navigable river, and so near to the
surface that the best qualities are raised, in a country
of dear labor, at 8s. or 9s. the ton, and delivered on
board ship for 125. For manufacturing purposes the
coal is perfect; for steamship use it is, though some-
what "dirty," a serviceable fuel; and copper and iron
are found in close proximity to the beds. The New-
castle and Port Jackson fields open a singularly bril-
liant future to Sydney in these times, when coal is
king in a far higher degree than was ever cotton. To
her black beds the colony will owe not only manu-
factures, bringing wealth and population, but that
leisure which is begotten of wealth leisure that brings
culture, and love of harmony and truth.
Manufactories are already springing up in the neigh-
borhood of Sydney, adding to the whirl and the bustle
of the town, and adding, too, to its enormous popula-
tion, already disproportionate to that of the colony in
which it stands. As the depot for much of the trade
of Queensland and New Zealand, and as the metropolis
of pleasure to which the wealthy squatters pour from
all parts of Australia, to spend, rapidly enough, their
hard-won money, Sydney would in any case have been
a populous city; but the barrenness of the country in
which it stands has, until the recent opening of the
railroads, tended still further to increase its size, by
failing to tempt into country districts the European
RIVAL COLONIES. 21
immigrants. The Irish in Sydney form a third of the
whole population, yet hardly one of these men but
meant to settle upon land when he left his native island.
In France there is a tendency to migrate to Paris,
in Austria a continual drain toward Vienna, in Eng-
land toward London. A corresponding tendency is
observable throughout Australia and America. Immi-
grants hang about New York, Philadelphia, Boston,
Sydney, Melbourne ; and, finding that they can scrape
a living in these large cities with toil somewhat less
severe than that which would be needed- to procure
them a decent livelihood in the bush, the unthrifty as
well as the dissipated throng together in densely-popu-
lated "bad quarters" in these cities, and render the
first quarter of New York and the so-called " Chinese "
quarter of Melbourne a danger to the colonies, and an
insult to the civilization of the world.
In the case of Australia this concentration of popu-
lation is becoming more remarkable day by day. Even
under the system of free selection, by which the legis-
lature has attempted to encourage agricultural settle-
ment, the moment a free selector can make a little
money he comes to one of the capitals to spend it.
Sydney is the city of pleasure, to which the wealthy
Queensland squatters resort to spend their money, re-
turning to the north for fresh supplies only when they
cannot afford another day of dissipation, while Mel-
bourne receives the outpour of Tasmania.
The rushing to great cities the moment there is
money to be spent, characteristic of the settlers in all
these colonies, is much to be regretted, and presents a
sad contrast to the quiet stay-at-home habits of Amer-
ican farmers. Everything here is fever and excite-
ment ; as in some systems of geometry, motion is the
primary, rest the derived idea. New South Welshmen
22 GREATER BRITAIN,
tell you that this unquiet is peculiar to Victoria; to a
new-comer it seems as rife in Sydney as in Melbourne.
Judging from the colonial government reports, which
immigrants are conjured by the inspectors to procure
and read, and which are printed in a cheap form for
the purpose, the New South Welsh can hardly wish to
lure settlers into a the bush," for in one of these docu-
ments, published while I was in Sydney, the curator
of the museum reported that he never went more than
twelve miles from the city, but that within that circuit
he found seventeen distinct species of land snakes, two
of sea snakes, thirty of lizards, and sixteen of frogs
seventy-eight species of reptiles rewarded him in all.
The seventeen species of land snakes found by him
within the suburbs were named by the curator in a
printed list ; it commenced with the pale-headed snake,
and ended with the death-adder.
CHAPTEE III.
VICTORIA.
THE smallest of our southern colonies except Tas-
mania, one-fourth the size of New South Wales, one-
eighth of Queensland, one-twelfth of West Australia,
one-fifteenth of South Australia, Victoria is the
wealthiest of the Australian nations, and, India alone
excepted, has the largest trade of any of the depend-
encies of Great Britain.
When Mr. Fawkner's party landed in 1835 upon the
Yarra banks, mooring their boat to the forest trees,
VICTORIA. 23
they formed a settlement upon a grassy hill behind a
marsh, and began to pasture sheep where Melbourne,
the capital, now stands. In twenty years, Melbourne
became the largest city but one in the southern hemis-
phere, having 150,000 people within her limits or those
of the suburban towns. Victoria has grander public
buildings in her capital, larger and more costly rail-
roads, a greater income, and a heavier debt than any
other colony, and she pays to her governor <10,000 a
year, or one-fourth more than even New South Wales.
When looked into, all this success means gold.
There is industry, there is energy, there is talent, there
is generosity and public spirit, but they are the abili-
ties and virtues that gold will bring, in bringing a rush
from all the world of dashing fellows in the prime of
life. The progress of Melbourne is that of San Fran-
cisco ; it is the success of Kokitika on a larger scale,
and refined and steadied by having lasted through some
years the triumph of a population which has hitherto
consisted chiefly of adult males.
Sydney people, in their jealousy of the Victorians,
refuse to admit even that the superior energy of the
Melbourne men is a necessary consequence of their
having been the pride of the spirited youths of all the
world, brought together by the rush for gold. At the
time of the first "find" in 1851, all the resolute, able,
physically strong do-noughts of Europe and America
flocked into Port Phillip, as Victoria was then called,
and such timid and weak men as came along with them
being soon crowded out, the men of energy and tough
vital force alone remained.
Some of the New South Welsh, shutting their eyes
to the facts connected with the gold-rush, assert so
loudly that the Victorians are the refuse of California,
or "Yankee scum," that when I first landed in Mel-
24 GEE ATE E B El TAIN.
bourne I expected to find street-cars, revolvers, big
hotels, and fire-clubs, euchre, caucusses, and mixed
drinks. I could discover nothing American about
Melbourne except the grandeur of the public buildings
and the width of the streets, and its people are far more
thoroughly British than are the citizens of the rival
capital. In many senses Melbourne is the London,
Sydney the Pal-is, of Australia.
About the surpassing vigor of the Victorians there
can be no doubt; a glance at the map shows the Vic-
torian railways stretching to the Murray, while those
of Few South Wales are still boggling at the Green
Hills, fifty miles from Sydney. Melbourne, the more
distant port, has carried off the Australian trade with
the New Zealand gold fields from Sydney, the nearer
port. Melbourne imports Sydney shale, and makes '
from it mineral oil, before the Sydney people have
found out its value ; and gas in Melbourne is cheaper
than in Sydney, though the Victorians are bringing
their coal five hundred miles, from a spot only fifty
miles from Sydney.
It is possible that the secret of the superior energy
of the Victorians may be, not in the fact that they are
more American, but more English, than the New
South Welsh. The leading Sydney people are mainly
the sous or grandsons of original settlers, "cornstalks"
reared in the semi-tropical climate of the coast; the
Victorians are full-blooded English immigrants, bred
in the more rugged climes of Tasmania, Canada, or
Great Britain, and brought only in their maturity to
live in the exhilarating air of Melbourne, the finest
climate in the world for healthy men : Melbourne is
hotter than Sydney, but its climate is never tropical.
The squatters on the Queensland downs, mostly immi-
grants from England, show the same strong vitality
THE OLD AND THE NEW.
BUSH SCENERY.
COLLINS STREET EAST, MELBOURNE. P. 24.
VICTORIA. 25
that the Melbourne men possess; but their brother im-
migrants in Brisbane the Queensland capital, where
the afternoon languid breeze resembles that of Sydney
are as incapable of prolonged exertion as are the
Sydney " cornstalks."
Whatever may be the causes of the present triumph
of Melbourne over Sydney, the inhabitants of the latter
city are far from accepting it as likely to be permanent.
They cannot but admit the present glory of what they
call the "Mushroom City." The magnificent pile of
the new Post-office, the gigantic Treasury (which,
when finished, will be larger than our own in Lon-
don), the University, the Parliament-house, the Union
and Melbourne Clubs, the City Hall, the Wool Ex-
change, the viaducts upon the government railroad
lines, all are Cyclopean in their architecture, all seem
built as if to last forever ; still, they say that there is a
certain want of permanence about the prosperity of
Victoria. When the gold discovery took place, in
1851, such trade sprang up that the imports of the
colony jumped from one million to twenty-five mil-
lions sterling in three years ; but, although she is now
commencing to ship breadstuffs to Great Britain, ex-
ports and imports alike show a steady decrease. Con-
siderably more than half of the hand-workers of the
colony are still engaged in gold-mining, and nearly
half the population is resident upon the gold fields;
yet the yield shows, year by year, a continual decline.
Had it not been for the discoveries in New Zealand,
which have carried off the floating digger population,
and for the wise discouragement by the democrats of
the monopolization of the land, there would have been
distress upon the gold fields during the last few years.
The Victorian population is already nearly stationary,
and the squatters call loudly for assisted immigration
VOL. II. 3
26 GREATER BRITAIN.
and free trade, but the stranger sees nothing to astonish
him in the temporary stagnation that attends a de-
creasing gold production.
The exact economical position that Victoria occupies
is easily ascertained, for her statistics are the most per-
fect in the world ; the arrangement is a piece of exqui-
site mosaic. The brilliant statistician who fills the
post of registrar-general to the colony, had the im-
mense advantage of starting clear of all tradition, un-
hampered and unclogged; and, as the governments of
the other colonies have of the last few years taken
Victoria for model, a gradual approach is being made
to uniformity of system. It was not too soon, for
British colonial statistics are apt to be confusing. I
have seen a list of imposts, in which one class consisted
of ale, aniseed, arsenic, assatbetida, and astronomical
instruments; boots, bullion, and salt butter; capers,
cards, caraway seed; gauze, gin, glue, and gloves;
maps and manure; philosophical instruments and salt
pork; sandal-wood, sarsaparilla, and smoked sausages.
Alphabetical arrangement has charms for the official
mind.
Statistics are generally considered dull enough, but
the statistics of these young countries are figure-
poems. Tables that in England contrast jute with
hemp, or this man with that man, here compare the
profits of manufactures with those of agriculture, or
pit against each other, the powers of race and race.
Victoria is the only country in existence which pos-
sesses a statistical history from its earliest birth ; but,
after all, even Victoria falls short of Minnesota, where
the settlers founded the " State Historical Society" a
week before the foundation of the State.
Gold, wheat, sheep, are the three great staples of
Victoria, and have each its party, political and com-
VICTORIA. 27
mercial diggers, agricultural settlers, and squatters
though of late the diggers and the landed democracy
have made common cause against the squatters. Gold
can now be studied best at Ballarat, and wheat at
Clunes, or upon the Barrabool hills behind Geelong;
but I started first for Echuca, the headquarters of the
squatter interest, and metropolis of sheep, taking upon
my way Kyneton, one of the richest agricultural dis-
tricts of the colony, and also the once famous gold dig-
gings of Bendigo Creek.
Between Melbourne and Kyneton, where I made
my first halt, the railway runs through undulating
lightly-timbered tracks, free from underwood, and well
grassed. By letting my eyes persuade me that the
burnt-up herbage was a ripening crop of wheat or oats,
I found a likeness to tbe views in the weald of Sussex,
though the foliage of the gums, or eucalypti, is thinner
than that of the English oaks.
Hiding from Kyneton to Carlsruhe, Pastoria, and
the foot hills of the " Dividing Range," I found the
agricultural community busily engaged upon the har-
vest, and much excited upon the great thistle question.
Women and tiny children were working in the fields,
while the men were at Kyneton, trying in vain to hire
the harvest hands from Melbourne at less than 2 10s.
or <3 a week and board. The thistle question was not
less serious; the "thistle inspectors," elected under
the " Thistle Prevention Act," had commenced their
labors, and although each man agreed with his friend
that his neighbor's thistles were a nuisance, still he did
not like being fined for not weeding out his own. The
fault, they say, lies in the climate ; it is too good, and
the English seeds have thriven. Great as was the
talk of thistles, the fields in the fertile Kyneton dis-
'trict were as clean as in a well-kept English farm, and
28 GREATER BRITAIN.
showed the clearest signs of the small farmer's personal
care.
Every one of the agricultural villages in Australia
that I visited was a full-grown municipality. The col-
onial English, freed from the checks which are put by
interested landlords to local government in Britain,
have passed in all the settlements laws under which
any village must be raised into a municipality on fifty
of the villagers (the number varies in the different col-
onies) signing a requisition, unless within a given time
a larger number sign a petition to the contrary effect.
After a short visit to the bustling digging town of
Castlemaine, I pushed on by train to Sandhurst, a town
of great pretensions, which occupies the site of the
former digging camp at Bendigo. On a level part of
the line between the two great towns, my train dashed
through some closed gates, happily without hurt. The
Melbourne Argus of the next day said that the crash had
been the result of the signalman taking the fancy that
the trains should wait on him, not he upon the trains,
so he had " closed the gates, hoisted the danger signal,
and adjourned to a neighboring store to drink." On
my return from Echuca, I could not find that he had
been dismissed.
When hands are scarce, and lives valuable not to
the possessor only, but to the whole community, care
to avoid accidents might be expected ; but there is a
certain recklessness in all young countries, and not
even in Kansas is it more observable than in Victoria
and New South Wales.
Sandhurst, like Castlemaine, straggles over hill and
dale for many miles, the diggers following the gold-
leads, and building a suburb by each alluvial mine,
rather than draw their supplies from the central spot.
The extent of the worked-out gold field struck me as
VICTORIA. 29
greater than the fields round Placerville, but then in
California many of the old diggings are hidden by the
vines.
In Sandhurst I could find none of the magnificent
restaurants of Virginia City; none of the gambling
saloons of Hokitika ; and the only approach to gayety
among the diggers was made in a drinking-hall, where
some dozen red-shirted, bearded men were dancing by
turns with four well-behaved and quiet-looking German
girls, who were paid, the constable at the gate informed
me, by the proprietor of the booth. My hotel "The
Shamrock" kept by New York Irish, was a thor-
oughly American house ; but, then, digger civilization
is everywhere American a fact owing, no doubt, to
the American element having been predominant in
the first-discovered diggings those of California.
Digger revolts must have been feared when the
Sandhurst Government Reserve was surrounded with
a ditch strangely like a moat, and palings that bear an
ominous resemblance to a Maori pah. In the morn-
ing I found my way through the obstructions, and dis-
covered the police station, and in it the resident magis-
trate, to whom I had a letter. He knew nothing of
" Gumption Dick," Hank Monk's friend, but he intro-
duced me to his intelligent Chinese clerk, and told me
many things about the yellow diggers. The bad feel-
ing between the English diggers and the Chinese has
not in the least died out. Upon the worked-out fields of
Castlemaine and Sandhurst, the latter have things their
own way, and I saw hundreds of them washing quietly
and quickly in the old Bendigo Creek, finding an ample
living in the leavings of the w 7 hites. So successful have
they been that a few Europeans have lately been taking
to their plan, and an old Frenchman who died here
3*
30 GREATER BRITAIN.
lately, and who, from his working persistently in worn*
out fields, had always been thought to be a harmless
idiot, left behind him a fortune of twenty thousand
pounds, obtained by washing in company with the
Chinese.
The spirit that called into existence the Ballarat
anti-Chinese mobs is not extinct in Queensland, as I
found during my stay at Sydney. At the Crocodile
Creek diggings in Northern Queensland, whither many
of the Chinese from New South Wales have lately
gone, terrible riots occurred the week after I landed
in Australia. The English diggers announced their
intention of "rolling up" the Chinese, and proceeded
to "jump their claims " that is, trespass on the mining
plots, for in Queensland the Chinese have felt them-
selves strong enough to purchase claims. The Chinese
bore the robbery for some days, but at last a digger
who had sold them a claim for <50 one morning,
hammered the pegs into the soft ground the same
day, and then jumped the claim on the pretense that
it was not "pegged out." This was too much for the
Chinese owner, who tomahawked the digger on the
spot. The English at once fired the Chinese town,
and even attacked the English driver of a coach for
conveying Chinamen on his vehicle. Some diggers
in North Queensland are said to have kept blood-
hounds for the purpose of hunting Chinamen for sport,
as the rowdies of the old country hunt cats with
terriers.
On the older gold fields, such as those of Sandhurst
and Castlemaine, the hatred of the English for the
Chinese lies dormant, but it is not the less strong for
being free from physical violence. The woman in a
baker's shop near Sandhurst, into which I went to buy
a roll for lunch, shuddered when she told me of one
VICTORIA. 31
or two recent marriages between Irish "Biddies" and
some of the wealthiest Chinese.
The man against whom all this hatred and suspicion
is directed is no ill-conducted rogue or villain. The
chief of the police at Sandhurst tells me that the Chi-
nese are " the best of citizens;" a member of the Vic-
torian Parliament, resident in the very edge of their
quarter at Geelong, spoke of the yellow men to me as
" well-behaved and frugal;" the registrar-general told
me that there is less crime, great or small, among the
Chinese, than among any equal number of English in
the colony.
The Chinese are not denied civil rights in Victoria,
as they have been in California. Their testimony is
accepted in the courts against that of whites ; they
may become naturalized, and then can vote. Some
twenty or thirty of them, out of 30,000, have been
naturalized in Victoria up to the present time.
That the Chinese in Australia look upon their stay
in the gold fields as merely temporary is clear from
the character of their restaurants, which are singularly
inferior to those of San Francisco. The best in the
colonies is one near Castlemaine, but even this is small
and poor. Shark's fin is an unheard-of luxury, and
even puppy you would have to order. " Silk- worms
fried in castor oil" is the colonial idea of a Chinese
delicacy ; yet the famous sea-slug is an inhabitant of
Queensland waters, and the Gulf of Carpentaria.
From Sandhurst northward, the country, known as
Elysium Flats, becomes level, and is wooded in patches,
like the "oak-opening" prairies of Wisconsin and Illi-
nois. When within fifty miles of Echuca, the line
comes out of the forest on to a vast prairie, across which
I saw a marvelous mirage of water and trees on various
step-like levels. From the other window of the com-
32 GREATER BRITAIN.
partment carriage (sadly hot and airless after the Amer-
ican cars), I saw the thin dry yellow grass on fire for
a dozen miles. The smoke from these " hush-fires"
sometimes extends for hundreds of miles to sea. In
steaming down from Sydney to Wilson's Promontory
on my way to Melbourne, we passed through a column
of smoke about a mile in width when off" Wolongong,
near Botany Bay, and never lost sight of it, as it lay in
a dense brown mass upon the sea, until we rounded
Cape Howe, two hundred miles farther to the south-
ward.
The fires on these great plains are caused by the
dropping of fusees by travelers as they ride along smok-
ing their pipes Australian fashion, or else by spreading
of the fires from their camps. The most ingenious
stories are invented by the colonists to prevent us from
throwing doubt upon their carefulness, and I was told
at Echuca that the late fires had been caused by the
concentration of the sun's rays upon spots of grass
owing to the accidental conversion into burning-glasses
of beer-bottles that had been suffered to lie about.
Whatever their cause, the fires, in conjunction with
the heat, have made agricultural settlement upon the
Murray a lottery. The week before my visit, some
ripe oats at Echuca had been cut down to stubble by
the hot wind, and farmers are said to count upon the
success of only one harvest in every three seasons. On
the other hand, the Victorian apricots, shriveled by
the hot wind, are so many lumps of crystallized nectar
when you pierce their thick outer coats.
Defying the sun, I started off* to the banks of the
Murray River, not without some regret at the absence
of the continuous street verandas which in Melbourne
form a first step toward the Italian piazza. One may
be deceived by trifles when the character of an unknown
VICTORIA. 33
region is at stake. Before reaching the country, I had
read, " Steam-packet Hotel, Esplanade, Echuca ;" and,
though experiences on the Ohio had taught me to put
no trust in " packets," yet I had somehow come to the
belief that the Murray must be a second Missouri at
least, if not an Upper Mississippi. The "Esplanade"
I found to be a myth, and the " fleet" of " steam-
packets" were drawn up in a long line upon the mud,
there being in this summer weather no water in which
they could float. The Murray in February is a stream-
less ditch, which in America, if known and named at
all, would rank as a tenth-rate river.
The St. Lawrence is 2200 miles in length, and its
tributary, the Ottawa, 1000 miles in length, itself re-
ceives a tributary stream, the Gatineau, with a course
of 420 miles. At 217 miles from its confluence with
the Ottawa the Gatineau is still 1000 feet in width. At
Albury, which even in winter is the head of navigation
on the Murray, you are only some 600 or 700 miles by
river from the open sea, or about the same distance as
from Memphis in Tennessee to the mouth of the Mis-
sissippi.
During six months of the year, however, the Mur-
ray is for wool-carrying purposes an important river.
The railway to Echuca has tapped the river system in
the Victorians' favor, and Melbourne has become the
port of the back country of New South Wales, and
even Queensland. "The Riverina is commercially
annexed" to Victoria, said the premier of New South
Wales while I was in that colony, and the "Riverina"
means that portion of New South Wales which lies
between the Lachlan, the Murrumbidgee, and the
Murray, to the northward of Echuca.
Returning to the inn to escape the sun, I took up
the Riverina Herald, published at Echuca; of its twenty-
34 GREATER BRITAIN.
four columns, nineteen and a half are occupied by the
eternal sheep in one shape or another. A representa-
tion of Jason's fleece stands at the head of the title ;
"wool" is the first word in the first line of the body of
the paper. More than half of the advertisements are
those of wool brokers, or else of the fortunate posses-
sors of specifics that will cure the scab. One disin-
fectant compound is certified to by no less than seven-
teen inspectors; another is puffed by a notice informing
flock-masters that, in cases of foot-rot, the advertiser
goes upon the principle of "no cure, no pay." One
firm makes " liberal advances on the ensuing clip ;"
another is prepared to do the like upon "pastoral secu-
rities." Sheep-chandlers, regardless of associations,
advertise in one line their bread and foot-rot ointment,
their biscuit and sheep-wash solution; and the last of
the advertisements upon the front page is that of an
" agent for the sale of fat." The body of the paper
contains complaints against the judges at a recent show
of wool, and an account of the raising of a sawyer " 120
feet in length and 33 feet in girth" by the new " snag-
boat" working to clear out the river for the floating
down of the next wool clip. Whole columns of small
type are filled with "impounding" lists, containing
brief descriptions of all the strayed cattle of each dis-
trict. The technicalities of the distinctive marks are
surprising. Who not to the manner born can make
much of this: "Blue and white cow, cock horns, 22
off-rump, IL off-ribs?" or of this: " Strawberry stag,
top off off-ear, J. C. over 4 off-rump, like H. G. con-
joined near loin and rump?" This, again, is difficult:
" Swallow tail, off-ear, q_ and illegible over F off-ribs,
PT off-rump." What is a "blue strawberry bull?" is
a question which occurred to me. Again, what a phe-
nomenon is this : " White cow, writing capital A oft-
VICTORIA. 35
shoulder?" A paragraph relates the burning of
"<10,000 worth of country near Gambler," and adver-
tisements of Colt's revolvers and quack medicines
complete the sheet. The paper shows that for the
most part the colonists here, as in New Zealand, have
had the wisdom to adopt the poetic native names of
places, and even to use them for towns, streets, and
ships. Of the Panama liners, the Hakaia and Maitoura
bear the names of rivers, the Rechine and the Kaikoura,
names of mountain ranges; and the colonial boats
have for the most part familiar Maori or Australian
names ; for instance, jRangitoto, " hill of hills," and
Rangitiri, "great and good." The New Zealand col-
onists are better oft' than the Australian in this respect :
Wongawonga, Yarrayarra, and Wooloomooloo are not
inviting; and some of the Australian villagers have
still stranger names. Nindooinbah is a station in south-
ern Queensland; Yallack-a-yallack,Borongorong, Bun-
duramongee, Jabbarabbara, Thuroroolong, Yalla-y-
poora, Yanac-a-Yanac, Wuid Kerruick, Woolongu-
woong-wrinan, Woori Yalloak, and Borhoneyghurk,
are stations in Victoria. The only leader in the Herald
is on the meat question, but there is in a letter an ac-
count of the Christmas festivities at Melbourne, which
contains much merry-making at the expense of "unac-
climatized new chums," as fresh comers to the col-
onies are called. The writer speaks rapturously of the
rush on Christmas-day from the hot, dry, dusty streets
to the "golden fields of waving corn." The " exposed
nature of the Royal Park" prevented many excursion-
ists from picnicking there, as they had intended; but
we read on, and find that the exposure dreaded was
not to cold, but to the terrible hot wind which swept
from the plains of the northwest, and scorched up
every blade of grass, every green thing, in the open
36 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
spots. We hear of Christmas dinners eaten upon the
grass at Richmond, in the sheltered shade of the gum-
forest, hut in the botanical gardens the " plants had
been much affected 'by the trying heat." However,
"the weather on boxing-day was somewhat more favor-
able for open-air enjoyment," as the thermometer was
only 98 in the shade.
Will ever ISTew Zealand or Australian bard spring
up to write of the pale primroses that in September
commence to peep out from under the melting snows,
and to make men look forward to the blazing heat and
the long December days ? Strangely enough, the only
English poem which an Australian lad can read with-
out laughing at the old country conceit that connects
frosts with January, and hot weather with July, is
Thomson's "Seasons," for in its long descriptions of
the changes in England from spring to summer, from
autumn to winter, a month is only once named: "rosy-
footed May" cannot be said to "steal blushing on" in
Australia, where May answers to our November.
In the afternoon, I ventured out again, and strolled
into the gum-forest on the banks of the Campaspe
River, not believing the reports of the ferocity of the
Victorian bunyips and alligators which have lately
scared the squatters who dwelt on creeks. The black
trees, relieved upon a ground of white dust and yellow
grass, were not inviting, and the scorching heat soon
taught me to hate the shadeless boughs and ragged
bark of the inevitable gum. It had not rained for
nine weeks at the time of my visit, and the ther-
mometer (in the wind) reached 116 in the shade, but
there was nothing oppressive in the heat ; it seemed
only to dry up the juices of the frame, and dazzle you
with intense brightness. I soon came to agree with a
newly-landed Irish gardener, who told a friend of mine
VICTOBIA. 37
that Australia was a strange country, for he could not
see that the thermometer had "the slightest effect
upon the heat." The blaze is healthy, and fevers are
unknown in the Biverina, decay of noxious matter,
animal or vegetable, being arrested during summer by
the drought. This is a hot year, for on the 12th of
January the thermometer, even at the Melbourne Ob-
servatory, registered 108 in the shade, and 123 in the
shade was registered at Wentworth, near the confluence
of the Murray and ihe Darling.
As the afternoon drew on, and, if not the heat, at
least the sun declined, the bell-birds ceased their tune-
ful chiming, and the forest was vocal only with the
ceaseless chirp of the tree-cricket, whose note recalled
the goatsucker of our English woods. The Australian
landscapes show best by the red light of the hot
weather sunsets, when the dark feathery foliage of the
gum-trees conies out in exquisite' relief upon the fiery
fogs that form the sky, and the yellow earth gaining a
tawny hue in the lurid glare, throws off a light resem-
bling that which in winter is reflected from our English
snows. At sunset there was a calm, but, as I turned
to walk homeward, the hot wind sprang up, and died
again, while the trees sighed themselves uneasily to
sleep, as though fearful of to-morrow's blast.
A night of heavy heat was followed by a breathless
dawn, and the scorching sun returned in all its red-
ness to burn up once more the earth, not cooled from
the glare of yesterday. Englishmen must be bribed
by enormous gains before they will work with con-
tinuous toil in such a climate, however healthy.
VOL. II.
38 GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER IV.
SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY.
is a Colonial Conservative ?" is a question
that used to be daily put to a Victorian friend of mine
when he was in London. His answer, he told me, was
always, "A statesman who has got four of the 'points'
of the People's Charter, and wants to conserve them,"
but as used in Victoria, the term " Conservative" ex-
presses the feeling less of a political party than of the
whole of the people who have anything whatever to
lose. Those who have something object to giving a
share in the government to those who have nothing ;
those who have much, object to political equality with
those who have less; and, not content with having won
a tremendous victory in basing the Upper House upon
a 5000 qualification and 100 freehold or 300 lease-
hold franchise, the plutocracy are meditating attacks
upon the Legislative Assembly.
The democracy hold out undauntedly, refusing all
monetary tests, though an intelligence basis for the
franchise is by no means out of favor, except with the
few who cannot read or write. One day, when I was
driving from Melbourne to Saudridge, in company with
a colonial merchant, he asked our car-driver: "Now,
tell me fairly: do you think these rogues of fellows
that hang about the shore here ought to have votes?"
"No, I don't.' 7 "Ah, you'd like to see a 5s. fee on
registration, wouldn't you ?" The answer was sharp
SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY. 39
enough in its tone. " Five shillings would be nothing
to you; it would be something to me, and it would be
more than my brother could pay. What I'd have
done would be to say that those who couldn't read
shouldn't vote, that's all. That would keep out the
loafers."
The plutocratic party is losing, not gaining, ground
in Victoria ; it is far more likely that the present gen-
eration will see the Upper House abolished than that
it will witness the introduction of restrictions upon the
manhood suffrage which exists for the Lower ; but
there is one branch of the plutocracy which actively
carries on the light in all the colonies, and which claims
to control society, the pastoral tenants of crown lands,
or Squatter Aristocracy.
The word "squatter" has undergone a remarkable
change of meaning since the time when it denoted
those who stole government land, and built their
dwellings on it. As late as 1837, squatters were de-
fined by the chief justice of New South Wales as
people occupying lands without legal title, and who
were subject to a fine on discovery. They were de-
scribed as living by bartering rum with convicts for
stolen goods, and as being themselves invariably con-
victs or " expirees."
Escaping suddenly from these low associations, the
word came to be applied to graziers who drove their
Hocks into the unsettled interior, and thence to those
of them who received leases from the crown of pas-
toral lands.
The squatter is the nabob of Melbourne and Sydney,
the inexhaustible mine of wealth. He patronizes balls,
promenade concerts, flower-shows; he is the mainstay
of the great clubs, the joy of the shopkeepers, the good
angel of the hotels ; without him the opera could not
40 GREATER BRITAIN.
be kept up, and the jockey-clubs would die a natural
death.
Neither squatters nor townsfolk will admit that this
view of the former's position is exactly correct. The
Victorian squatters tell you that they have been ruined
by confiscation, but that their neighbors in New South
"Wales, who have leases, are more prosperous ; in New
South Wales they tell you of the destruction of the
squastters by "free selection," of which there is none
in Queensland, "the squatter's paradise;" but in
Queensland the squatters protest that they have never
made wages for their personal work, far less interest
upon their capital. " Not one of us in ten is solvent,"
they say.
As sweeping assertions^ are made by the townsfolk
upon the other side. The squatters, they sometimes
say, may well set up to be a great landed aristocracy,
for they have every fault of a dominant caste except
its generous vices. They are accused of piling up vast
hoards of wealth while living a most penurious life,
and contributing less than would so many mechanics
to the revenue of the country, in order that they may
return in later life to England, there to spend what
they have wrung from the soil of Victoria or New
South Wales.
The occupation of the whole of the crown lands by
squatters has prevented the making of railways to be
paid for in land on the American system ; but the
chief of all the evils connected with squatting is the
tendency to the accumulation in a few hands of all the
land and all the pastoral wealth of the country, an
extreme danger in the face of democratic institutions,
such as those of Victoria and New South Wales. Re-
membering that manufactures are few, the swelling of
the cities shows how the people have been kept from
SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY. 41
the land; considerably more than half of the popula-
tion of Victoria lives within the corporate towns.
A few years back, a thousand men held between
them, on nominal rents, forty million acres out of the
forty-three and a half million mountain and swamp
excluded of which Victoria consists. It is true that
the amount so held has now decreased to thirty mil-
lion, but on the other hand the squatters have bought
vast tracts which were formerly within their " runs,"
with the capital acquired in squatting, and, knowing
the country better than others could possibly know it,
have naturally selected all the most valuable land.
The colonial democracy in 1860 and the succeeding
years rose to a sense of its danger from the land
monopoly, and began to search about for means to
put it down, and to destroy at the same time the sys-
tem of holding from the crown, for it is singular that
while in England there seems to be springing up a
popular movement in favor of the nationalization of
the land, in the most democratic of the Australian
colonies the tendency is from crown land tenure to
individual freehold ownership of the soil rather than
the other way. Yet here in Victoria there was a free
field to start upon, for the land already belonged to
the State the first of the principles included under
the phrase, nationalized land. In America, again, we
see that, with the similar advantage of State posses-
sion of territories which are still fourteen times the
size of the French Empire, there is little or no tend-
ency toward agitation for the continuance of State
ownership. In short, freehold ownership, the Saxon
institution, seems dear to the Anglo-Saxon race. The
national land plan would commend itself rather to the
Celtic races : to the Highlander, who remembers clan-
ship, to the Irishman, who regrets the Sept.
4*
42 GEE ATE E BRITAIN.
Since the Radicals have been in power, both here
and in New South Wales, they have carried act after
act to encourage agricultural settlers on freehold tenure,
at the expense of the pastoral squatters. The "free
selection" plan, now in operation in New South Wales,
allows the agricultural settler to buy, but at a fixed
price, the freehold of a patch of land, provided it be
over forty acres and less than 320, anywhere he pleases
even in the middle of a squatter's "run," if he en-
ters at once, and commences to cultivate; and the Land
Act of 1862 provides that the squatting license system
shall entirely end with the year 1869. Forgetting thafc
in every lease the government reserved the power of
terminating the agreement for the purpose of the sale
of land, the squatters complain that free selection is
but confiscation, and that they are at the mercy of a
pack of cattle-stealers and horse-thieves, who roam
through the country haunting their "runs" like
"ghosts," taking up the best land on their "runs,"
" picking the eyes out of the land," turning to graze
anywhere, on the richest grass, the sheep and cattle
they have stolen on their way. The best of them, they
say, are but " cockatoo farmers," living from hand to
mouth on what they manage to grub and grow. On
the other hand, the "free selection" principle "up
country" is tempered by the power of the wealthy
squatter to impound the cattle of the poor little free-
holder whenever he pleases to say that they stray on
to his "run;" indeed, "Pound them off, or if you
can't, buy them off," has become a much used phrase.
The squatter, too, is protected in Victoria by such pro-
visions as that "improvements" by him, if over <40 on
forty acres, cover an acre of land for each 1. The
squatters are themselves buying largely of land, and
thus profiting by the free selection. To a stranger it
SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY. 43
seems as though the interests of the squatter have been
at least sufficiently cared for, remembering the vital
necessity for immediate action. In 1865, Victoria,
small as she is, had not sold a tenth of her land.
In her free selectors, Victoria will gain a class of
citizens whose political views will contrast sharply
with the strong anti-popular sentiments of the squat-
ters, and who, instead of spending their lives as ab-
sentees, will stay, they and their children, upon the
land, and spend all they make within the colony, while
their sons add to its laboring arms.
Since land has been, even to a limited extent, thrown
open, Victoria has suddenly ceased to be a wheat-im-
porting, and become a wheat-exporting country, and
flourishing agricultural communities, such as those of
Ceres, Clunes, Kyneton, are springing up on every
side, growing wheat instead of wool, while the wide
extension which has in Victoria been given to the
principle of local self-government in the shape of shire-
councils, road-boards, and village-municipalities allows
of the junction in a happy country of the whole of the
advantages of small and great farming, under the un-
equaled system of small holdings, and co-operation
for improvements among the holders.
44 GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTEE V.
COLONIAL DEMOCRACY.
PAYMENT of members by the State was the great
question under debate in the Lower House during
much of the time I spent in Melbourne, and, in spite
of all the efforts of the Victorian democracy, the bill
was lost. The objection taken at home, that payment
degrades the House in the eyes of the people, could
never arise in a new country, where a practical nation
looks at the salaries as payment for work done, and
obstinately refuses to believe in the work being done
without payment in some shape or other. In these
colonies, the reasons in favor of payment are far
stronger than they are in Canada or America, for while
their country or town share equally the difficulties of
finding representatives who will consent to travel hun-
dreds and thousands of miles to Ottawa or Washing-
ton, in the Australias Parliament sits in towns which
contain from one-sixth to one-fourth of the whole
population, and under a non-payment system power is
thrown entirely into the hands of Melbourne, Sydney,
Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Hobarton. Not only
do these cities return none but their own citizens, but
the country districts, often unable to find within their
limits men who have the time and- money to make
them able to attend throughout the sessions at the
capital, elect the city traders to represent them.
Payment of members was met by a proposition on
COLONIAL DEMOCRACY. 45
the part of the leader of the squatter party in the
Upper House to carry it through that assembly if the
Lower House would introduce the principle of per-
sonal representation; but it was objected that under
such a system the Catholics, who form a fifth of the
population, might, if they chose, return a fifth of the
members. That they ought to be able to do so never
seemed to strike friend or foe. The Catholics, who
had a long turn of power under the O'Shaughnessey
government, were finally driven out for appointing
none but Irishmen to the police. " I always said this
ministry would go out on the back of a policeman,"
was the comment of the Opposition wit. The present
ministry, which is Scotch in tone, was hoisted into
office by a great coalition against the Irish Catholics,
of whom there are only a handful in the House.
The subject of national education, which was before
the colony during my visit, also brought the Catholics
prominently forward, for an episcopal pastoral was
read in all their churches threatening to visit ecclesi-
astical censure upon Catholic teachers in the common
schools, and upon the parents of the children who
attend them. " Godless education " is as little popular
here as it used to be at home, and the Anglican and
Catholic clergymen insist that it is proposed to make
their people pay heavily for an education in which it
would be contrary to their conscience to share; but
the laymen seem less distressed than their pastors. It
has been said that the reason why the Catholic bishop
declined to be examined upon the Education Com-
mission was that he was afraid of this question : "Are
you aware that half the Catholic children in the coun-
try are attending schools which you condemn?"
The most singular, perhaps, of the spectacles pre-
sented by colonial politics during my visit was that of
46 GREATER BRITAIN.
the Victorian Upper House going deliberately into
committee to consider its own constitution, with the
view of introducing a bill for its own reform, or to
meditate, its enemies said, upon self-destruction.
"Whether the blow comes from within or without,
there is every probability that the Upper House will
shortly disappear, and the advice of Milton and
Franklin be followed in having but a single chamber.
It is not unlikely that this step will be followed by
the demand of the Victorians to be allowed to choose
their own governor, subject to his approval by the
queen, with a view to making it impossible that
needy men should be sent out to suck the colony, as
they sometimes have been in the past. The Austra-
lians look upon the liberal expenditure of a governor
as theip own liberality, but upon meanness on his part
as a robbery from themselves.
The Victorian have a singular advantage over the
American democrats as being unhampered by a con-
stitution of antiquity and renown. Constitution-tink-
ering is here continual; the new society is continually
reshaping its political institutions to keep pace with the
latest developments of the national mind; in America,
the party of liberty, at this moment engaged in re-
moulding the worn-out constitution in favor of free-
dom, dares not even yet proclaim that the national
good is its aim, but keeps to the old watchwords, and
professes to be treading in the footsteps of George
Washington.
The tone of Victorian democracy is not American.
There is the defiant way of taking care of themselves
and ignoring their neighbors, characteristic of the
founders of English plantations in all parts of the
world ; the spirit which prompted the passing, in 1852,
of the act prohibiting the admission to the colony of
COLONIAL DEMOCEACY. 47
convicts for three years after they had received their
pardons ; but the English race here is not Latinized as
it is in America. If it were, Australian democracy
would not he so "shocking" to the squatters. De-
mocracy, like Mormonism, would he nothing if found
among Frenchmen or people with black faces, but it
is at first sight very terrible, when it smiles on you
from between a pair of rosy Yorkshire cheeks.
The political are not greater than the social differ-
ences between Australia and America. Australian
society resembles English middle-class society; the
people have, in matters of literature and religion, tastes
and feelings similar to those which pervade such com-
munities as those of Birmingham or Manchester. On
the other hand, the vices of America are those of aris-
tocracies ; her virtues, those of a landed republic. Shop
and factory are still in the second rank; wheat and
corn still the prevailing powers. In all the Australian
colonies land is coming to the front for the second
time under a system of small holdings, except in Queens-
land, where it has never ceased to rule, and that under
an oligarchic form of society and government; but it
is doubtful whether, looking to the size of Melbourne,
the landed democracy will ever outvote the townfolk
in Victoria.
That men of ability and character are proscribed has
been one of the charges brought against colonial de-
mocracy. For my part, I found gathered in Melbourne,
at the University, at the Observatory, at the Botanical
Garden, and at the government offices, men of the
highest scientific attainments, drawn from all parts of
the world, and tempted to Australia by large salaries
voted by the democracy. The statesmen of all the
colonies are well worthy of the posts they hold. Mr.
Macalister, in Queensland, and Mr. Martin, at Sydney,
48 GREATER BRITAIN.
are excellent debaters. Mr. Parkes, whose biography
would be the typical history of a successful colonist,
and who has fought his way up from the position of a
Birmingham artisan free-emigrant to that of Colonial
Secretary of New South Wales, is an extremely able
writer and deep thinker. The business powers of the
present Colonial Treasurer of New South "Wales are
remarkable ; and Mr. Higinbotham, the Attorney-
General of Victoria, possesses a fund of experience and
a power of foresight which it would be hard to equal
at home. Many of the ministers in all the colonies
are men who have worked themselves up from the
ranks, and it is amusing to notice the affected horror
with which their antecedents have been recalled by
those who have brought out a pedigree from the old
country. A government clerk in one of the colonies
told me that the three last ministers at the head of his
department had been " so low in the social scale, that
my wife could not visit theirs."
Class animosity and political feud runs much higher,
and drives its roots far deeper into private life in Vic-
toria than in any other English-speaking country I have
seen. Political men of distinction are shunned by their
opponents in the streets and clubs ; and, instead of its
being possible to differ on politics and yet continue
friends, as in the old country, I have seen men in Vic-
toria refuse to sit down to dinner with a statesman
from whose views on land questions they happened to
dissent. A man once warned me solemnly against
dining with a quiet grave old gentleman, on the ground
that he was " a most dangerous radical a perfect fire-
brand."
Treated in this way, it is not strange that the demo-
cratic ministers and members stand much upon their
dignity, and colonial Parliaments are in fact not only
COLONIAL DEMOCRACY. 49
as haughty as the parent assembly at Westminster, but
often assert their privileges by the most arbitrary of
means. A few weeks before I arrived in Melbourne,
a member of the staff of the Argus newspaper was given
up by the proprietors to soothe the infuriated Assembly.
Having got him, the great question of what to do with
him arose, and he was placed in a vault with a grated
window, originally built for prisoners of the House, but
which had been temporarily made use of as a coal-hole.
Such a disturbance was provoked by the alleged bar-
barity of this proceeding, that the prisoner was taken
to a capital room up stairs, where he gave dinner-par-
ties every day. His opponents said the great difficulty
was to get rid of him, for he seemed to be permanently
located in the Parliamenc-house, and that, when they
ordered his liberation, his friends insisted that it should
not take place until he had been carried down to the
coal-hole cell which he had occupied the first day, and
there photographed " through the dungeon bars" as
the "martyr of the Assembly."
Though both Victoria and New South Wales are
democratic, there is a great difference between the
two democracies. In New South Wales, I found not
a democratic so much as a mixed country, containing
a large and wealthy class with aristocratic prejudices,
but governed by an intensely democratic majority a
country not unlike the State of Maryland. On the
other hand, the interest which attaches to the political
condition of Victoria is extreme, since it probably pre-
sents an accurate view, "in little," of the state of
society which will exist in England, after many steps
toward social democracy have been taken, but before
the nation as a whole has become completely demo-
cratic.
One, of the best features of the colonial democracy is
VOL. II. 5
50 GREATER BRITAIN.
its earnestness in the cause of education. In England
it is one of our worst national peculiarities that, what-
ever our station, we either are content with giving
children an "education" which is absolutely wanting
in any real training for the mind, or aid to the brain in
its development, or else we give them a schooling which
is a mere preparation for the Bar or Church, for it has
always been considered with us that it is a far greater
matter to be a solicitor or a curate than to be wise or
happy. This is, of course, a consequence partly of the
energy of the race, and partly of our aristocratic form
of society, which leads every member of a class to be
continually trying to get into the class immediately
above it in wealth or standing. In the colonies, as in
the United States, the democratic form which society
has taken has carried with it the continental habit of
thought upon educational matters, so that it would
seem as though the form of society influenced this
question much more than the energy of the race, which
is rather heightened than depressed in these new coun-
tries. The English Englishman says, "If I send Dick
to a good school, and scrape up money enough to put
him into a profession, even if he don't make much, at
least he'll be a gentleman." The Australian or demo-
cratic Englishman says, " Tom must have good school-
ing, and must make the most of it; but I'll not have
him knocking about in broadcloth, and earning no-
thing ; so no profession for him ; but let him make
money like me, and mayhap get a few acres more land."
Making allowance for the thinness of population in
the bush, education in Victoria is extremely general
among the children, and is directed by local commit-
tees with success, although the members of the boards
are often themselves destitute of all knowledge except
that which tells them that education will do their chil-
COLONIAL DEMOCRACY. 51
dren good. Mr. Geary, an inspector of schools, told
the Commissioners that he had examined one school
where not a single member of the local committee
could write ; but these immigrant fathers do their duty
honestly toward the children for all their ignorance,
and there is every chance that the schools will grow
and grow until their influence on behalf of freedom
becomes as marked in Victoria as ever it has been in
Massachusetts. Education has a great advantage in
countries where political rights are widely extended:
in the colonies, as in America, there is a spirit of
political life astir throughout the country, and news-
papers and public meetings continue an education
throughout life which in England ceases at twelve,
and gives place to driving sheep to paddocks, and
shouting at rooks in a wheat-field.
There is nothing in the state of the Victorian schools
to show what will be the type of the next generation,
but there are many reasons for believing that the pres-
ent disorganization of colonial society will only cease
with the attainment of complete democracy or absolute
equality of conditions, which must be produced by
the already completely democratic institutions in little
more than a generation. The squatter class will dis-
appear as agriculture drives sheep-farming from the
field, and, on the other hand, the town democracy will
adopt a tone of manly independence instead of one of
brag and bluster, when education makes them that
which at present they are not the equals of the
wealthy farmers.
It has been justly pointed out that one of the worst
dangers of democracy is the crushing influence of pub-
lic opinion upon individuality, and many who have
written upon America have assumed that the tendency
has already manifested itself there. I had during my
52 GREATER BRITAIN.
stay in the United States arrived at the contrary opinion,
'and come to believe that in no country in the world is
eccentricity, moral and religious, so ripe as in America,
in no country individuality more strong; but, ascribing
to intermixture of foreign blood this apparently abnor-
mal departure from the assumed democratic shape of
society, I looked forward to the prospect of seeing the
overwhelming force of the opinion of the majority ex-
hibited in all its hideousness in the democratic colonies.
I was as far from discovering the monster as 1 had been
in America, for I soon found that, although there may
be little intellectual unrest in Australia, there is mar-
velous variety of manners.
There is in our colonies no trace of that multiplica-
tion of creeds which characterizes America, and which
is said to be everywhere the result of the abolition of
Establishments. In Victoria, eighty per cent, of the
whites belong to either Episcopalians, Catholics, or
Presbyterians, and almost all of the remainder to the
well-known English Churches; nothing is heard of
such sects as the hundreds that have sprung up in
New England Hopkinsians, Universalists, Osgoodites,
liogerenes, Come-Outers, Non-Resistants, and the like.
The Australian democrat likes to pray as his father
prayed before him, and is strongly conservative in his
ecclesiastical affairs. It may be the absence in Aus-
tralia of enthusiastic religion which accounts for the
want among the country-folk of the peculiar gentle-
ness of manner which distinguishes the farmer in
America. Climate may have its effect upon the voice ;
the influence of the Puritan and Quaker in the early
history of the thirteen States, when manners were
moulded and the national life shaped for good or harm,
may have permanently affected the descendants of the
early settlers; but everywhere in America I noticed
COLONIAL DEMOCRACY. 53
that the most perfect dignity and repose of manner
was found in districts where the passionate religious
systems had their strongest hold.
There is no trace in the colonies at present of that
love for general^deas which takes America away from
England in philosophy, and sets her with the Latin
and Celtic races on the side of France. The tendency
is said to follow on democracy, but it would be better
said that democracy is itself one of these general ideas.
Democracy in the colonies is at present an accident,
and nothing more ; it rests upon no basis of reasoning,
but upon a fact. The first settlers were active, bust-
ling men of fairly even rank or wealth, none of whom
could brook the leadership of any other. The only
way out of the difficulty was the adoption of the rule
"All of us to be equal, and the majority to govern;"
but there is no conception of the nature of democracy,
as the unfortunate Chinese have long since discovered.
The colonial democrats understood "democracy" as
little as the party which takes the name in the United
States; but there is at present no such party in the
colonies as the great Republican party of America.
Democracy cannot always remain an accident in
Australia : where once planted, it never fails to fix its
roots ; but even in America its growth has been ex-
tremely slow. There is at present in Victoria and New
South Wales a general admission among the men of
the existence of equality of conditions, together with a
perpetual rebellion on the part of their wives to defeat
democracy, and to reintroduce the old " colonial court"
society, and resulting class divisions. The consequence
of this distinction is that the women are mostly en-
gaged in elbowing their way; while among their hus-
bands there is no such thing as the pretending to a
style, a, culture, or a wealth that the pretender does
5*
54 GEEATER BRITAIN.
not possess, for the reason that no male colonist ad-
mits the possibility of the existence of a social superior.
Like the American "democrat," the Australian will
admit that there may be any number of grades below
him, so long as you allow that he is afrthe top; but no
republican can be stauncher in the matter of his own
equality with the best.
There is no sign that in Australia any more than in
America there will spring up a center of opposition to
the dominant majority; but there is as little evidence
that the majority will even unwittingly abuse its power.
It is the fashion to say that for a State to be intel-
lectually great and noble there must be within it a
nucleus of opposition to the dominant principles of the
time and place, and that the best and noblest minds,
the intellects the most seminal, have invariably be-
longed to men who formed part of such a group. It
may be doubted whether this assumed necessity for
opposition to the public will is not characteristic of a
terribly imperfect state of society and government. It
is chiefly because the world has never had experience
of a national life at once throbbing with the pulse of
the whole people, and completely tolerant not only in
law but in opinion of sentiments the most divergent
from the views of the majority firm in the pursuit of
truths already grasped, but ready to seize with avidity
upon new; gifted with a love of order, yet ready to fit
itself to shifting circumstances that men continue to
look with complacency upon the enormous waste of
intellectual power that occurs when a germ of truth
such as that contained in the doctrines of the Puritans
finds development and acceptance only after centuries
have passed.
Australia will start unclogged by slavery to try this
experiment for the world.
PROTECTION. 55
CHAPTER VI.
PROTECTION.
THE greatest of all democratic stumbling-blocks is
said to be Protection.
"Encourage native industry!" the colonial shop-
keepers write up; " Show your patriotism, and buy
colonial goods!" is painted in huge letters on a shop-
front at Castlemaine. In England, some unscrupulous
traders, we are told, write "From Paris" over their
English goods, but such dishonesty in Victoria takes
another shape; there we have "Warranted colonial
made" placed over imported wares, for many will pay
a higher price for a colonial product confessedly not
more than equal to the foreign, such is the rage for
Native Industry, and the hatred of the " Antipodean
doctrine of Free Trade."
Many former colonists who live at home persuade
themselves, and unfortunately persuade also the public
in England, that the Protectionists are weak in the
colonies. So far is this from being the case in either
Victoria or New South Wales, that in the former
colony I found that in the Lower House the Free
Traders formed but three-elevenths of the Assembly,
and in New South Wales the pastoral tenants of the
crown may be said to stand alone in their support of
Free Trade. Some of the squatters go so far as to
declare that none of the public men of the colonies
really believe in the advantages of Protection, but that
they dishonestly accept the principle, and undertake
56 GREATER BRITAIN.
to act upon it when in office, in order to secure the
votes of an ignorant majority of laborers, who are
themselves convinced that Protection means high
wages.
It would seem as though we Free Traders had be-
come nearly as bigoted in favor of Free Trade as our
former opponents were in favor of Protection. Just
as they used to say " We are right; why argue the
question?" so now, in face of the support of Protec-
tion by all the greatest minds in America, all the first
statesmen of the Australias, we tell the New England
and the Australian politicians that we will not discuss
Protection with them, because there can be no two
minds about it among men of intelligence and educa-
tion. We will hear no defense of " national lunacy,"
we say.
If, putting aside our prejudices, we consent to argue
with an Australian or American Protectionist, we find
ourselves in difficulties. All the ordinary arguments
against the compelling people by act of Parliament to
consume a dearer or inferior article are admitted as
soon as they are urged. If you attempt to prove that
Protection is bolstered up by those whose private in-
terests it subserves, you are shown the shrewd Aus-
tralian diggers and the calculating Western farmers
in America men whose pocket interest is wholly op-
posed to Protection, and who yet, almost to a man,
support it. A digger at Ballarat defended Protection
to me in this way : he said he knew that under a pro-
tective tariff he had to pay dearer than would other-
wise be the case for his jacket and his moleskin trow-
sers, but that he preferred to do this, as by so doing
he aided in building up in the colony such trades as
the making up of clothes, in which his brother and
other men physically too weak to be diggers could
PROTECTION. 57
gain an honest living. In short, the self-denying Pro-
tection of the Australian diggers is of the character of
that which would be accorded to the glaziers of a town
by the citizens, if they broke their windows to find
their fellow-townsmen work : " We know we lose, but
men must live," they say. At the same time they
deny that the loss will be enduring. The digger tells
you that he should not mind a continuing pocket loss,
but that, as a matter of fact, this, which in an old
country would be pocket loss, in a new country such
as his only comes to this that it forms a check on im-
migration. Wages being 5s. a day in Victoria and 3s.
a day in England, workmen would naturally flock into
Victoria from England until wages in Melbourne fell
to 3s. 6d. or 4s. Here comes in prohibition, and by
increasing the cost of living in Victoria, and cutting
into the Australian handicraftsman's margin of lux-
uries, and reducing his wages to 4s., diminishes the
temptation to immigration, and consequently the in-
flux itself.
The Western farmers in America, I have heard, de-
fend Protection upon far wider grounds : they admit
that Free Trade would conduce to the most rapid pos-
sible peopling of their country with foreign immi-
grants ; but this, they say, is an eminently undesirable
conclusion. They prefer to pay a heavy tax in the
increased price of everything they consume, and in the
greater cost of labor, rather than see their country
denationalized by a rush of Irish or Germans, or their
political institutions endangered by a still further in-
crease in the size and power of New York. One old
fellow said to me : " I don't want the Americans in
1900 to be 200 millions, but I want them to be happy."
The American Protectionists point to the danger
that their countrymen would run unless town kept
58 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
pace with country population. Settlers would pour off
to the West, and drain the juices of the fertile land by
cropping it year after year without fallow, without
manure, and then, as the land became in a few years
exhausted, would have nowhere whither to turn to
find the fertilizers which the soil would need. Were
they to depend upon agriculture alone, they would
sweep in a wave across the land, leaving behind them
a worn-out, depopulated, jungle-covered soil, open to
future settlement, when its lands should have recovered
their fertility, by some other and more provident race.
The coastlands of most ancient countries are exhausted,
densely bushed, and uninhabited. In this fact lies the
power of our sailor race : crossing the seas, we occupy
the coasts, and step by step work our way into the
upper country, where we should not have attempted
to show ourselves had the ancient population resisted
us upon the shores. In India, in Ceylon, we met the
hardy race of the highlands and interior only after we
had already fixed ourselves upon the coast, with a safe
basis for our supply. The fate that these countries
have met is that which colonists expect to be their
own, unless the protective system be carried out in its
entirety. In like manner the Americans point to the
ruin of Virginia, and if you urge "slavery," answer,
"slavery is but agriculture."
Those who speak of the selfishness of the Protection-
ists as a whole, can never have taken the trouble to
examine into the arguments by which Protection is
supported in Australia and America. In these coun-
tries, Protection is no mere national delusion ; it is a
system deliberately adopted with open eyes as one
conducive to the country's welfare, in spite of objec-
tions known to all, in spite of pocket losses that come
home to all. If it be, as we in England believe, a folly,
PROTECTION. 59
it is at all events a sublime one, full of self-sacrifice,
illustrative of a certain nobility in the national heart.
The Australian diggers and Western farmers in Amer-
ica are setting a grand example to the world of self-
sacrifice for a national .object; hundreds of thousands
of rough men are content to live they and their fami-
lies upon less than they might otherwise enjoy, in
order that the condition of the mass of their country-
men may continue raised above that of their brother
toilers in Old England. Their manufactures are be-
ginning now to stand alone, but hitherto, without Pro-
tection, the Americans would have had no cities but
seaports. By picturing to ourselves England dependent
upon the City of London, upon Liverpool, and Hull,
and Bristol, we shall see the necessity the Western
men are now under of setting off Pittsburg against
New York and Philadelphia. In short, the tendency,
according to the Western farmers, of Free Trade, in
the early stages of a country's existence, is to promote
universal centralization, to destroy local centers and
the commerce they create, to so tax the farmer with
the cost of transport to the distant centers, conse-
quent upon the absence of local markets, that he can
grow but wheat and corn continuously, and cannot
but exhaust his soil. With markets so distant, the
richest forest lands are not worth clearing, and a wave
of settlement sweeps over the country, occupying
the poorer lands, and then abandoning them once
more.
Protection in the colonies and America is to a great
degree a revolt against steam. Steam is making the
world all one; steam "corrects" differences in the
price of labor. When steam brings all races into com-
petition with each other, the cheaper races will ex-
tinguish the dearer, till at last some one people will
60 GREATER BRITAIN.
inhabit the whole earth. Coal remains the only power,
as it will probably always be cheaper to carry the
manufactured goods than to carry the coal.
Time after time I have heard the Western farmers
draw imaginary pictures of the state of America if Free
Trade should gain the day, and asking of what avail it
is to say that Free Trade and free circulation of people
is profitable to the pocket, if it destroys the national
existence of America; what good to point out the gain
of weight to their purses, in the face of the destruction
of their religion, their language, and their Saxon insti-
tutions.
One of the greatest of the thinkers of America de-
fended Protection to me on the following grounds:
That without Protection, America could at present
have but few and limited manufactures. That a nation
cannot properly be said to exist as such, unless she has
manufactures of many kinds ; for men are born, some
with a turn to agriculture, some with a turn to mechan-
ics; and if you force the mechanic by nature to become
a farmer, he will make a bad farmer, and the nation
will lose the advantage of all his power and invention.
That the whole of the possible employments of the
human race are in a measure necessary employments
necessary to the making up of a nation. That every
concession to Free Trade cuts out of all chance of
action some of the faculties of the American national
mind, and, so doing, weakens and debases it. That
each and every class of workers is of such importance
to the country, that we must make any sacrifice neces-
sary to maintain them in full work. "The national
mind is manifold," he said; "and if you do not keep
up every branch of employment in every district, you
waste the national force. If we were to remain a
purely agricultural people, land would fall into fewer
PROTECTION. 61
and fewer hands, and our people become more and
more brutalized as the years rolled on."
It must not be supposed that Protection is entirely
defended upon these strange new grounds. "Save us
from the pauper-labor of Europe," is the most recent
as well as the oldest of Protectionist cries. The Aus-
tralians and Americans say, that by working women at
Is. a day in the mines in Wales, and by generally de-
grading all laborers under the rank of highly-skilled
artisans, the British keep wages so low, that, in spite 01
the cost of carriage, they can almost invariably under-
sell the colonists and American's in American and Aus-
tralian markets. This state of degradation and poverty
nothing can force them to introduce into their own coun-
tries, and, on the other hand, they consider the iron
manufacture necessary for the national purpose alluded
to before. The alternative is Protection.
The most unavoidable of all the difficulties of Pro-
tection namely, that no human government can ever
be trusted to adjust protective taxation without cor-
ruption is no objection to the prohibitions which the
Western Protectionists demand. The New Englanders
say "Let us meet the English on fair terms;" the
Western men say that they will not meet them at all.
Some of the New York Protectionists declare that their
object is merely the fostering of American manufac-
tures until they are able to stand alone, the United
States not having at present reached the point which
had been attained by other nations when they threw
Protection to the winds. Such halting Protectionists
as these manufacturers find no sympathy in Australia
or the West, although the highest of all Protectionists
look forward to the distant time when, local centers
being everywhere established, customs will be abolished
on all sides, and mankind form one great family.
VOL. II. 6
62 GREATER BRITAIN.
The chief thing to be borne in mind in discussing
Protection with an Australian or an American is that
he never thinks of denying that under Protection he
pays a higher price for his goods than he would if he
bought them from us, and that he admits at once that
he temporarily pays a tax of 15 or 20 per cent, upon
everything he buys in order to help set his country on
the road to national unity and ultimate wealth. With-
out Protection, the American tells you, there will be
commercial New York, sugar-growing Louisiana, the
corn-growing Northwest, but no America. Protection
alone can give him a united country. When we talk
about things being to the advantage or disadvantage
of a coiintry, the American Protectionist asks what
you mean. Admitting that all you say against Pro-
tection may be true, he says that he had sooner see
America supporting a hundred millions independent
of the remainder of the world than two hundred mil-
lions dependent for clothes upon the British. " You,
on the other hand," he says, "would prefer our cus-
tom. How can we discuss the question ? The differ-
ence between us is radical, and we have no base on
which to build."
It is a common doctrine in the colonies of England
that a nation cannot be called " independent" if it has
to cry out to another for supplies of necessaries ; that
true national existence is first attained when the coun-
try becomes capable of supplying to its own citizens
those g9ods without which they cannot exist in the
state of comfort which they have already reached.
Political is apt to follow upon commercial dependency,
they say.
The question of Protection is bound up with the
wider one of whether we are to love our fellow-subjects,
our race, or the world at large ; whether we are to pur-
PROTECTION. 63
sue our country's good at the expense of other nations?
There is a growing belief in England that the noblest
philosophy is to deny the existence of the moral right
to benefit ourselves by harming others ; that love of
mankind must in time replace love of race as that has
in part replaced narrow patriotism and love of self. It
would seem that our Free Trade system lends itself
better to these wide modern sympathies than does Pro-
tection. On the other hand, it may be argued that, if
every State consults the good of its own citizens, we
shall, by the action of all nations, obtain the desired
happiness of the whole world, and that, with rapidity,
from the reason that every country understands its own
interests better than it does those of its neighbor. As
a rule, the colonists hold that they should not protect
themselves against the sister-colonies, but only against
the outer world ; and while I was in Melbourne an ar-
rangement was made with respect to the border cus-
toms between Victoria and New South Wales; but this
is at present the only step that has been taken toward
intercolonial Free Trade.
It is passing strange that Victoria should be noted
for the eagerness with which her people seek Protec-
tion. Possessed of little coal, they appear to be at-
tempting artificially to create an industry which, owing
to this sad lack of fuel, must languish from the mo-
ment that it is let alone. Sydney coal sells in Mel-
bourne at thirty shillings a ton ; at the pit's-mouth at
Newcastle, New South Wales, it fetches only seven or
eight shillings. With regard, however, to the making-
up of native produce, the question in the case of Vic-
toria is merely this : Is it cheaper to carry the wool to
the coal, and then the woolen goods back again, than
to carry the coal to the wool ? and as long as Victoria
can continue to export wheat, so that the coal-ships
64 GEE ATE E B El TAIN.
may not want freight, wool manufactures may proba-
bly prosper in Victoria.
The Victorians naturally deny that the cost of coal
has much to do with the question. The French man-
ufacturers, they point out, with dearer coal, but with
cheaper labor, have in many branches of trade beaten
the English out of common markets, but then under
Protection there is no chance of cheap labor in Vic-
toria.
Writing for the Englishmen of Old England, it is
not necessary for me to defend Free Trade by any
arguments. As far as we in our island are concerned,
it is so manifestly to the pocket interest of almost all
of us, and at the same time, on account of the minute-
ness of our territory, so little dangerous politically,
that for Britain there can be no danger of a deliberate
relapse into Protection; although we have but little
right to talk about Free Trade so long as we continue
our enormous subsidies to the Cunard liners.
The American argument in favor of Prohibition is
in the main, it will be seen, political, the economical
objections being admitted, but outweighed. Our ac-
tion in the matter of our postal contracts, as in the
case of the Factory acts, at all events shows that we
are not ourselves invariably averse to distinguish be-
tween the political and the economical aspect of certain
questions.
My duty has been to chronicle what is said and
thought upon the matter in our various plantations.
One thing at least is clear that even if the opinions
I have recorded be as ridiculous when applied to Aus-
tralia or America as they would be when applied to
England, they are not supported by a selfish clique,
but rest upon the generosity and self-sacrifice of a
majority of the population.
LABOR. 65
CHAPTEK VII.
LABOR.
SIDE by side with the unselfish Protectionism of the
diggers there flourishes among the artisans of the Aus-
tralias a self-interested desire for non-intercourse with
the outside world.
In America, the working men, themselves almost
without exception immigrants, though powerful in the
various States from holding the balance of parties,
have never as yet been able to make their voices heard
in the Federal Congress. In the chief Australian
colonies, on the other hand, the artisans have, more
than any other class, the possession of political power.
Throughout the world the grievance of the working
classes lies in the fact that, while trade and profits have
increased enormously within the last few years, true as
distinguished from nominal wages have not risen*. It
is even doubted whether the American or British han-
dicraftsman can now live in such comfort as he could
make sure of a few years back: it is certain that agri-
cultural laborers in the south of England are worse off
than they were ten years ago, although the deprecia-
tion of gold prevents us from accurately gauging their
true position. In Victoria and New South Wales, and
in the States of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri, where
the artisans possess some share of power, they have set
about the attempt to remedy by law the grievance under
which they suffer. In the American States, where the
suppression of immigration seems almost impossible,
6*
66 GREATER BRITAIN.
their interference takes the shape of eight-hour bills,
and exclusion of colored laborers. There is no trades
union in America which will admit to membership a
Chinaman, or even a mulatto. In Victoria and New
South Wales, however, it is not difficult quietly to put a
check upon the importation of foreign labor. The vast
distance from Europe makes the unaided immigration
of artisans extremely rare, and since the democrats
have been in power the funds for assisted immigration
have been withheld, and the Chinese .influx all but for-
bidden, while manifestoes against the ordinary Euro-
pean immigration have repeatedly been published at
Sydney by the Council of the Associated Trades.
The Sydney operatives have always taken a leading
part in opposition to immigration, from the time when
they founded the Anti-Transportation Committee up
to the present day. In 1847, a natural and proper
wish to prevent the artificial depression of wages was
at the bottom of the anti-transportation movement,
although the arguments made use of in the petition to
the Queen were of the most general character, and
Sydney mechanics, many of them free immigrants
themselves, say that there is no difference of principle
between the introduction of free or assisted immigrants
and that of convicts.
If we look merely to the temporary results of the
policy of the Australian artisans, we shall find it hard
to deny that their acts are calculated momentarily to
increase their material prosperity ; so far they may be
selfish, but they are not blind. Admitting that wages
depend on the ratio of capital to population, the Aus-
tralians assert that, with them, population increases
faster than capital, and that hindering immigration
will restore the balance. Prudential checks on popu-
lation are useless, they say, in face of Irish immigra-
LABOR. 67
tion. At the same time, it is clear that, from the dis-
couragement of immigration and limitation to eight
hours of the daily toil, there results an exceptional
scarcity of labor, which cramps the development of
the country, and causes a depression in trade which
must soon diminish the wage-fund, and react upon
the working men. It is unfortunately the fact, that
colonial artisans do not sufficiently bear in mind the
distinction between real and nominal wages, but are
easily caught by the show of an extra few shillings a
week, even though the purchasing power of each shil-
ling be diminished by the change. When looked into,
"higher wages" often mean that the laborer, instead
of starving upon ten shillings a week, is for the future
to starve upon twenty.
As regards the future, contrasted with the tempo-
rary condition of the Australian laborer, there is no
disguising the fact that mere exclusion of immigration
will not in the long run avail him. It might, of course,
be urged that immigration is, even in America, a small
matter by the side of the natural increase of the peo-
ple, and that to shut out the immigrant is but one of
many checks- to population ; but in Australia the natural
increase is not so great as in a young country might
be expected. The men so largely outnumber the
women in Australia, that even early marriages and
large families cannot make the birth-rate very high,
and fertile land being at present still to be obtained at
first hand, the new agricultural districts swallow up
the natural increase of the population. Still, import-
ant as is immigration at this moment, ultimately
through the influx of women to which the democrats
are not opposed or, more slowly, by the effort of na-
ture to restore the balance of the sexes, the rate of
natural increase will become far greater in Australia.
68 GREATER BRITAIN.
Ultimately, there can be no doubt, if the Australian
laborer continues to retain his present standard of com-
fort, prudential checks upon the birth of children will
be requisite to maintain the present ratio of capital to
population.
Owing to the comparatively high prices fixed for
agricultural land in the three southeastern colonies of
Australia, the abundance of unoccupied tracts has not
hitherto had that influence on wages in Australia
which it appears to have exercised in America, but
under the democratic amendments of the existing free
selection system, wages will probably again rise in the
colonies, to be once more reduced by immigration, or,
if the democracy gains the day, more slowly lowered
by the natural increase of the population.
In places where competition has reduced the reward
of labor to the lowest amount consistent with the effi-
ciency of the work, compulsory restriction of the hours
of toil must evidently be an unmixed benefit to the
laborer, until carried to the point at which it destroys
the trade in which he is engaged. In America and
Australia, however, where the laborer has a margin of
luxuries which can be cut down, and where the manu-
facturers are still to some extent competing with Euro-
pean rivals, restriction of hours puts them at a disad-
vantage with the capitalists of the old world, and,
reducing their profits, tend also to diminish the wage-
fund, and ultimately to decrease the wages of their
men. The colonial action in this matter may, never-
theless, like all infringements of general economic
laws, be justified by proof of the existence of a higher
necessity for breaking than for adhering to the rule of
freedom. Our own Factory Acts, we should remem-
ber, were undoubtedly calculated to diminish the pro-
duction of the country.
LABOR. 69
"Were the American and Australian handicraftsmen
to become sufficiently powerful to combine strict Pro-
tection, or prohibition of foreign intercourse, with re-
duction of hours of toil, they would ultimately drive
capital out of their countries, and either lower wages,
or else diminish the population by checking both im-
migration and natural increase. Here, as in the con-
sideration of Protection, we come to that bar to all dis-
cussion, the question, "What is a nation's good?" It
is at least doubtful whether in England we do not
attach too great importance to the continuance of na-
tions in "the progressive state." Unrestricted immi-
gration may destroy the literature, the traditions, the
nationality itself of the invaded country, and it is a
question whether these ideas are not worth preserving
even at a cost of a few figures in the returns of imports,
exports, and population. A country in which Free Trade
principles have been carried to their utmost logical
development must be cosmopolitan and nationless, and
for such a state of things to exist universally without
danger to civilization the world is not yet prepared.
"Know-nothingism" in America, as what is now
styled " native Americanism " was once called a form
of the protest against the exaggeration of Free Trade
was founded by handicraftsmen, and will in all proba-
bility find its main support within their ranks when-
ever the time for its inevitable resuscitation shall arrive.
That there is honest pride of race at the bottom of the
agitation no one can doubt who knows the history of
the earlier Know-nothing movement; but class interest
happens to point the same way as does the instinct of
the race. The refusal of political privileges to immi-
grants will undoubtedly have some tendency to check
the flow of immigration ; at all events, it will check
the self-assertion of the immigrants. That which does
70 GREATER BRITAIN.
this leaves, too, the control of wages more within the
hands of actual laborers, and prevents the European
laborers of the eleventh hour coming in to share the
heightened wages for which the American hands have
struck, and suffered misery and want. No consistent
republican can object to the making ten or twenty
years' residence in the United States the condition for
citizenship of the land.
In the particular case of the Australian colonies,
they are happily separated from Ireland by seas so
wide as to have a chance of preserving a distinct
nationality, such as America can scarcely hope for:
only 1500 persons have come to New South Wales,
unassisted, in the last five years. The burden of proof
lies upon those who propose to destroy the rising
nationality by assisting the importation of a mixed
multitude of negroes, Chinamen, Hill-coolies, Irish,
and Germans, in order that the imports and exports
of Victoria and New South Wales may be increased,
and that there may be a larger number of so-called
Victorians and New South Welsh to live in misery.
Owing to the fostering of immigration by the aristo-
cratic government, the population of Queensland had,
in 1866, quadrupled itself since 1860 ; but, even were
the other colonies inclined to follow the example of
their northern sister, they could not do so with success.
New South Wales and Tasmania might import col-
onists by the thousand, but they would be no sooner
landed than they would run to Queensland, or sail to
the New Zealand diggings, just as the " Canadian im-
migrants" flock into the United States.
That phase of the labor question to which I have
last alluded seems to shape itself into the question,
" Shall the laborer always and everywhere be en-
couraged or permitted to carry his labor to the best
LABOR. 71
market?" The Australians answer that they are will-
ing to admit that additional hands in a new country
mean additional wealth, but that there is but little
good in our preaching moral restraint to them if Eu-
ropean immigration is to be encouraged, Chinese
allowed. The only effect, they say, that self-control
can have is that of giving such children as they do
rear Chinamen or Irishmen to struggle against instead
of brothers. It is hopeless to expect that the Austra-
lian workmen will retain their present high standard
of comfort if an influx of dard-skinned handicrafts-
men is permitted.
Some ten or even fewer years ago, we Free Traders
of the Western world, first then coming to know some
little about the kingdoms of the further East, paused a
moment in our daily toil to lift to the skies our hands
in lamentation at the blind exclusiveness which we
were told had for ages past held sway within the
council chambers of Pekin. No words were too strong
for our new-found laughing-stock; China became for
us what we are to Parisian journalists a Bceotia re-
deemed only by a certain eccentricity of folly. This
vast hive swarming with two hundred million working
bees was said to find its interest in shutting out the
world, punishing alike with death the outgoing and
incoming of the people. " China for the Chinese"
was the common war-cry of the rulers and the ruled;
" Self-contained has China been, and prospered; self-
contained she shall continue," the favorite maxim of
their teachers. Nothing could be conceived nobler
than the scorn which mingled with half-doubting
incredulity and with Pharisaic thanking of heaven
that we were not as they, when the blindness of these
outer barbarians of " Gog and Magog land" was drawn
for us by skillful pens, and served out to us with all
72 GREATER BRITAIN.
the comments that self-complacency could suggest.
A conversion in the future was foretold, however; this
Chinese infirmity of vision should not last forever; the
day, we were told, must come when Studentships in
Political Economy should be founded in Pekin. and
Bicardo take the place of Cou-fou-chow in Thibetian
schools. A conversion has taken place of late, but not
that hoped for ; or, if it be a conversion consistent with
the truths of Economic Science, it has taken a strange
shape. The wise men of Canton may be tempted,
perhaps, to think that it is we who have learnt the
wisdom of the sages, and been brought back into the
fold of the great master. Chinese immigration is
heavily taxed in California; taxed to the point of pro-
hibition in Victoria; and absolutely forbidden under
heavy penalties in Louisiana and the other ex-rebel
States.
The Chinaman is pushing himself to the fore
wherever his presence is not prohibited. We find
Chinese helmsmen and quartermasters in the service
of the Messageries and Oriental companies receiving
twice the wages paid to Indian Lascars. We hear of
the importation of Chinese laborers into India for rail-
way and for drainage works. The Chinaman has great
vitality. Of the cheap races the Mongol seems the
most pushing, the likeliest to conquer in the fight. It
would almost seem as though we were wrong in our
common scales of preference, far from right in our use
of the terms " superior" and "inferior" races.
A well-taught white man can outreason or can over-
reach a well-taught Chinaman or negro. But under
some climatic conditions, the negro can outwork the
white man ; under almost all conditions, the Chinaman
can outwork him. Where this is the case, is it not the
Chinaman or the negro that should be called the better
LABOR. 73
man ? Call him what we may, will he not prove his
superiority by working the Englishman off the soil ?
In Florida and Mississippi the black is certainly the
better man.
Many Victorians, even those who respect and admire
the Chinese, are in favor of the imposition of a tax
upon the yellow immigrants, in order to prevent the
destruction of the rising Australian nationality. They
fear that otherwise they will live to see the English
element swamped in the Asiatic throughout Australia.
It is not certain that we may not some day have to en-
counter a similar danger in Old England.
It will be seen from the account thus given of the
state of the labor question in Australia, that the
colonial handicraftsmen stand toward those of the
world in much the same relative position as that held
by the members of a trade union toward the other
workmen of the same trade. The limitation of immi-
gration there has much the same effects as the limita-
tion of apprentices in a single trade in England. It is
easy to say that the difference between fellow-country-
man and foreigner is important; that while it is an un-
fairness to all English workmen that English hatters
should limit apprentices, it is not unfair to English
hatters that Australian hatters should limit their ap-
prentices. For my own part, I am inclined to think
that, fair or unfair and we have no international
moral rule generally acknowledged to decide the ques-
tion we might at least say to Australia that, while
she throws upon us the chief expenses of her defense,
she is hardly in a position to refuse to aid our emi-
grants.
Day by day the labor question in its older aspects
becomes of less and less importance. The relationship
of master and servant is rapidly dying the death ; co-
VOL. n. 7
74 GREATER BRITAIN.
operative farming and industrial partnerships must
supersede it everywhere at no distant date. In these
systems we shall find the remedy against the decline
of trade with which the English-speaking countries of
the earth are threatened.
The existing system of labor is anti- democratic ; it
is at once productive of and founded on the existence
of an aristocracy of capital and a servitude of work-
men ; and our English democracies cannot afford that
half their citizens should be dependent laborers. If
manufactures are to be consistent with democracy,
they must be carried on in shops in which each man
shall be at once capitalist and handicraftsman. Such
institutions are already in existence in Massachusetts,
in Illinois, in Pennsylvania, and in Sydney; while at
Troy, in New York State, there is a great iron foundery,
owned from roof to floor by the men who work in it.
It is not enough that the workman should share in the
profits. The change which, continuing through the
middle ages into the present century, has at last every-
where converted the relation of lord and slave into that
of master and hireling, is already giving place to the
silent revolution which is steadily substituting for this
relationship of capital and labor that of a perfect mar-
riage, in which the laborer and the capitalist shall be
one.
Under this system there can be no strikes, no petty
trickery, no jealousy, no waste of time. Each man's
individual interest is coincident with that of all . Where
the labor is that of a brotherhood, the toil becomes
ennobled. Were industrial partnerships a new device,
their inventor would need no monument ; his would
be found in the future history of the race. As it is,
this latest advance of Western civilization is but a
return to ,the earliest and nobleet form of labor; the
WOMAN. 75
Arabs, the Don Cossacks, the Maori tribes are all co-
operative farmers ; it is the mission of the English race
to apply the ancient principle to manufactures.
CHAPTER VIII.
WOMAN.
IN one respect, Victoria stands at once sadly behind
and strangely in advance of other democratic coun-
tries. Women, or at least some women, vote at the
Lower House elections; but, on the other hand, the
legal position of the sex is almost as inferior to that of
man as it is in England or the East.
At an election held some few years ago, female rate-
payers voted everywhere throughout Victoria. Upon
examination, it was found that a new registration act
had directed the rate-books to be used as a basis for
the preparation of the electoral lists, and that women
householders had been legally put on the register,
although the intention of the legislature was not ex-
pressed, and the question of female voting had not been
raised during the debates. Another instance, this, of
the singular way in which in truly British countries
reforms are brought about by accident, and, when once
become facts, are allowed to stand. There is no more
sign of general adhesion in Australia than in England
to the doctrine which asserts that women, as well as
men, being interested in good government, should have
a voice in the selection of that government to which
they are forced to submit themselves.
76 GREATER BRITAIN.
As far as concerns their social position, women are
as badly off in Australia as in England. Our theory
of marriage which has been tersely explained thus :
"the husband and wife are one, and the husband is that
one" rules as absolutely at the antipodes as it does in
Yorkshire. I was daily forced to remember the men
of Kansas and Missouri, and the widely different view
they take of these matters to that of the Australians.
As they used to tell me, they are impatient of seeing
their women ranked with "lunatics. and idiots" in the
catalogue of incapacities. They are incapable of seeing
that women are much better represented by their male
friends than were the Southern blacks by their owners
or overseers. They believe that the process of election
would not be more purified by female emancipation
than would the character of the Parliaments elected.
The Kansas people often say that if you were told
that there existed in some ideal country two great sec-
tions of a race, the members of the one often gross,
often vicious, often given to loud talking, to swearing,
to drinking, spitting, chewing, not infrequently cor-
rupt; those of the other branch, mild, kind, quiet,
pure, devout, with none of the habitual vices of the
first-named sect, if you were told that one of these
branches was alone to elect rulers and to govern, you
would at once say, "Tell us where this happy country
is that basks in the rule of such a godlike people."
"Stop a minute," says your informant, "it is the creat-
ures I described first the men who rule; the others
are only women, poor silly fools imperfect men, I
assure you ; nothing more."
It is somewhat the fashion to say that the so-called
"extravagancies" of the Kansas folk and other Amer-
ican Western men arise from the extraordinary position
given to their women by the disproportion of the sexes.
WOMAN. 77
Now in all the Australian colonies the men vastly out-
number the women, yet the disproportion has none of
those results which have been attributed to it by some
writers on America. In New South Wales, the sexes
are as 250,000 to 200,000, in Victoria 370,000 to 280,000,
in New Zealand 130,000 to 80,000, in Queensland
60,000 to 40,000, in Tasmania 50,000 to 40,000, in West
Australia 14,000 to 8000, 90,000 to 80,000 in South
Australia. In all our Southern colonies together, there
are a million of men to only three-quarters of a million
of women; yet with all this disproportion, which far
exceeds that in Western America, not only have the
women failed to acquire any great share of power,
political or social, but they are content to occupy a
position not relatively superior to that held by them at
home.
The "Sewing Clubs" of the war-time are at the bot-
tom of a good deal of the "woman movement" in
America. At the time of greatest need, the ladies of
the Northern States formed themselves into associa-
tions for the supply of lint, of linen, and of comforts
to the army: the women of a district would meet
together daily in some large room, and sew, and chat
while they were sewing.
'the British section of the Teutonic race seems natu-
rally inclined, through the operation of its old interest-
begotten prejudices, to rank women where Plato placed
them in the " Timseus," along with horses and draught
cattle, or to think of them much as he did when he
said that all the brutes derived their origin from man
by a series of successive degradations, of which the
first was from man to woman. There is, however, one
strong reason why the English should, in America,
have laid aside their prejudices upon this point, re-
taining them in Australia, where the conditions are
7*
78 GREATER BRITAIN.
not the same. Among farming peoples, whose women
do not work regularly in the field, the woman to
whom falls the household and superior work is better
off than she is among town-dwelling peoples. The
Americans are mainly a farming, the Australians and
British mainly a town-dwelling, people. The absence
in all sections of our raee of regular woman labor in
the field seems to be a remnant of the high estimation
in which women were held by our former ancestry. In
Britain we have, until the last few years, been steadily
retrograding upon this point.
It is a serious question how far the natural prejudice
of the English mind against the labor of what we call
"inferior races" will be found to extend to half the
superior race itself. How will English laborers receive
the inevitable competition of women in many of their
fields ? Woman is at present starved, if she works at
all, and does not rest content in dependence upon
some man, by the terrible lowness of wages in every
employment open to her, and this low rate of wages is
itself the direct result of the fewness of the occupa-
tions which society allows her. Where a man can see
a thousand crafts in which he may engage, a woman
will perhaps be permitted to find ten. A hundred
times as many women as there is room for invade each
of this small number of employments. In the Aus-
tralian labor-field the prospects of women are no bet-
ter than they are in Europe, and during my residence
in Melbourne the Council of the Associated Trades
passed a resolution to the effect that nothing could
justify the employment of women in any kind of pro-
ductive labor.
VICTORIAN POETS. 79
CHAPTER IX.
VICTORIAN* PORTS.
ALL allowance being made for the great number of
wide roads for trade, there is still a singular absence of
traffic in the Melbourne streets. Trade may be said
to be transacted only upon paper in the city, while the
tallow, grain, and wool, which form the basis of Aus-
tralian commerce, do not pass through Melbourne, but
skirt it, and go by railway to Williamstown, Sandridge,
and Geelong.
Geelong, once expected to rival Melbourne, and be-
come the first port of all Australia, I found grass-grown
and half deserted, with but one vessel lying at her
wharf. At Williamstown a great fleet of first-class
ships was moored alongside the pier. When the gold-
find at Ballarat took place, Geelong rose fast as the
digging port, but her citizens chose to complete the
railway line to Melbourne instead of first opening that
to Ballarat, and so lost all the up-country trade. Mel-
bourne, having once obtained the lead, soon managed
to control the legislature, and grants were made for
the Echuca Railroad, which tapped the Murray, and
brought the trade of Upper Queensland and New South
Wales down to Melbourne, in the interest of the ports
of Williamstown and Sandridge. Not content with
ruining Geelong, the Melbourne men have set them-
selves to ridicule it. One of their stories goes that the
Geelong streets bear such a fine crop of grass, that a
free selector has applied to have them surveyed and
80 GEE ATE E BEITAIN.
sold to him, under the 42d clause of the New Land
Act. Another story tells how a Geelongee lately died,
and went to heaven. Peter, opening the door to his
knock, asked, " Where from ?" "Geelong." "Where?"
said Peter. "Geelong.'*' "There's no such place,"
replied the Apostle. " In Victoria," cried the colonist.
"Fetch Ham's Australian Atlas," called Peter; and
when the map was brought and the spot shown to him,
he replied, "Well, I beg your pardon, but I really
never had any one here from that place before."
If Geelong be standing still, which in a colony is the
same as rapid decline would be with us, the famed
wheat country around it seems as inexhaustible as it
ever was. The whole of the Barrabool range, from
Ceres to Mount Moriac, is one great golden waving
sheet, save where it is broken by the stunted claret-
vineyards. Here and there I came upon a group of
the little daughters of the German vine-dressers, tend-
ing and trenching the plants, with the round eyes, rosy
cheeks, and shiny pigtails of their native Rudesheim
all flourishing beneath the Southern Cross.
The colonial vines are excellent ; better, indeed, than
the growths of California, which, however, they resem-
ble in general character. The wines are naturally all
Burgundies, and colonial imitations of claret, port, and
sherry are detestable, and the hocks but little better.
The Albury hermitage is a better wine than can be
bought in Europe at its price, but in some places this
wine is sold as Murray Burgundy, while the dealers
foist horrible stuff upon you under the name of her-
mitage. Of the wines of New South Wales, White
Dallwood is a fair Sauterne, and White Cawarra a
good Chablis, while for sweet wines the Chasselas is
singularly cheap ; and the Tokay, the Shiraz, and the
still Muscat are remarkable.
VICTORIAN POUTS. 81
Northwest of Geelong, upon the summit of the foot
hills of the dividing range, lies Ballarat, the head-
quarters of deep quartz mining, and now no longer
a diggers' camp, but a graceful city, full of shady
boulevards and noble buildings, and with a stationary
population of thirty thousand. My first visit was made
in the company of the prime ministers of all the colo-
nies, who were at Melbourne nominally for a confer-
ence, but really to enjoy a holiday and the International
Exhibition. With that extraordinary generosity in the
spending of other people's money which distinguishes
colonial cabinets, the Victorian government placed
special trains, horses, carriages, and hotels at our dis-
posal, the result of which was that, fted everywhere,
we saw nothing, and I had to return to Ballarat in order
even to go through the mines.
In visiting Lake Learmouth and Clunes, and the
mining district on each side of Ballarat, I found my-
self able to discover the date of settlement by the
names of places, as one finds the age of a London
suburb by the titles of its terraces. The dates run in
a wave across the country. St. Arnaud is a town be-
tween Ballarat and Castlemaine, and Alma lies near
to it, while Balaklava Hill is near Ballarat, where also
are Raglan and Sebastopol. Inkerman lies close to
Castlemaine, and Mount Cathcart bears the name of
the general killed at the Two Gun battery, while the
Malakhoff diggings, discovered doubtless toward the
end of the war, lie to the northward, in the Wimmera.
Everywhere I found the interior far hotter than the
coast, but free from the sudden changes of tempera-
ture that occur in Melbourne twice or thrice a week
throughout the summer, and are dangerous to children
and to persons of weak health. After two or three
days of the hot wind, then comes a night, breathless,
82 GEE ATE E KEITAIN.
heavy, still. In the morning the sun rises, once more
fierce and red. After such a night and dawn, I have
seen the shade thermometer in the cool verandas of
the Melbourne Club standing at 95 before ten o'clock,
when suddenly the sun and sky would change from
red and brown to gold and blue, and a merry breeze,
dancing up from the ice-packs of the South Pole and
across the Antarctic seas, would lower the temperature
in an hour to 60 or 65. After a few days of cold
and rain, a quiet English morning would be cut in
half about eleven by a sudden slamming of doors and
whirling of dust from the north across the town, while
darkness came upon the streets. Then was heard the
cry of "Shut the windows; here's a hot wind," and
down would go every window, barred and bolted,
while the oldest colonists walked out to enjoy the dry
air and healthy heat. The thick walls of the clubs and
private houses will keep out the heat for about three
days, but if, as sometimes happens, the hot wind lasts
longer, then the walls are heated through, and the
nights are hardly to be borne. Up country the settlers
know nothing of these changes. The regular irregu-
larity is peculiar to the Melbourne summer.
TASMANIA.
CHAPTER X.
TASMANIA.
AFTER the parching heat of Australia, a visit to
Tasmania was a grateful change. Steaming along
Port Dalrymple and up the Tamar in the soft sunlight
of an English afternoon, we were able to look upward,
and enjoy the charming views of wood and river, in-
stead of having to stand with downcast head, as in the
blaze of the Victorian sun.
The beauty of the Tamar is of a quiet kind: its
scenery like that of the non- Alpine districts of the
west coast of New Zealand, but softer and more habit-
able than is that of even the least rude portions of
these islands. To one fresh from the baked Australian
plains, there is likeness between any green and humid
land and the last unparched country that he may have
seen. Still, New Zealand cannot show fresher cheeks
nor homes more cosy than those of the Tamar valley.
Somersetshire cannot surpass the orchards of Tas-
mania, nor Devon match its flowers.
The natural resemblance of Maria Van Dieman's
Land (as Tasman called it after his betrothed) to Eng-
land seems to have struck the early settlers. In sail-
ing up the Tamar, we had on one bank the County
of Dorset, with its villages touchingly named after
those at home, according to their situations, from its
Lulworth Cove, Corfe Castle, and St. Alban's Head,
round to Abbotsbury, and, on our right hand, Devon,
with its Sidmouth, Exeter, arid Torquay.
84 GREATER BRITAIN.
Hurrying through Launceston a pretty little town,
of which the banks and post-office are models of simple
architecture I passed at once across the island south-
ward to Hobarton, the capital. The scenery on the
great convict road is not impressive. The Tasmanian
Mountains detached and rugged masses of basaltic
rock, from four to live thousand feet in height are
wanting in grandeur when seen from a distance, with
a foreground of flat corn-land. It is disheartening,
too, in an English colony, to see half the houses shut
up and deserted, and acre upon acre of old wheat-land
abandoned to mimosa scrub. The people in these
older portions of the island have worked their lands to
death, and even guano seems but to galvanize them
into a momentary life. Since leaving Virginia, I had
seen no such melancholy sight.
Nature is bountiful enough : in the world there is
not a fairer climate; the gum-trees grow to 350 feet,
attesting the richness of the soil; and the giant tree-
ferns are never injured by heat, as in Australia, nor
by cold, as in New Zealand. All the fruits of Europe
are in season at the same time, and the Christmas
dessert at Hobarton often consists of five and twenty
distinct fresh fruits. Even more than Britain, Tas-
mania may be said to present on a small area an
epitome of the globe: mountain and plain, forest and
rolling prairie land, rivers and grand capes, and the
noblest harbor in the world, all are contained in a
country the size of Ireland. It is unhappily not only
in this sense that Tasmania is the Ireland of the
South.
Beautiful as is the view of Hobarton from Mount
Wellington, the spurs in the foreground clothed with
a crimson carpet by a heathlike plant ; the city nestled
under the basaltic columns of the c^ags, even here it
TASMANIA. 85
is difficult to avoid a certain gloom when' the eye,
sweeping over the vast expanse of Storm Bay and
D'Entrecasteaux Sound, discovers only three great
ships in a harbor fitted to contain the navies of the
world.
The scene first of the horrible deeds of early convict
days at Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, and later
of the still more frightful' massacres of the aboriginal
inhabitants of the isle, Van Dieman's Land has never
been a name of happy omen, and now the .island, in
changing its title, seems not to have escaped from the
former blight. The poetry of the English village
names met with throughout Tasmania vanishes before
t^e recollection of the circumstances under which the
harsher native terms came to be supplanted. Fifty
years ago, our colonists found in Tasmania a powerful
and numerous though degraded native race. At this
moment, three old women and a lad who dwell on
Gun-carriage Rock, in Bass's Straits, are all who re-
main of the aboriginal population of the island.
We live in an age of mild humanity, we are often
told, but, whatever the polish of manner and of minds
in the old country, in outlying portions of the empire
there is no lack of the old savagery of our race. Bat-
tues of the natives were conducted by the military in
Tasmania not more than twenty years ago, and are
not unknown even now among the Queensland set-
tlers. Let it not be thought that Englishmen go out
to murder natives unprovoked ; they have that provo-
cation for which even the Spaniards in Mexico used to
wait, which the Brazilians wait for now the provoca-
tion of robberies committed in the neighborhood by
natives unknown. It is not that there is no offense to
punish, it is that the punishment is indiscriminate, that
even when it falls upon the guilty it visits men who
VOL. II. 8
86 GREATER BRITAIN.
know no better. Where one wretched untaught native
pilfers from a sheep-station, on the Queensland Downs,
a dozen will be shot by the settlers, "as an example,"
and the remainder of the tribe brought back to the
district to be fed and kept, until whisky, rum, and
other devils' missionaries have done their work.
Nothing will persuade the rougher class of Queens-
land settlers that the "black-fellow" and his "jin"
are human. They tell you freely that they look upon
the native Australian as an ingenious kind of monkey,
and that it is not for us to talk too much of the treat-
ment of the "jins," or native women, while the " wrens"
of the Curragh exist among ourselves. No great dis-
tance appears to separate us from the days when the
Spaniards in the West Indies used to brand on the
face and arms all the natives they could catch, and
gamble them away for wine.
Though not more than three or four million acres
out of seventeen million acres of land in Tasmania
have as yet been alienated by the crown, the popula-
tion has increased only by 15,000 in the last ten years.
Such is the indolence of the settlers, that vast tracts of
land in the central plain, once fertile under irrigation,
have been allowed to fall back into a desert state from
sheer neglect of the dams and conduits. Though iron
and coal are abundant, they are seldom if ever worked,
and one house in every thirty-two in the whole island
is licensed for the sale of spirits, of which the annual
consumption exceeds five gallons a head for every man,
woman, and child in the population. Tasmania reached
her maximum of revenue in 1858, and her maximum
of trade in 1853.
The curse of the country is the indolence of its lotus-
eating population, who, like all dwellers in climates
cool but winterless, are content to dream away their
GOVERNOR DAVEY'S PROCLAMATION. P. 8l>
TASMANIA. 87
lives in drowsiness to which the habits of a hotter but
less equable clime Queensland, for example are
energy itself. In addition, however, to this natural
cause of decline, Van Dieman's Land is not yet free
from all traces of the convict blood, nor from the evil
effects of reliance on forced labor. It is, indeed, but a
few years since the island was one great jail, and in
1853 there were still 20,000 actual convicts in the
island. The old free settlers will tell you that the
deadly shade of slave labor has not blighted Jamaica
more thoroughly than that of convict labor has Van
Dieman's Land.
Seventy miles northwest of Hobarton is a sheet of
water called Macquarie Harbor, the deeds wrought
upon the shores of which are not to be forgotten in a
decade. In 1823, there were 228 prisoners at Mac-
quarie Harbor, to whom, in the year, 229 floggings and
9925 lashes were ordered, 9100 lashes being actually
inflicted. The cat was, by order of the authorities,
soaked in salt water and dried in the sun before being
used. There was at Macquarie Harbor one convict
overseer who took a delight in seeing his companions
punished. A day seldom passed without five or six
being flogged on his reports. The convicts were at
his mercy. In a space of five years, during which the
prisoners at Macquarie Harbor averaged 250 in num-
ber, there were 835 floggings and 32,723 lashes admin-
istered. In the same five years, 112 convicts absconded
from this settlement, of whom 10 were killed and eaten
by their companions, 75 perished in the bush with or
without cannibalism, two were captured with portions
of human flesh in their possession, and died in hospital,
two were shot, 16 were hanged for murder and canni-
balism, and seven are reported to have made good
their escape, though this is by no means certain.
88 GREATER BRITAIN.
It has been stated by a Catholic missionary bishop
in his evidence before a Royal Commission, that when,
after a meeting at one of the stations, he read out to
his men the names of thirty-one condemned to death,
they with one accord fell upon their knees, and solemnly
thanked God that they were to be delivered from that
horrible place. Men were known to commit murder
that they might be sent away for trial, preferring death
to Macquarie Harbor.
The escapes were often made with the deliberate
expectation of death, the men perfectly knowing that
they would have to draw lots for which should be
killed and eaten. Nothing has ever been sworn to in
the history of the world which, for revolting atrocity,
can compare with the conduct of the Pierce-Greenhill
party during their attempted escape. The testimony
of Pierce is a revelation of the depths of degradation
to which man can descend. The most fearful thought,
when we hear of these Tasmanian horrors, is that prob-
ably many of those subjected to them were originally
guiltless. If only one in a thousand was an innocent
man, four human beings were consigned each year to
hell on earth. We think, too, that the age of trans-
portation for mere political offenses has long gone by,
yet it is but eleven or twelve years since Mr. Frost re-
ceived his pardon, after serving for sixteen years amid
the horrors of Port Arthur.
Tasmania has never been able to rid herself of the
convict population in any great degree, for the free
colonies have always kept a jealous watch upon her
emigrants. Even at the time of the great gold-rush to
Victoria, almost every "Tasmanian bolter" and many
a suspected but innocent man was seized upon his
landing, and thrown into Pentridge Jail, to toil within
its twenty-foot walls till death should come to his re-
TASMANIA. 89
lief. Even now, men of wealth and station in Victoria
are sometimes discovered to have been "bolters" in the
digging times, and are at the mercy of their neighbors
and the police, unless the governor can be wheedled
into granting pardons for their former deeds. A
wealthy Victorian was arrested as a "Tasmanian
bolter" while I was in the colony.
The passport system is still in force in the free colo-
nies with regard to passengers arriving from penal
settlements, and there is a penalty of .100 inflicted
upon captains of ships bringing convicts into Mel-
bourne. The condftional pardons granted to prisoners
in West Australia and in Tasmania generally contain
words permitting the convict to visit any portion of the
world except the British Isles, but the clause is a mere
dead letter, for none of our free colonies will receive
even our pardoned convicts.
It is hard to quarrel with the course the colonies
have taken in this matter, for to them the transporta-
tion system appears in the light of moral vitriol-throw-
ing; still, there is a wide distinction to be drawn be-
tween the action of the New South Welsh and that of
the New Yorkers, when they declared to a British
government of the last century, that nothing should
induce them to accept the labor of "white English
slaves :" the Sydney people have enjoyed the advant-
ages of the system they now blame. Even the Vic-
torians and South Australians, who have never had
convicts in their land, can be met by argument. The
Australian colonies, it might be urged, were planted
for the sole purpose of affording a suitable soil for the
reception of British criminals: in face of this fact,
the remonstrances of the free colonists read somewhat
oddly, for it would seem as though men who quitted,
with open eyes, Great Britain to make their home in
8*
90 GREATER BRITAIN.
the spots which their government had chosen as its
giant prisons have little right to pretend to rouse them-
selves on a sudden, and cry out that England is pour-
ing the scum of her soil on to a free land, and that
they must rise and defend themselves against the griev-
ous wrong. Weighing, however, calmly the good and
evil, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the Victorians
have much reason to object to a system which sends
to another country a man who is too bad for his own,
just as Jersey rogues are transported to Southampton.
The Victorian proposition of selecting the most ruffianly
of the colonial expirees, and shipping them to England
in exchange for the convicts that we might send to
Australia, was but a plagiarism on the conduct of the
Virginians in a similar case, who quietly began to
freight a ship with snakes.
The only cure for Tasmania, unless one is to be
found in the mere lapse of years, lies in annexation to
Victoria; a measure strongly wished for by a con-
siderable party in each of the colonies concerned. No
two countries in the world are more manifestly des-
tined by nature to be complementary to each other.
Owing to the small size of the country, and the
great moral influence of the landed gentry, Tasmanian
politics are singularly peaceful. For the Lower House
elections the suffrage rests upon a household, not a
manhood basis, as in Victoria and New South Wales ;
and for the Upper House it is placed at .500 in any
property, or <50 a year in freehold land. Tasmanian
society is cast in a more aristocratic shape than is that
of Queensland, with this exception the most oligarchi-
cal of all our colonies; but even here, as in the other
colonies and the United States, the ballot is supported
by the Conservatives. Unlike what generally happens
in America, the vote in the great majority of cases is
TASMANIA. 91
here kept secret, bribery is unknown, and, the public
"nomination" of candidates having been abolished,
elections pass off in perfect quiet. In the course of a
dozen conversations in Tasmania, I met with one man
who attacked the ballot. He was the first person,
aristocrat or democrat, conservative or liberal, male or
female, silly or wise, by whom I had found the ballot
opposed since I left home.
The method in which the ballot is conducted is
simple enough. The returning officer sits in an outer
room, beyond which is an inner chamber with only
one door, but with a desk. The voter gives his name
to the returning officer, and receives a white ticket
bearing his number on the register. On the ticket
the names of the candidates are printed alphabetically,
and the voter, taking the paper into the other room,
makes a cross opposite to the name of each candidate
for whom he votes, and then brings the paper folded
to the returning officer, who puts it in the box. In
New South Wales and Victoria, he runs his pen
through all the names excepting those for which he
wishes to vote, and himself deposits the ticket in the
box, the returning officer watching him, to see that he
does not carry out his ticket to show it to his bribers,
and then send it in again by a man on his own side.
One scrutineer for each candidate watches the opening
of the box. In New South Wales, the voting papers,
after having been sealed up, are kept for five years, in
order to allow of the verification of the number of
votes said to have been cast; but in Tasmania they
are destroyed immediately after the declaration of
the poll.
Escaping from the capital and its Lilliputian politics,
I sailed up the Derwent to New Norfolk. The river
reminds the traveler sometimes of the Meuse, but
92 GREATER BRITAIN.
ofterier of the Dart, and unites the beauties of both
streams. The scenery is exquisitely set in a frame-
work of hops ; for not only are all the flats covered
with luxuriant bines, but the hills between which you
survey the views have also each its "garden," the
bines being trained upon a wire trellis.
A lovely ride was that from New Norfolk to the
Panshanger salmon-ponds, where the acclimatization
of the English fish has lately been attempted. The
track, now cut along the river cliff, now lost in the
mimosa scrub, offers a succession of prospects, each
more lovely than the one before it; and that from the
ponds themselves is a repetition of the view along the
vale of the Towy, from Steele's house near Caer-
marthen. Trout of a foot long, and salmon of an inch,
rewarded us (in the spirit) for our ride, but we were
called on to express our belief in the statement, that
salmon " returned from the sea" have lately been seen
in the river. Father , the Catholic parish priest,
"that saw 'em," is the hero of the day, and his past
experiences upon the Shannon are quoted as testi-
monies to his infallibility in fish questions. My hosts
of New Norfolk had their fears lest the reverend gen-
tleman should be lynched, if it were finally proved
that he had been mistaken.
The salmon madness will at least have two results :
the catalogue of indigenous birds will be reduced to a
blank sheet, for every wretched Tasmanian bird that
never saw a salmon egg in all its life is shot down and
nailed to a post for fear it should eat the ova; and the
British wasp will be acclimatized in the southern
hemisphere. One is known to have arrived in the
last box of ova, and to have survived with apparent
cheerfulness his one hundred days in ice. Happy fel-
low, to cross the line in so cool a fashion !
TASMANIA. 93
The chief drawbacks to Tasmanian picnics and ex-
cursions are the snakes, which are as numerous
throughout the island as they are round Sydney. One
of the convicts in a letter home once wrote: "Parrots
is as thick as crows, and snakes is very bad, fourteen
to sixteen feet long;" but in sober truth the snakes
are chiefly small.
The wonderful "snake stories" that in the colonial
papers take the place of the English "triple birth"
and "gigantic gooseberry" are all written in vacation
time by the students at Melbourne University, but a
true one that -I heard in Hobarton is too good to be
lost. The chief justice of the island, who, in his leisure
time, is an amateur naturalist, and collects specimens
for European collections in his walks, told me that it
was his practice, after killing a snake, to carry it into
Hobarton tied to a stick by a double lashing. A few
days before my visit, on entering his hall, where an
hour before he had hung his stick with a rare snake
in readiness for the government naturalist, he found
to his horror that the viper had been only scotched,
and that he had made use of his regained life to free
himself from the string which confined his head and
neck. He was still tied by the tail, so he was swing-
ing to and fro, or " squirming around," as some Amer-
icans would say, with open mouth and protruded
tongue. When lassoing with a piece of twine had
been tried in vain, my friend fetched a gun, and suc-
ceeded in killing the snake and much damaging the
stone-work of his vestibule.
After a week's sojourn in the neighborhood of
Hobarton I again crossed the island, but this time by
a night of piercing moonlight such as can be witnessed
only in the dry air of the far south. High in the heav-
ens, and opposite the moon, was the solemn constel-
94 GREATER BRITAIN.
lation of the Southern Cross, sharply relieved upon
the pitchy background of the Magellanic clouds, while
the weird-tinted stars which vary the night-sky of the
southern hemisphere stood out from the blue firma-
ment elsewhere. The next day I was again in Mel-
bourne.
CHAPTER XL
CONFEDERATION.
MELBOURNE is unusually gay, for at a shapely palace
in the center of the city the second great Intercolonial
Exhibition is being held, and, as its last days are draw-
ing to their close, fifty thousand people a great num-
ber for the colonies visit the building every week.
There are exhibitors from each of our seven southern
colonies, and from French New Caledonia, Nether-
landish India, and the Mauritius. It is strange to
remember now that in the colonization both of New
Zealand and of Australia, we were the successful rivals
of the French only after having been behind them in
awakening to the advisability of an occupation of these
countries. In the case of New Zealand, the French
fleet was anticipated three several times by the fore-
thought and decision of our naval officers on the sta-
tion ; and in the case of Australia, the whole south
coast was actually named "La Terre Napoleon," and
surveyed for colonization by Captain Baudin in 1800.
New Caledonia, on the other hand, was named and
occupied by ourselves, and afterward abandoned to
the French.
CONFEDEEA TION. 9 5
The present remarkable exhibition of the products
of the Australias, coming just at the time when the
border customs between Victoria and New South Wales
have been abolished by agreement, and when all seems
to point to the formation of a customs union between
the colonies, leads men to look still further forward,
and to expect confederation. It is worthy of notice at
this conjuncture that the Australian Protectionists, as
a rule, refuse to be protected against their immediate
neighbors, just as those of America protect the manu-
factures of the Union rather than of single States.
They tell us that they can point, with regard to Eu-
rope, to pauper labor, but that they have no case as
against the sister colonies; they wish, they say, to
obtain a wide market for the sale of the produce of
each colony; the nationality they would create is to be
Australian, not provincial.
Already there is postal union, and a partial customs
union, and confederation itself, however distant in
fact, has been very lately brought about in the spirit
by the efforts of the London press, one well-known
paper having three times in a single article called the
governor of New South Wales by the sounding title
of " Governor-General of the Australasian colonies,"
to which he has, of course, not the faintest claim.
There are many difficulties in the way of confedera-
tion. The leading merchants and squatters of Vic-
toria are in favor of it; but not so those of the poorer
or less populous colonies, where there is much fear of
being swamped. The costliness of the federal govern-
ment of New Zealand is a warning against over-hasty
confederation. Victoria, too, would probably insist
upon the exclusion of West Australia, on account of
her convict population. The continental theory is un-
dreamt of by Australians, owing to their having always
96 GREATER BRITAIN.
been inhabitants of comparatively small States, and
not, like dwellers in the organized territories of Amer-
ica, potentially citizens of a vast and homogeneous
empire.
The choice of capital will, here as in Canada, be a
matter of peculiar difficulty. It is to be hoped by all
lovers of freedom that some hitherto unknown village
will be selected. There is in all great cities a strong
tendency to Imperialism. Bad pavement, much noise,
narrow lanes, blockaded streets, all these things are ill
dealt with by free government, we are told. English-
men who have been in Paris, Americans who know St.
Petersburg, forgetting that without the Emperor the
PreTet is impossible, cry out that London, that New
York, in their turn need a Haussman. In this tend-
ency lies a terrible danger to free States a danger
avoided, however, or greatly lessened, by the seat of
the legislature being placed, as in Canada and the
United States, far away from the great cities. Were
Melbourne to become the seat of government, nothing
could prevent the distant colonies from increasing the
already gigantic power of that city by choosing her
merchants as their representatives.
The bearing of confederation upon Imperial interests
is a more simple matter. Although union will tend
to the earlier independence of the colonies, yet, if
federated, they are more likely to be a valuable ally
than they could be if remaining so many separate
countries. They would also be a stronger enemy ; but
distance will make all their wars naval, and a strong
fleet would be more valuable to us as a friend than
dangerous as an enemy, unless in the case of a coalition
against us, in which it would probably not be the
interest of Australia to join.
From the colonial point of view, federation would
CONFEDERA TION. 9 7
tend to secure to the Australians better general and
local government than they possess at present. It is
absurd to expect that colonial governors should be
upon good terms with their charges when we shift
men every four years say from Demerara to JSTew
South Wales, or from Jamaica to Victoria. The un-
happy governor loses half a year in moving to his
post, and a couple of years in coming to understand
the circumstances of his new province, and then set-
tles down to be successful in the ruling of educated
whites under democratic institutions only if he can
entirely throw aside the whole of his experience, de-
rived as it will probably have been from the despotic
sway over blacks. We never can have a set of colonial
governors fit for Australia until the Australian gov-
ernments are made a separate service, and entirely
separated from the West Indies, Africa, and Hong
Kong.
Besides improving the government, confederation
would lend to every colonist the dignity derived from
citizenship of a great country a point the importance
of which will not be contested by any one who has
been in America since the war.
It is not easy to resist the conclusion that confedera-
tion is in every way desirable. If it leads to independ-
ence, we must say to the Australians what Houmai
ta Whiti said in his great speech to the progenitors of
the Maori race when they were quitting Hawaiki:
" Depart, and dwell in peace; let there be no quarrel-
ing among you, but build up a great people."
VOL. II.
98 GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER XII.
ADELAIDE.
THE capital of South Australia is reputed the hottest
of all the cities that are chiefly inhabited by the Eng-
lish race, and as I neared it through the Backstairs
Passage into the Gulf of St. Vincent, past Kangaroo
Island, and still more upon landing at Glenelg, I came
to the conclusion that its reputation was deserved.
The extreme heat which characterizes South Australia
is to some extent a consequence of its lying as far north
as JSTew South Wales and Queensland, and so far in-
land as to escape the breeze by which their coasts are
visited ; for although by " South Australia" we should,
in the southern hemisphere, naturally understand that
portion of Australia which was farthest from the
tropics, yet it is a curious fact that the whole colony
of Victoria lies to the south of Adelaide, that neither
of the great southern peninsulas of Australia are in,
but that nearly all the northernmost points of the con-
tinent now lie within, the country misnamed " South
Australia."
The immense northern territory, being supposed to
be valueless, has generously been made a present of
to South Australia, which thus becomes the largest
British colony, and nearly as large as British Hin-
dostan. If the great expenditure which is going on
succeeds in causing the discovery of any good land at
the north, it will of course at once be made into a
separate colony. The only important result that seems
ADELAIDE. 99
likely to follow from this annexation to South Aus-
tralia of the northern territory is that school-boys'
geography will suffer ; indeed, I should say that a total
destruction of all principle in the next generation
would be the inevitable result of so rude a blow to
confidence in books and masters as the assurance from
a teacher's lips that the two most remote countries of
Australia from each other are united under one colonial
government, and that the northernmost points of the
whole continent are situated in South Australia. Boys
will probably conclude that across the line south be-
comes north and north south, and that in Australia
the sun rises in the west.
Instead of gold, wheat, sheep, as in Victoria, the
staples here are wheat, sheep, copper, and my intro-
duction to South Australia was characteristic of the
colony, for I found in Port Adelaide, where I first set
foot, not only every store filled to overflowing, but
piles of wheat-sacks in the roadways, and lines of wheat-
cars on the sidings of railways, without even a tar-
paulin to cover the grain.
Of all the mysteries of commerce, those that concern
the wheat and flour trade are, perhaps, the strangest
to the uninitiated. Breadstuff's are still sent from Cali-
fornia and Chili to Victoria, yet from Adelaide, close
at hand, wheat is being sent to England and flour to
New York !
There can be no doubt that ultimately Victoria and
Tasmania will at least succeed in feeding themselves.
It is probable that neither New Zealand nor Queens-
land will find it to their interest to do the like. Wool-
growing in the former and cotton and wool in the lat-
ter will continue to pay better than wheat in the greater
portion of their lands. Their granary, and that possi-
bly of the City of Sydney itself, will be found in South
100 GREATER BRITAIN,
Australia, especially if land "capable of carrying wheat
be discovered to the westward of the settlements about
Adelaide. That the Australias, Chili, California,
Oregon, and other Pacific States can ever export
largely of wheat to Europe is now more than doubtful.
If manufactures spring up on this side the world, these
countries, whatever their fertility, will have at least
enough to do to feed themselves.
As I entered the streets of the " farinaceous village,"
as Adelaide is called by conceited Victorians, I was
struck with the amount of character they exhibit both
in the way of buildings, of faces, and of dress. The
South Australians have far more idea of adapting their
houses and clothes to their climate than have the peo-
ple of the other colonies, and their faces adapt them-
selves. The verandas to the shops are sufficiently con-
tiguous to form a perfect piazza; the people rise early,
and water the sidewalk in front of their houses ; and
you never meet a man who does not make some sacri-
fice to the heat, in the shape of puggree, silk coat, or
sun-helmet ; but the women are nearly as unwise here
as in the other colonies, and persist in going about in
shawls and colored dresses. Might they but see a few
of the Richmond or Baltimore ladies in their pure white
muslin frocks, and die of envy, for the dress most con-
venient in a hot dry climate is also the most beautiful
under its bright sun.
The German element is strong in South Australia,
and there are whole villages in the wheat-country where
English is never spoken ; for here, as in America, there
has been no mingling of the races, and the whole diverg-
ence from the British types is traceable to climatic
influences, and especially dry heat. The men born
here are thin, and fine-featured, somewhat like the
Pitcairn Islanders, while the women are all alike
ADELAIDE. 101
small, pretty, and bright, but with a burnt-up look.
The haggard eye might, perhaps, be ascribed to the
dreaded presence of my old friend of the Rocky
Mountains, the brulot sand-fly.
The inhabitants of all hot dry countries speak from
the head, and not the chest, and the English in Aus-
tralia are acquiring this habit; you seldom find a
" cornstalk" who speaks well from the chest.
The air is crisp and hot crisper and hotter even
than that of Melbourne. The shaded thermometer
upon the Victorian coast seldom reaches 110, but in
the town of Adelaide 117 has been recorded by the
government astronomer. Such is the figure of the
Australian continent that Adelaide, although a sea-
port town, lies far up as it were inland. Catching the
heated gales from three of the cardinal points, Ade-
laide has a summer six months long, and is exposed
to a fearful continuance of hot winds ; nevertheless,
105 at Adelaide is easier borne than 95 in the shade
at Sydney.
Nothing can be prettier than the outskirts of the
capital. In laying out Adelaide, its founders have
reserved a park about a quarter of a mile in width
all round the city. This gives a charming drive nine
miles long, outside which again are the olive-yards
and villas of the citizens. Hedges of the yellow cactus,
or of the graceful Kangaroo Island acacia, bound the
gardens, and the pomegranate, magnolia, fig, and aloe
grow upon every lawn. Five miles to the eastward
are the cool wooded hills of the Mount Lofty Range,
on the tops of which are grown the English fruits for
which the plains afford no shade or moisture.
Crossing the Adelaide plains, for fifty miles by rail-
way, to Kapunda, I beheld one great wheat-field with-
out a break. The country was finer than any stretch
9*
102 GREATER BRITAIN.
of equal extent in California or Victoria, and looked as
though the crops were " standing" which in one sense
they were, though the grain was long since "in." The
fact is that they use the Ridley machines, by which the
ears are thrashed out without any cutting of the straw,
which continues to stand, and which is finally plowed
in at the farmer's leisure, except in the neighborhood
of Adelaide. There would be a golden age of par-
tridge-shooting in Old England did the climate and
the price of straw allow of the' adoption of the Ridley
reaper. Under this system, South Australia grows on
the average six times as much wheat as she can use,
whereas, if reaping had to be paid for, she could only
grow from one and a half to twice as much as would
meet the home demand.
In this country, as in America, "bad farming" is
found to pay, for with cheap land, the Ridley reaper,
and good markets, light crops without labor, save the
peasant-proprietor's own toil, pay well when heavy
crops obtained by the use of hired labor would not re-
imburse the capitalist. The amount of land under
cultivation has been trebled in the last seven years,
and half a million acres are now under wheat. South
Australia has this year produced seven times as much
grain as she can consume, and twelve acres are under
wheat for every adult male of the population of the
colony.
A committee has been lately sitting in ISTew South
Wales "to consider the state of the colony/' To
judge from the evidence taken before it, the members
seemed to have conceived that their task was to in-
quire why South Australia prospered above _N"ew South
Wales. Frugality of the people, especially of the
Germans, and fertility of the soil were the reasons
-vhich they gave for the result, but it is impossible not
ADELAIDE. 103
to see that the success of South Australia is but another
instance of the triumph of small proprietors, of whom
there are now some seven or eight thousand in the
colony, and these were brought here by the adoption
of the Wakefield land system.
In the early days of the colony, land was sold at a
good price in 130-acre sections, with one acre of town-
land to each agricultural section. Now, under rules
made at home, but confirmed after the introduction
of self-government, land is sold by auction, with a
reserved price of <! an acre, but when once a block
has passed the hammer, it can forever be taken up at
<! the acre without further competition. The Land
Fund is kept separate from the other revenue, and a
few permanent charges, such as that for the aborigines,
being paid out of it, the remainder is divided into
three portions, of which two are destined for public
works, and one for immigration.
There is a marvelous contrast to be drawn between
the success which has attended the Wakefield system
in South Australia and the total failure, in the neigh-
boring colony of West Australia, of the old system,
under which vast tracts of land being alienated for
small prices to the crown, there remains no fund for
introducing that abundant supply of labor without
which the land is useless.
Adelaide is so distant from Europe that no immi-
grants come of themselves, and, in the assisted import-
ation of both men and women, the relative proportions
of English, Scotch, and Irish that exist at home are
carefully preserved, by which simple precaution the
colony is saved from an organic change of type, such
as that which threatens all America, although it would,
of course, be idle to deny that the restriction is aimed"
against the Irish.
104 GREATER BRITAIN.
The greatest difficulty of young countries lies in
the want of women : not only is this a bar to the
natural increase of population ; it is a deficiency pre-
ventive of permanency, destructive of religion ; where
woman is not there can be no home, no country.
How to obtain a supply of marriageable girls is a
question which Canada, Tasmania, South Australia,
New South Wales, have each in their turn attempted
to solve by the artificial introduction of Irish work-
house girls. The difficulty apparently got rid of, we
begin to find that it is not so much as fairly seen; we
have yet to look it squarely in the face. The point of
the matter is that we should find not girls, but honest
girls, not women merely, but women fit to bear fam-
ilies in a free State.
One of the colonial superintendents, writing of a
lately -received batch of Irish work-house girls, has said
that, if these are the " well-conducted girls, he should
be anxious to see a few of the evil-disposed." While
in South Australia, I read the details of the landing
of a similar party of women from Limerick work-
house one Sunday afternoon at Point Levi, the Lam-
beth of Quebec. Although supplied by the city au-
thorities with meat and drink, and ordered to leave
for Montreal at early morning, nothing could be more
abominable than their conduct in the mean while.
They sold baggage, bonnets, combs, cloaks, and scarfs,
keeping on nothing but their crinolines and senseless
finery. With the pence they thus collected they bought
corn- whisky, and in a few hours were yelling, fighting,
swearing, wallowing in beastly drunkenness; and by
the time the authorities came down to pack them off
by train, they were as fiends, mad with rum and wisky.
At five in the morning, they reached the Catholic
Home at Montreal, where the pious nuns were shocked
ADELAIDE. 105
and horrified at their grossness of conduct and lewd
speech ; nothing should force them, they declared, ever
again to take into their peaceable asylum the Irish
work-house girls. This was no exceptional case : the
reports from South Australia, from Tasmania, can
show as bad ; and in Canada such conduct on the part
of the freshly-landed girls is common. A Tasmanian
magistrate has stated in evidence before a Parliament-
ary Committee that once when his wife was in ill health
he went to one of the immigration offices, and applied
for a decent woman to attend on a sick lady. The
woman was duly sent down, and found next day in
her room lying on the bed in a sjate best pictured in
her own words : " Here I am with my yard of clay,
blowing a cloud, you say."
It is evident that a batch of thoroughly bad girls
cost a colony from first to last, in the way of prisons,
hospitals, and public morals, ten times as much as the
free passages across the seas of an equal number of
worthy Irish women, free from the work-house taint.
Of one of these gangs which landed in Quebec not
many years ago, it has been asserted by the immigra-
tion superintendents that the traces are visible to this
day, for wherever the women went, " sin, and shame,
and death were in their track." The Irish unions have
no desire in the matter beyond that of getting rid of
their most abandoned girls ; their interests and those
of the colonies they supply are diametrically opposed.
^jo inspection, no agreements, no supervision can be
effective in the face of facts like these. The class that
the unions can afford to send, Canada and Tasmania
cannot afford to keep. Women are sent out with
babies in their arms ; no one will take them into ser-
vice because the children are in the way, and in a few
weeks they fall chargeable on one of the colonial
106 GEE ATE E BEITAIN.
benevolent societies, to be kept till the children grow
up or the mothers die. Even when the girls are not
so wholly vicious as to be useless in service, they are
utterly ignorant of everything they ought to know. Of
neither domestic nor farm-work have they a grain of
knowledge. Of thirteen who were lately sent to an
up-country town, but one knew how to cook, or wash,
or milk, or iron, while three of them had agreed to
refuse employment unless they were engaged to serve
together. The agents are at their wits' ends ; either
the girls are so notoriously infamous in their ways of
life that no one will hire them, or else they are so ex-
travagant in their new-found "independence" that they
on their side will not be hired. Meanwhile the Irish
authorities lay every evil upon the long sea voyage.
They say that they select the best of girls, but a few
days at sea suffice to demoralize them.
The colonies could not do better than combine for
the establishment of a new and more efficient emigra-
tion agency in Ireland. To avoid the evil, by as far
as possible refusing to meet it face to face at all, South
Australia has put restrictions on her Irish immigration ;
for here as in America it is found that the Scotch and
Germans are the best of immigrants. The Scotch are
not more successful in Adelaide than everywhere in
the known world. Half the most prominent among
the statesmen of the Canadian Confederation, of Vic-
toria, and of Queensland, are born Scots, and all the
great merchants of India are of the same natio^
Whether it be that the Scotch emigrants are for the
most part men of better education than those of other
nations, of whose citizens only the poorest and most
ignorant are known to emigrate, or whether the Scotch-
man owes his uniform success in every climate to his
perseverance or his shrewdness, the fact/remains, that
ADELAIDE. 107
wherever abroad you come across a Scotchman, you
invariably find him prosperous and respected.
The Scotch emigrant is a man who leaves Scotland
because he wishes to rise faster and higher than he
can at home, whereas the emigrant Irishman quits
Galway or County Cork only because there is no longer
food or shelter for him there. The Scotchman crosses
the seas in calculating contentment ; the Irishman in
sorrow and despair.
At the Burra Burra and Kapunda copper-mines
there' is not much to see, so my last days in South
Australia were given to the politics of the colony,
which present one singular feature. For the elections
to the Council or Upper House, for which the fran-
chise is a freehold worth <50 or a leasehold of <20 a
year, the whole country forms but a single district, and
the majority elect their men. In a country where
party feeling runs high, such a system, were it possi-
ble, would evidently unite almost all the evils conceiv-
able in a plan of representation, but in a peaceful
colony it undoubtedly works well. Having absolute
power in their hands, the majority here, as in the selec-
tion of a governor for an American State, use their
position with great prudence, and make choice of the
best men that the country can produce. The franchise
for the Lower House, for the elections to which the
colony is " districted," is the simple one of six months'
residence, which with the ballot works irreproachably.
The day that I left Adelaide was also that upon
which Captain Cadell, the opener of the Murray to
trade, sailed with his naval expedition to fix upon a
capital for the Northern territory ; that coast of tropi-
cal Australia which faces the Moluccas. As Governor
Gilpin had pressed me to stay, he pressed me to go
with him, making as an inducement a promise to name
108 GREATER BRITAIN.
after me either "a city" or a headland. He said he
should advise me to select the headland, because that
would remain, whereas the city probably would not.
When I pleaded that he had no authority to carry pas-
sengers, he offered to take me as his surgeon. Hitherto
the expeditions have discovered nothing but natives,
mangroves, alligators, and sea-slugs, and the whole of
the money received from capitalists at home, for
300,000 acres of land to be surveyed and handed over
to them in North Australia, being now exhausted, the
government are seriously thinking of reimbursing the
investors and giving up the search for land. It would
be as cheap to colonize equatorial Africa from Adelaide,
as tropical Australia. If the Northern territory is ever
to be rendered habitable, it must be by Queensland
that the work is done.
It is not certain that North Australia may not be
found to yield gold in plenty. In a little known manu-
script of the seventeenth century, the northwest of
Australia is called "The land of gold;" and we are
told that the fishermen of Solor, driven on to this land
of gold by stress of weather, picked up in a few hours
their boat full of gold nuggets, and returned in safety.
They never dared repeat their voyage, on account of
their dread of the unknown seas ; but Manoel Godinho
de Eredia was commissioned by the Portuguese Lord
Admiral of India to explore this gold land, and enrich
the crown of Portugal by the capture of the treasures
it contained. It would be strange enough if gold
came to be discovered on the northwest coast, in
the spot from which the Portuguese reported their
discovery.
By dawn, after one of the most stifling of Australian
nights, I left Port Adelaide for King George's Sound.
A long narrow belt of a clear red-yellow light lay
TRANSPORTATION. 109
glowing along the horizon to the east, portending
heat and drought; elsewhere the skies were of a deep
blue-black. As we steamed past Kangaroo Island,
and through Investigator Straits, the sun shot up
from the tawny plains, and the hot wind from the
northern desert, rising on a fe^aaen afio? the stillness
of the night, whirled clouds of sand over the surface
of the bay.
CHAPTER XIII.
TRANSPORTATION.
AFTER five days' steady steaming across the great
Australian bight, north of which lies the true "Terra
Australia incognita," I reached Xing George's Sound
"Le Pot du Roi Georges en Australie," as I saw it
written on a letter in the jail. At the shore end of
a great land-locked harbor, the little houses of bright
white stone that make up the town of Albany peep
out from among geranium-covered rocks. The climate,
unlike that of the greater portion of Australia is damp
and tropical, and the dense scrub is a mass of flower-
ing bushes, with bright blue and scarlet blooms and
curiously-cut leaves.
The contrast between the scenery and the people
of West Australia is great indeed. The aboriginal
inhabitants of Albany were represented by a tribe of
filthy natives tall, half starved, their heads bedaubed
with red ochre, and their faces smeared with yellow
clay; the "colonists" by a gang of fiend-faced con-
VOL. II. 10
110 GREATER BRITAIN.
victs working in chains upon the esplanade, and a
group of scowling expirees hunting a monkey with
bull-dogs on the pier, while the native women, half
clothed in tattered kangaroo-skins, came slouching
past with an aspect of defiant wretchedness. Work is
never done in West Australia unless under the com-
pulsion of the lash, for a similar degradation of lahor
is produced by the use of convicts as by that of slaves.
Settled at an earlier date than was South Australia,
West Australia, then called Swan River, although one
of the oldest of the colonies, was so soon ruined by
the free gift to the first settlers of vast territories use-
less without labor, that in 1849 she petitioned to be
made a penal settlement, and though at the instance
of Victoria transportation to the Australias has now
all but ceased, Freemantle Prison is still the most con-
siderable convict establishment we possess across the
seas.
At the time of my visit there were 10,000 convicts
or emancipists within the " colony," of whom 1500
were in prison, 1500 in private service on tickets-of-
leave, while 1500 had served out their time, and over
5000 had been released upon conditional pardons : 600
of the convicts had arrived from England in 1865.
Out of a total population, free and convict, of 20,000,
the offenders in the year had numbered nearly 3500,
or more than one-sixth of the people, counting women
and children.
If twenty years of convict labor seem to have done
but little for the settlement, they have at least enabled
us to draw the moral, that transportation and free
emigration cannot exist side by side : the one element
must overbear and destroy the other. In Western
Australia, the convicts and their keepers form two-
thirds of the whole population, and the district is a
TEANSPOR TA TION. HI
great English prison, not a colony, and exports but a
little wool, a little sandal-wood, and a little cotton.
Western Australia is as unpopular with the convicts
as with free settlers : fifty or sixty convicts have suc-
cessfully escaped from the settlement within the last
few years. From twenty to thirty escapes take place
annually, but the men are usually recaptured within a
mouth or two, although sheltered by the people, the
vast majority of whom are ticket-of-leave men or ex-
convicts. Absconders receive a hundred lashes and
one year in the chain-gang, yet from sixty to seventy
unsuccessful attempts at escape are reported every
year.
On the road between Albany and Hamilton I saw a
man at work in ponderous irons. The sun was strik-
ing down on him in a way that none can fancy who
have no experience of Western Australia or Bengal,
and his labor was of the heaviest; now he had to prise
up huge rocks with a crow-bar, now to handle pick and
shovel, now to use the rammer, under the eye of an
armed warder, who idled in the shade by the road-
side. This was an "escape-man," thus treated with a
view to cause him to cease his continual endeavors to
get away from Albany. No wonder that the " chain-
gang" system is a failure, and the number both of
attempts and actual escapes heavier under it than
before the introduction of this tremendous punish-
ment.
Many of the " escapes " are made with no other view
than to obtain a momentary change of scene. On the
last return trip of the ship in which I sailed from Ade-
laide to King George's Sound, a convict coal-man was
found built up in the coal-heap on deck : he and his
mates at Albany had drawn lots to settle which of
them should be thus packed off by the help of the
112 GREATER BRITAIN.
others "for a change." Of ultimate escape there could
be no chance ; the coal on deck could not fail to be
exhausted within a day or two after leaving port, and
this they knew. When he emerged, black, half
smothered, and nearly starved, from his hiding-place,
he allowed himself to be quietly ironed, and so kept
till the ship reached Adelaide, when he was given up
to the authorities, and sent back to Albany for punish-
ment. Acts of this class are common enough to have
received a name. The offenders are called "bolters
for a change."
A convict has been known when marching in his
gang suddenly to lift up his spade, and split the skull
of the man who walked in front of him, thus courting
a certain death for no reason but to escape from the
monotony of toil. Another has doubled his punish-
ment for fun by calling out to the magistrates, "Gentle-
men, pray remember that I am entitled to an iron-gang,
because this is the second time of my absconding."
One of the strangest things about the advance of
England is the many-sided character of the form of
early settlement: Central North America we plant
with Mormons, New Zealand with the runaways of
our whaling ships, Tasmania and portions of Australia
with our transported felons. Transportation has gone
through many phases since the system took its rise in
the exile to the colonies under Charles II. of the moss-
troopers of Northumberland. The plan of forcing the
exiles to labor as slaves on the plantations was intro-
duced in the reign of George II., and by an Act then
passed offenders were actually put up to auction, and
knocked down to men who undertook to transport
them, and make what they could of their labor. In
1786, an Order in Council named the eastern coast of
Australia arid the adjacent islands as the spot to which
TRANSPORTATION. 113
transportation beyond the seas should be directed, and
in 1787 the black bar was drawn indelibly across the
page of history which records the foundation of the
colony of New South Wales. From that time to the
present day the world has witnessed the portentous
sight of great countries in which the major portion of
the people, the whole of the handicraftsmen, were con-
victed felons.
There being no free people whatever in the " col-
onies" when first formed, the governors had no choice
but to appoint convicts to all the official situations.
The consequence was robbery and corruption. Ke-
corded sentences were altered by the convict-clerks,
free pardons and grants of land were sold for money.
The convict overseers forced their gangmen to labor
not for government, but for themselves, securing
secrecy by the unlimited supply of rum to the men,
who in turn bought native women with all that they
could spare. On the sheep-stations whole herds were
stolen, and those from neighboring lands driven in to
show on muster-days. Enormous fortunes were accumu-
lated by some of the emancipists, by fraud and infamy
rather than by prudence, we are told, and a vast num-
ber of convicts were soon at large in Sydney town
itself, without the knowledge of the police. As the
settlements grew in years and size, the sons of convict
parents grew up in total ignorance, while such few
free settlers as arrived "the ancients," as they were
styled, or "the ancient nobility of Botany Bay" were
wholly dependent on convict tutors for the education
of their children the "cornstalks" and "currency
girls ;" and cock-fighting was the chief amusement of
both sexes. The newspapers were without exception
conducted by gentleman convicts, or " specials," as
they were called, who were assigned to the editors for
10*
114 GREATER BRITAIN.
that purpose, and the police force itself was composed
of ticket-of-leave men and " emancipists." Convicts
were thus the only schoolmasters, the only governesses,
the only nurses, the only journalists, and, as there were
even convict clergymen and convict university pro-
fessors, the training of the youth of the land was com-
mitted almost exclusively to the felon's care.
A petition sent home from Tasmania in 1848 is sim-
ple and pathetic; it is from the parents and guardians
resident in Van Dieman's Land. They set forth that
there are 13,000 free children growing up in the colony,
that within six years alone 24,000 convicts have been
turned into the island, and of these but 4000 were
women. The result is that their children are brought
up in the midst of profligacy and degradation.
The lowest depth of villainy, if in such universal in-
famy degrees can be conceived, was to be met with in
the parties working in the "chain-gangs" on the roads.
"Assignees" too bad even for the whip of the harsh-
est, or the "beef and beer" of the most lenient master,
brutalized still further, if that were possible, by asso-
ciation with those as vile as themselves, and followed
about the country by women too infamous even for
service in the houses of the up-country settlers, or the
gin-palaces of the towns, worked in gangs upon the
roads by day, whenever promises of spirits or the hope
of tobacco could induce them to work at all, and found
a compensation for such unusual toil in nightly quitting
their camp, and traversing the country, robbing and
murdering those they met, and sacking every home-
stead that lay in their track.
The clerk in charge of one of the great convict bar-
racks was himself a convict, and had an understanding
with the men under his care that they might prowl
about at night and rob on condition that they should
TEA NSP OR TA TION. 115
share their gains with him, and that, if they were found
out, he should himself prosecute them for being absent
without leave. Juries were composed either of con-
victs, or of publicans dependent on the convicts for
their livelihood, and convictions were of necessity
extremely rare. In a plain case of murder the judge
was known to say: "If I don't attend to the recom-
mendation to mercy, these fellows will never find a
man guilty again," and jurymen would frequently
hand down notes to the counsel for the defense, and
bid him give himself no trouble, as they intended to
acquit their friend.
The lawyers were mostly convicts, and perjury in
the courts was rife. It has been given in evidence
before a Royal Commission by a magistrate of New
South Wales that a Sydney free immigrant once had
a tailor's bill sent in which he did not owe, he having
been but a few weeks in the colony. He instructed a
lawyer, and did not himself appear in court. He after-
ward heard that he had won his case, for the tailor had
sworn to the bill, but the immigrant's lawyer, "to
save trouble," had called a witness who swore to hav-
ing paid it, which settled the case. Sometimes there
were not only convict witnesses and convict jurors, but
convict judges.
The assignment system was supposed to be a great
improvement upon the jail, but its only certain result
was that convict master and convict man used to get
drunk together, while a night never passed without a
burglary in Sydney. Many of the convicts' mistresses
went out from England as government free emigrants,
taking with them funds subscribed by the thieves at
home and money obtained by the robberies for which
their "fancy men" had been convicted, and on their
arrival at Sydney succeeded in getting their paramours
116 GEE ATE E BEITAIN.
assigned to them as convict servants. Such was the
disparity of the sexes that the term "wife" was a
mockery, and the Female Emigration Society and the
government vied with each other in sending out to
Sydney the worst women in all London, to reinforce
the ranks of the convict girls of the Paramatta factory.
Even among the free settlers, marriage soon became
extremely rare. Convicts were at the head of the
colleges and benevolent asylums; the custom-house
officials were all convicts; one of the occupants of the
office of attorney-general took for his clerk a notorious
convict, who was actually recommitted to Bathurst
after his appointment, and yet allowed to return tc-
Sydney and resume his duties.
The most remarkable peculiarity of the assignment
system was its gross uncertainty. Some assigned con-
victs spent their time working for high wages, living
and drinking with their masters; others were mere
slaves. Whether, however, he be in practice well or
ill treated, in the assignment or apprenticeship system
the convict is, under whatever name, a slave, subject
to the caprice of a master who, though he cannot him-
self flog his " servant," can have hkn flogged by writing
a note or sending his compliments to his neighbor the
magistrate on the next run or farm. The "whipping-
houses" of Mississippi and Alabama had their parallel
in New South Wales ; a look or word would cause the
hurrying of the servant to the post or the forge as a
preliminary to a month in the chain-gang "on the
roads." On the other hand, nothing under the assign-
ment system can prevent skilled convict workmen
being paid and pampered by their masters, whose in-
terest it evidently becomes to get out of them all the
work possible through excessive indulgence, as intel-
ligent labor cannot be produced through the machinery
TRANSP OR TA TION. 117
of the whipping-post, but may be through that of " beef
and beer."
Whatever may have been the true interest of the
free settlers, cruelty was in practice commoner than
indulgence. Fifty and a hundred lashes, months of
solitary confinement, years of labor in chains upon
the roads, were laid upon convicts for such petty
offenses as brawling, drunkenness, and disobedience.
In 1835, among the 28,000 convicts then in New
South Wales, there were 22,000 summary convictions
for disorderly or dishonest conduct, and in a year the
average was 3000 floggings, and above 100,000 lashes.
In Tasmania, where the convicts then numbered 15,000,
the summary convictions were 15,000 and the lashes
50,000 a year.
The criminal returns of Tasmania and New South
Wales contain the condemnation of the transportation
.system. In the single year of 1834, one-seventh of
the free population of Van Dieman's Land were sum-
marily convicted of drunkenness. In that year, in a
population of 37,000, 15,000 were convicted before the
courts for various offenses. Over a hundred persons
a year were at that time sentenced to death for crimes
of violence in New South Wales alone. Less than a
fourth of the convicts served their time without incur-
ring additional punishment from the police, and those
who thus escaped proved generally in after-life the
worst of all, and even government officials were forced
into admitting that transportation demoralized far
more persons than it reformed. Hundreds of assigned
convicts made their escape to the back country, and
became bushrangers ; many got down to the coast,
and crossed to the Pacific islands, whence they spread
the infamies of New South Wales throughout all Poly-
nesia. A Select Committee of the House of Commons
118 GREATER BRITAIN.
reported, in words characteristic of our race, that these
convicts committed, in New Zealand and the Pacific,
" outrages at which humanity shudders," and which
were to be deplored as being "injurious to our com-
mercial interests in that quarter of the globe."
Transportation to New South Wales came to its end
none too soon : in fifty years, 75,000 convicts had been
transported to that colony, and 30,000 to the little
island of Tasmania in twenty years.
Were there no other argument for the discounte-
nance of transportation, it would be almost enough
to say that the life in the convict-ship itself makes
the reformation of transported criminals impossible.
Where many bad men are brought together, the few
not wholly corrupt who may be among them have no
opportunity for speech, and the grain of good that may
exist in every heart can have no chance for life; if not
inclination, pride at least leads the old hand to put
down all acts that are not vile, all words that are not
obscene. Those who have sailed in convict company
say that there is something terrible in the fiendish
delight that the "old hands" take in watching the
steady degradation of the "new chums." The hard-
ened criminals invariably meet the less vile with out-
rage, ridicule, and contempt, and the better men soon
succumb to ruffians who have crime for their profes-
sion, and for all their relaxation vice.
To describe the horrors of the convict-ships, we are
told, would be impossible. The imagination will scarce
suffice to call up dreams so hideous. Four months of
filthiness in a floating hell sink even the least bad to
the level of unteachable brutality. Mutiny is un-
known; the convicts are their own masters and the
ship's, but the shrewd callousness of the old jail-bird
teaches all that there is nothing to be gained even by
TRANSPORTATION. 119
momentary success. Rage and violence are seldom
seen, but there is a humor that is worse than blows,
conversation that transcends all crime in infamy.
It will be long before the last traces of convict dis-
ease disappear from Tasmania and New South Wales ;
the gold-find has done much to purify the air, free
selection may lead to a still more bright advance,
manufacturing may lend its help ; but years must go
by before Tasmania can be prosperous or Sydney
moral. Their history is not only valuable as a guide
to those who have to save West Australia, as General
Bourke and Mr. Wentworth saved New South Wales,
but as an example, not picked from ancient rolls, but
from the records of a system founded within the
memory of living man, and still existent, of what
transportation must necessarily be, and what it may
easily become.
The results of a dispassionate survey of the trans-
portation system are far from satisfactory. If deporta-
tion be considered as a punishment, it would be hard
to find a worse. Punishment should be equable, re-
formatory, deterrent, cheap. Transportation is the
most costly of all the punishments that are known to
us; it is subject to variations that cannot be guarded
against ; it is severest to the least guilty and slightest
to the most hardened ; it morally destroys those who
have some good remaining in them; it leaves the ruf-
fianly malefactor worse if possible than it finds him;
and, while it is frightfully cruel and vindictive in its
character, it is useless as a deterrent because its nature
is unknown at home. Transportation to the English
thief means exile, and nothing more; it is only after
conviction, when far away from his uncaught asso-
ciates, that he comes to find it worse than death. In-
stead of deterring, transportation tempts to crime ;
120 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
instead of reforming, it debases the bad, and confirms
in villainy the already infamous. To every bad man it
gives the worst companions ; the infamous are to be
reformed by association with the vile ; while its effects
upon the colonies are described in every petition of the
settlers, and testified to by the whole history of our
plantations in the antipodes, and by the present con-
dition of West Australia and Tasmania, from which,
however, New South Wales has happily escaped. We
have come at last to transportation in its most limited
and restricted sense; the only remaining step is to be
quit of it altogether.
In conjunction with all punishment, we should secure
some means of separating the men one from another
as soon as the actual punishment is terminated : to
settle them on land, to settle them with wives where
possible, should be our object. The work which really
has in it something of reformation is that which a man
has to do, not in order that he may avoid whipping,
but that he may escape starvation; and it is from this
point of view that transportation indefensible. A man,
however bad, will generally become a useful member
of society and a not altogether neglectful father if
allowed to settle upon land away from his old asso-
ciates; but morbid tendencies of every kind are
strengthened by close association with others who are
laboring under a like infirmity : and where the former
convicts are allowed to hang together in towns, nothing
is to be expected better than that which is actually
found namely, a state of society where wives speedily
become as villainous as their husbands, and where chil-
dren are brought up to emulate their fathers' crimes.
To keep the men separate from each other, after the
expiration of the sentence, we need to send the con-
victs to a fairly populous country, whence arises this
TRANSPORTATION. 121
great difficulty: if we send convicts to a populous
colony, we are met at once by a cry that we are forc-
ing the workmen of the colony into a one-sided com-
petition ; that we are offering an unbearable insult to
the free population ; that, in attempting to reform the
felon, in allowing him to be absorbed into the colonial
society, we are degrading and corrupting the whole
community on the chance of possible benefit to our
English villain. On the other hand, if we send our
convicts to an uninhabited land, such as New South
Wales and Tasmania were, such as West Australia is
now, we build up an artificial Pandemonium, whither
we convey at the public cost the pick and cream of the
ruffians of the world, to form a community of which
each member must be sufficiently vile of himself to
corrupt a nation.
If by care the difficulty of which I have spoken can
be avoided, transportation might be replaced by short
sentences and solitary confinement, and low diet, to be
followed by forced exile, under regulations, to some
selected colony, say the Ghauts of Eastern Africa, op-
posite to Madagascar, or the highlands that skirt the
Zambesi River. Exile after punishment may often be
the only way of providing for convicts who would
otherwise be forced to return to their former ways.
The difficulties in the way of discharged convicts seek-
ing employment are too terrible for them not to ac-
cept joyfully any simple plan for emigration to a coun-
try where they are unknown.
In Western Australia, transportation has not been
made subservient to colonization, and both in conse-
quence have failed.
On going on board the Bombay at King George's
Sound, I at once found myself in the East. The cap-
tain's crew of Malays, the native cooks in long white
VOL. II. 11
122 GREATER BRITAIN.
gowns, the Bombay serangs in dark-blue turbans, red
cummerbunds, and green or yellow trowsers ; the negro
or Abyssinian stokers, and passengers in coats of
China-grass; the Hindoo deck-sweepers playing on
their tomtoms in the intervals of work; the punkahs
below; the Hindostanee names for every one on deck;
and, above all, the general indolence of everybody, all
told of a new world.
A convict clerk superintended the coaling, which
took place before we left the harbor for Ceylon, and
I remarked that the dejection of his countenance ex-
ceeded that of the felon-laborers who worked in irons
on the quay. There is a wide-spread belief in England
that unfair favor is shown to " gentlemen convicts."
This is simply not the case ; every educated prisoner
is employed at in-door work, for which he is suited,
and not at road-making, in which he might be useless;
but there are few cases in which he would not wish to
exchange a position full of hopeless degradation for
that of an out-door laborer, who passes through his
daily routine drudgery (far from the prison) unknown,
and perhaps in his fancy all but free. The longing to
change the mattock for the pen is the result of envy,
and confined to those who, if listened to, would prove
incapable of pursuing the pen-driver's occupation.
Under a fair and freshening breeze, we left the port
of Albany, happy to escape from a jail the size of In-
dia, even those of us who had been forced to pass only
a few days in West Australia.
AUSTRALIA. 123
CHAPTER XIY.
AUSTRALIA.
PACING the deck with difficulty as the ship tore
through the lava-covered seas, before a favoring gale
that caught us off Cape Lewin, some of us discussed
the prospects of the great south land as a whole.
In Australia, it is often said, we have a second
America in-its infancy ; but it may be doubted whether
we have not become so used to trace the march of em-
pire on a westward course, through Persia and Assy-
ria, Greece and Rome, then by Germany to England
and America, that we are too readily prepared
to accept the probability of its onward course to the
Pacific.
The progress of Australia has been singularly rapid.
In 1830, her population was under 40,000; in 1860, it
numbered 1,500,000 ; nevertheless, it is questionable
how far the progress will continue. The natural con-
ditions of America in Australia are exactly reversed.
All the best lands of Australia are on her coast, and
these are already taken up by settlers. Australia has
three-quarters the area of Europe, but it is doubtful
whether she will ever support a dense population
throughout even half her limits. The uses of the
northern territory have yet to be discovered, and the
interior of the continent is far from being tempting
to the settler. Upon the whole, it seems likely that
almost all the imperfectly-known regions of Australia
will in time be occupied by pastoral crown tenants,
124 GREATER BRITAIN.
but that the area of agricultural operations is not
likely to admit of indefinite extension. % The central
district of Australia, to the extent, perhaps, of half
the entire continent, lies too far north for winter rains,
too far south for tropical wet seasons, and in these
vast solitudes agriculture may be pronounced impos-
sible, sheep-farming difficult. As far as sufficient
water for sheep and cattle-stations is concerned, there
will be no difficulty in retaining this in tanks or rais-
ing it by means of wells, and the wool, tallow, and
even meat, will be carried by those railways for which
the country is admirably fitted, while the construc-
tion of locks upon the Murray and its tributaries will
enable steamers to carry the whole trade of the
Riverina. So far, all is well, but the arable lands of
Australia are limited by the rains, and apparently the
limit is a sadly narrow one.
Once in awhile, a heavy winter rain appears to fall
in the interior ; grass springs up, the lagoons are filled,
the up-country squatters make their fortunes, and all
goes prosperously for a time. Accounts reach the
coast cities of the astonishing fertility of the interior,
and hundreds of settlers set oft* to the remotest dis-
tricts. Two or three years of drought then follow,
and all the more enterprising squatters are soon ruined,
with a gain, however, sometimes of a few thousand
square miles of country to civilization.
Hitherto the Australians have not made so much as
they should have done of the country that is within
their reach. The want of railroads is incredible. There
are but some 400 miles of railway in all Australia far
less than the amount possessed by the single infant
State of Wisconsin. The sums spent upon the Vic-
torian lines have deterred the colonists from com-
pleting their railway system: X10,000,000 sterling
AUSTRALIA. 125
were spent upon 200 miles of road, through easy
country in which the land cost nothing. The United
States have made nearly 40,000 miles of railroad for
less than X300,000,000 sterling; Canada made her
2000 miles for <20,000,000, or ten times as much rail-
road as Victoria for only twice the money. Cuba has
already more miles of railroad than all Australia.
Small as are the inhabited portions of Australia
when compared with the corresponding divisions of
the United States, this country nevertheless to English
eyes is huge enough. The part of Queensland already
peopled is five times larger than the United Kingdom.
South Australia and West Australia are each of them
nearly as large as British India, but of these colonies
the greater part is desert. Fertile Victoria, the size of
Great Britain, is only a thirty-fourth part of Australia.
In face of the comparatively small amount of good
agricultural country known to exist in Australia, the
disproportionate size of the great cities shows out more
clearly than ever. Even Melbourne, when it comes to
be examined, has too much the air of a magnified
Hobart, of a city with no country at its back, of a
steam-hammer set up to crack nuts. Queensland is at
present free from the burden of gigantic cities, but
then Queensland is in greater danger of becoming
what is in reality a slave republic.
Morally and intellectually, at all events, the colonies
are thriving. A literature is springing up, a national
character is being grafted upon the good English stock.
What shape the Australian mind will take is at pres-
ent somewhat doubtful. In addition to considerable
shrewdness and purely Saxon capacity and willingness
to combine for local objects, we find in Australia an
admirable love of simple mirth, and a serious distaste
for prolonged labor in one direction, while the down-
11*
126 GREATER BRITAIN.
Tightness and determination in the pursuit of truth,
remarkable in America, are less noticeable here.
The extravagance begotten of the tradition of con-
vict times has not been without effect, and the settlers
waste annually, it is computed, food which would
support in Europe a population of twice their numbers.
This wastefulness is perhaps, however, in some de-
gree a consequence of the necessary habits of a pas-
toral people. The 8000 tons of tallow exported annually
by the Australias are said to represent the boiling
down of sheep enough to feed half a million of people
for a twelvemonth.
Australian manners, like the American, resemble
the French rather than the British a resemblance
traceable, perhaps, to the essential democracy of Aus-
tralia, America, and France. One surface point which
catches the eye in any Australian ball-room, or on any
race-course, is clearly to be referred to the habit of mind
produced by democracy the fact, namely, that the
women dress with great expense and care, the men
with none whatever. This, as a rule, is true of Amer-
icans, Australians, and French.
Unlike as are the Australians to the British, there
is nevertheless a singular mimicry of British forms
and ceremonies in the colonies', which is extended to
the most trifling details of public life. Twice in Aus-
tralia was I invited to ministerial dinners, given to
mark the approaching close of the session ; twice also
was I present at university celebrations, in which home
whimsicalities were closely copied. The governors'
messages to the Colonial Parliaments are travesties of
those which custom in England leads us to call "the
Queen's." The very phraseology is closely followed.
We find Sir J. Manners Button gravely saying : " The
representatives of the government of iSTew South Wales
AUSTRALIA. 127
and of my government have agreed to an arrangement
on the border duties . . ." The "my" in a democratic
country like Victoria strikes a stranger as pre-emi-
nently incongruous, if not absurd.
The imitation of Cambridge forms by the Univer-
sity of Sydney is singularly close. One almost ex-
pects to see the familiar blue gown of the " bull-dog"
thrown across the arm of the first college servant met
within its precincts. Chancellor, Vice-chancellor,
Senate, Syndicates, and even Proctors, all are here in
the antipodes. Registrar, professors, " seniors," fees,
and "petitions with the University seal attached;"
"Board of Classical Studies" the whole corporation
sits in borrowed plumage ; the very names of the col-
leges are being imitated : we find already a St. John's.
The Calendar reads like a parody on the volume is-
sued every March by Messrs. Deighton. ..Rules upon
matriculation, upon the granting of testamurs ; prize-
books stamped with college arms are named, ad eundem
degrees are known, and we have imitations of phrase-
ology even in the announcement of prizes to "the
most distinguished candidates for honors in each of
the aforesaid schools," and in the list of subjects for
the Moral Science tripos. Lent Term, Trinity Term,
Michaelmas Term, take the place of the Spring, Sum-
mer, and Fall Terms of the less pretentious institutions
in America, and the height of absurdity is reached in
the regulations upon " academic costume," and on the
" respectful salutation" by undergraduates of the " fel-
lows and professors" of the University. The situation
on a hot-wind day of a member of the Senate, in
"black silk gown, with hood of scarlet cloth edged
with white fur, and lined with blue silk, black velvet
trencher cap," all in addition to his ordinary clothing,
it is to be presumed, can be imagined only by those
128 GREATER BRITAIN.
who know what hot winds are. We English are great
acclimatizers : we have carried trial by jury to Bengal,
tenant-right to Oude, and caps and gowns to be worn
over loongee and paejama at Calcutta University.
"Who are we, that we should cry out against the
French for " carrying France about with them every-
where" ?
The objects of the founders are set forth in the
charter as " the advancement of religion and morality,
and the promotion of useful knowledge ;" but as there
is no theological faculty, no religious test or exercise
whatever, the philosophy of the first portion of the
phrase is not easily understood.
In no Western institutions is the radicalism of West-
ern thought so thoroughly manifested as in the Uni-
versities ; in no English colonial institutions is Conser-
vatism so manifest. The contrast between Michigan
and Sydney is far more striking than that between
Harvard and old Cambridge.
Of the religious position of Australia there is little
to be said : the Wesleyans, Catholics, and Presbyte-
rians are stronger, and the other denominations weaker,
than they are at home. The general mingling of in-
congruous objects and of conflicting races, character-
istic of colonial life, extends to religious buildings.
The graceful Wesleyan church, the Chinese joss-house,
and the Catholic cathedral stand not far apart in Mel-
bourne. In Australia, the mixture of blood is not yet
great. In South Australia, where it is most complete,
the Catholics and Wesleyans have great strength.
Anglicanism is naturally strongest where the race is
most exclusively British in Tasmania and JN"ew South
Wales.
As far as the coast tracts are concerned, Australia,
as will be seen from what has been said of the indi-
AUSTRALIA. 129
vidual colonies, is rapidly ceasing to be a land of great
tenancies, and becoming a land of small freeholds, each
cultivated by its owner. It need hardly be pointed
out that, in the interests of the country and of the race,
this is a happy change. When English rural laborers
commence to fully realize the misery of their position,
they will find not only America, but Australia also,
open to them as a refuge and future home. Looming
in the distance, we still, however, see the American
problem of whether the Englishman can live out of
England. Can he thrive except where mist and damp
preserve the juices of his frame ? He comes from the
fogs of the Baltic shores, and from the Flemish low-
lands ; gains in vigor in the south island of New Zea-
land. In Australia and America hot and dry the
type has already changed. Will it eventually disap-
pear?
It is still an open question whether the change of
type among the English in America and Australia is
a climatic adaptation on the part of nature, or a tem-
porary divergence produced by abnormal causes, and
capable of being modified by care.
Before we had done our talk, the ship was pooped
by a green sea, which, curling in over her taffrail,
swept her decks from end to end, and our helmsmen,
although regular old " hard-a-weather" fellows, had
difficulty in keeping her upon her course. It was the
last of the gale, and when we made up our beds upon
the skylights, the heavens were clear of scud, though
the moon was still craped with a ceaseless roll of cloud.
130 GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER XV.
COLONIES.
WHEN a Briton takes a survey of the colonies, he
finds much matter for surprise in the one-sided nature
of the partnership which exists between the mother
and the daughter lands. No reason presents itself to
him why our artisans and merchants should be taxed
in aid of populations far more wealthy than our own,
who have not, as we have, millions of paupers to sup-
port. "We at present tax our humblest classes, we
weaken our defenses, we scatter our troops and fleets,
and lay ourselves open to panics such as those of 1853
and 1859, in order to protect against imaginary dan-
gers the Australian gold-digger and Canadian farmer.
There is something ludicrous in the idea of taxing St.
Giles's for the support of Melbourne, and making Dor-
setshire agricultural laborers pay the cost of defending
New Zealand colonists in Maori wars.
It is possible that the belief obtains in Britain among
the least educated classes of the community that colo-
nial expenses are rapidly decreasing, if they have not
already wholly disappeared; but in fact they have for
some years past been steadily and continuously grow-
ing in amount.
As long as we choose to keep up such propugnacula
as Gibraltar, Malta, and Bermuda, we must pay roundly
for them, as we also must for such costly luxuries as
our Gold Coast settlements for the suppression of the
slave-trade ; but if we confine the term " colonies' 7 to
COLONIES. 131
English-speaking, white-inhabited, and self-governed
lands, and exclude on the one hand garrisons such as
Gibraltar, and on the other mere dependencies like
the West Indies and Ceylon, we find that our true
colonies in North America, Australia, Polynesia, and
South Africa, involve us nominally in yearly charges
of almost two millions sterling, and, really, in untold
expenditure.
Canada is in all ways the most flagrant case. She
draws from us some three millions annually for her
defense, she makes no contribution toward the cost;
she relies mainly on us to defend a frontier of 4000
miles, and she excludes our goods by prohibitive duties
at her ports. In short, colonial expenses which, rightly
or wrongly, our fathers bore (and that not ungrudg-
ingly) when they enjoyed a monopoly of colonial trade,
are borne by us in face of colonial prohibition. What
the true cost to us of Canada may be is unfortunately
an open question, and the loss by the weakening of
our home forces we have no means of computing ; but
whgn we consider that, on a fair statement of the case,
Canada would be debited with the cost of a large por-
tion of the half-pay and recruiting services, of Horse
Guards and War Office expenses, of arms, accouter-
ments, barracks, hospitals, and stores, and also with
the gigantic expenses of two of our naval squadrons,
we cannot but admit that we must pay at least three
millions a year for the hatred that the Canadians pro-
fess to bear toward the United States. Whatever may
be the case, however, with regard to Canada, less fault
is to be found with the cost of the Australian colonies.
If they hore a portion of the half-pay and recruiting
expenses as well as the cost of the troops actually
employed among them in time of peace, and also paid
their share in the maintenance of the British navy
132 GREATER BRITAIN.
a share to increase with the increase of their merchant
shipping there would be little to desire, unless, in-
deed, we should wish that, in exchange for a check
upon imperial braggadocio and imperial waste, the
Australia** should also contribute toward the expenses
of imperial wars.
No reason can be shown for our spending millions
on the defense of Canada against the Americans or in
aiding the New Zealand colonists against the Maories
that will not apply to their aiding us in case of a
European war with France, control being given to
their representatives over our public action in ques-
tions of imperial concern. Without any such control
over imperial action, the old American colonists were
well content to do their share of fighting in imperial
wars. In 1689, in 1702, and in 1744, Massachusetts
attacked the French, and, taking from them Nova
Scotia and others of their new plantations, handed
them over to Great Britain. Even when the tax-time
came, Massachusetts, while declaring that the English
Parliament had no right to tax colonies, went on to
say that the king could inform them of the exigencies
of the public service, and that they were ready " to
provide for them if required."
It is not likely, however, nowadays, that our colo-
nists would, for any long stretch of time, engage to
aid us in our purely European wars. Australia would
scarcely feel herself deeply interested in the guarantee
of Luxembourg, nor Canada in the affairs of Servia.
The fact that we in Britain paid our share or rather
nearly the whole cost of the Maori wars would be no
argument to an Australian, but only an additional
proof to him of our extraordinary folly. We have
been educated into a habit of paying with complacency
other people's bills not so the Australian settler.
COLONIES. 133
As far as Australia is concerned, our soldiers are
not used as troops at all. The colonists like the show
of the red-coats, and the military duties are made up
partly of guard- of-ho nor work, and partly of the labors
of police. The colonists well know that in time of
war we should immediately withdraw our troops, and
they trust wholly in their volunteers and the colonial
marine.
As long as we choose to allow the system to con-
tinue, the colonists are well content to reap the benefit.
When we at last decide that it shall cease, they will
reluctantly consent. It is more than doubtful whether,
if we were to insist to the utmost upon our rights as
toward our southern colonies, they would do more
than grumble and consent to our demands; and there
is no chance whatever of our asking for more than our
simple due.
When you talk to an intelligent Australian, you can
always see that he fears that separation would be made
the excuse for the equipment of a great and costly
Australian fleet not more necessary then than now
and that, however he may talk, he would, rather than
separate from England, at least do his duty by her.
The fear of conquest of the Australian colonies if we
left them to themselves is on the face of it ridiculous.
It is sufficient, perhaps, to say that the old American
colonies, when they had but a million and a half of
people, defended themselves successfully against the
then all-powerful French, and that there is no instance
of a self-protected English colony being conquered by
the foreigner. The American colonies valued so highly
their independence of the old country in the matter of
defense that they petitioned the Crown to be allowed
to fight for themselves, and called the British army by
the plain name of "grievance.''
VOL. II. 12
134 GREATER BRITAIN.
As for our so-called defense of the colonies, in war-
time we defend ourselves ; we defend the colonies only
during peace. In war-time they are ever left to shift
for themselves, and they would undoubtedly be better
fit to do so were they in the habit of maintaining their
military establishments, in time of peace. The present
system weakens us and them us, by taxes and by the
withdrawal of our men and ships ; the colonies, by pre-
venting the development of that self-reliance which is
requisite to form a nation's greatness. The successful
encountering of difficulties is the marking feature of
the national character of the English, and we can hardly
expect a nation which has never encountered any, or
which has been content to see them met by others,
ever to become great. In short, as matters now stand,
the colonies are a source of military weakness to us,
and our " protection" of them is a source of danger to
the colorjists. No doubt there are still among us men
who would have wished to have seen America continue
in union with England, on the principle on which the
Russian conscripts are chained each to an old man to
keep her from going too fast and who now consider it
our duty to defend our colonies at whatever cost, on
account of the "prestige" which attaches to the some-
what precarious tenure of these great lands. With
such men it is impossible for colonial reformers to
argue : the stand-points are wholly different. To those,
however, who admit the injustice of the present system
to the tax-payers of the mother-country, but who fear
that her merchants would suffer by its disturbance,
inasmuch as, in their belief, action on our part would
lead to a disruption of the tie, we may plead that, even
should separation be the result, we should be none the
worse off for its occurrence. The retention of colonies
at almost any cost has been defended so far as it has
COLONIES. 135
been supported by argument at all on the ground
that the connection conduces to trade, to which argu-
ment it is sufficient to answer that no one has ever
succeeded in showing what effect upon trade the con-
nection can have, and that as excellent examples to
the contrary we have the fact that our trade with the
Ionian Islands has greatly increased since their annex-
ation to the kingdom of Greece, arid a much more
striking fact than even this namely, that while the
trade with England of the Canadian Confederation is
only four-elevenths of its total external trade, or little
more than one-third, the English trade of the United
States was in 1860 (before the war) nearly two-thirds
of its total external trade, in 1861 more than two-thirds,
and in 1866 (first year after the war) again four-sevenths
of its total trade. Common institutions, common free-
dom, and common tongue have evidently far more to
do with trade than union has; and for purposes of
commerce and civilization, America is a truer colony
of Britain than is Canada.
It would not be difficult, were it necessary, to mul-
tiply examples whereby to prove that trade with a
country does not appear to be affected by union with
or separation from it. Egypt (even when we carefully
exclude from the returns Indian produce in transport)
sends us nearly all such produce as she exports, not-
withstanding that the French largely control the gov-
ernment, and that we have much less footing in the
country than the Italians, and no more than the Aus-
trian s or Spanish. Our trade with Australia means
that the Australians want something of us and that we
need something of them, and that we exchange with
them our produce as we do in a larger degree with the
Americans, the Germans, and the French.
The trade argument being met, and it being remem-
136 GREATER BRITAIN.
bered that our colonies are no more an outlet for our
surplus population than they would be if the Great
Mogul ruled over them, as is seen by the fact that of
every twenty people who leave the United Kingdom,
one goes to Canada, two to Australia, and sixteen to
the United States, we come to the " argument" which
consists in the word "prestige." When examined,
this cry seems to mean that, in the opinion of the ut-
terer, extent of empire is power a doctrine under which
Brazil ought to be nineteen and a half times, and
China twenty-six times as powerful as France. Per-
haps the best answer to the doctrine is a simple con-
tradiction : those who have read history with most care
well know that at all times extent of empire has been
weakness. England's real empire was small enough
in 1650, yet it is rather doubtful whether her "pres-
tige" ever reached the height it did while the Crom-
wellian admirals swept the seas. The idea conveyed
by the words "mother of free nations" is every bit as
good as that contained in the cry "prestige," and the
argument that, as the colonists are British subjects, we
have no right to cast them adrift so long as they wish
to continue citizens, is evidently no answer to those
who merely urge that the colonists should pay their
own policemen.
It may, perhaps, be contended that the possession
of "colonies" tends to preserve us from the curse of
small island countries, the dwarfing of mind which
would otherwise make us Guernsey a little magnified.
If this be true, it is a powerful argument in favor of
continuance in the present system. It is a question,
however, whether our real preservation from the insu-
larity we deprecate is not to be found in the possession
of true colonies of plantations such as America, in
short rather than in that of mere dependencies. That
COLONIES. 137
which raises us above the provincialism of citizenship
of little England is our citizenship of the greater Saxon-
dom which includes all that is best and wisest in the
world.
From the foundation, separation would be harmless,
does not of necessity follow the conclusion, separation
is to be desired. This much only is clear that we
need not hesitate to demand that Australia should do
her duty.
With the more enlightened thinkers of England,
separation from the colonies has for many years been
a favorite idea, but as regards the Australias it would
hardly be advisable. If we allow that it is to the in-
terest both of our race and of the world that the Aus-
tralias should prosper, we have to ask whether they
would do so in a higher degree if separated from the
mother-country than if they remained connected with
her and with each other by a federation. It has often
been said that, instead of the varying relations which
now exist between Britain and America, we should
have seen a perfect friendship had we but permitted
the American colonies to go their way in peace ; but
the example does not hold in the case of Australia,
which is by no means wishful to go at all.
Under separation we should, perhaps, find the colo-
nies better emigration-fields for our surplus population
than they are at present. Many of our emigrants who
flock to the United States are attracted by the idea
that they are going to become citizens of a new nation
instead of dependents upon an old one. On the separa-
tion of Australia from England we might expect that
a portion of these sentimentalists would be diverted
from a colony necessarily jealous of us so long as we
hold Canada, to one which from accordance of interests
is likely to continue friendly or allied. This argument,
12*
138 GREATER BRITAIN.
however, would have no weight with those who desire
the independence of Canada, and who look upon
America as still our colony.
Separation, we may then conclude, though infinitely
better than a continuance of the existing one-sided tie,
would, in a healthier state of our relations, not be to
the interest of Britain, although it would perhaps be
morally beneficial to Australia. Any relation, how-
ever, would be preferable to the existing one of mutual
indifference and distrust. Recognizing the fact that
Australia has come of age, and calling on her, too, to
recognize it, we should say to the Australian colonists :
" Our present system cannot continue ; will you amend
it, or separate ?" The worst thing that can happen to
us is that we should " drift" blindly into separation.
After all, the strongest of the arguments in favor
of separation is the somewhat paradoxical one that it
would bring us a step nearer to the virtual confedera-
tion of the English race.
INDIA.
(139)
A REGULAR and uniform system of spelling of native
names and other words has lately been brought into
common use in India, and adopted by the govern-
ment. ISTot without hesitation, I have decided upon
ignoring this improvement, and confining myself to
spellings known to and used by the English in Eng-
land, for whom especially I am writing.
I am aware that there is no system in the spelling,
and that it is scientifically absurd; nevertheless, the
new government spelling is not yet sufficiently well
understood in England to warrant its use in a book
intended for general circulation. The scientific spell-
ing is not always an improvement to the eye, more-
over: Talookdars of Oude may not be right, but it is
a neater phrase than " Ta&lukhdars of Awdh;" and
it will probably be long before we in England write
"kuli" for coolie, or adopt the spelling " Tata hordes."
(140)
CHAPTER I.
MARITIME CEYLON.
WE failed to sight the Island of Cocoas, a territory
where John Ross is king a worthy Scotchman, who
having settled down in mid-ocean, some hundreds of
miles from any port, proceeded to annex himself to
Java and the Dutch. On being remonstrated with,
he was made to see his error ; and, being appointed
governor of and consul to himself and laborers, now
hoists the union-jack, while his island has a red line
drawn under its name upon the map. Two days after
quitting John Ross's latitudes, we crossed the line in
the heavy noonday of the equatorial belt of calms.
The sun itself passed the equator the same day; so,
after having left Australia at the end of autumn, I
suddenly found myself in Asia in the early spring.
Mist obscured the skies except at dawn and sunset,
when there wa^s a clear air, in which floated cirro-
cumuli with flat bases clouds cut in half, as it
seemed and we were all convinced that Homer
must have seen the Indian Ocean, so completely
did the sea in the equatorial belt realize his epithet
"purple" or "wine-dark." All day long the flying-
fish "those good and excellent creatures of God,"
as Drake styled them were skimming over the water
on every side. The Elizabethan captain, who knew
their delicacy of taste, attributed their freedom from
the usual slime of fish, and their wholesome nature,
to "their continued exercise in both air and water."
The heat was great, and I made the discovery that
(141)
142 GREATER BRITAIN.
Australians as well as Americans can put their feet
above their heads. It may be asserted that the height
above the deck of the feet of passengers on board
ocean steamers varies directly as the heat, and in-
versely as the number of hours before dinner.
In the afternoon of the day we crossed the line,
we sighted a large East Indiaman lying right in our
course, and so little way was she making that, on
coming up with her, we had to port our helm, in
order not to run her down. She hailed us, and we
lay-to while she sent a boat aboard us with her mail ;
for although she was already a month out from Cal-
cutta and bound for London, our letters would reach
home before she was round the Cape a singular com-
mentary upon the use of sailing ships in the Indian
seas. Before the boat had left our side, the ships had
floated so close together, through attraction, that we
had to make several revolutions with the screw in
order to prevent collision.
When we, who were all sleeping upon deck, were
aroused by the customary growl from the European
quartermaster of "Four o'clock, sir! Going to swab
decks, sir! Get up, sir!" given with the flare of the
lantern in our eyes, we were still over a hundred miles
from Galle ; but before the sun had risen, we caught
sight of Adam's Peak, a purple mass upon the northern
sky, and soon we were racing with a French steamer
from Saigon, and with a number of white-sailed native
craft from the Maldives. Within a few hours, we were
at anchor in a small bay, surrounded with lofty cocoa-
palms, in which were lying, tossed by a rolling swell,
some dozen huge steamers, yard-arm to yard-arm the
harbor of Point de Galle. Every ship was flying her
ensign, and in the damp hot air the old tattered union-
jacks seemed brilliant crimson, and the dull green of
MARITIME CEYLON. 143
the cocoa-palms became a dazzling emerald. The scene
wanted but the bright plumage of the Panama macaws.
Once seated in the piazza of the Oriental Company's
hotel, the best managed in the East, I had before me a
curious scene. Along the streets were pouring silent
crowds of tall and graceful girls, as we at the first
glance supposed, wearing white petticoats and bodices ;
their hair carried off the face with a decorated hoop,
and caught at the back by a high tortoise-shell comb.
As they drew near, mustaches began to show, and I
saw that they were men, while walking with them
were women naked to the waist, combless, and far more
rough and " manly" than their husbands. Petticoat
and chignon are male institutions in Ceylon, and time
after time I had to look twice before I could fix the
passer's sex. My rule at last became to set down every-
body that was womanly as a man, and everybody that
was manly as a woman. Cinghalese, Kandians, Tamils
from South India, and Moormen with crimson caftans
and shaven crowns, formed the body of the great crowd ;
but, besides these, there were Portuguese, Chinese,
Jews, Arabs, Parsees, Englishmen, Malays, Dutchmen,
and half-caste burghers, and now and then a veiled
Arabian woman or a Veddah one of the aboriginal in-
habitants of the isle. Ceylon has never been independ-
ent, and in a singular mixture of races her ports bear
testimony to the number of the foreign conquests.
Two American missionaries were among the passers-
by, but one of them, detecting strangers, came up to
the piazza in search of news. There had been no loss
of national characteristics in these men; they were
brimful of the mixture of earnestness and quaint pro-
fanity which distinguishes the New England puritan :
one of them described himself to me as "just a kind
of journeyman soul-saver, like."
144 GREATER BRITAIN.
The Australian strangers were not long left unmo-
lested by more serious intruders than grave Vermont-
ers. The cry of "baksheesh" an Arabian word that
goes from Gibraltar to China, and from Ceylon to the
Khyber Pass, and which has reached us in the form of
" boxes" in our phrase Christmas-boxes was the first
native word I heard in the East, at Galle, as it was
afterward the last, at Alexandria. One of the beggars
was an Albino, fair as a child in a Hampshire lane ;
one of those strange sports of nature from whom Cin-
ghalese tradition asserts the European races to be
sprung.
The beggars were soon driven off by the hotel ser-
vants, and better licensed plunderers began their work.
" Ah safeer, ah rupal, ah imral, ah mooney stone, ah
opal, ah am tit, ah!" was the cry from every quarter,
and jewel-sellers of all the nations of the East de-
scended on us in a swarm. "Me givee you written
guarantee dis real stone;" "Yes, dat real stone; but
dis good stone dat no good stone no water. Ah,
see!" " Dat no good stone. Ah, sahib, you tell good
stone : all dese bad stone, reg'lar England stone. You
go by next ship? No? Ah, den you come see me shop.
D6se ship-passenger stone humbuk stone. Ship gone,
den you come me shop ; see good stone. When you
come? eh? when you come?" "Ah, safeer, ah catty-
eye, ah pinkee collal!" Meanwhile every Galle-dwell-
ing European, at the bar of the hotel, was adding to
the din by shouting to the native servants, "Boy, turn
out these fellows, and stop their noise." This cry of
"boy" is a relic of the old Dutch times: it-was the
Hollander's term for his slave, and hence for every
member of the inferior race. The first servant that I
heard called "boy" was a tottering, white-haired old
man.
MARITIME CEYLON. 145
The gems of Ceylon have long been famed. One
thousand three hundred and seventy years ago, the
Chinese records tell us that Ceylon, then tributary to
the empire, sent presents to the Brother of the Moon,
one of the gifts being a " lapis-lazuli spittoon." It is
probable that some portion of the million and a half
pounds sterling which are annually absorbed in this
small island, but four-fifths the size of Ireland, is con-
sumed in the setting of the precious stones for native
use ; every one you meet wears four or five heavy sil-
ver rings, and sovereigns are melted down to make
gold ornaments.
Rushing away from the screaming crowd of peddlers,
I went with some of my Australian friends to stroll
upon the ramparts and enjoy the evening salt breeze.
We met several bodies of white-faced Europeans, saun-
tering like ourselves, and dressed like us in white
trowsers and loose white jackets and pith hats. What
we looked like I do not know, but they resembled
ships' stewards. At last it struck me that they were
soldiers, and upon inquiring I found that these washed-
out dawdlers represented a British regiment of the line.
I was by this time used to see linesmen out of scarlet,
having beheld a parade in bushranger-beards and
blue-serge "jumpers" at Taranaki in New Zealand;
but one puts up easier with the soldier-bushranger
than with the soldier-steward.
. The climate of the day had been exquisite with its
bright air and cooling breeze, and I had begun to think
that those who knew Acapulco and Echuca could afford
to laugh at the East, with its thermometer at 88. The
reckoning came at night, however, for by dark all the
breeze was gone, and the thermometer, instead of fall-
ing, had risen to 90 when I lay down to moan and
wait for dawn. As I was dropping off to sleep at about
VOL. II. 13
146 GREATER BRITAIN.
four o'clock, a native came round and closed the doors,
to shut out the dangerous land-breeze that springs up
at that hour. Again, at half-past five, it was cooler,
and I had begun to doze, when a cannon-shot, fired ap-
parently under my bed, brought me upon my feet with
something more than a start. I remembered the say-
ing of the Western boy before Petersburg, when he
heard for the first time the five o'clock camp-gun, and
called to his next neighbor at the fire, " Say, Bill, did
you hap to hear how partic'lar loud the day broke just
now?" for it was the morning-gun, which in Ceylon is
always fired at the same time, there being less than an
hour's difference between the longest and shortest days.
Although it was still pitch dark, the bugles began to
sound the reveille on every side in the infantry lines,
the artillery barracks, and the lines of the Malay regi-
ment, the well-known Ceylon Rifles. Ten minutes
afterward, when I had bathed by lamplight, I was
eating plantains and taking my morning tea in a cool
room lit by the beams of the morning sun, so short is
the April twilight in Ceylon.
It is useless to consult the thermometer about heat:
a European can labor in the open air in South Aus-
tralia with the thermometer at 110 in the shade, while,
with a thermometer at 88, the nights are unbearable
in Ceylon. To discover whether the climate of a place
be really hot, examine its newspapers; and if you find
the heat recorded, you may make up your mind that it
is a variable climate, but if no "remarkable heat" or
similar announcements appear, then you may be sure
that you are in a permanently hot place. It stands to
reason that no one in the tropics ever talks of " tropical
heat."
In so equable a climate, the apathy of the Cinghalese
is not surprising; but they are not merely lazy, they
MARITIME CEYLON. 147
are a cowardly, effeminate, and revengeful race. They
Bleep and smoke, and smoke and sleep, rousing them-
selves only once in the day to snatch a bowl of curry
and rice, or to fleece a white man ; and so slowly do the
people run the race of life that even elephantiasis, com-
mon here, does not seem to put the sufferer far behind
his fellow-men. Buddhism is no mystery when ex-
pounded under this climate. See a few Cinghalese
stretched in the shade of a cocoa-palm, and you can
conceive Buddha sitting cross-legged for ten thousand
years contemplating his own perfection.
The second morning that I spent in Galle, the cap-
tain of the Bombay was kind enough to send his gig
for me to the landing-steps at dawn, and his Malay
crew soon rowed me to the ship, where the captain
joined me, and we pulled across the harbor to Water-
ing-place Point, and bathed in the shallow sea, out of
the reach of sharks. When we had dressed, we went
on to a jetty, to look into the deep water just struck by
the rising sun. I should have marveled at the trans-
lucency of the waters had not the awful clearness with
which the bottoms of the Canadian lakes stand revealed
in evening light been fresh within my memory, buUhere
the bottom was fairly paved with corallines of inconceiv-
able brilliancy of color, and tenanted by still more gor-
geous fish. Of the two that bore the palm, one was a
little fish of mazarine blue, without a speck of any other
color, and perfect too in shape; the second, a silver
fish, with a band of soft brown velvet round its neck,
and another about its tail. In a still more sheltered
cove the fish were so thick that dozens of Moors were
throwing into the water, with the arm-twist of a fly-
fisher, bare hooks, which they jerked through the shoal
and into the air, never failing to bring them up clothed
with a fish, caught most times by the fin.
148 GREATER BRITAIN.
In the evening, two of us tried a native dinner, at a
house where Cinghalese gentlemen dine when they
come into Galle on business. Our fare was as follows:
First course : a curry of the delicious seir-fish, a sort
of mackerel; a prawn curry; a bread-fruit and cocoa-
nut curry; a Brinjal curry, and a dish made of jack-
fruit, garlic, and mace; all washed down by iced water.
Second course : plantains, and very old arrack in thim-
ble-glasses, followed by black coffee. Of meat there
was no sign, as the Cinghalese rarely touch it; and,
although we liked our vegetarian dinner, my friend
passed a criticism in action on it by dining again at
the hotel- ordinary one hour later. "We agreed, too,
that the sickly smell of cocoanut would cleave to us
for weeks.
Starting with an Australian friend, at the dawn of
my third day in the island, I took the coach by the
coast road to Columbo. We drove along a magnificent
road in an avenue of giant cocoanut-palms, with the sea
generally within easy sight, and with a native hut at
each few yards. Every two or three miles, the road
crossed a lagoon, alive with bathers, and near the
bridge was generally a village, bazaar, and Buddhist
temple, built pagoda-shape, and filled with worshipers.
The road was thronged with gayly-dressed Cinghalese;
and now and again we would pass a Buddhist priest
in saffron-colored robes, hastening along, his umbrella
borne over him by a boy clothed from top to toe in
white. The umbrellas of the priests are of yellow
silk, and shaped like ours, but other natives carry
flat-topped umbrellas, gilt, or colored red and black.
The Cinghalese farmers we met traveling to their
temples in carts drawn by tiny bullocks. Such was
the brightness of the air, that the people, down to the
very beggars, seemed clad in holiday attire.
MARITIME CEYLON. 149
As we journeyed on, we began to find more variety
in the scenery and vegetation, and were charmed with
the scarlet-blossomed cotton-tree, and with the areca,
or betel-nut palm. The cocoanut groves, too, were
carpeted with an undergrowth of orchids and ipeca-
cuanha, and here and there was a bread-fruit tree or
an hibiscus.
In Ceylon we have retained the Dutch posting sys-
tem, and small light coaches, drawn by four or six
small horses at a gallop, run over excellent roads,
carrying, besides the passengers, two boys behind,
who shout furiously whenever vehicles or passengers
obstruct the mails, and who at night carry torches high
in the air, to light the road. Thus we dashed through
the bazaars and cocoa groves, then across the golden
sands covered with rare shells, and fringed on the one
side with the bright blue dancing sea, dotted with
many a white sail, and on the other side with deep
green jungle, in which were sheltered dark lagoons.
Once in a while, we would drive out on to a plain,
varied by clumps of fig and tulip trees, and, looking
to the east, would sight the purple mountains of the
central range; then, dashing again into the thronged
bazaars, would see little but the bright palm-trees re-
lieved upon an azure sky. The road is one continuous
village, for the population is twelve times as dense in
the western as in the eastern provinces of Ceylon. JSTo
wonder that ten thousand natives have died of cholera
within the last few months ! All this dense coast popula-
tion is supported by the cocoanut, for there are in Cey-
lon 200,000 acres under cocoa-palms, which yield from
seven to eight hundred million cocoanuts a year, and
are worth two millions sterling.
Near Bentotte, where we had lunched off horrible
oysters of the pearl-yielding kind, we crossed the Kalu-
13*
150 GREATER BRITAIN.
ganga River, densely fringed with mangrove, and in its
waters saw a python swimming bravely toward the
shore. Snakes are not so formidable as land-leeches,
the Cinghalese and planters say, and no one hears of
many persons being bitten, though a great reward for
an antidote to the cobra bite has lately been offered by
the Rajah of Travancore.
As we entered what the early maps style "The
Christian Kyngdom of Colombo," though where they
found their Christians no one knows, our road lay
through the cinnamon gardens, which are going out of
cultivation, as they no longer pay, although the cinna-
mon laurel is a spice-grove in itself, giving cinnamon
from its bark, camphor from the roots, clove oil from
its leaves. The plant grows wild about the island, and
is cut and peeled by the natives at no cost save that
of children's labor, which they do not count as cost at
all. The scene in the gardens that still remain was
charming : the cinnamon-laurel bushes contrasted well
with the red soil, and the air was alive with dragon-
flies, moths, and winged-beetles, while the softness of
the evening breeze had tempted out the half-caste
Dutch "burgher" families of the city, who were driv-
ing and walking clothed in white, the ladies with their
jet hair dressed with natural flowers. The setting sun
threw brightness without heat into the gay scene.
A friend who had horses ready for us at the hotel
where the mail-coach stopped, said that it was not too
late for a ride through the fort, or European town in-
side the walls; so, cantering along the esplanade,
where the officers of the garrison were enjoying their
evening ride, we crossed the moat, and found ourselves
in what is perhaps the most graceful street in the
world : a double range of long low houses of bright
white stone, with deep piazzas, buried in masses of
MARITIME CEYLON. 151
bright foliage, in which the fire-flies were beginning
to play. In the center of the fort is an Italian cam-
panile, which serves at once as a belfry, a clock-tower,
and a light-house. In the morning, before sunrise, we
climbed this tower for the view. The central range
stood up sharply on the eastern sky, as the sun was
still hid behind it, and to the southeast there towered
high the peak where Adam mourned his son a hundred
years. In color, shape, and height, the Cinghalese
Alps resemble the Central Apennines, and the view
from Columbo is singularly like that from Pesaro on
the Adriatic. As we looked landwards from the cam-
panile, the native town was mirrored in the lake, and
outside the city the white-coated troops were marching
by companies on to the parade-ground, whence we
could faintly hear the distant bands.
Driving back in a carriage, shaped like a street cab,
but with fixed Venetians instead of sides and windows,
we visited the curing establishment of the Ceylon
Coffee Company, where the coffee from the hills is
dried and sorted. Thousands of native girls are em-
ployed in coffee-picking at the various stores, but it is
doubted whether the whole of this labor is not wasted,
the berries being sorted according to their shape and
size characteristics which seem in no way to affect the
flavor. The Ceylon exporters say that if we choose to
pay twice as much for shapely as for ill-shaped berries,
it is no business of theirs to refuse to humor us by
sorting.
The most remarkable institution in Columbo is the
steam factory where the government make or mend
such machinery as their experts certify cannot be dealt
with at any private works existing in the island. The
government elephants are kept at the same place, but
I found them at work up country on the Kandy road.
152 GREATER BRITAIN.
In passing through the native town upon Slave
Island, we saw some French Catholic priests in their
working jungle dresses of blue serge. They have met
with singular successes in Ceylon, having made 150,000
converts, while the English and American missions
have between them only 30,000 natives. The Protest-
ant missionaries in Ceylon complain much of the plant-
ers, whom they accuse of declaring, when they wish to
hire men, that " no Christian need apply;" but it is a
remarkable fact that neither Protestants nor Catholics
can make converts among the self-supported " Moor-
men," the active push ing inhabitants of the ports, who
are Mohammedans to a man. The chief cause of the
success of the Catholics among the Cinghalese seems
to be the remarkable earnestness of the French and
Italian missionary priests. Our English missionaries
in the East are too often men incapable of bearing
fatigue or climate ; ignorant of every trade, and inferior
even in teaching and preaching powers to their rivals.
It is no easy matter to spread Christianity among the
Cinghalese, the inventors of Buddhism, the most an-
cient and most widely spread of all the religions of the
world. Every Buddhist firmly believes in the potential
perfection of man, and is incapable of understanding
the ideas of original sin and redemption ; and a Cin-
ghalese Buddhist passionless himselfcannot com-
prehend the passionate worship that Christianity re-
quires. The Catholics, however, do not neglect the
Eastern field for missionary labor. Four of their
bishops from Cochin China and Japan were met by me
in Galle, upon their way to Rome.
Our drive was brought to an end by a visit to the
old Dutch quarter a careful imitation of Amsterdam ;
indeed, one of its roads still bears the portentous Bata-
vian name of Dam Street. Their straight canals, and
MARITIME CEYLON. 153
formal lines of trees, the Hollanders have carried with
them throughout the world; but in Columbo, not con-
tent with manufacturing imitation canals, that began
and ended in a wall, they dug great artificial lakes to
recall their well-loved Hague.
The same evening, I set off by the new railway for
Kandy and Nuwara Ellia (pronounced Nooralia) in the
hills. Having no experience of the climate of mountain
regions in the tropics, I expected a merely pleasant
change, and left Columbo wearing my white kit, which
served me well enough as far as Ambe Pusse the rail-
way terminus, which we reached at ten o'clock at night.
We started at once by coach, and had not driven far
up the hills in the still moonlight before the cold be-
came*" extreme, and I was saved from a severe chill only
by the kindness of the coffee-planter who shared the
back seat with me, and who, being well clad in woolen,
lent me his great-coat. After this incident, we chatted
pleasantly without fear of interruption from our sole
companion a native girl, who sat silently chewing
betel all the way and reached Kaudy before dawn.
Telling the hotel servants to wake me in an hour, I
wrapped myself in a blanket the first I had seen since
I left Australia and enjoyed a refreshing sleep.
154 GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER II.
KANDY.
THE early morning was foggy and cold as an October
dawn in an English forest ; but before I had been long
in the gardens of the Government House, the sun rose,
and the heat returned once more. After wandering
among the petunias and fan-palms of the gardens, I
passed on into the city, the former capital of the
Kandian or highland kingdom, and one of the holiest
of Buddhist towns. The kingdom was never con-
quered by the Portuguese or Dutch whije they held
the coasts, and was not overrun by us till 1815, while
it has several times been in rebellion since that date.
The people still retain their native customs in a high
degree: for instance, the Kandian husband does not
take his wife's inheritance unless he lives with her on
her father's land: if she lives with him, she forfeits
her inheritance. Kandian law, indeed, is expressly
maintained by us except in the matters of polygamy
and polyandry, although the maritime Cinghalese are
governed, as are the English in Ceylon and at the
Cape, by the civil code of Holland.
The difference between the Kandian and coast Cin-
ghalese is very great. At Kandy, I found the men
wearing flowing crimson robes and flat-topped caps,
while their faces were lighter in color than those of
the coast people, and many of them had beards. The
women also wore the nose-ring in a different way, and
were clothed above as well as below the waist. It is
KANDY. 155
possible that some day we may unfortunately hear
more of this energetic and warlike people.
The city is one that dwells long in the mind. The
Upper Town is one great garden, so numerous are
the sacred groves, vocal with the song of the Eastern
orioles, but here and there are dotted about pagoda-
shaped temples, identical in form with those of Tartary
two thousand miles away, and from these there pro-
ceeds a roar of tomtoms that almost drowns the song.
One of these temples contains the holiest of Buddhist
relics, the tooth of Buddha, which is yearly carried in
a grand procession. When we first annexed the Kan-
tian kingdom, we recognized the Buddhist Church,
made our officers take part in the procession of the
Sacred Tooth, and sent a State offering to the shrine.
Times are changed since then, but the Buddhist priests
are still exempt from certain taxes. All round the
sacred inclosures are ornamented walls, with holy
sculptured figures; and in the Lower Town are fresh-
water lakes and tanks, formed by damming the Mavali-
ganga Eiver, and also, in some measure, holy. An
atmosphere of Buddhism pervades all Kandy.
From Kandy, I visited the coffee-district of which it
is the capital and center, but I was much disappointed
with regard to the amount of land that is still open to
coffee-cultivation. At the Government Botanic Garden
at Peredenia (where the jalap plant, the castor-oil plant,
and the ipecacuanha were growing side by side), I was
told that the shrub does not flourish under 1500 nor
over 3000 or 4000 feet above sea-level, and that all the
best coffee-land is already planted. Coffee-growing has
already done so much for Ceylon that it is to be hoped
that it has not Breached its limit : in thirty-three years
it has doubled her trade ten times, and to England
alone she now sends two millions' worth of coffee every
156 GREATER BRITAIN.
year. The central district of the island, in which lie
the hills and coffee-country, is, with the exception of
the towns, politically not a portion of Ceylon: there
are English capital, English management, and Indian
labor, and the cocoa-palm is unknown; Tamil laborers
are exclusively employed upon the plantations, although
the carrying trade, involving but little labor, is in the
hands of the Cinghalese. No such official discourage-
ment is shown to the European planters in Ceylon as
that which they experience in India; and were there
but more good coffee-lands and more capital, all would
be well. The planters say that, after two years' heavy
expenditure and dead loss, 20 per cent, can be made.,
by men who take in sufficient capital, but that no one
ever does taks capital enough for the land he buys, and
that they all have to borrow from one of the Columbo
companies at 12 per cent., and are then bound to ship
their coffee through that company alone. It is re-
garded as an open question by many disinterested
friends of Ceylon whether it might not be wise for the
local government to advance money to the planters;
but besides the fear of jobbery, there is the objection
to this course, that the government, becoming inter-
ested in the success of coffee-planting, might also come
to connive at the oppression of the native laborers.
This oppression of the people lies at the bottom of that
Dutch system which is often held up for our imitation
in Ceylon.
Those who narrate to us the effects of the Java
system forget that it is not denied that in the tropical
islands, with an idle population and a rich soil, com-
pulsory labor may be the only way of developing the
resources of the countries, but they fail to show the
justification for our developing the resources of the
country by such means. The Dutch culture-system puts
RANDY. 157
a planter down upon the crown lands, and, having
made advances to him, leaves it to him to find out
how he shall repay the government. Forced labor
under whatever name is the natural result.
The Dutch, moreover, bribe the great native chiefs
by princely salaries and vast percentage upon the
crops their people raise, and force the native agri-
culturists to grow spices for the Eoyal Market of
Amsterdam. Of the purchase of these spices the gov-
ernment has a monopoly: it buys them at what price
it will, and, selling again in Europe to the world,
clears annually some 4,000,000 sterling by the job.
That plunder, slavery, and famine often follow the
extension of their system is nothing to the Dutch.
Strict press-laws prevent the Dutch at home from
hearing anything of the discontent in Java, except
when famine or insurrection calls attention to the isle ;
and 4,000,000 a year profit, and half the expenses of
their navy paid for them by one island in the Eastern
seas, make up for many deaths of brown-faced people
by starvation.
The Dutch often deny that the government retains
the monopoly of export ; but the fact of the matter is
that the Dutch Trading Company, who have the mo-
nopoly of the exports of the produce of crown lands
which amount to two-thirds of the total exports of the
isle are mere agents of the government.
It is hard to say that, apart from the nature of the
culture-system, the Dutch principle of making a profit
out of the countries which they rule is inconsistent
with the position of a Christian nation. It is the
ancient system of countries having possessions in the
East, and upon our side we are not able to show any
definite reasons in favor of our course of scrupulously
keeping separate the Indian revenue, and spending
VOL. II. 14
158 GREATER BRITAIN.
Indian profits upon India and Cinghalese in Ceylon,
except such reasons as would logically lead to our
quitting India altogether. That the Dutch should
make a profit out of Java is perhaps not more im-
moral than that they should he there. At the same
time, the character of the Dutch system lowers the
tone of the whole Dutch nation, and especially of those
who have any connection with the Indies, and effectu-
ally prevents future amendment. With our system,
there is some chance of right being done, so small is
our self-interest in the wrong. From the fact that no
surplus is sent home from Ceylon, she is at least free
from that bane of Java, the desire of the local au-
thorities to increase as much as possible the valuable
productions of their districts, even at the risk of famine,
provided only that they may hope to put oft* the famine
until after their time a desire that produces the result
that subaltern Dutch officers who observe in their in-
tegrity the admirable rules which have been made for
the protection of the native population are heartily
abused for their ridiculous scrupulosity, as it is styled.
Not to be carried away by the material success of the
Dutch system, it is as well to bear in mind its secret
history. A private company the Dutch Trading
Society was founded at Amsterdam in 1824, the then
King being the largest shareholder. The company
was in difficulties in 1830, when the King, finding he
was losing money fast, sent out as Governor-General
of the Dutch East Indies his personal friend Van den
Bosch. The next year, the culture-system, with all its
attendant horrors, was introduced into Java by Van den
Bosch, the Dutch Trading Society being made agents
for the government. The result was the extraordinary
prosperity of the company, and the leaving by the mer-
chant-king of a private fortune of fabulous amount.
RANDY. 159
The Dutch system has been defended by every con-
ceivable kind of blind misrepresentation ; it has even
been declared, by writers who ought certainly to know
better, that the four millions of surplus that Holland
draws from Java, being profits on trade, are not taxa-
tion ! Even the blindest admirers of the system are
forced, however, to admit that it involves the absolute
prohibition of missionary enterprise, and total exclu-
sion from knowledge of the Java people.
The Ceylon planters have at present political as well
as financial difficulties on their hands. They have
petitioned the Queen for " self-government for Cey-
lon," and for control of the revenue by "representa-
tives of the public" excellent principles, if "public"
meant public, and "Ceylon," Ceylon; but, when we
inquire of the planters what they really mean, we find
that by "Ceylon" they understand Galle and Columbo
Fort, and by "the public" they mean themselves.
There are at present six unofficial members of the
Council : of these, the whites have three members, the
Dutch burghers one, and the natives two; and the
planters expect the same proportions to be kept in a
Council to which supreme power shall be intrusted in
the disposition of the revenues. They are, indeed,
careful to explain that they in no way desire the exten-
sion of representative institutions to Ceylon.
The first thing that strikes the English traveler in
Ceylon is the apparent slightness of our hold upon the
country. In my journey from Galle to Columbo, by
early morning and mid- day, I met no white man; from
Columbo to Kandy, I traveled with one, but met none;
at Kandy, I saw no whites ; at Nuwara Ellia, not half
a dozen. On my return, I saw no whites between
Nuwara Ellia and Ambe Pusse, where there was a white
man in the railway-station; and on my return by even-
160 GREATER BRITAIN.
ing from Columbo to Galle, in all the thronging crowds
along the roads there was not a single European.
There are hundreds of Cinghalese in the interior who
live and die and never see a white man. Out of the
two and a quarter millions of people who dwell in what
the planters call the "colony of Ceylon," there are but
3000 Europeans, of whom 1500 are our soldiers, and
250 our civilians. Of the European non-official class,
there are but 1300 persons, or about 500 grown-up men.
The proposition of the Planters' Association is that we
should confide the despotic government over two and
a quarter millions of Buddhist, Mohammedan, and Hin-
doo laborers to these 500 English Christian employers.
It is not the Ceylon planters who have a grievance
against us, but we who have a serious complaint against
them; so flourishing a dependency should certainly
provide for all the costs of her defense.
Some of the mountain views between Kandy and
Nuwara Ellia are full of grandeur, though they lack
the New Zealand snows; but none can match, for
variety and color, that which I saw on my return from
the ascent to the Kaduganava Pass, where you look
over a foreground of giant-leaved talipot and slender
areca palms and tall bamboos, lit with the scarlet
blooms of the cotton-tree, on to a plain dotted with
banyan-tree groves and broken by wooded hills.. On
either side, the deep valley-bottoms are carpeted with
bright green the wet rice-lands, or terraced paddy-
fields, from which the natives gather crop after crop
throughout the year.
In the union of rich foliage with deep color and
grand forms, no scenery save that of New Zealand can
bear comparison with that of the hill country of Ceylon,
unless, indeed, it be the scenery of Java and the far
Eastern Isles.
MADRAS TO CALCUTTA. 161
CHAPTER III.
MADRAS TO CALCUTTA.
SPENDING but a single day in Madras an inferior
Columbo I passed on to Calcutta with a pleasant
remembrance of the air of prosperity that hangs about
the chief city of what is still called by Bengal civilians
" The Benighted Presidency." Small as are the houses,
poor as are the shops, every one looks well-to-do, and
everybody happy, from the not undeservedly famed
cooks at the club to the catamaran men on the shore.
Coffee and good government have of late done much
for Madras.
The surf consists of two lines of rollers, and is alto-
gether inferior to the fine-weather swell on the west
coast of New Zealand, and only to be dignified and
promoted into surfship by men of that fine imagination
which will lead them to sniff the spices a day before
they reach Ceylon, or the pork and molasses when off
Nantucket light-ship. The row through the first roller
in the lumbering Massullah boat, manned by a dozen
sinewy blacks, the waiting for a chance between the
first and second lines of spray, and then the dash for
shore, the crew singing their measured "Ah! lah!
lalala ! ah ! lah ! lalala !" the stroke coming with the
accented syllable, and the helmsman shrieking w r ith
excitement, is a more pretentious ceremony than that
which accompanies the crossing of Hokitika bar, but
the passage is a far less dangerous one. The Massullah
14*
162 GREATER BRITAIN.
boats are like empty hay-barges on the Thames, but
built without nails, so that they "give" instead of
breaking up when battered by the sand on one side
and the s^as upon the other. This is a very wise pre-
caution in the case of boats which are always made to
take the shore broadside on. The first sea that strikes
the boat either shoots the passenger on to the dry
sand, or puts him where he can easily be caught by
the natives on the beach, but the Massullah boat her-
self gets a terrible banging before the crew can haul
her out of reach of the seas.
Sighting the Temple of Juggernauth and one palm-
tree, but seeing no land, we entered the Hoogly, steam-
ing between light-houses, guard-ships, and buoys, but
not catching a glimpse of the low land of the Sundera-
bunds till we had been many hours in "the river."
After lying right off the tiger-infested island of Saugur,
we started on our run up to Calcutta before the sun
was risen. Compared with Ceylon, the scene was
English; there was nothing tropical about it except
the mist upon the land; and low villas and distant
factory -chimneys reminded one of the Thames between
Battersea and Fulham. Coming into Garden Reach,
where large ships anchor before they sail, we had a
long, low building on our right, gaudy and archi-
tecturally hideous, but from its vast size almost im-
posing: it was the palace of the dethroned King of
Oude, the place where, it is said, are carried on deeds
become impossible in Lucknow. Such has been the
extravagance of the King that the government of India
has lately interfered, and appointed a commission to
pay his debts, and deduct them from his income of
120,000 a year ; for we pay into the privy purse of
the dethroned Vizier of Oude exactly twice the yearly
sum that we set aside for that of Queen Victoria.
MADRAS TO CALCUTTA. 163
"Whatever income is allowed to native princes, they
always spend the double. The experience of the
Dutch in Java and our own in India is uniform in this
respect. Removed from that slight restraint upon
expenditure which the fear of bankruptcy or revolution
forces upon reigning kings, native princes supported
by European governments run recklessly into debt.
The commission which was sitting upon the debts of
the King of Oude while I was in Calcutta warned him
that, if he offended a second time, government would
for the future spend his income for him. It is not the
King's extravagance alone, however, that is complained
of. Always notorious for debauchery, he has now
become infamous for his vices. One of his wives was
arrested while I was in Calcutta for purchasing girls
for the harem, but the King himself escaped. For
nine years he has never left his palace, yet he spends,
we are told, from 200,000 to X250,000 a year.
In his extravagance and immorality the King of
Oude does not stand alone in Calcutta. His mode of
life is imitated by the wealthy natives; his vices are
mimicked by every young Bengalee baboo. It is a
question whether we are not responsible for the tone
which has been taken by "civilization" in Calcutta.
The old philosophy has gone, and left nothing in its
place ; we have by moral force destroyed the old reli-
gions in Calcutta, but we have set up no new. Whether
the character of our Indian government, at once level-
ing and paternal, has not much to do with the spread
of careless sensuality is a question before answering
which it would be well to look to France, where a
similar government has for sixteen years prevailed.
In Paris, at least, democratic despotism is fast de-
grading the French citizen to the moral level of the
Bengalee baboo.
164 GREATER BRITAIN.
The first thing in Calcutta that I saw was the view
of the Government House from the Park Reserve a
miniature Sahara since its trees were destroyed by the
great cyclone. The Viceroy's dwelling, though crushed
by groups of lions and unicorns of gigantic stature and
astonishing design, is an imposing building; but it is
the only palace in the " city of palaces" a name which
must have been given to the pestiferous city by some
one who had never seen any other towns but Liverpool
and London. The true city of palaces is Lucknow.
In Calcutta, I first became acquainted with that un-
bounded hospitality of the great mercantile houses in
the East of which I have since acquired many pleasing
remembrances. The luxury of "the firm" impresses
the English traveler; the huge house is kept as a
hotel; every one is welcome to dinner, breakfast, and
bed in the veranda, or in a room, if he can sleep
under a roof in the hot weather. Sometimes two and
sometimes twenty sit down to the meals, and always
without notice to the butlers or the cooks, but every
one is welcome, down to the friend of a friend's friend ;
and junior clerks will write letters of introduction to
members of the firm, which secure the bearer a most
hospitable welcome from the other clerks, even when
all the partners are away. "If Brown is not there,
Smith will be, and if he's away, why then Johnson
will put you up," is the form of invitation to the hos-
pitalities of an Eastern firm. The finest of fruits are
on table between five and six, and tea and iced drinks
are ready at all times, from dawn to breakfast a cere-
mony which takes place at ten. To the regular meals
you come in or not as you please, and no one trained in
Calcutta or Bombay can conceive offense being taken by
a host at his guest accepting, without consulting him,
invitations to dine out in the city, or to spend some
MADRAS TO CALCUTTA. 165
days at a villa in its outskirts. Servants are in the
corridors by day and night at the call of guests, and
your entertainers tell you that, although they have not
time to go about with you, servants will always be
ready to drive you at sunset to the band-stand in the
carriage of some member of the firm.
The population of Calcutta is as motley as that of
Galle, though the constituents are not the same.
Greeks, Armenians, and Burmese, besides many Eura-
sians, or English-speaking half-castes, mingle with the
mass of Indian Mohammedans and Hindoos. The hot
weather having suddenly set in, the Calcutta officials,
happier than the merchants who, however, care little
about heat when trade is good were starting for
Simla in a body, "just as they were warming to their
work," as the Calcutta people say, and, finding that
there was nothing to be done in the stifling city, I, too,
determined to set off.
The heat was great at night, and the noisy native
crows and whistling kites held durbars inside my
window in the only cool hour of the twenty-four
namely, that which begins at dawn and thus hast-
ened my departure from Calcutta by preventing me
from taking rest while in it. Hearing that at Patna
there was nothing to be. seen or learnt, I traveled from
Calcutta to Benares 500 miles in the same train
and railway carriage. Our first long stoppage was at
Chandernagore, but, as the native baggage-coolies, or
porters, howl the station names in their own fashion, I
hardly recognized the city in the melancholy moan of
"Orn-dorn-orn-gorne," which welcomed the train, and
it was riot till I saw a French infantry uniform upon
the platform that I remembered that Chandernagore,
a village belonging to the French, lies hard by Cal-
cutta, to which city it was once a dangerous rival. It
166 GREATER BRITAIN.
is said that the French retain their Indian depend-
encies, instead of selling them to us as did the Dutch,
in order that they may ever bear in mind the fact that
we once conquered them in India; but it would be hard
to find any real ground for their retention, unless they
are held as centers for the Catholic missions. We will
not even permit them to be made smuggling depots,
for which purpose they would be excellently adapted.
The whole of the possessions in India of the French
amount together to only twenty-six leagues square.
Even Pondicherry, the largest and only French Indian
dependency of which the name is often heard in
Europe, is cut into several portions by strips of British
territory, and the whole of the French-Indian depend-
encies are mere specks of land isolated in our vast
territories. The officer who was lounging in the
station was a native; indeed, in the territory of Chan-
dernagore there are but 230 Europeans, and but 1500
in all French India. He made up to my compartment
as though he would have got in, which I wished that
he would have done, as natives in the French service
all speak French, but, seeing a European, he edged
away to a dark uncomfortable compartment. This
action was, I fear, a piece of silent testimony to the
prejudice which makes our people in India almost in-
variably refuse to travel with a native, whatever may
be his rank.
As we passed through Burdwan and Rajmahal,
where the East Indian Railway taps the Ganges, the
station scenes became more and more interesting.
We associate with the word "railway" ideas that
are peculiarly English: shareholders and directors,
guards in blue, policemen in dark green, and porters
in brown corduroy; no English institution, however,
assumes more readily an Oriental dress. Station-
MADE AS TO CALCUTTA. 167
masters and sparrows alone are English; everything
else on a Bengal railway is purely Eastern. Sikh
irregulars jostle begging fakeers in the stations;
palkees and doolies palankeens and sedans, as we
should call them wait at the back doors; ticket-
clerks smoke water-pipes; an ibis drinks at the engine-
tank; a sacred cow looks over the fence, and a tame
elephant reaches up with his trunk at the telegraph-
wire, on which sits a hoopoe, while an Indian vulture
crowns the post.
When we came opposite to the Monghyr Hills, the
only natural objects which for 1600 miles break the
level of the great plain of Hindostan, people of the
central tribes, small-headed and savage-looking, were
mingled with the Hindoos at the stations. In black-
ness there was not much difference between the
races, for low-caste Bengalees are as black as Guinea
negroes.
As the day grew hot, a water-carrier with a well-
filled skin upon his back appeared at every station,
and came running to the native cars in answer to the
universal long-drawn shoutof "Ah! ah! Bheestie e!"
The first view of the Ganges calls up no enthusiasm.
The Thames below Gravesend half dried up would be
not unlike it; indeed, the river itself is as ugly as
the Mississippi or Missouri, while its banks are more
hideous by far than theirs. Beyond Patna, the plains,
too, become as monotonous as the river, flat, dusty,
and treeless, they are in no way tropical in their char-
acter ; they lie, indeed, wholly outside the tropics. I
afterward found that a man may cross India from the
Irawaddy to the Indus, and see no tropical scenery, no
tropical cultivation. The aspect of the Ganges valley
is that of Cambridgeshire, or of parts of Lincoln seen
after harvest time, and with flocks of strange and bril-
168 GREATER BRITAIN.
liant birds and an occasional jackal thrown in. The
sun is hot not, indeed, much hotter than in Aus-
tralia, but the heat is of a different kind from that
encountered by the English in Ceylon or the West
Indies. From a military point of view, the plains may
be described as a parade-ground continued to infinity;
and this explains the success of our small forces against
the rebels in 1857, our cavalry and artillery having in
all cases swept their infantry from these levels with
the utmost ease.
A view over the plains by daylight is one which in
former times some old Indians can never have enjoyed.
Many a lady in the days of palki-dawk has passed a
life in the Deccan table-land without ever seeing a
mountain, or knowing she was on the top of one.
Carried up and down the ghauts at night, it was only
by the tilting of her palki that she could detect the
rise or fall, for day traveling for ladies was almost
unknown in India before it was introduced with the
railways.
At Patna, the station was filled with crowds of rail-
way coolies, or navvies, as we should say, who, with
their tools and baggage, were camped out upon the
platform, smoking peacefully. I afterward found that
natives have little idea of time-tables and departure
hours. When they want to go ten miles by railway,
they walk straight down to the nearest station, and
there smoke their hookahs till the train arrives at the
end of twenty- four hours or ten minutes, as the case
may be. There is but one step that the more ignorant
among the natives are in a hurry to take, and that is
to buy their tickets. They are no sooner come to the
terminus than with one accord they rush at the native
ticket-clerk, yelling the name of the station to which
they wish to go. In vain he declares that, the train
MADRAS TO CALCUTTA. 169
not being due for ten or fifteen hours, there is plenty
of time for the purchase. Open-mouthed, and wrought
up almost to madness, the passengers dance round him,
screaming " Burdwan !" or " Serampoor !" or whatever
the name may be, till at last he surrenders at discre-
tion. There is often no room for all who wish to go;
indeed, the worst point about the management of the
railways lies in the defective accommodation for the
native passengers, and their treatment by the English
station-masters is not always good: I saw them on
many occasions terribly kicked and cuffed; but Indian
station-masters are not very highly paid, and are too
often men who cannot resist the temptations to vio-
lence which despotic power throws in their way. They
might ask with the Missourian in the United States
army when he was accused of drunkenness, "Whether
Uncle Sam expected to get all the cardinal virtues for
fifteen dollars a month?"
The Indian railways are all made and worked by
companies; but as the government guarantees the
interest of five per cent., which only the East Indian,
or Calcutta and Delhi, line can pay, it interferes much
in the management. The telegraph is both made and
worked by government ; and the reason why the rail-
ways were not put upon the same footing is that the
government of India was doubtful as to the wisdom
of borrowing directly the vast sum required, and
doubtful also of the possibility of borrowing it with-
out diminishing its credit.
The most marked among the effects of railways upon
the state of India are, as a moral change, the weaken-
ing of caste ties as a physical, the destruction of the
Indian forests. It is found that if a rich native dis-
covers that he can, by losing caste in touching his infe-
riors, travel a certain distance in a comfortable second-
VOL. II. 15
170 GREATER BRITAIN.
class carriage for ten rupees, while a first-class ticket
costs him twenty, he will often risk his caste to save
his pound ; still, caste yields but slowly to railways
and the telegraph. It is but a very few years since one
of my friends received a thousand rupees for pleading
in a case which turned on the question whether the
paint-spot on Krishna's nose, which is also a caste sign,
should be drawn as a plain horizontal crescent, or with
a pendant from the center. It is only a year since, in
Orissa, it was seen that Hindoo peasants preferred can-
nibalism, or death by starvation, to defilement by eating
their bullocks.
As for the forests, their destruction has already in
many places changed a somewhat moist climate to one
of excessive drought, and planting is now taking place
with a view both to supplying the railway engines
and bringing back the rains. On the East Indian line,
I found that they burnt mixed coal and wood, but the
Indian coal is scarce and bad, and lies entirely in shal-
low " pockets."
The train reached Mogul-Serai, the junction for
Benares, at midnight of the day following that on
which it left Calcutta, and, changing my carriage at
once, I asked how long it would be before we started,
to which the answer was, "half an hour;" so I went
to sleep. Immediately, as it seemed, I was awakened
by whispering, and, turning, saw a crowd of boys and
baggage-coolies at the carriage-door. When I tried
to discover what they wanted, my Hindostanee broke
down, and it was some time before I found that I had
slept through the short journey from Mogul-Serai, and
had dozed on in the station till the lights had been put
out, before the coolies w T oke me. Crossing the Ganges
by the bridge of boats, I found myself in Benares, the
ancient Varanasi, and sacred capital of the Hindoos.
BENARES. 171
CHAPTER IV.
BENARES.
IN the comparative cool of early morning, I sallied
out on a stroll through the outskirts of Benares. Thou-
sands of women were stepping gracefully along the
crowded roads, bearing on their heads the water-jars,
while at every few paces there was a well, at which
hundreds were waiting along with the bheesties their
turn for lowering their bright gleaming copper cups
to the well-water to fill their skins or vases. All were
keeping up a continual chatter, women with women,
men with men : all the tongues were running cease-
lessly. It is astonishing to see the indignation that a
trifling mishap creates such gesticulation, such shout-
ing, and loud talk, you would think that murder at
least was in question. The world cannot show the
Hindoo's equal as a babbler ; the women talk while
they grind corn, the men while they smoke their water-
pipes; your true Hindoo is never quiet; when not talk-
ing, he is playing on his tomtom.
The Doorgha Khond, the famed Temple of the Sacred
Monkeys, I found thronged with worshipers, and gar-
landed in every part with roses : it overhangs one of
the best holy tanks in India, but has not much beauty
or grandeur, and is chiefly remarkable for the swarms
of huge, fat-paunched, yellow-bearded, holy monkeys,
whose outposts hold one quarter of the city, and whose
main body forms a living roof to the temple. A sin-
gular contrast to the Doorgha Khond was the Queen's
172 GREATER BRITAIN.
College for native students, built in a mixture of Tudor
and Hindoo architecture. The view from the roof is
noticeable, depending as it does for its beauty on the
mingling of the rich green of the timber with the gay
colors of the painted native huts. Over the trees are
seen the minarets at the river- side, and an unwonted
life was given to the view by the smoke and flames
that were rising from two burning huts, in widely-
separated districts of the native town. It is said that
the natives, whenever they quarrel with their neigh-
bors, always take the first opportunity of firing their
huts ; but in truth the huts in the hot weather almost
fire themselves, so inflammable are their roofs and sides.
"When the sun had declined sufficiently to admit of
another excursion, I started from my bungalow, and,
passing through the elephant-corral, went down with
a guide to the ghauts, the .observatory of Jai Singh,
and the Golden Temple. From the minarets of the
mosque of Aurungzebe I had a lovely sunset view of
the ghauts, the city, and the Ganges; but the real
sight of Benares, after all> lies in a walk through the
tortuous passages that do duty for streets. No carriages
can pass them, they are so narrow. You walk pre-
ceded by your guide, who warns the people, that they
may stand aside and not be defiled by your touch, for
that is the real secret of the apparent respect paid to
you in Benares ; but the sacred cows are so numerous
and so obstinate that you cannot avoid sometimes
jostling them. The scene in the passages is the most
Indian in India. The gaudy dresses of the Hindoo
princes spending a week in purification at the holy
place, the frescoed fronts of the shops and houses, the
deafening beating of the tomtoms, and, above all, the
smoke and sickening smell from the " burning ghauts"
that meets you, mingled with a sweeter smell of burn-
BENARES. 173
ing spices, as you work your way through the vast
crowds of pilgrims who are pouring up from the river's
bank all alike are strange to the English traveler,
and fill his mind with that indescribable awe which
everywhere accompanies the sight of scenes and cere-
monies that we do not understand. When once you
are on the Ganges bank itself, the scene is wilder still :
a river front of some three miles, faced with lofty
ghauts, or nights of river stairs, over which rise, pile
above pile, in sublime confusion, lofty palaces with oriel
windows hanging over the sacred stream ; observato-
ries with giant sun-dials, gilt domes (golden, the story
runs), and silver minarets. On the ghauts, rows of
fires, each with a smouldering body ; on the river, boat-
loads of pilgrims, and fakeers praying while they float;
under the houses, lines of prostrate bodies those of
the sick brought to the sacred Ganges to die or, say
our government spies, to be murdered by suffocation
with sacred mud ; while prowling about are the wolf-
like fanatics who feed on putrid flesh. The whole is
lit by a sickly sun fitfully glaring through the smoke,
while the Ganges stream is half obscured by the river
fog and reek of the hot earth.
The lofty pavilions that crown the river front are
ornamented with paintings of every beast that walks
and bird that flies, with monsters, too pink and green
and spotted with griifins, dragons, and elephant-
headed gods embracing dancing-girls. Here and there
are representations of red-coated soldiers English, it
would seem, for they have white faces, but so, the
Maories say, have the New Zealand fairies, who are
certainly not British. The Benares taste for painting
leads to the decoration with pink and yellow spots of
the very cows. The tiger is the commonest of all the
figures on the walls indeed, the explanation that the
15*
174 GREATER BRITAIN.
representations are allegorical, or that gods are pictured
in tiger shape, has not removed from my mind the
belief that the tiger must have been worshiped in
India at some early date. All Easterns are inclined
to worship the beasts that eat them : the Javanese light
floating sacrifices to their river crocodiles ; the Scindees
at Kurrachee venerate the sacred muggur, or man-eat-
ing alligator; the hill-tribes pray to snakes; indeed,
to a new-comer, all Indian religion has the air of devil-
worship, or worship of the destructive principle in some
shape : the gods are drawn as grinning fiends, they are
propitiated by infernal music, they are often worshiped
with obscene and hideous rites. There is even some-
thing cruel in the monotonous roar of the great tom-
toms ; the sound seems to connect itself with widow-
burning, with child-murder, with Juggernauth pro-
cessions. Since the earliest known times, the tomtom
has been used to drown the cries of tortured fanatics ;
its booming is bound up with the thousand barbarisms
of false religion. If the scene on the Benares ghauts
is full of horrors, we must not forget that Hindooism
is a creed of fear and horror, not of love.
The government of India has lately instituted an in-
quiry into the alleged abuses of the custom of taking
sick Hindoos to the Ganges-side to die, with a view to
regulating or suppressing the practice which prevails
in the river-side portion of Lower Bengal. At Ben-
ares, Bengal people are still taken to the river-side,
but not so other natives, as Hindoos dying anywhere
in the sacred city have all the blessings which the most
holy death can possibly secure ; the Benares Shastra,
moreover, forbids the practice, and I saw but two cases
of it in the city, although I had seen many near Cal-
cutta. Not only are aged people brought from their
sick-rooms, laid in the burning sun, and half suffocated
BENARES. 175
with the Ganges water poured down their throats,
but, owing to the ridicule which follows if they re-
cover, or the selfishness of their relatives, the water is
often muddier than it need be : hence the phrase
"ghaut murder," by which this custom is generally
known. Similar customs are not unheard of in other
parts of India, and even in Polynesia and North
America. The Veddahs, or black aborigines of Cey-
lon, were, up to very lately, in the habit of carrying
their dying parents or children into the jungle, and,
having placed a chatty of water and some rice by their
side, leaving them to be devoured by wild beasts.
Under pressure from our officials, they are believed to
have ceased to act thus, but they continue, we are told,
to throw their dead to the leopards and crocodiles.
The Maories, too, have a way of taking out to die alone
those whom their seers have pronounced doomed men,
but it is probable that, among the rude races, the cus-
tom which seems to be a relic of human sacrifice has
not been so grossly abused as it has been by the Bengal
Hindoos. The practice of Ganjatra is but one out of
many similar barbarities that disgrace the religion of
the Hindoos, but it is fast sharing the fate of suttee
and infanticide.
As I returned through the bazaar, I met many most
unholy-looking visitors to the sacred town. Fierce
Rajpoots, with enormous turbans ornamented with zig-
zag stripes : Bengal bankers, in large purple turbans,
curling their long white mustaches, and bearing their
critical noses high aloft as they daintily picked their
way over the garbage of the streets ; and savage re-
tainers of the rajahs staying for a season at their city
palaces, were to the traveler's eye no very devout
pilgrims. In truth, the immoralities of the " holy
city" are as great as its religious virtues, and it is the
176 GREATER BRITAIN.
chosen ground of the loose characters as well as of the
pilgrims of the Hindoo world.
In the whole of the great throng in the bazaar,
hardly the slightest trace of European dressing was to
be perceived : the varnished boots of the wealthier
Hindoos alone bore witness to the existence of English
trade a singular piece of testimony, this, to the essen-
tial conservatism of the Oriental mind. With any
quantity of old army clothing to be got for the asking,
you never see a rag of it on a native back not even
on that of the poorest coolie. If you give a blanket to
an out-door servant, he will cut it into strips and wear
them as a puggree round his head; but this is about the
only thing he will accept, unless to sell it in the bazaar.
As I stopped to look for a moment at the long trains
of laden camels that were winding slowly through the
tortuous streets, I saw a European soldier cheapening
a bracelet with a native jeweler. He was the first topee
wallah ("hat-fellow," or "European") that I had seen
in Benares City. Calcutta is the only town in North-
ern India in which you meet Europeans in your walks
or rides, and, even there, there is but one European to
every sixty natives. In all India, there are, including
troops, children, and officials of all kinds, far less than
as many thousands of Europeans as there are millions
of natives.
The evening after that on which I visited the native
town, I saw in Secrole cantonments, near Benares, the
India hated and dreaded by our troops by day a
blazing deadly heat and sun, at night a still more
deadly fog a hot white fog, into which the sun dis-
appears half an hour before his time for setting,
and out of which he shoots soon after seven in the
morning, to blaze and kill again a pestiferous fever-
breeding ground-fog, out of which stand the tops of
BENARES. 177
the palms, though their stems are invisible in the
steam. Compared with our English summer climate,
it seems the atmosphere of another planet.
Among the men in the cantonments, I found much
of that demoralization that heat everywhere produces
among Englishmen. The newly-arrived soldiers appear
to pass their days in alternate trials of hard drinking
and of total abstinence, and are continually in a state
of nervous fright, which in time must wear them out
and make them an easy prey to fever. The officers
who are fresh from England often behave in much the
same manner as the men, though with them " belatee
pawnee" takes the place of plain water with the
brandy. "Belatee pawnee" means, being translated,
"English water," but, when interpreted, it means
"soda-water" the natives once believing that this
was English river-water, bottled and brought to India
by us as they carry Ganges water to the remotest parts.
The superstition is now at an end, owing to the fact
that natives are themselves largely employed in the
making of soda-water, which is cheaper in India than
it is at home ; but the name remains.
Our men kill themselves with beer, with brandy and
soda-water, and with careless inattention to night chills,
and then blame the poor climate for their fevers, or
die cursing " India." Of course, long residence in a
climate winterless and always hot at mid-day produces
or intensifies certain diseases ; but brandy and soda-
water produces more, and intensifies all. They say it
is " soda-and-b randy" the first month, and then " brandy-
and-soda," but that men finally take to putting in the
^soda-water first, and then somehow the brandy always
kills them. If a man wears a flannel belt and thick
clothes when he travels by night, and drinks hot tea,
he need not fear India.
178 GREATER BRITAIN.
In all ways, Benares is the type of India; in the Se-
crole cantonments, you have the English in India, in-
telligent enough, but careless, and more English than
they are at home, with garrison chaplains, picnics, balls,
and champagne suppers ; hard by, in the native town,
the fierce side of Hindooism, and streets for an English-
man to show himself in which ten years ago was almost
certain death. Benares is the center of all the political
intrigues of India; but the great mutiny itself was
hatched there without being heard of at Secrole. Ex-
cept that our policemen now perambulate the town,
change in Benares there has been none. Were mis-
sionaries to appear openly in its streets, their fate would
still very possibly be the same as that which in this
city befell St. Thomas.
CHAPTER V.
CASTE.
ONE of the greatest difficulties with which the Brit-
ish have to contend in Hindostan is how to discover
the tendencies, how to follow the changes, of native
.opinion. Your Hindoo is so complaisant a companion,
that, whether he is your servant at threepence a day,
or the ruler of the State in which you dwell, he is per-
petually striving to make his opinions the reflex of
your own. You are engaged in a continual struggle
to prevent your views from being seen, in order that
you may get at his : in this you always fail ; a slight
CASTE. 179
hint is enough for a Hindoo, and, if he cannot find even
that much of suggestion in your words, he confines
himself to commonplace. We should see in this, not
so much one of the forms assumed by the cringing
slavishness born of centuries of subjection, not so much
an example of Oriental cunning, as of the polish of
Eastern manners. Even in our rude country it is
hardly courteous, whatever your opinions, flatly to con-
tradict the man with whom you happen to be talking
with the Hindoo, it is the height of ill breeding so
much as to differ from him. The results of the prac-
tice are deplorable ; 'our utter ignorance of the secret
history of the rebellion of 1857 is an example of its
working, for there must have been a time, before discon-
tent ripened into conspiracy, when we might have been
advised and warned. The native newspapers are worse
than useless to us; accepted as exponents of Hindoo
views by those who know no better, and founded mostly
by British capital, they are at once incapable of direct-
ing and of acting as indexes to native opinion, and ex-
press only the sentiments of half a dozen small mer-
chants at the presidency towns, who give the tone to
some two or three papers, which are copied and fol-
lowed by the remainder.
The result of this difficulty in discovering native
opinion is that our officers, however careful, however
considerate in their bearing toward the natives, daily
wound the feelings of the people who are under their
care by acts which, though done in a praiseworthy
spirit, appear to the natives deeds of gross stupidity or
of outrageous despotism. It is hopeless to attempt to
conciliate, it is impossible so much as to govern unless
by main force continually displayed, an Eastern people
in whose religious thought we are not deeply learned.
Not only are we unacquainted with the feelings of the
180 GREATER BRITAIN.
people, but we are lamentably ignorant of the simplest
facts about their religions, their wealth, and their oc-
cupations, for no census of all India has yet been taken.
A complete census had, indeed, been taken, not long
before my visit, in Central India, and another in the
Northwest Provinces, but none in Madras, Bombay,
the Punjaub, or Bengal. The difficulties in the way
of the officials who carried through the arrangements
for the two that had been taken were singularly great.
In the Central Provinces, the census-papers had to be
prepared in five languages ; both here and in the North-
west, the purely scientific nature of the inquiry had to
be brought home to the minds of the people. In Cen-
tral India the hill-tribes believed that our object in the
census was to pave the way for the collection of the un-
married girls as companions for our wifeless soldiers,
so all began marrying forthwith. In the Northwest,
the natives took it into their heads that our object was
to see how many able-bodied men would be available
for a war against Russia, and to collect a poll-tax to
pay for the expedition. The numerous tribes that are
habitually guilty of infanticide threw every difficulty
in the way ; Europeans disliked the whole affair, on ac-
count of the insult offered to their dignity in ranking
them along with natives. It must be admitted, indeed,
that the provisions for recording caste distinctions gave
an odd shape to the census-papers .left at the houses at
Secrole, in which European officers were asked to state
their " caste or tribe." The census of the Central Prov-
inces was imperfect enough, but that of the North-
west was the second that had been taken there, arid
showed signs of scientific arrangement and great
care.
The Northwest Provinces include the great towns
of Benares, Agra, and Allahabad, and the census fell
CASTE. 181
into my hands at Benares itself, at the Sanscrit Col-
lege. It was a strange production, and seemed to have
brought together a mass of information respecting
castes and creeds which was new even to those who
had lived long in the Northwest Provinces. All call-
ings in India being hereditary, there were entries re-
cording the presence in certain towns of " hereditary
clerks who pray to their inkhorns," " hereditary beg-
gars," "hereditary planters of slips or cuttings," "he-
reditary grave-diggers," "hereditary hermits," and
"hereditary hangmen," for in India a hangmanship
descends with as much regularity as a crown. In the
single district of the Dehra Valley, there are 1500
" hereditary tomtom men" drummers at the festivals;
234 Brahmins of Bijnour returned themselves as having
for profession " the receipt of presents to avert the in-
fluence of evil stars." In Bijnour, there are also fifteen
people of a caste which professes "the pleasing of peo-
ple by assuming disguises," while at Benares there is
a whole caste the Bhats whose hereditary occupa-
tion is to " satirize the enemies of the rich, and to
praise their friends." In the Northwest Provinces,
there are 572 distinct castes in all.
The accounts which some castes gave of their origin
read strangely in a solemn governmental document:
the members of one caste described themselves as
"descended from Maicasur, a demon;" but some of
the records are less legendary and more historic. One
caste in the Dehra Valley sent in a note that they
carne in 1000 A.D. from the Deccan ; another, that
they emigrated from Arabia 500 years ago. The Gour
Brahmins claim to have been in the district of Moozuf-
ferrmggur for 5000 years.
Under the title of " occupations," the heads of fami-
lies alone were given, and not the number of those
VOL. II. 16
182 GREATER BRITAIN.
dependent on them, whence it comes that in the whole
province only " 11, 000 tomtom players" were set down.
The habits and tastes of the people are easily seen
in the entries: "3600 firework manufacturers," "45
makers of crowns for idols," "4353 gold-bangle mak-
ers," " 29,136 glass-bangle makers," "1123 astrolo-
gers." There are also 145 "ear -cleaners," besides
"kite -makers," "ear -piercers," "pedigree -makers,"
"makers of caste-marks," "cow-dung sellers," and
" hereditary painters of horses with spots." There was
no backwardness in the followers of maligned pur-
suits: 974 people in Allahabad described themselves
as "low blackguards," 35 as "men who beg with
threats of violence," 25 as "hereditary robbers,"
479,015 as "beggars," 29 as " howlers at funerals,"
226 as " flatterers for gain ;" "vagabonds," "charm-
ers," "informers" were all set down, and 1100 re-
turned themselves as "hereditary buffoons," while
2000 styled themselves "conjurers," 4000 "acrobats,"
and 6372 "poets." In one district alone, there were
777 "soothsayers and astrologers" by profession.
It is worthy of notice that, although there are in the
Northwest Provinces half a million of beggars in a
population of thirty millions, they seem never to beg
of Europeans at least, I was not once asked for alms
during my stay in India. If the smallest service be
performed, there comes a howl of "O Bauks-heece!"
from all quarters, but at other times natives seem
afraid to beg of Englishmen.
The number of fakeers, soothsayers, charmers, and
other "religious" vagabonds is enormous, but the
dense ignorance of the people renders them a prey to
witchcraft, evil-eye, devil-influence, and all such folly.
In Central India, there are whole districts which are
looked upon as witch-tracts or haunted places, and
CASTE. 183
which are never approached by man, but set aside as
homes for devils. A gentleman who was lately en-
gaged there on the railroad survey found that night
after night his men were frightened out of their wits
by " fire-fiends," or blazing demons. He insisted that
they should take him to the spot where these strange
sights were seen, and to his amazement he, too, saw
the fire-devil; at least, he saw a blaze of light moving
slowly through the jungle. Gathering himself up for
a chase, he rushed at the devil with a club, when the
light suddenly disappeared, and instantly shone out
from another spot, a hundred yards from the former
place. Seeing that there was some trickery at work,
he hid himself, and after some hours caught his devil,
who, to escape from a sound drubbing, gave an expla-
nation of the whole affair. The man said that the
natives of the surveyor's party had stolen his mangoes
for several nights, but that at last he had hit on a
plan for frightening them away. He and his sons
went out at dark with pots of blazing oil upon their
heads, and, when approached by thieves, the leading
one put a cover on his pot, and became invisible, while
the second uncovered his. The surveying party got
the drubbing, and the devil escaped scot-free; but the
surveyor, with short-sighted wisdom, told his men,
who had not seen him catch the fire-bearer, that he
had had the honor of an interview with the devil
himself, who had joyfully informed him of the thefts
committed by the men. The surveyor did not admit
that he was from this time forward worshiped by his
party, but it is not unlikely that such was the case.
One of the hill-tribes of Madras worships Colonel
Palmer, a British officer who died some seventy years
ago, just as Drake was worshiped in America, and
Captain Cook in Hawaii. It was one of these tribes
184 GREATER BRITAIN.
that invented the well-known worshiping machine, or
" pray ing- wheel. "
The hill-tribes are less refined, but hardly more
ignorant in their fanaticism than are the Hindoos. At
Bombay, upon the beach where the dead are buried,
or rather tossed to the wild beasts, I saw a filthy and
holy Hindoo saint, whose claim to veneration consists
in his having spent the whole of the days and portions
of the nights for twenty years in a stone box in which
he can neither stand, nor lie, nor sit, nor sleep. These
saintly fakeers have still much influence with the Hin-
doo mass, but in old times their power and their inso-
lence were alike unbounded. Agra itself was founded
to please one of them. The great Emperor Akbar,
who, although a lax Mohammedan, was in no sense a
Hindoo, kept nevertheless a Hindoo saint for political
purposes, and gave him the foremost position in his
train. When the emperor was beginning to fortify
Futtehpore Sikri, where he lived, the saint sent for
him, and said that the work must b.e stopped, as the
noise disturbed him at his prayers. The emperor
offered him new rooms away from the site of the
proposed walls, but the saint replied that, whether
Akbar went on with his works or no, he should leave
Futtehpore. To pacify him, Akbar founded Agra, and
dismantled Futtehpore Sikri.
From the census it appears that there are, in the
Northwest Provinces, no less than twenty-two news-
papers under government inspection, of which five are
published at Agra. The circulation of these papers
is extremely small, and as the government itself takes
3500 of the 12,000 copies which they issue, its hold
over them, without exertion of force, is great. Of the
other 8500, 8000 go to native and 500 to European
subscribers. All the native papers are skillful at cater-
CASTE. 185
ing for their double public, but those which are printed
half in a native tongue and half in English stand in
the first rank for unscrupulousness. One of these
papers gave, while I was in India, some French speech
in abuse of the English. This was headed on the
English side, "Interesting Account of the English," but
on the native side, "Excellent Account of the English."
The " English correspondence" and English news of
these native papers are so absurdly concocted by the
editors out of their own brains that it is a question
whether it would not be advisable to send them weekly
a column of European news, and even to withhold
government patronage from them unless they gave it
room, leaving them to qualify and explain the facts as
best they could. Their favorite statements are that
Russia is going to invade India forthwith, that the
Queen has become a Catholic or a Mohammedan, and
that the whole population of India is to be converted
to Christianity by force. The external appearance of
the native papers is sometimes as comical as their
matter. The Umritsur Commercial Advertiser, of which
nothing is English but the title, gives, for instance,
the time-tables of the Punjaub Eailway on its back
sheet. The page, which is a mere maze of dots and
crooked lines, has at the top a cut of a railway train,
in which guards apparently cocked-hatted, but proba-
bly meant to be wearing pith helmets, are represented
sitting on the top of each carriage, with their legs dan-
gling down in front of the windows.
Neither Christianity nor native reformed religions
make much show in the Northwestern census. The
Christians are strongest in the South of India, the
Hindoo reformers in the Punjaub. The Sikhs them-
selves, and the Kookhas, Nirunkarees, Goolab Dasseas,
Naukeeka-punth, and many other Punjaubee sects, all
16*
186 GREATER BRITAIN.
show more or less hostility to caste ; but in the' North-
west Provinces caste distinctions flourish, although in
reality they have no doubt lost strength. The high-
caste men are beginning to find their caste a drawback
to their success in life, and are given to concealing it.
Just as with ourselves kings go incognito when they
travel for pleasure, so the Bengal sepoy hides his Brah-
minical string under his cloth, in order that he may
be ent on foreign service without its being known
that by crossing the seas he will lose caste.
Judging by the unanimous opinion of the native
press on the doings of the Maharajahs of Bombay,
and on the licentiousness of the Koolin Brahmins,
many of our civilians have come to think that Hindoo-
ism in its present shape has lost the support of a large
number of the more intelligent Hindoos ; but there is
little reason to believe that this is the case. In Cal-
cutta, the Church of Hindoo Deists is gaining ground,
and one of their leaders is said to have met with some
successes during a recent expedition to the Northwest,
but of this there is no proof. The little regard that
many high-caste natives show for caste except as a
matter of talk merely^ means that caste is less an affair
of religion than of custom, but that it is a matter of
custom does not show that its force is slight : on the
contrary, custom is the lord of India.
The success of Mohammedanism in India should show
that caste has never been strong except so far as caste
is custom. It is true that the peasants in Orissa starved
by the side of the sacred cows, but this was custom
too : any one man killing the cow would have been at
once killed by his also starving neighbors for breaking
custom ; but once change the custom by force, and
there is no tendency to return to the former state of
things. The Portuguese and the Mohammedans alike
CASTE. 187
made converts by compulsion, yet when the pressure
was removed there was no return to the earlier faith.
Of the nature of caste we had an excellent example in
the behavior of the troopers of a Bengal cavalry regi-
ment three weeks before the outbreak of the mutiny
of 1857, when they said that for their part they knew
that their cartridges were not greased with the fat of
cows, but that, as they looked as though they were, it
came to the same thing, for they should lose caste if
their friends saw them touch the cartridges in question.
It was the cry of infringement of custom that was
raised against us by the mutineers: "They aim at sub-
verting our institutions; they have put down the suttee
of the Brahmins, the infanticide of the Marattas, caste
and adoption are despised ; they aim at destroying all
our religious customs," was the most powerful cry that
could be raised. It is one against which we shall never
be wholly safe; but it is the custom and not the reli-
gion which is the people's especial care.
There is one point in which caste forms a singular
difficulty in our way, which has not yet been brought
sufficiently home to us. The comparatively fair treat-
ment which is now extended to the low-caste and no-
caste men is itself an insult to the high-caste nobility;
and while the no-caste men care little how we treat
them, provided we pay them well, and the bunnya, or
shop-keeping class, encouraged by the improvement,
cry out loudly that the government wrongs them in
not treating them as Europeans, the high-caste men
are equally disgusted with our good treatment both of
middle-class and inferior Hindoos. These things are
stumbling-blocks in our way, chiefly because no amount
of acquaintance with the various phases of caste feeling
is sufficient to bring home its importance to English-
men. The Indian is essentially the caste man, the
188 GREATER BRITAIN.
Saxon as characteristically the no-caste man, and it is
difficult to produce a mutual understanding. Just as
in England the people are too democratic for the gov-
ernment, in India the government is too democratic
for the people.
Although caste has hitherto been but little shaken,
there are forces at work which must in time produce
the most grave results. The return to their homes of
natives who have emigrated and worked at sugar-
planting in Mauritius and coffee-growing in Ceylon,
mixing with negroes and with Europeans, will gradu-
ally aid in the subversion of caste distinctions, and the
Parsees will give their help toward the creation of a
healthier feeling. The young men of the merchant-
class who are all pure deists set an example of doing
away with caste distinctions which will gradually affect
the whole population of the towns; railways will act
upon the laborers and agriculturists ; a closer inter-
course with Europe will possibly go hand in hand with
universal instruction in the English tongue, and the
indirect results of Christian teaching will continue to
be, as they have been', great.
The positive results of missionary work in India
have hitherto been small. Taking the census as a
guide, in the district of Mooradabad we find but 107
Christians in 1,100,000 people; in Budaon, 64 "Chris-
tians, Europeans, and Eurasians" (half-castes) out of
900,000 people; in Bareilly, 137 native Christians
in a million and a half of people; in Shajehanpoor,
98 in a million people; in Turrai, none in a million
people; in Etah, no native Christians, and only twenty
Europeans to 614,000 people; in the Banda dis-
trict, thirteen native Christians out of three-quarters
of a million of people; in Goruckpoor, 100 native
Christians out of three and a half millions of people.
CASTE. 189
"Not to multiply instances, this proportion is preserved
throughout the whole of the districts, and the native
Christians in the Northwest are proved to form but an
insignificant fraction of the population.
The number of native- Christians in India is ex-
tremely small. Twenty-three societies, having three
hundred Protestant missionary stations, more than
three hundred native missionary churches, and five
hundred European preachers, costing with their assist-
ants two hundred thousand pounds a year, profess to
show only a hundred and fifty thousand converts, of
whom one-seventh are communicants. The majority
of the converts who are not communicants are con-
verts only upon paper, and it may be said that of real
native non-Catholic Christians there are not in India
more than 40,000, of whom half are to be found
among the devil-worshipers of Madras. The so-called
"aboriginal" hill-tribes, having no elaborate religious
system of their own, are not tied down to the creed of
their birth in the same way as are Mohammedans and
Hindoos, among whom our missionaries make no way
whatever. The native Protestant's position is a fear-
ful one, except in such a city as Madras, for he wholly
loses caste, and becomes an outlaw from his people.
The native Catholic continues to be a caste man, and
sometimes an idol-worshiper, and the priests have
made a million converts in Southern India.
Besides revealing the fewness of the native Chris-
tians, the Northwestern census has shown us plainly
the weakness of the Europeans. In the district of
Mooradabad, 1,100,000 people are ruled by thirty-
eight Europeans. In many places, two Europeans
watch over 200,000 people. The Eurasians are about
as numerous as the Europeans, to which class they
may for some purposes be regarded as belonging, for
190 GREATER BRITAIN.
the natives reject their society, and refuse them a place
in every caste. The Eurasians are a much-despised
race, the butt of every Indian story, but as a commu-
nity they are not to be ranked high. That they should
be ill educated, vain, and cringing, is perhaps only what
we might expect of persons placed in their difficult
position ; nevertheless, that they are so tends to lessen,
in spite of our better feelings, the pity that we should
otherwise extend toward them.
The census had not only its revelations, but its re-
sults. One effect of the census-taking is to check the
practice of infanticide, by pointing out to the notice of
our officers the castes and the districts in which it
exists. The deaths of three or four hundred children
are credited to the wolves in the Umritsur district of
the Punjaub alone, but it is remarked that the "wolves"
pick out the female infants. The great disproportion
of the sexes is itself partly to be explained as the re-
sult of infanticide.
One weighty drawback to our influence upon Hindoo
morals, is that in the case of many abuses we legislate
without effect, our laws being evaded where they are
outwardly obeyed. The practice of infanticide exists
in all parts of India, but especially in Rajpootana, and
the girls are killed chiefly in order to save the cost of
marrying them or, rather, of buying husbands for
them. Now we have " suppressed' 7 infanticide which
means that children are smothered or starved, instead
of being exposed. It is no easy task to bring about
reforms in the customs of the people of India.
The many improvements in the moral condition of
the people which the census chronicles are steps in a
great march. Those who have known India long are
aware that a remarkable change has come over the
country in the last few years. Small as have been the
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. * 191
positive visible results of Christian teaching, the indi-
rect effects have been enormous. Among the Sikhs
and Marattas, a spirit of reflection, of earnest thought,
unusual in natives, has been aroused ; in Bengal it has
taken the form of pure deism, but then Bengal is not
India. The spirit rather than the doctrinal teaching
of Christianity 4 has been imbibed: a love of truth
appeals more to the feelings of the upright natives
than do the whole of the nine-and-thirty Articles.
Here, as elsewhere, the natives look to deeds, not
words ; the example of a Frere is worth the teaching
of a hundred missionaries, painstaking and earnest
though they be.
CHAPTER VI.
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES.
THROUGH Mirzapore, Allahabad, and Futtehpore, I
passed on to Cawnpore, spending but little time at
Allahabad; for though the city is strategically im-
portant, there is in it but little to be seen. Like all
spots of the confluence of rivers, Allahabad is sacred
with the Hindoos, for it stands, they say, at the meeting-
point of no less than three great streanis-r-the Ganges,
the Jumna, and a river of the spirit-land. To us poor
pagans the third stream is invisible; not so to the
faithful. Catching a glimpse of Marochetti's statue at
the Cawnpore well, as I hurried through that city, I
diverged from the East Indian Railway, and took
dawk-carriage to Lucknow.
As compared with other Indian cities, the capital of
192 GREATER BRITAIN.
Oude is a town to be seen in driving rather than in
walking ; the general effects are superior in charm and
beauty to the details, and the vast size of the city
makes mere sight-seeing a work of difficulty. More
populous before 1857 than either Calcutta or Bombay,
it is still twice as large as Liverpool. Not only, how-
ever, is Lucknow the most perfect o the modern or
Italianized Oriental towns, but there are in it several
buildings that have each the charm pf an architecture
special to itself. Of these, the Martiniere is the most
singular, and it looks like what it is the freak of a
wealthy madman. Its builder was General Martine,
a Frenchman in the service of the Kings of Oude.
Not far behind the Martiniere is the Dilkousha a
fantastic specimen of an Oriental hunting-lodge. The
ordinary show-building of the place, the Kaiser-Bagh,
or Palace of the Kings of Oude, is a paltry place enough,
but there is a certain grandeur in the view of the great
Imaumbara and the Hooseinabad from a point whence
the two piles form to the .eye but one. The great
Imaumbara suffered terribly in 1858 from the wanton
destruction which our troops committed everywhere
during the war of the mutiny. Had they confined
themselves to outrages such as these, however, but
little could have been said against the conduct of the
war. There is too much fear that the English, unless
held in check, exhibit a singularly strong disposition to-
ward cruelty, wherever they have a weak enemy to meet.
The stories of the Indian mutiny and of the
Jamaica riot are but two out of many two that
we happen to have heard; but the Persian war in
1857 and the last of the Chinese campaigns are not
without their records of deliberate barbarity and
wrong. From the first officer of one of the Peninsular
and Oriental steamers, which was employed in carry-
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 193
ing troops up the Euphrates during the Persian war,
I heard a story that is the type of many such. A
Persian drummer-boy of about ten years old was seen
bathing from the bank one morning by the officers on
deck. Bets were made as to the chance of hitting
him with an Enfield rifle, and one of the betters killed
him at the first shot.
It is not only in war-time that our cruelty comes
out; it is often seen in trifles during peace. Even
a traveler, indeed, becomes so soon used to see the
natives wronged in every way by people of quiet man-
ner and apparent kindness of disposition, that he ceases
to record the cases. In Madras roads, for instance, I
saw a fruit-seller hand up some lirnes to a lower-deck
port, just as we were weighing anchor. Three Anglo-
Indians (men who had been out before) asked in chorus,
"How much?" "One quarter rupee." "Too much."
And, without more ado, paying nothing, they pelted
the man with his own limes, of which he lost more
than half. " In Ceylon, near Bentotte rest-house, a
native child offered a handsome cowrie (of a kind
worth in Australia about five shillings, and certainly
worth something in Ceylon) to the child of a Mauritius
coffee-planter who was traveling with us to Columbo,
himself an old Indian officer. The white child took it,
and would not give it up. The native child cried for
money, or to have his shell back, but the mother of the
white child exclaimed, "You be hanged; it's worth
nothing;" and off came the shell with us in the dawk.
Such are the small but galling wrongs inflicted daily
upon the Indian natives. It was a maxim of the
Portuguese Jesuits that men who live long among
Asiatics seldom fail to learn their vices; but our older
civilians treat the natives with strict justice, and Anglo-
Indian ladies who have been reared in the country are
VOL. II. IT
194 GREATER BRITAIN.
generally kind to their own servants, if somewhat harsh
toward other natives. It is those who have been in the
country from five to ten years, and especially soldiers,
who treat the natives badly. Such men I have heard
exclaim that the new penal code has revolutionized the
country. "Formerly," they say, "you used to send a
man to a police-officer or a magistrate with a note:
4 My dear . Please give the bearer twenty lashes.'
But now the magistrates are afraid to act, and your
servant can have you fined for beating him." In spite
of the lamentations of Anglo-Indians over the good old
days, I noticed in all the hotels in India the significant
notice, "Gentlemen are earnestly requested not to
strike the servants."
The jokes of a people against themselves are not
worth much, but may be taken in aid of other evi-
dence. The two favorite Anglo-Indian stories are that
of the native who, being asked his religion, said, "Me
Christian me get drunk like massa;" and that of the
young officer who, learning Hindostanee in 1858, had
the difference between the negative "ne" and the par-
ticle "ne" explained to him by the moonshee, when
he exclaimed: "Dear me! I hanged lots of natives
last year for admitting that they had not been in their
villages for months. I suppose they meant to say that
they had not left their villages for months." It is cer-
tain that in the suppression of the mutiny hundreds of
natives were hanged by Queen's officers who, unable
to speak a word of any native language, could neither
understand evidence nor defense.
It is in India, when listening to a mess-table con-
versation on the subject of looting, that we begin
to remember our descent from Scandinavian sea-king
robbers. Centuries of education have not purified the
blood: our men in India can hardly set eyes upon a
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 195
native prince or a Hindoo palace before they cry,
"What a place to break up!" "What a fellow to
loot!" When I said to an officer who had been sta-
tioned at Secrole in the early days of the mutiny, "I
suppose you were afraid that the Benares people
would have attacked you," his answer was, "Well,
for my part, I rather hoped they would, because then
we should have thrashed them, and looted the city.
It hadn't been looted for two hundred years."
Those who doubt that Indian military service makes
soldiers careless of men's lives, reckless % as to the rights
of property, and disregardful of human dignity, can
hardly remember the letters which reached home in
1857, in which an officer in high command during the
march upon Cawnpore reported, "Good bag to-day;
polished oft' rebels," it being borne in mind
that the "rebels" thus hanged or blown from guns
were not taken in arms, but villagers apprehended
"on suspicion." During this march, atrocities were
committed in the burning of villages, and massacre of
innocent inhabitants, at which Mohammed Togluk
himself would have stood ashamed, and it would be to
contradict all history to assert that a succession of
such deeds would not prove fatal to our liberties at
home.
The European officers of native regiments, and many
officers formerly in the Company's service, habitually
show great kindness to the natives, but it is the
benevolent kindness of the master for a favorite slave,
of the superior for men immeasurably beneath him;
there is little of the feeling which a common citizen-
ship should bestow, little of that equality of man and
man which Christianity would seem to teach, and
which our Indian government has for some years
favored.
196 GREATER BRITAIN.
At Lucknow, I saw the Residency, and at Cawn-
pore, on my return to the East Indian Railway, the
intrenchraents which were, each of them, the scene in
1857 of those defenses against the mutineers generally
styled "glorious" or "heroic," though made by men
fighting with ropes about their necks. The successful
defenses of the fort at Arrah and of the Lucknow
Residency were rather testimonies to the wonderful
fighting powers of the English than to their courage,
for cowards would fight when the alternative was,
fight or die. As far as Oude was concerned, the "re-
bellion" of 1857 seems to have been rather a war than
a mutiny; but the habits of the native princes would
probably have led them to have acted as treacherously
at Lucknow in the case of a surrender as did the Nana
at Cawnpore, and our officers wisely determined that
in no event would they treat for terms. What is to be
regretted is that we as conquerors should have shown
the Oude insurgents no more mercy than they would
have shown to us, and that we should have made use
of the pretext that the rising was a mere mutiny of
our native troops, as an excuse for hanging in cold
blood the agriculturists of Oude. Whatever the du-
plicity of their rulers, whatever the provocation to
annexation may have been, there can be no doubt
that the revolution in the land-laws set on foot by us
resulted in the offer of a career as native policemen
or railway ticket-clerks to men whose ancestors were
warriors and knights when ours wore woad; and we
are responsible before mankind for having treated as
flagrant treason and mutiny a legitimate war on the
part of the nobility of Oude. In the official papers of
the government of the Northwest Provinces, the so-
called "mutiny" is styled more properly "a grievous
civil war."
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 197
There is much reason to fear, not that the mutiny
will be too long remembered, but that it will be too
soon forgotten. Ten years ago, Monghyr was an ash-
heap, Cawnpore a name of horror, Delhi a stronghold
of armed rebels, yet now we can travel without change
of cars through peaceful and prosperous Monghyr and
Cawnpore a thousand arid twenty miles in forty
hours, and find at the end of our journey that shaded
boulevards have already taken the place of the walls
of Delhi.
Quitting the main line of the East Indian Railway at
Toondla Junction, I passed over a newly-made branch
road to Agra. The line was but lately opened, and
birds without number sat upon the telegraph-posts, and
were seemingly too astonished to fly away from the
train, while, on the open barrens, herds of Indian
antelopes grazed fearlessly, and took no notice of us
when we passed.
Long before we entered Akbarabad, as the city
should be called, by the great new bridge across the
Jumna, I had sighted in the far distance the majestic,
shining dome of the famed Taj Mahal ; but when
arrived within the city, I first visited the citadel and
ramparts. The fort and palace of Akbar are the
Moslem creed in stone. Without turned toward the
unbeliever and the foe the far-famed triple walls,
frowning one above the other with the frown that a
hill-fanatic wears before he strikes the infidel ; within
is the secure paradise of the believing " Emperor of
the world" delicious fountains pouring into basins of
the whitest marble, beds of rose and myrtle, balconies
and pavilions ; part of the zenana, or women's wing,
overhanging the river, and commanding the distant
snow-dome of the Taj. Within, too, the " Motee Mus-
jid" "Pearl of Mosques" in fact as well as name a
It*
198 GREATER BRITAIN.
marble-cloistered court, to which an angel architect
could not add a stone, nor snatch one from it, without
spoiling all. These for believers; for non-believers
the grim old Saracenic "Hall of the Seat of Judgment."
The palace, except the mosque, which is purity itself,
is overlaid with a crust of gems. There is one famed
chamber a woman's bath-house the roof and sides
of -which are covered with tiny silver-mounted mirrors,
placed at such angles as to reflect to infinity the figures
of those who stand within the bath ; and a court is
near at hand, paved with marble squares in black and
white, over which Akbar and his vizier used to sit and
gravely play at draughts with dancinggirls for " pieces."
On the river bank, a mile from Akbar's palace, in
the center of a vast garden entered through the noblest
gateways in the world, stands the Taj Mahal, a terrace
rising in dazzling whiteness from a black mass of
cypresses, and bearing four lofty, delicate minars, and
the central pile that gleams like an Alp against the
deep-blue sky minars, terrace, tomb, all of spotless
marble and faultless shape. Its Persian builders named
the Taj " the palace floating in the air."
Out of the fierce heat and blazing sunlight you enter
into chill and darkness, but soon begin to see the hol-
low dome growing into form above your head, and the
tomb itself that of Noor Mahal, the favorite queen of
Shah Jehan before you, and beside it her husband's
humbler grave. Though within and without the Taj
is white, still here you find the walls profusely jeweled,
and the purity retained. Flowers are pictured on every
-block in mosaic of cinnamon - stone, carnelian, tur-
quoise, amethyst, and emerald ; the corridors contain
the whole Koran, inlaid in jet- black *stone, yet the
interior as a whole exceeds in chastity the spotlessness
of the outer dome. Oriental, it is not barbaric, and a
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 199
sweet melancholy is the effect the Taj produces on the
mind, when seen by day; in the still moonlight, the
form is too mysterious to be touching.
In a Persian manuscript, there still remains a cata-
logue of the prices of the gems made use of in the
building of the Taj, and of the places from which they
came. Among those named are coral from Arabia,
sapphires from Moldavia, amethysts from Persia, crys-
tal from China, turquoises from Thibet, diamonds from
Bundelcund, and lapis-lazuli from Ceylon. The stones
were presents or tribute to the emperor, and the master-
masons came mostly from Constantinople and Bagdad
a fact which should be remembered when we are
discussing the intellectual capacity of the Bengal Hin-
doos. That a people who paint their cows pink with
green spots, and their horses orange or bright red,
should be the authors of the Pearl Mosque and the
Taj, would be too wonderful for our belief; but the
Mohammedan conquerors brought with them the
chosen artists of the Moslem world. The contrast
between the Taj and the Monkey Temple at Benares
reminds one of that between a Cashmere and a Nor-
wich shawl.
It is not at Agra alone that we meet the works of
Mogul emperors. Much as we have ourselves done in
building roads and bridges, there are many parts of
Upper India where the traces of the* Moslem are still
more numerous than are at present those of the later
conquerors of the unfortunate Hindoos. Mosques,
forts, conduits, bridges, gardens all the works of the
Moguls are both solid and magnificent, and it was with
almost reverential feelings that I made my pilgrimage
to the tomb at Secundra of the great Emperor Akbar,
grandfather of Shah Jehan, son of Hoomayoon, and
founder of Agra City.
200 GREATER BRITAIN.
It is to be remarked that the Mohammedans in India
make a considerable show for their small numbers.
Of the great cities of India, the three Presidency
towns are English; and the three gigantic cities of
Delhi, Agra, and Lucknow, chiefly Mohammedan. Be-
nares alone is a Hindoo city, and even in Benares the
Mohammedans have their temples. All the great
buildings of India are Mohammedan; so are all the
great works that are not English. Yet even in the
Agra district the Mohammedans are only one-twelfth
of the population, but they live chiefly in the towns.
The history of the Mogul empire of India from the
time of the conquest of the older empire by Tamer-
lane in the fourteenth century, and the forced conver-
sion to Mohammedanism of a vast number of Hindoos,
and that of Akbar's splendor and enormous power,
down to the transportation of the last emperor in 1857
to Rangoon, and the shooting of his sons in a dry ditch
by Captain Hodson, is one for us to ponder carefully.
Those who know what we have done in India, say that
even in our codes and they are allowed to be our best
claim to the world's applause we fall short of Akbar's
standard.
Delhi, the work of Shah Jehan, founder of the Taj
and the Pearl Mosque, was built by himself in a wil-
derness, as was Agra by the Emperor Akbar. "We
who have seen the time that has passed since its foun-
dation by Washington before the capital of the United
States has grown out of the village shape, cannot deny
that the Mogul emperors, if they were despots, were at
least tyrants possessed of imperial energy. Akbar
built Agra twenty or thirty miles from Futtehpore
Sikri, his former capital, but Jehan had the harder
task of forcing his people to quit an earlier site not
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES. 201
five miles from modern Delhi, while Akbar merely
moved his palace and let the people follow.
Delhi suffered so much at our hands during the
storm in 1857, and has suffered so much since in the
way of Napoleonic boulevards intended to prevent the
necessity of storming it again, that it must be much
changed from what it was before the war. The walls
which surround the whole city are nearly as grand as
those of the fort at Agra, and the gate towers are very
Gibraltars of brick and stone, as we found to our cost
when we battered the Cashmere Gate in 1857. The
palace and the Motee Musjid are extremely fine, but
inferior to their namesakes at Agra; and the Jumna
Musjid reputed the most beautiful as it is the largest
mosque in the world impressed me only by its size.
The view, however, from its minars is one of the whole
Northwest. The vast city becomes an ant-heap, and
you instinctively peer out into space, and try to dis-
cern the sea toward Calcutta or Bombay.
The historical memories that attach to Delhi differ
from those that we associate with the name of Agra.
There is little pleasure in the contemplation of the
zenana, where the miserable old man, the last of the
Moguls, dawdled away his years.
202 GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER VII.
SIMLA.
AFTER visiting Nicholson's tomb at the Cashmere
Gate, I entered my one-horse dawk the regulation
carriage of India and set off for Kurnaul and Simla,
passing between the sand-hills, gravel-pits, and ruined
mosques through which the rebel cavalry made their
famous sortie upon our camp. It was evening when
we started, and as the dawk-gharrees are so arranged
that you can lie with comfort at full-length, but cannot
sit without misery, I brought my canvas bag into ser-
vice as a pillow, and was soon asleep.
When I woke, we had stopped; and when I drew
the sliding shutter that does duty for door and window,
and peered out into the darkness, I discovered that
there was no horse in the shafts, and that my driver
and his horse syce or groom were smoking their
hubble-bubbles at a well in the company of a passing
friend. By making free use of the strongest language
that my dictionary contained, I prevailed upon the men
to put in a fresh horse; but starting was a different
matter. The horse refused to budge an inch, except,
indeed, backwards, or sideways toward the ditch. Six
grooms came running from the stable, and placed them-
selves one at each wheel, and one on each side of the
horse, while many boys pushed behind. At a signal
from the driver, the four wheelmen threw their whole
weight on the spokes, and one of the men at the horse's
SIMLA. 203
head held up the obstinate brute's off fore-leg, so that
he was fairly run off the ground, and forced to make a
start, which he did with a violent plunge, for which all
the grooms were, however, well prepared. As they
yelled with triumph, we dashed along for some twenty
yards, then swerved sideways, and came to a dead stop.
Again and again the starting process was repeated, till
at last the horse went off at a gallop, which carried us
to the end of the stage. This is the only form of start-
ing known to up-country horses, as I soon found; but
sometimes even this ceremony fails to start the horse,
and twice in the Delhi-to-Kalka journey we lost a
quarter of an hour over horses, and had finally to get
others from the stable.
About midnight, we reached a government bunga-
low, or roadside inn, where I was to sup, and five
minutes produced a chicken curry which, in spite of
its hardness, was disposed of in as many more. Mean-
while a storm had come rumbling and roaring across
the skies, and when I went to the door to start, the
bungalow butler and cook pointed to the gharree, and
told me that driver and horse were gone. Not wish-
ing the bungalow men to discover how small was my
stock of Hindostanee, I paid careful attention to their
conversation, and looked up each time that I heard
"sahib," as I knew that then they must be talking
about me. Seeing this, they seemed to agree that I
was a thorough Hindostanee scholar, but too proud to
answer when they spoke. While they were humbly
requesting that I would bow to the storm and sleep in
the bungalow, which was filled with twittering spar-
rows, waked by the thunder or the lights, I was read-
ing my dictionary by the faint glimmer of the cocoa-
nut oil-lamp, and trying to find out how I was to declare
that I insisted on going on at once. When at last I
204 GREATER BRITAIN.
hit upon my phrase, the storm was over, and the butler
soon found both horse and driver. After this adven-
ture, my Hindostanee improved fast.
A remarkable misapprehension prevails in England
concerning the languages of India. The natives of
India, we are inclined to believe, speak Hindostanee,
which is the language of India as English is that of
Britain. The truth is that there are in India a multi-
tude of languages, of which Hindostanee is not even
one. Besides the great tongues, Urdu, Maratti, and
Tamil, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of local
languages, and innumerable dialects of each. Hindo-
stanee is a camp language, which contains many native
words, but which also is largely composed of imported
Arabic and Persian words, and which is not without
specimens of English and Portuguese. " Saboou," for
soap, is the latter; "glassie," for a tumbler, and
"istubul," for a stable, the former: but almost every
common English phrase and English word of command
forms in a certain measure part of the Hindostanee
tongue. Some terms have been ingeniously perverted ;
for instance, " Who comes there ?" has become " Hook-
urn dar?" "Stand at ease!" is changed to " Tundel
tis," and "Present arms!" to "Furyunt arm!" The
Hindostanee name for a European lady is " mem sahib,"
a feminine formed from " sahib" lord, or European
by prefixing to it the English servants' "mum," or
corruption of "madam." Some pure Hindostanee
words have a comical sound enough to English ears, as
" hookm," an order, pronounced " hook'em ;" " misri,"
sugar, which sounds like "misery;" "top," fever;
" molly," a gardener; and " dolly," a bundle of vege-
tables.
Dawk traveling in the Punjaub is by no means
unpleasant; by night you sleep soundly, and by day
SIMLA. 205
there is no lack of life in the mere traffic on the road,
while the general scene is full of charm. Here and
there are serais, or corrals, built by the Mogul empe-
rors or by the British government for the use of native
travelers. Our word " caravansery" is properly "cara-
van-serai," an inclosure for the use of those traveling
in caravans. The keeper of the serai supplies water,
provender, and food, and at night the serais along the
road glow with the cooking-tires and resound with the
voices of thousands of natives, who when on journeys
never seem to sleep. Throughout the plains of India,
the high-roads pass villages, serais, police-stations, and
groups of trees at almost equal intervals. The space
between clump and clump is generally about three
miles, and in this distance you never see a house, so
compact are the Indian villages. The Northwest Prov-
inces are the most densely-peopled countries of the
world, yet between village and village you often see
no trace of man, while jackals and wild blue-cows
roam about as freely as though the country were an
untrodden wilderness.
Each time you reach a clump of banyans, tamarind
and tulip trees, you find the same tenants of its shades:
village police-station, government posting-stable, and
serai are always inclosed within its limits. All the
villages are fortified with lofty walls of mud or brick,
as are the numerous police-stations along the road,
where the military constabulary, in their dark-blue
tunics, yellow trowsers, and huge puggrees of bright
red, rise up from sleep or hookah as you pass, and,
turning out with tulwars and rifles, perform the mili-
tary salute due in India to the white face from all
native troops. Your skin here is your patent of aris-
tocracy arid your passport, all in one.
It is not only by the police and troops that you are
VOL. II. 18
206 GREATER BRITAIN.
saluted: the natives all salaam to you except mere
coolies, who do not think themselves worthy even to
offer a salute and many Anglo-Indians refuse to re-
turn their bow. Every Englishman in India ought to
act as though he were an ambassador of the Queen
and people, and regulate accordingly his conduct in
the most trifling things; but too often the low bow
and humble " Salaam sahib" is not acknowledged even
by a curt "Salaam."
In the drier portions of the country, women were
busy with knives digging up little roots of grass for
horse-food ; and four or five times a day a great bugling
would be heard and answered by my driver, while the
mail-cart shot by us at full speed. The astonishment
with which I looked upon the Indian plains grew even
stronger as I advanced up country. Not only is bush
scarce, and forest never seen, but where there is jungle
it is of the thinnest and least tropical kind. It would
be harder to traverse, on horse or foot, the thinnest
coppice in the south of England than the densest jungle
in the plain country of all India.
Both in the villages and in the desert portions of the
road, the ground-squirrels galloped in troops before the
dawk, and birds without number hopped fearlessly be-
side us as we passed; hoopoes, blue-jays, and minas
were the commonest, but there were many paddy-birds
and graceful golden egrets in the lower grounds.
Between Delhi and Kurnaul were many ruins, now
green with the pomegranate leaf, now scarlet with the
bloom of the peacock-tree, and, about the ancient vil-
lages, acre after acre of plantain-garden, irrigated by
the conduits of the Mohammedan conquerors ; at last,
Kurnaul itself a fortified town seen through a forest
of date, wild mango, and banyan, with patches of wheat
about it, and strings of laden camels winding along the
SIMLA. 207
dusty road. After a bheestie had poured a skinful of
water over me, I set off again for Kalka, halting in the
territory of the Puttiala Rajah to see his gardens at
Pinjore, and then passed on toward the base of the
Himalayan foot-hills. The wheat-harvest was in prog-
ress in the Kalka country, and the girls, reaping with
the sickle, and carrying away the sheaves upon their
heads, bore themselves gracefully, as Hindoo women
ever do, and formed a contrast to the coarse old land-
owners as these rode past, each followed by his pipe-
bearer and his retinue.
A Goorkha battalion and a Thibetan goat-train had
just entered Kalka when I reached it, and the confu-
sion was such that I started at once in a jampan up the
sides of the brown and desolate hills. A jampan, called
tonjon in Madras, is an arm-chair in shafts, and built
more lightly than a sedan; it is carried at a short trot
by four men, while another four, and a mate or chief,
make their way up the hills before you, and meet you
here and there to relieve guard. The hire of the jam-
pan and nine men is less than that of a pony and groom
a curious illustration of the cheapness of labor in the
East. When you first reach India, this cheapness is a
standing wonder. At your hotel at Calcutta you are
asked, "You wish boy pull punkah all night? Boy
pull punkah all day and all night for two annas" (3d.).
On some parts of the railway lines, where there is also
a good road, the natives find it cheaper to travel by
palankeen than to ride in a third-class railway car-
riage. It is cheaper in Calcutta to be carried by four
men in apalki than to ride in a "second-class gharry,"
or very bad cab ; and the streets of the city are inva-
riably watered by hand by bheesties with skins. The
key to Indian politics lies in these facts.
At Wilson's at Calcutta, the rule of the hotel obliges
208 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
one to hire a kitmutghar, who waits at table. This I
did for the magniticent wage of lid. a day, out of which
Cherry the nearest phonetic spelling of my man's
name of course fed and kept himself. I will do him
the justice to add that he managed to make about
another shilling a day out of me, and that he always
brought me small change in copper, on the chance that
I should give it him. Small as seemed these wages, I
could have hired him for one-fifth the rate that I have
named had I been ready to retain him in my service
for a month or two. Wages in India are somewhat
raised by the practice of dustooree a custom by which
every native, high or low, takes toll of all money that
passes through his hands. My first introduction to
this institution struck me forcibly, though afterward
I came to look upon it as tranquilly as old Indians do.
It was in the gardens of the Taj, where, to relieve my-
self from importunity, I had bought a photograph of
the dome : a native servant of the hotel, who accom-
panied me much against my will, and who, being far
more ignorant of English than I was of Hindostanee,
was of absolutely no use, I had at last succeeded in
warning off from my side, but directly I bought the
photograph for half a rupee, he rushed upon the seller,
and claimed one-fourth of the price, or two annas, as
his share, I having transgressed his privilege in buy-
ing directly instead of through him as intermediary.
I remonstrated, but to my amazement the seller paid
the money quietly, and evidently looked on me as a
meddling sort of fellow enough for interfering with
the institution of dustooree. Customs, after all, are
much the same throughout the world. Our sportsmen
follow the habit of Confucius, whose disciples two or
three thousand years ago proclaimed that "he angled,
but did not use a net; he shot, but not at birds perch-
SIMLA. 209
ing;" our servants, perhaps, are not altogether inno-
cent of dustooree. However much wages may be
supplemented by dustooree, they are low enough to
allow of the keeping of a tribe of servants by persons
of moderate incomes. A small family at Simla "re-
quire" three body servants, two cooks, one butler,
two grooms, two gardeners, two messengers, two
nurses, two washermen, two water-carriers, thirteen
jampan-men, one sweeper, one lamp-cleaner, and one
boy, besides the European lady's maid, or thirty-five
in all; but if wages were doubled, perhaps fewer men
would be u absolutely needed." At the house where
I stayed at Simla, ten jampan-men and two gardeners
were supposed to be continuously employed in a tiny
flower-garden round the house. To a European fresh
from the temperate climates there is something irk-
some in the restraint produced by the constant pres-
ence of servants in every corner of an Indian house.
To pull off one's own socks or pour out the water into
the basin for one's self becomes a much-longed-for lux-
ury. It is far from pleasant to have three or four
natives squatting in front of your door, with nothing
to do unless you find such odd jobs for them as hold-
ing the heel of your boot while you pull it on, or
brushing your clothes for the fourteenth time.
The greater or less value of the smallest coin in
common use in a country is a rough test of the wealth
or poverty of its inhabitants, and by the application of
it to India we find that country poor indeed. At Agra,
I had gone to a money-changer in the bazaar, and
asked him for change, in the cowrie-shells which do
duty as money, for an anna, or IJd. piece. He gave
me handful after handful, till I -cried enough. Yet
when in the afternoon of the same day I had a per-
formance on my threshold of u Tasa-ba-tasa " that
18*
210 GREATER BRITAIN.
singular tune which reigns from Java to the Bos-
phorus, with Sanscrit words in Persia, arid Malay
words in the Eastern islands the three players
seemed grateful for half a dozen of the cowries, for
they treated me to a native version of " Vee vont gah
ham tall mardid, vee vont gah ham tall mardid," by
way of thanks. Many strange natural objects pass
as uncoined money in the East: tusks in Africa,
women in Arabia, human skulls in Borneo; the Red
Indians of America sell their neighbors' scalps for
money, but have not yet reached the height of civili-
zation which would be denoted by their keeping
them to use as such ; cowrie-shells, however, pass as
money in almost every ancient trading country of the
world.
The historical cheapness of labor in India has led to
such an obstinate aversion to all labor-saving expe-
dients that such great works as the making of railway
embankments and the boulevard construction at Delhi
are conducted by the scraping together of earth with
the hands, and the collected pile is slowly placed in
tiny baskets, much like strawberry pottles, and borne
away on women's heads to its new destination. Wheel-
barrows, water-carts, picks, and shovels are in India
all unknown.
If, on my road from Kalka to Simla, I had an exam-
ple of the cheapness of Indian labor, I also had one
of its efficiency. The coolie who carried my baggage
on his head trotted up the hills for twenty-one hours,
without halting for more than an hour or two, and
this for two days' pay.
During the first half-hour after leaving Kalka, the
heat was as great as on the plains, but we had not
gone many miles before we came out of the heat and
dust into a new world, and an atmosphere every breath
SIMLA. 211
of which was life. I got out, and walked for miles;
and when we halted at a rest-house on the first plateau,
I thoroughly enjoyed a cup of the mountain tea, and
was still more pleased at the sight of the first red-coated
English soldiers that I had seen since I left Niagara.
The men were even attempting bowls and cricket, so
cool were the evenings at this station. There is grim
satire in the fact that the director-general of military
gymnastics has his establishment at Simla, in the cold
of the Snowy Range, and there invents running drills
and such like summer diversions, to be executed by
the unfortunates in the plains below. Bowls, which
are an amusement at Kussoolie, would in the hot
weather be death at Kalka, only ten miles away ; but
so short is the memory of climate that you are no
more able to conceive the heat of the plains when in
the hills than the cold of the hills when at Calcutta.
There is no reason except a slight and temporary
increase of cost to prevent the whole of the European
troops in India being concentrated in a few cool and
healthy stations. Provided that all the artillery be
retained in the hands of the Europeans, almost the
whole of the English forces might be kept in half a
dozen hill-stations, of which Darjeeling and Bangalore
would be two, and some place near Bombay a third.
It has been said that the men would be incapable,
through want of acclimatization, of acting on the plains
if retained in hill-stations except when their services
were needed ; but it is notoriously the fact that new-
comers from England that is, men with health do
not suffer seriously from heat during the first six months
which they pass upon the plains.
Soon after dark, a terrific thunder-storm came on, the
thunder rolling round the valleys and along the ridges,
while the rain fell in short, sharp showers. My men
212 GREATER BRITAIN.
put me down on the lee-side of a hut, and squatted for
a long smoke. The custom common to all the Eastern
races of sitting round a fire smoking all night long
explains the number and the excellence of their tales
and legends. In Europe we see the Swedish peasants
sitting round their hearths chatting during the long
winter evenings: hence follow naturally the Thor
legends; our sailors are with us the only men given
to sitting in groups to talk: they are noted story-tellers.
The word "yarn" exemplifies the whole philosophy of
the matter. We meet, however, here the eternal dif-
ficulty of which is cause and which is effect. It is easy
to say that the long nights of Norway, the confined space
of the ship, making the fo'cast-le the sailor's only lounge,
each in their way necessitate the story-telling; not so
in India, not so in Egypt, in Arabia, in Persia: there
can here be no necessity for men sitting up all night to
talk, short of pure love of talk for talking's sake.
When the light came in the morning, we were as-
cending the same strangely-ribbed hills that we had
been crossing by torchlight during the night, and were
meeting Chinese-faced Thibetans, with hair done into
many pig-tails, who were laboriously bringing over the
mountain passes Chinese goods in tiny sheep-loads.
For miles I journeyed on, up mountain sides and
down into ravines, but never for a single moment
upon a level, catching sight sometimes of portions of
the Snowy Kange itself, far distant, and half mingled
with the clouds, till at last a huge mountain mass
rising to the north and east blocked out all view save
that behind me over the sea of hills that I had crossed,
and the scene became monotonously hideous, with only
that grandeur which hugeness carries with it a view,
in short, that would be fine at sunset, and at no other
time. The weather, too, grew damp and cold a cruel
SIMLA. 213
cold, with driving rain and the landscape was dreari-
ness itself.
Suddenly we crossed the ridge, and began to de-
scend, when the sky cleared, and I found myself on
the edge of the rhododendron forest tall trees with
dark-green leaves and masses of crimson flowers ;
ferns of a hundred different kinds marking the beds
of the rivulets that coursed down through the woods,
which were filled with troops of chattering monkeys.
Rising again slightly, I began to pass the European
bungalows, each in its thicket of deodar, and few with
flat ground enough for more than half a rose-bed or a
quarter of a croquet-ground. On either side the ridge
was a deep valley, with terraced rice-fields five thou-
sand feet below, and, in the distance, on the one side
the mist-covered plains lit by the single silvery rib-
bon of the distant Sutlej, on the other side the Snowy
Range.
The first Europeans whom I met in Simla were the
Viceroy's children and their nurses, who formed with
their escort a stately procession. First came a tall
native in scarlet, then a jampan with a child, then one
with a nurse and viceregal baby, and so on, the bearers
wearing scarlet and gray. All the residents at Simla
have different uniforms for their jampanees, some
clothing their men in red and green, some in purple
and yellow, some in black and white. Before reach-
ing the center of the town, I had met several Europeans
riding, although the sun was still high and hot; but
before evening a hailstorm came across the range and
filled the woods with a chilling mist, and night found
me toasting my feet at a blazing fire in an Alpine room
of polished pine a real room, with doors and case-
ment ; not a section of a street with a bed in it, as are
the rooms in the Indian plains. Two blankets were a
214 GREATER BRITAIN. ^
luxury in this "tropical climate of Simla," as one of
our best-informed London newspapers once called it.
The fact is that Simla, which stands at from seven to
eight thousand feet above the sea, and in latitude 31,
or 7 north of the boundary of the tropics, has a climate
cold in everything except its sun, which is sometimes
strong. The snow lies on the ground at intervals for
five months of the year ; and during what ist>y courtesy
styled "the hot weather," cold rains are of frequent
occurrence.
The climate of Simla is no mere matter of curiosity ;
it is a question of serious interest in connection with
the retention of our Indian empire. When the gov-
ernment seeks refuge here from the Calcutta heat, the
various departments are located in tiny cottages and
bungalows up on the'mountain and down in the valley,
practically as far from each other as London from
Brighton ; and, moreover, Simla itself is forty miles
from Kalka by the shortest path, and sixty by the bet-
ter bridle-path. There is clearly much loss of time in
sending dispatches for half the year to and from a place
like this, and there is no chance of the railway ever
coming nearer to it than Kalka, even if it reaches that.
On the other hand, the telegraph is replacing the rail-
way day by day, and mountain heights are no bar to
wires. This poor, little, uneven hill-village has been
styled the "Indian Capua" and nicknamed the " Hill
Versailles;" but so far from enervating the ministers
or enfeebling the administration, Simla gives vigor to
the government, and a hearty English tone to the State
papers issued in the hot months. English ministers
are not in London all the year long, and no men, min-
isters or not, could stand four years' continual brain-
work in Calcutta. In 1866-, the first year of the re-
moval of the government as a whole and publication
SIMLA. 215
of the Gazette at Simla during the summer, all the
arrears of work in all the offices were cleared off for
the first time since the occupation by us of any part
of India.
Bengal, the Northwest Provinces, and the Punjaub
must soon be made into " governorships," instead of
' 'lieutenant-governorships," so that the Viceroy may
be relieved from tedious work, and time saved by the
Northern Governors reporting straight home, as do the
Governors of Madras and Bombay, unless a system be
adopted under which all shall report to the Viceroy.
At all events, the five divisions must be put upon the
same footing one with another. This being granted,
there is no conceivable reason for keeping the Viceroy
at Calcutta a city singularly hot, unhealthy, and out
of the way. On our Council of India, sitting at the
capital, we ought to have natives picked from all India
for their honesty, ability, and discretion ; but so bad
is the water at Calcutta, that the city is deadly to
water-drinkers; and although they value the distinc-
tion of a seat at the Council more than any other
honor within their reach, many of 'the most distin-
guished natives in India have chosen to resign their
places rather than pass a second season at Calcutta.
It is not necessary that we should argue about Cal-
cutta's disadvantages. It is enough to say that, of all
Indian cities, we have selected for our capital the most
distant and the most unhealthy. The great question
is, Shall we have one capital, or two? Shall we keep
the Viceroy all the year round in a central but hot
position, such as Delhi, Agra, Allahabad, or Jubbel-
pore, or else at a less central but cooler station, such as
Nassuck, Poonah, Bangalore, or Mussoorie? or shall
we keep him at a central place during the cool, and a
hill place during the hot weather? There can be but
216 GREATER BRITAIN.
little doubt that Simla is a necessity at present, but
with a fairly healthy city, such as Agra, for the head-
quarters of the government, and the railway open to
within a few miles of Mussoorie, so that men could
run to the hills in six or seven hours, and even spend
a few days there in each summer month, an efficient
government could be maintained in the plains. We
must remember that Agra is now within twenty-three
days of London ; and that, with the Persian Gulf route
open, and a railway from Kurrachee (the natural port
of England in India), leave for home would be a mat-
ter still more simple than it has become already. With
some such central town as Poonah for the capital, the
Bombay and Madras commander-in-chiefships could
be abolished, with the, result of saving a considerable
expense, and greatly increasing the efficiency of the
Indian army. It is probable that Simla will not con-
tinue to be the chosen station of the government in
the hills. The town is subject to the ravages of dys-
entery; the cost of draining it would be immense, and
the water supply is very limited ; the bheesties have
often to wait whole hours for their turn.
Mussoorie has all the advantages and none of the
drawbacks of Simla, and lies compactly in ground
on which a small city could be built, whereas Simla
straggles along a narrow mountain ridge, and up and
down the steep sides of an Alpine peak. It is ques-
tionable, however, whether, if India is to be governed
from at home, the seat of government should not be
at Poonah, within reach of London. The telegraph
has already made viceroys of the ancient kind impos-
sible.
The sunrise view of the Snowy Range from my bun-
galow was one rather strange, from the multitude of
peaks in sight at once, than either beautiful or grand.
COL ONIZA TION. 217
The desolate ranges of foot-hills destroy the beauty
that the contrast of the deodars, the crimson rhododen-
drons, and the snow would otherwise produce, and the
height at which you stand seems to dwarf the distant
ranges ; but from one of the spots which I reached in
a mountain march, the prospect was widely different.
Here we saw at once the sources of the Jumna, the
Sutlej, and the Ganges, the dazzling peaks of Gun-
gootrie, of Jumnotrie, and of Kamet ; while behind us
in the distant plains we could trace the Sutlej itself,
silvered by the hazy rays of the half-risen sun. We
had in sight not only the 26,000 feet of Kamet, but no
less than twenty other peaks of over 20,000 feet, snow-
clad to their very bases, while between us and the near-
est outlying range were valleys from which the ear
caught the humble murmur of fresh-risen streams.
CHAPTER VIII.
COLONIZATION.
CONNECTED with the question of the site of the future
capital is that of the possibility of the colonization by
Englishmen of portions of the peninsula of India.
Hitherto the attempts at settlement which have been
made have been mainly confined to six districts My-
sore, where there are only some dozen planters; the
Neilgherries proper, where coffee-planting is largely
carried on; Oude, where many Europeans have taken
land as zemindars, and cultivate a portion of it, while
they let out the remainder to natives on the Metayer
plan ; Bengal, where indigo-planting is gaining ground ;
VOL. II. 19
218 GREATER BRITAIN.
the Himalayan valleys, and Assam. Settlement in the
hot plains is limited by the fact that English children
cannot there be reared, so to the hill districts the dis-
cussion must be confined.
One of the commonest of mistakes respecting India
consists in the supposition that there is available land
in large quantities on the slopes of the Himalayas.
There are no Himalayan slopes; the country is all
straight up and down, and for English colonists there
is no room no ground that will grow anything but
deodars, and those only moderately well. The hot sun
dries the ground, and the violent rains follow, and cut
it through and through with deep channels, in this way
gradually making all the hills both steep and ribbed.
Mysore is still a native State, but, in spite of this, Eu-
ropean settlement is increasing year by year, and there,
as in the Neilgherries proper, there is room for many
coffee-planters, though fever is not unknown ; but when
India is carefully surveyed, the only district that ap-
pears to be thoroughly suited to English settlement,
as contrasted with mere planting or land-holding, is the
valley of Cashmere, where the race would probably not
suffer deterioration. With the exception of Cashmere,
none of the deep mountain valleys are cool enough for
permanent European settlement. Family life is im-
possible where there is no home; you can have no
English comfort, no English virtues, in a climate which
forces your people to live out of doors, or else in rock-
ing-chairs or hammocks. Night-work and reading are
ail-but impossible in a climate where multitudes of in-
sects haunt the air. In the Himalayan valleys, the hot
weather is terribly scorching, and it lasts for half the
year, and on the hill-sides there is but little fertile soil.
The civilians and rulers of India in general are ex-
tremely jealous of the "interlopers," as European set-
COLONIZATION. 219
tiers are termed ; and, although tea-cultivation was at
first encouraged by the Bengal government, recent
legislation, fair or unfair, has almost ruined the tea-
planters of Assam. The native population of that
district is averse to labor, and coolies from a distance
have to be brought in ; but the government of India,
as the planters say, interferes with harsh and narrow
regulations, and so enormously increases the cost of
imported labor as to ruin the planters, who, even when
they have got their laborers on the ground, cannot
make them work, as there exists no means of compel-
ling specific performance of a contract to work. The
remedy known to the English law is an action for
damages brought by the employer against the laborer,
so with English obstinacy we declare that an action for
damages shall be the remedy in Burmah or Assam. A
provision for attachment of goods and imprisonment of
person of laborers refusing to perform their portion of
a contract to work was inscribed in the draft of the
proposed Indian " Code of Civil Procedure," but vetoed
by the authorities at home.
The Spanish Jesuits themselves were not more afraid
of free white settlers than is our Bengal government.
An enterprising merchant of Calcutta lately obtained
a grant of vast tracts of country in the Sunderbunds
the fever-haunted jungle near Calcutta and had
already completed his arrangements for importing
Chinese laborers to cultivate his acquisitions, when
the jealous civilians got wind of the affair, and forced
government into a most undignified retreat from their
agreement.
The secret of this opposition to settlement by Euro-
peans lies partly in a horror of " low-caste Englishmen,"
and a fear that they will somewhat debase Europeans
in native eyes, but far more in the wish of the old
220 GREATER BRITAIN.
civilians to keep India to themselves as a sort of
"happy hunting-ground" a wish which has prompted
them to start the cry of " India for the Indians" which
of course means India for the Anglo-Indians.
Somewhat apart from the question of European
colonization, but closely related to it, is that of the
holding by Europeans of landed estates in India. It
will perhaps be conceded that the European should,
on the one hand, be allowed to come into the market
and purchase land, or rent it from the government or
from individuals, on the same conditions as those which
would apply to natives, and, on the other hand, that
special grants should not be made to Europeans as
they were by us in Java in old times. In Eastern
countries, however, government can hardly be wholly
neutral, and, whatever the law, if European land-hold-
ers be encouraged, they will come; if discouraged,
they will stop away. From India they stop away,
while such as do reach Hindostan are known in offi-
cial circles by the significant name of " interlopers."
Under a healthy social system, which the presence
of English planters throughout India, and the support
which would thus be given to the unofficial press, would
of itself do much to create, the owning of land by Eu-
ropeans could produce nothing but good. The danger
of the use of compulsion toward the natives would not
exist, because in India unlike what is the case in
Dutch Java the interest of the ruling classes would
be the other way. If it be answered that, once in
possession of the land, the Europeans would get the
government into their own hands, we must reply that
they could never be sufficiently numerous to have the
slightest chance of doing anything of the kind. As
we have seen in Ceylon, the attempt on the part of the
planters to usurp the government is sternly repressed
COLONIZATION. 221
by the English people, the moment that its true bear-
ing is understood, and yet in Ceylon the planters are
far more numerous in proportion to the population
than they can ever be in India, where the climate of
the plains is fatal to European children, and where
there is comparatively little land upon the hills ; while
in Ceylon the coffee-tracts, which are mountainous and
healthy, form a sensible proportion of the whole lands
of the island. It is true that the press, when once
completely in the planters' hands, may advocate their
interests at the expense of those of the natives, but in
the case of Queensland we have seen that this is no
protection to the planters against the inquisitive home
eye, which would be drawn to India as it has been to
Queensland by the reports of independent travelers
and of interested but honest missionaries.
The infamies of the foundation of the indigo-plan-
tations in Bengal, and of many of the tea-plantations
in Assam, in which violence was freely used to make
the natives grow the selected crop, and in some cases
the land actually stolen from its owners, have gone far
to make European settlement in India a by-word among
the friends of the Hindoo; but it is clear that an effi-
cient police would suffice to restrain these illegalities
and hideous wrongs. It might become advisable in
the interest of the natives to provide that not only the
officers, but also the sub-officers and some constables
of the police, should be Europeans in districts where
the plantations lay, great care being taken to select
honest and fearless men, and to keep a strict watch on
their conduct.
The two great securities against that further degra-
dation of the natives which has been foretold as a result
of the expected influx of Europeans are the general
teaching of the English language, and the grant of
19*
222 GEE A TER BRITAIN.
perfect freedom of action (the government standing
aloof) to missionaries of every creed under heaven.
The bestowal of the English tongue upon the natives
will give the local newspapers a larger circulation
among them than among the planter classes, and so,
by the powerful motive of self-interest, force them to
the side of liberty ; while the honesty of some of the
missionaries and the interest of others will certainly
place the majority of the religious bodies on the side
of freedom. It is needless to say that the success of a
policy which would be opposed by the local press and
at the same time by the chief English Churches is not
an eventuality about which we need give ourselves
concern, and it is therefore probable that on the whole
the encouragement of European settlement upon the
plains would be conducive to the welfare of the native
race.
That settlement or colonization would make our
tenure of India more secure is very doubtful, and, if
certain, would be a point of little moment. If, when
India has passed through the present transition stage
from a country of many peoples to a country of only
one, we cannot continue to rule her by the consent of
the majority of her inhabitants, our occupation of the
country must come to an end, whether we will or no.
At the same time, the union of interests and community
of ideas which would rise out of well-ordered settle-
ment would do much to endear our government to the
great body of the natives. As a warning against
European settlement as it is, every Englishman should
read the drama "Nil Darpan."
During my stay at Simla, I visited a pretty fair in
one of the neighboring valleys. There was much
buffoonery and dancing among other things, a sort of
iig by a fakeer, who danced himself into a tit, real or
COLONIZATION. 223
pretended; but the charm of this, as of all Hindoo
gatherings, lay in the color. The women of the Pun-
jaub dress very gayly for their fetes, wearing tight-fit-
ting trowsers of crimson, blue, or yellow, and a long
thin robe of white, or crimson-grounded Cashmere
shawl ; bracelets and anklets of silver, and a nose-ring,
either huge and thin, or small and nearly solid, com-
plete the dress.
At the fair were many of the Goorkhas (of whom
there is a regiment at Simla), who danced, and seem-
ingly enjoyed themselves immensely; indeed, the
natives of all parts of India, from Nepaul to the Deccan,
possess a most enviable faculty of amusement, and they
say that there is a professional buffoon attached to
every Goorkha regiment. Their full-dress is like that
of the French chasseurs a pied, but in their undress
uniform, of white, the trowsers worn so tight as to
wrinkle from stretching these dashing little fellows,
with their thin legs, broad shoulders, bullet heads, and
flat faces, look extremely like a corps of jockeys. A
general inspecting one of these regiments once said to
the colonel : " Your men are small, sir." " Their pay
is small, sir !" growled the colonel, in a towering passion.
There were unmistakable traces of Buddhist archi-
tecture in the little valley Hindoo shrine. Of the
Chinese pilgrimages to India in the Buddhist period
there are many records yet extant, and one of these,
we are told, relates how, as late as the fourteenth
century, the Emperor of China asked leave of the
Delhi ruler to rebuild a temple at the southern base
of the Himalayas, inasmuch as it was visited by his
Tartar people.
224 GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER IX.
OF all printed information upon India, there is none
which, either for value or interest, can be ranked with
that contained in the Government Gazette, which
during my stay at Simla was published at that town,
the Viceroy's Council having moved there for the hot
weather. Not only are the records of the mere
routine business interesting from their variety, but
almost every week there is printed along with the
Gazette a supplement, which contains memoranda from
leading natives or from the representatives of the local
governments upon the operations of certain customs,
or on the probable effects of a proposed law, or similar
communications. Sometimes the circulars issued by
the government are alone reprinted, " with a view to
elicit opinions," but more generally the whole of the
replies are given.
It is difficult for English readers to conceive the
number and variety of subjects upon which a single
number of the Gazette will give information of some
kin$. The paragraphs are strung together in the
order in which they are received, without arrange-
ment or connection. "A copy of a treaty with his
Highness the Maharajah of Cashmere" stands side by
side with a grant of three months' leave to a lieu-
tenant of Bombay Native Foot; while above is an ac-
count of the suppression of the late murderous outrages
in the Punjaub, and below a narrative of the upsetting
THE "GAZETTE." 225
of the Calcutta mails into a river near Jubbelpore. " A
khureta from the Viceroy to his Highness the Rao
Oomaid Singh Bahadoor" orders him to put down
crime in his dominions, and the humble answer of the
Rao is printed, in which he promises to do his best.
Paragraphs are given to "the floating dock at Ran-
goon;" "the disease among mail horses;" "the Suez
Canal;" "the forests of Oude;" and " polygamy among
the Hindoos." The Viceroy contributes a u note on the
administration of the Khetree chieftainship;" the
Bengal government sends a memorandum on " bribery
of telegraph clerks ;" and the Resident of Kotah an
official report of the ceremonies attending the recep-
tion of a viceregal khureta restoring the honors of a
salute to the Maha Rao of Kotah. The khureta was
received in state, the letter being mounted alone upon
an elephant magnificently caparisoned, and saluted
from the palace with 101 guns. There is no honor
that we can pay to a native prince so great as that of
increasing his salute, and, on the other hand, when
the Guicodar of Baroda allows a suttee, or when Jung
Bahadoor of Nepaul expresses his intention of visiting
Paris, we punish them by docking them of two guns,
or abolishing their salute, according to the magnitude
of the offense.
An Order in Council confers upon the High Priest
of the Parsees in the Deccan, " in consideration of
his services during the mutiny of 1857," the honorary
title of "Khan Bahadoor." A paragraph announces
that an official investigation has been made into the
supposed desecration by Scindia and the Viceroy of a
mosque at Agra, and that it has been found that the
place in question was not a mosque at all. Scindia had
given an entertainment to the Viceroy at the Taj
Mahal, and supper had been laid out at a building in
226 GREATER BRITAIN.
the grounds. The native papers said the building was
a mosque, but the Agra officials triumphantly demon-
strated that it had been used for a supper to Lord El-
lenborough after the capture of Cabool, and that its
name meant " Feast-place." "Report on the light-
houses of the Abyssinian coast;" "Agreement with
the Governor of Leh," Thibet, in reference to the
trans-Himalayan caravans; the promotion of one gen-
tleman to be " Commissioner of Coorg," and of another
to be " Superintendent of the teak forests of Lower
Burmah;" "Evidence on the proposed measures to
suppress the abuses of polyandry in Travancore and
Cochin (by arrangement with the Rajah of Travan-
core);" "Dismissal of Policeman Juggernauth Ram-
kam Oude division, No. 11 company for gross mis-
conduct;" "Report on the Orissa famine;" "Plague
in Turkey;" "Borer insects in coffee-plantations;"
" Presents to gentlemen at Fontainebleau for teaching
forestry to Indian officers;" "Report on the Cotton
States of America," for the information of native
planters; "Division of Calcutta into postal districts"
(in Bengalee as well as English); "Late engagement
between the Purijaub cavalry and the Afghan tribes;"
"Pension of 3rs. per mensem to the widow (aged 12)
of Jararam Chesa, Sepoy, 27th Bengal E". I.," are other
headings. The relative space given to matters of im-
portance and to those of little moment is altogether in
favor of the latter. The government of two millions
of people is transferred in three lines, but a page is
taken up with a list of the caste-marks and nose-borings
of native women applying for pensions as soldiers'
widows, and two pages are full of advertisements of
lost currency notes.
The columns of the Gazette, or at all events its sup-
plements, offer to government officials whose opinion
THE "GAZETTE." 227
has been asked upon questions on which they possess
valuable knowledge, or in which the people of their
district are concerned, an opportunity of attacking the
acts or laws of the government itself a chance of
which they are not slow to take advantage. One cov-
ertly attacks the license-tax; a second, under pre-
tense of giving his opinion on some proposed change
in the contract law, backs the demands of the indigo-
planters for a law that shall compel specific perform-
ance of labor-contracts on the part of the workman,
and under penalty of imprisonment; another lays all
the ills under which India can be shown to suffer at
the door of the home government, and points out the
ruinous effects of continual changes of Indian Secre-
taries in London.
It would be impossible to overrate the importance
of the supplements to the Gazette, viewed either as a
substitute for a system of communicated articles to the
native papers, or as material for English statesmen,
whether in India or at home, or as a great experiment
in the direction of letting the people of India legis-
late for themselves. The results of no less than three
government inquiries were printed in the supplement
during my stay in India, the first being in the shape
of a circular to the various local governments request-
ing their opinion on the proposed extension to natives
of the testamentary succession laws contained in the
Indian Civil Code: while the second related to the
" ghaut murders," and the third to the abuses of po-
lygamy among the Hindoos. The second and third
inquiries were conducted by means of circulars ad-
dressed by government to those most interested,
whether native or European.
The evidence in reply to the " ghaut murder" circu-
lar was commenced by a letter from the Secretary to
228 GREATER BRITAIN.
the government of Bengal to the Secretary to the gov-
ernment of India, calling the attention of the Viceroy
in Council to an article written in Bengalee by a Hin-
doo in the Dacca Prokash on the practice of taking sick
Hindoos to the river-side to die. It appears from this
letter that the local governments pay careful attention
to the opinions of the native papers unless, indeed,
we are to accept the view that " the Hindoo" was a
government clerk, and the article written to order a
supposition favored by its radical and destructive tone.
The Viceroy answered that the local officers and na-
tive gentlemen of all shades of religious opinion were
to be privately consulted. A confidential communica-
tion was then addressed to eleven English and four
Hindoo gentlemen, and the opinions of the English
and native newspapers were unofficially invited. The
Europeans were chiefly for the suppression of the
practice; the natives with the exception of one, who
made a guarded reply stated that the abuses of the
custom had been exaggerated, and that they could not
recommend its suppression. The government agreed
with the natives, and decided that nothing should be
done an opinion in which the Secretary of State con-
curred.
In his reply to the "ghaut murder" circular, the
representative of the orthodox Hindoos, after point-
ing out that the Dacca Prokash is the Dacca organ of
the Brahmos, or Bengal Deists, and not of the true
Hindoos, went on to quote at length from the Hindoo
scriptures passages which show that to die in the
Ganges water is the most blessed of all deaths. The
quotations were printed in native character as well
as in English in the Gazette. One of the officials in
his reply, pointed out that the discouragement of a
custom was often as effective as its prohibition, and
THE "GAZETTE." 229
instanced the cessation of the practice of " hook-swing-
ing" and "self-mutilation."
Valuable as is the correspondence as a sample of
the method pursued in such inquiries, the question
under discussion has not the importance that attaches
to the examination into the abuses of the practice of
polygamy.
To prevent an outcry that the customs of the Hindoo
people were being attacked, the Lieutenant-Governor
of Bengal stated in his letters to the government of
India that it was his wish that the inquiry should be
strictly confined to the abuses of Koolin polygamy,
and that there should be no general examination into
ordinary polygamy, which was not opposed even by
enlightened Hindoos. The polygamy of the Koolin
Brahmins is a system of taking a plurality of wives as
a means of subsistence: the Koolins were originally
Brahmins of peculiar merit, and such was their sanc-
tity that there grew up a custom of payments being
made to them by the fathers of the forty or fifty women
whom they honored by marriage. So greatly has the
custom grown that Koolins have sometimes as many
as eighty wives, and the husband's sole means of sub-
sistence consists in payments from the fathers of his
wives, each of whom he visits, however, only once in
three or four years. The Koolin Brahmins live in
luxury and indolence, their wives exist in misery, and
the whole custom is plainly repugnant to the teach-
ings of the Hindoo scriptures, and is productive of
vice and crime. The committee appointed for the
consideration of the subject by the Lieutenant-Gov-
ernor of Bengal which consisted of two English ci-
vilians and five natives reported that the suggested
systems of registration of marriages, or of fines in-
creasing in amount for every marriage after the first,
VOL. ii. 20
230 GREATER BRITAIN.
would limit the general liberty of the Hindoos to take
many wives, which they were forbidden to touch. On
the other hand, to recommend a declaratory law on
plural marriages would be to break their instructions,
which ordered them to refrain from giving the sanc-
tion of English law to Hindoo polygamy. One native
dissented from the report, and favored a declaratory
law.
The English idea of "not recognizing" customs or
religions which exist among a large number of the
inhabitants of English countries is a strange one, and
productive of much harm. It is not necessary, indeed,
that we should countenance the worship of Jugger-
nauth by ordering our officials to present offerings at
his shrine, but it is at least necessary that we should
recognize native customs by legislating to restrain them
within due limits. To refuse to " recognize" polyg-
amy, which is the social state of the vast majority of
the citizens of the British Empire, is not less ridiculous
than to refuse to recognize that Hindoos are black.
Recognition is one thing, interference another. How
far we should interfere with native customs is a ques-
tion upon which no general rule can be given, unless
it be that we should in all cases of proposed interfer-
ence with social usages or religious ceremonies consult
intelligent but orthodox natives, and act up to their
advice. In Ceylon, we have prohibited polygamy and
polyandry, although the law is not enforced; in India,
we " unofficially recognize" the custom; in Singapore,
we have distinctly recognized it by an amendment to
the Indian Succession Law, which there applies to
natives as well as Europeans. In India, we put down
suttee ; while, in Australia, we tolerate customs at least
as barbarous.
One of the social systems which we recognize in
THE "GAZETTE" 231
India is far more revolting to our English feelings
than is that of polygamy namely, the custom of poly-
andry, under which each woman has many husbands
at a time. This custom we unofficially recognize as
completely as we do polygyny, although it prevails
only on the Malabar coast, and among the hill-tribes
of the Himalaya, and not among the strict Hindoos.
The Thibetan frontier tribes have a singular form of
the institution, for with them the woman is the wife
of all the brothers of a family, the eldest brother choos-
ing her, and the eldest son succeeding to the property
of his mother and all her husbands. In Southern
India, the polyandry of the present day differs little
from that which in the middle of the fifteenth century
Piccolo de Conti found flourishing in Calicut. Each
woman has several husbands, some as many as ten,
who all contribute to her maintenance, she living apart
from all of them ; and the children are allotted to the
husbands at the will of the wife.
The toleration of polygyny, or common polygamy,
is a vexed question everywhere. In India, all author-
ities are in favor of respecting it; in Natal, opinion is
the other way. While we suppress it in Ceylon, even
among black races conquered by us with little pretext
only fifty years ago, we are doubtful as to the propriety
of its suppression by the United States among white
people, who, whatever was the case with the original
leaders, have for the most part settled down in Utah
since it has been the territory of a nation whose
imperial laws prohibit polygamy in plain terms.
The inquiries into the abuses of polygamy which
have lately been conducted in Bengal and in Natal
have revealed singular differences between the polyg-
amy of the Hindoos and of the hill-tribes, between
Indian and Mormon polygamy, and between both and
232 GREATER BRITAIN.
the Mohammedan law. The Hindoo laws, while they
limit the number of legal wives, allow of concubines,
and, in the Maharajah case, Sir Joseph Arnould went
so far as to say that polygamy and courtesanship are
always found to flourish side by side, although the re-
verse is notoriously the case at Salt Lake City, where
concubinage is punishable, in name at least, by death.
Again, polygamy is somewhat discouraged by Moham-
medan and Hindoo laws, and the latter even lay down
the sum which in many cases is to be paid to the first
wife as compensation for the wrong done her by the
taking of other wives. Among the Mormons, on the
other hand, polygamy is enjoined upon the faithful,
and, so far from feeling herself aggrieved, the first wife
herself selects the others, or is at the least consulted.
Among some of the hill-tribes of India, such as the
Paharis of Bhaugulpoor, polygamy is encouraged, but
with a limitation to four wives.
Among the Mohammedans, the number of marriages
is restricted, and divorce is common ; among the Mor-
mons, there is no limit indeed, the more wives the
greater a man's glory and divorce is ail-but unknown.
The greatest, however, of all the many differences be-
tween Eastern and Mormon polygamy lies in the fact
that, of the Eastern wives, one is the chief, while
Mormon wives are absolutely equal in legitimacy and
rank.
Not only is equality the law, but the first wife has
recognized superiority of position over the others in
the Mormon family. By custom she is always con-
sulted by her husband in reference to the choice of a
new wife, while the other wives are not always asked
for their opinion; but this is a matter of habit, and the
husband is in no way bound by her decision. Again,
the first wife if she is a consenting party often gives
UMRITSUR. 233
away the fresh wives at the altar; but this, too, is a
mere custom. The fact that in India one of the wives
generally occupies a position of far higher dignity than
that held by the others will make Indian polygamy
easy to destroy by the lapse of time and operation of
social and moral causes. As the city-dwelling natives
come to mix more with the Europeans, they will find
that only one of their wives will be generally recog-
nized. This will tend of itself to repress polygamy
among the wealthy native merchants and among the
rajahs who are members of our various councils, and
their example will gradually react upon the body of the
natives. Already a majority of the married people of
India are monogamists by practice, although polygam-
ists in theory; their marriages being limited by poverty,
although not by law. The classes which have to be
reached are the noble families, the merchants, and the
priests ; and over the two former European influence
is considerable, while the inquiry into Koolinism has
proved that the leading natives will aid us in repress-
ing the abuses of polygamy among the priests.
CHAPTEE X.
UMRITSUR.
AT Umbala, I heard that the Sikh pilgrims return-
ing from the sacred fair, or great Hindoo camp-meet-
ing, at Hurdwar, had been attacked by cholera, and
excluded from the town ; and as I quitted Umbala in
the evening, I came upon the cholera-stricken train of
pilgrims escaping by forced marches toward their
20*
234 GREATER BRITAIN.
homes, in many cases a thousand miles away. Tall,
lithe, long-bearded men with large hooked noses, high
foreheads, and thin lips, stalked along, leading by one
hand their veiled women, who ran behind, their crim-
son and orange trowsers stained with the dust of travel,
while bullock-carts decked out with jingling bells bore
the tired and the sick. Many children of all ages
were in the throng. For mile after mile I drove
through their ranks, as they marched with a strange
kind of weary haste, and marched, too, with few halts,
with little rest, if any. One great camp we left behind
us, but only one ; and all night long we were still pass-
ing ranks of marching men and women. The march
was silent ; there was none of the usual chatter of an
Indian crowd ; gloom was in every face, and the people
marched like a beaten army flying from a destroying
foe.
The disease, indeed, was pressing on their heels.
Two hundred men and women, as I was told at the
Umbala lines, had died among them in the single day.
Many had dropped from fright alone, but the pestilence
was in the horde, and its seeds were carried into what-
ever villages the pilgrims reached.
The gathering at Hurdwar had been attended by a
million people drawn from every part of the Punjaub
and Northwest; not only Hindoos and Sikhs, but
Scindhees, Beloochees, Pathans, and Afghans had their
representatives in this great throng. As we neared
the bridge of boats across the Sutlej, I found that a
hurried quarantine had been set up on the spot. Only
the sick or dying and bearers of corpses were detained,
however ; a few questions were asked of the remainder,
and ultimately they were allowed to cross ; but driving
on at speed, I reached Jullundur in the morning, only
to find that the pilgrims had been denied admittance
UMRITSUR. 235
to the town. A camp had been formed without the
city, to which the pilgrims had to go, unless they pre-
ferred to straggle on along the roads, dropping and
dying by the way ; and the villagers throughout the
country had risen on the wretched people, to prevent
them returning to their homes.
It is not strange that the government of India should
lately have turned its attention to the regulation or
suppression of these fairs, for the city-dwelling people
of North India will not continue long to tolerate enor-
mous gatherings at the commencement of the hot
weather, by which the lives of thousands must ulti-
mately be lost. At Hurdwar, at Juggernauth, and at
many other holy spots, hundreds of thousands mil-
lions, not unfrequently are collected yearly from all
parts of India. Great princes come down traveling
slowly from their capitals with trains of troops and fol-
lowers so long that they often take a day or more to
pass a given spot. The Maharajah of Cashmere's camp
between Kalka and Umbala occupied when I saw it
more space than that of Aldershot. Camels, women,
sutlers without count, follow in the train, so that a
body of five thousand men is multiplied until it occupies
the space and requires the equipments of a vast army.
A huge multitude of cultivators, of princes, of fakeers,
and of roisterers met for the excitement and the
pleasures of the camp is gathered about the holy spot.
There is religion, and there is trade ; indeed, the re-
ligious pilgrims are for the most part shrewd traders,
bent on making a good profit from their visit to the
fair.
The gathering at Hurdwar in 1867 had been more
than usually well attended and successful, when sud-
denly a rumor of cholera was heard ; the police pro-
cured the break-up of the camp, and government
236 GREATER BRITAIN.
thought fit to prohibit the visit to Simla ot the Mahara-
jah of Cashmere. The pilgrims had hardly left the
camp upon their journey home when cholera broke
out, and by the time I passed them hundreds were
already dead, and a panic had spread through India.
The cholera soon followed the rumor, and spread even
to the healthiest hill-towns, and 6000 deaths occurred
in the city of Srinuggur, after the Maharajah's return
with his infected escort from Hurdwar. A government
which has checked infanticide and suppressed suttee
could not fail to succeed, if it interfered, in causing
these fairs to be held in the cold weather.
At Jullundur I encountered a terrible dust-storm.
It came from the south and west, and, to judge from
its fierceness, must have been driven before the wind
from the great sandy desert of Northern Scinde. The
sun was rising for a sultry day, when from the south
there came a blast which in a minute covered the sky
with a leaden cloud, while from the horizon there ad-
vanced, more slowly, a lurid mass of reddish-brown.
It soon reached the city, and then, from the wall where
I sought shelter, nothing could be seen but driving
sand of ocher color, nothing heard but the shrieking
of the wind. The gale ceased as suddenly as it began,
but left a day which, delightful to travelers upon the
Indian plains, would elsewhere have been called by
many a hard name a day of lowering sky and drop-
ping rain, with chilling cold in short, a day that felt
and looked like an English thaw, though the ther-
mometer must have stood at 75. Another legacy
from the storm was a view of the Himalayas such as
is seldom given to the dwellers on the plains. Look-
ing at the clouds upon the northern horizon, I suddenly
caught sight of the Snowy Range hanging, as it seemed,
above them, half-way up the skies. Seen with a fore-
UMRITSUR. 237
ground of dawk jungle in bright bloom, the scene was
beautiful ; but the view too distant to be grand, except
through the ideas of immensity called up by the lofti-
ness of the peaks. While crossing the Beeas (the an-
cient Hyphasis, and eastern boundary of the Persian
empire in the days of Darius), as I had crossed the
Sutlej, by a bridge of boats, I noticed that the railway
viaduct, which was being built for the future Urnritsur
and Delhi line, stood some way from the deep water of
the river; indeed, stood chiefly upon dry land. The
rivers change their course so often that the Beeas and
Sutlej bridges will each have to be made a mile long.
There has lately been given us in the Punjaub a sin-
gular instance of the blind confidence in which gov-
ernment orders are carried out by the subordinates.
The order was that the iron columns on which the
Beeas bridge was to rest should each be forty-five feet
long. In placing them, in some cases the bottom of
the forty-five feet was in the shifting sand in others,
it was thirty feet below the surface of the solid rock ;
but a boring which was needless in the one case and
worse than useless in the other has been persevered in
to the end, the story runs, because it was the " hook'm."
The Indian rivers are the great bars to road and rail-
way making ; indeed, except on the Grand Trunk road,
it may be said that the rivers of India are still un-
bridged. On the chief mail-roads stone causeways are
built across the river-beds, but the streams are ail-but
impassable during the rains. Even on the road from
Kalka to Umbala, however, there is one river-bed with-
out a causeway, across which the dawk-gharree is
dragged by bullocks, who struggle slowly through the
sand ; and, in crossing it, I saw a steam-engine lying
half buried in the drift.
In India, we have been sadly neglectful of the roads.
238 GREATER BRITAIN.
The Grand Trunk road and the few great railroads are
the only means of communication in the country.
Even between the terminus of the Bengal lines at
Jubbelpore and of the Bombay railroad at ISTagpore
there was at the time of my visit no metaled road,
although the distance was but 200 miles, and the mails
already passed that way. Half a day at least was lost
upon all the Calcutta letters, and Calcutta passengers
for Bombay or England were put to an additional ex-
pense of some 30 and a loss of a week or ten days in
time from the absence of 200 miles of road. Until we
have good cross-roads in India, and metaled roads into
the interior from every railway station, we shall never
succeed in increasing the trade of India, nor in civil-
izing its inhabitants. The Grand Trunk road is, how-
ever, the best in the world, and is formed of soft white
nodules, found in beds through North India, which
when pounded and mixed with water is known as
"kunkur," and makes a road hard, smooth, clean, and
lasting, not unlike to that which asphalt gives.
At Umritsur I first found myself in the true East
the East of myrtles, roses, and veiled figures with flash-
ing eyes the East of the " Arabian Mghts" and "Lalla
Rookh." The city itself is Persian, rather than Indian,
in its character, and is overgrown with date-palms,
pomegranates, and the roses from which the precious
attar is distilled. Umritsur has the making of the
attar for the world, and it is made from a rose which
blossoms only once a year. Ten tons of petals of the
ordinary country rose (Rosa centifolia) are used annually
in attar-making at Umritsur, and are worth from X20
to ,30 a ton in the raw state. The petals are placed
in the retort with a small quantity of water, and heat
is applied until the water is distilled through a hollow
bamboo into a second vessel, which contains sandal-
UMRITSUE. 239
wood oil. A small quantity of pure attar passes with
the water into the receiver. The contents of the re-
ceiver are then poured out, and allowed to stand till
the attar rises to the surface, in small globules, and
is skimmed oft'. The pure attar sells for its weight in
silver.
Umritsur is famous for another kind of merchandise
more precious even than the attar. It is the seat of
the Cashmere shawl trade, and three great French
firms have their houses in the town, where, through
the help of friends, shawls may be obtained at singu-
larly low prices; but travelers in far-off regions are
often in the financial position of the Texan hunter who
was offered a million of acres for a pair of boots they
"have not got the boots."
It is only shawls of the second class that can be
bought cheap at Umritsur; those of the finest quality
vary in price from <40 to X250, <30 being the cost of
the material. The shawl manufacture of the Punjaub
is not confined to Umritsur; there are 900 shawl-
making shops in Loodiana, I was told while there.
There are more than sixty permanent dyes in use at
the Umritsur shawl-shops; cochineal, indigo, log-
wood, and saffron are the commonest and best. The
shawls are made of the down which underlies the hair
of the "shawl-goat" of the higher levels. The yak,
the camel, and the dog of the Himalayas, all possess
this down as well as their hair or wool ; it serves them
as a protection against the winter cold. Chogas long
cloaks used as dressing-gowns by Europeans are also
made in Umritsur, from the soft wool of the Bokhara
camel, for Umritsur is now the headquarters of the
Central Asian trade with Hiudostan.
The bazaar is the gayest and . most bustling in
India the goods of all India and Central Asia are
240 GREATER BRITAIN.
there. Dacca muslin known as " woven air" lies
side by side with thick chogas of kinkob and embroid-
ered Cashmere, Indian towels of coarse huckaback
half cover Chinese watered silks, and the brilliant dyes
of the brocades of Central India are relieved by the
modest grays of the soft puttoo caps. The buyers are
as motley as the goods Rajpoots in turbans of deep
blue, ornamented with gold thread, Cashmere valley
herdsmen in strange caps, nautch girls from the first
three bridges of Srinuggur, some of the so-called " hill-
fanatics," whose only religion is to levy contributions
on the people of the plains, and Sikh troopers, home
on leave, stalking through the streets with a haughty
swagger. Some of the Sikhs wear the pointed helmets
of their ancestors, the ancient Sakse ; but, whether he
be helmeted or not, the enormous white beard of the
Sikh, the erce curl of his mustache, the cock of the
turban, and the amplitude of his sash, all suggest the
fighting-man. The strange closeness of the likeness
of the Hungarians to the Sikhs would lead one to
think that the races are identical. Not only are they
alike in build, look, and warlike habits, but they brush
their beards in the same fashion, and these little cus-
toms endure longer than manners longer, often, than
religion itself. One of the crowd was a ruddy-faced,
red-bearded, Judas-haired fellow, that looked every
inch a Fenian, and might have stepped here from the
Kilkenny wilds; but the majority of the Sikhs had
aquiline noses and fine features, so completely Jewish
of the best and oldest type that I was reminded of
Sir William Jones's fanciful derivation of the Afghan
races from the lost Ten Tribes of Israel. It may be
doubted whether the Sikhs, Afghans, Persians, ancient
Assyrians, Jews, ancient Scythians, and Magyars were
not all originally of one stock.
UMEITSUB. 241
In India, dress still serves the purpose of denoting
rank. The peasant is clothed in cotton, the prince
in cloth of gold; and even religion, caste, and occu-
pation are distinguished by their several well-known
and unchanging marks. Indeed, the fixity of fashion
is as singular in Hindostan as its infinite changeable-
ness in New York or France. The patterns we see
to-day in the Bombay bazaar are those which were
popular in the days of Shah Jehan. This regulation
of dress by custom is one of the many difficulties
in the way of our English manufacturers in their
Indian ventures. There has been an attempt made
lately to bring about the commercial annexation of
India to England: Lancashire is to manufacture the
Longee, Dhotee, and Saree, we are told; Nottingham
or Paisley are to produce us shumlas; Dacca is to
give way to Norwich, and Coventry to supersede Jey-
poor. It is strange that men of Indian knowledge
and experience should be found who fail to point out
the absurdity of our entertaining hopes of any great
trade in this direction. The Indian women of the
humbler castes are the only customers we can hope to
have in India; the high- caste people wear only orna-
mented fabrics, in the making of which native manu-
facturers have advantages which place them out of the
reach of European competition: cheap labor; work-
men possessed of singular culture, and of a grace of
expression which makes their commonest productions
poems in silk and velvet; perfect knowledge of their
customers' wants and tastes; scrupulous regard to
caste conservatism all these are possessed by the
Hindoo manufacturer, and absent in the case of the
firms of Manchester and Rochdale. As a rule, all
Indian dress is best made by hand ; only the coarsest
and least ornamented fabrics can be largely manu-
VOL. II. 21
242 GREATER BRITAIN.
factured at paying rates in England. As for the
clothing of the poorer people, the men for the most
part wear nothing, the women little, and that little
washed often, and changed never. Even for the
roughest goods we cannot hope to undersell the native
manufacturers by much in the presidency towns. Up
country, if we enter into the competition, it can
scarcely fail to be a losing one. England is not more
unlikely to be clothed from India than India from
Great Britain. If European machinery is needed, it
will be erected in Yokohama, or in Bombay, not in
the "West Elding.
It is hardly to be believed that Englishmen have
for some years been attempting to induce the natives
to adopt our flower patterns peonies, butterflies, and
all. Ornament in India is always subordinate to the
purpose which the object has to serve. Hindoo art
begins where English ends. The principles which
centuries of study have given us as the maxims upon
which the grammar of ornament is based are those
which are instinctive in every native workman. Every
costume, every vase, every temple and bazaar in India,
gives eye-witness that there is truth in the saw that
the finest taste is consistent with the deepest slavery of
body, with the utmost slavishness of mind. A Hindoo
of the lowest caste will spurn the gift of a turban or a
loin-cloth the ornamentation of which consists not with
his idea of symmetry and grace. Nothing could in-
duce a Hindoo to clothe himself in such a gaudy, mas-
querading dress as maddens a Maori with delight and
his friends with jealousy and mortification. In art as
in deportment, the Hindoo loves harmony and quiet;
and dress with the Oriental is an art: there is as much
feeling as deep poetry in the curves of the Hindoo
Saree as in the outlines of the Taj.
U MBIT SUB. 243
Umritsur is the spiritual capital of^the Sikhs, and
the Durbar Temple in the center of the town is the
holiest of their shrines. It stands, with the sunbeams
glancing from its gilded roof, in the middle of a very
holy tank, filled with huge weird fish-monsters that
look as though they fed on men, and glare at you
through cruel eyes.
Leaving your shoes outside the very precincts of the
tank, with the police guard that we have stationed
there, you skirt one side of the water, and then leave
the mosaic terrace for a still more gorgeous causeway,
that, bordered on either side by rows of golden lamp-
supporters, carries the path across toward the rich
pavilion, the walls of which are as thickly spread with
gems as are those of Akbar's palace. Here you are
met by a bewildering din, for under the inner dome
sit worshipers by the score, singing with vigor the
grandest of barbaric airs to the accompaniment of
lyre, harp, and tomtom, while in the center, on a
cushion, is a long-bearded gray old gooroo, or priest
of the Sikh religion a creed singularly pure, though
little known. The effect of the scene is much en-
hanced by the beauty of the surrounding houses, whose
oriel windows overhang the tank, that the Sikh princes
may watch the evolutions of the lantern-bearing boats
on nights when the temple is illuminated. When seen
by moonlight, the tank is a very picture from the
"Arabian Nights."
This is a time of ferment in the Sikh religion. A
carpenter named Ram Singh a man with all that
combination of shrewdness and imagination, of enthu-
siasm and worldliness, by which the world is governed
another Mohammed or Brigham Young, perhaps
has preached his way through the Punjaub, infusing
his own energy into others, and has drawn away from
244 GREATER BRITAIN.
the Sikh Church some hundred thousand followers-
reformers who call themselves the Kookas. These
modern Anabaptists for many are disposed to look
upon Earn Singh as another John of Leyden bind
themselves by some terrible and secret oath, and the
government fear that reformation of religion is to be
accompanied by reformation of the State of a kind not
advantageous to the English power. When Ram Singh
lately proclaimed his intention of visiting the Durbar
Temple, the gooroos incited the Sikh fanatics to at-
tack his men with clubs, and the military police were
forced to interfere. There is now, however, a Kooka
temple at Lahore.
In spite of religious ferment, there is little in the
bazaar or temples of Umritsur to remind one of the
times only some twenty years ago when the Sikh
army crossed the Sutlej, and its leaders threatened to
sack Delhi and Calcutta, and drive the English out of
India; it is impossible, however, to believe that there
is no undercurrent in existence. Eighteen years cannot
have sufficed to extinguish the Sikh nationality, and
the men who beat us at Chillianwallah are not yet
dead, or even old. When the Maharajah Dhuleep
Singh returned from England in 1864 to bury his
mother's body, the chiefs crowded round him as he
entered Lahore, and besought him to resume his posi-
tion at their head. His answer was a haughty "Jao!"
("Begone!") If the Sikhs are to rise once more, they
will look elsewhere for their leader.
LAHOEE. 245
CHAPTER XL
LAHORE.
CROSSING in a railway journey of an hour one of the
most fertile districts of the Punjaub, I was struck with
the resemblance of the country to South Australia: in
each great sweeps of wheat-growing lands, with here
and there an acacia or mimosa tree; in each a climate
hot, but dry, and not unhealthy ; singularly hot here
for a tract in the latitude of Vicksburg, near which the
Mississippi is sometimes frozen.
Through groves of a yellow-blossomed, sweet-scented,
weeping acacia, much like laburnum, in which the for-
tified railway station seems out of place, I reached the
tomb-surrounded garden that is called Lahore a city
of pomegranates, oleanders, hollyhocks, and roses.
The date-groves of Lahore are beautiful beyond de-
scription; especially so the one that hides the Agra
Bank.
Lahore matches Umritsur in the purity of its Orient-
alism, Agra in the strength and grandeur of its walls:
but it has no Tank Temple and no Taj; the Great
Mosque is commonplace, Runjeet Singh's tomb is
tawdry, and the far-famed Shalimar Gardens inferior
to those of Pinjore. The strangest sight of Lahore is
its new railway station a fortress of red brick, one of
many which are rising all over India. The fortification
of the railway stations is decidedly the next best step
to that of having no forts at all.
The city of Lahore is surrounded by a suburb of
21*
246 GREATER BRITAIN.
great tombs, in which Europeans have in many cases
taken up their residence by permission of the owner,
the mausoleums being, from the thickness of their
walls, as cool as cellars. Sometimes, however, a fanat-
ical relative of the man buried in the tomb will warn
the European tenant that he will die within a year a
prophecy which poison has once or twice brought to
its fulfillment in the neighborhood of Lahore and at
Moultan.
Strolling in the direction of the Cabool Gate, I came
on the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjaub, driving
in an open carriage drawn by camels ; and passing out
on to the plain, I met all the officers in garrison return-
ing on Persian ponies from a game at the Afghan sport
of " hockey upon horseback," while a little farther
were some English ladies with hawks. Throughout
the Northern Punjaub a certain settling down in com-
fort on the part of the English officials is to be re-
marked, and the adaptation of native habits to English
uses, of which I had in one evening's walk the three
examples which I have mentioned, is a sign of a tend-
ency toward that making the best of things which in
a newly-occupied country precedes the entrance upon
a system of permanent abode. Lahore has been a Brit-
ish city for nineteen years, Bombay for two centuries
and more ; yet Lahore is far more English than Bombay.
Although there are as yet no signs of English settle-
ment in the Punjaub, still the official community in
many a Punjaub station is fast becoming colonial in
its type, and Indian traditions are losing ground. Eng-
lish wives and sisters abound in Lahore, even the rail-
way and canal officials having brought out their fam-
ilies ; and during the cool weather race meetings, drag
hunts, cricket matches, and croquet parties follow one
another from day to day, and Lahore boasts a volun-
LAHORE. 247
teer corps. When the hot season comes on, those who
can escape to the hills, and the wives and children of
those who cannot go, run to Dalhousie, as Londoners
do to Eastbourne.
The healthy English tone of the European communi-
ties of Umritsur and Lahore is reflected in the news-
papers of the Punjaub, which are the best in India, al-
though the blunders of the native printers render the
"betting news" unintelligible, and the " cricket scores"
obscure. The columns of the Lahore papers present
as singular a mixture of incongruous articles as even the
Government Gazette offers to its readers. An official
notice that it will be impossible to allow more than
560 elephants to take part in the next Lucknow pro-
cession follows a report of the "ice meeting" of the
community of Lahore, to arrange about the next
supply ; and side by side with this is an article on the
Punjaub trade with Chinese Tartary, which recom-
mends the government of India to conquer Afghanis-
tan, and to reoccupy the valley of Cashmere. A para-
graph notices the presentation by the Punjaub govern-
ment to a native gentleman, who has built a serai at
his own cost, of a valuable gift; another records a
brush with the Wagheers. The onty police case is the
infliction on a sweeper of a fine of thirty rupees for let-
ting his donkey run against a high-caste woman, where-
by she was defiled; but a European magistrate repri-
mands a native pleader for appearing in court with his
shoes on ; and a notice from the Lieutenant-Governor
gives a list of the holidays to be observed by the courts,
in which the "Queen's Birthday" comes between
"Bhudur Kalee" and " Oors data Gunjbuksh," while
"Christmas" follows "Shubberat," and "Ash Wed-
nesday" precedes "Holee." As one of the holidays
lasts a fortnight, and many more than a week, the total
248 GREATER BRITAIN.
number of dies non is considerable; but a postscript de-
crees that additional local holidays shall be granted for
fairs and festivals, and for the solar and lunar eclipse,
which brings the no-court days up to sixty or seventy,
besides those in the Long Vacation. The Hindoos are
in the happy position of having also six new-year's
days in every twelvemonth ; but the editor of one of
the Lahore papers says that his Mohammedan com-
positors manifest a singular interest in Hindoo feasts,
which shows a gratifying spread of toleration ! An
article on the "Queen's English in Hindostan," in the
Punjaub Times, gives, as a specimen of the poetry of
Young Bengal, a serenade in which the skylark carols
on the primrose bush. "Emerge, my love," the poet
cries
" The fragrant, dewy grove
We'll wander through till gun-fire bids us part."
But the final stanza is the best:
" Then, Leila, come ! nor longer cogitate ;
Thy egress let no scruples dire retard ;
Contiguous to the portals of thy gate
Suspensively I supplicate regard."
The advertisements range from books on the lan-
guages of Dardistan to government contracts for ele-
phant fodder, or price-lists of English beer; and an
announcement of an Afghan history in the Urdu tongue
is followed by a prospectus of Berkhamstead Gram-
mar School. King Edward would rub his eyes were
he to wake and find himself being advertised in La-
hore.
The Punjaub Europeans, with their English news-
papers and English ways, are strange governors for an
empire conquered from the bravest of all Eastern races
little more than eighteen years ago. One of them,
OUR INDIAN ARMY. 249
taking up a town policeman's staff, said to me, one day,
" Who could have thought in 1850 that in 1867 we
should be ruling the Sikhs with this ?"
CHAPTER XII.
OUK INDIAN ARMY.
DURING my stay in Lahore, a force of Sikhs and
Pathans was being raised for service at Hong Kong by
an officer staying in the same hotel with myself, and a
large number of men were being enlisted in the city
by recruiting parties of the Bombay army. In all
parts of India, we are now relying, so far as our native
forces are concerned, upon the men who only a few
years back were by much our most dangerous foes.
Throughout the East, subjects concern themselves
but little in the quarrels of their princes, and the
Sikhs are no exception to the rule. They fought splen-
didly in the Persian ranks at Marathon ; under Shere
Singh, they made their memorable stand at Chillian-
wallah; but, under Nicholson, they beat the bravest
of the Bengal sepoys before Delhi. Whether they
fight for us or against us is all one to them. They fight
for those who pay them, and have no politics beyond
their pockets. So far, they seem useful allies to us,
who hold the purse of India. Unable to trust Hin-
doos with arms, we can at least rule them by the em-
ployment as soldiers of their fiercest enemies.
When we come to look carefully at our system, its
morality is hardly clear. As we administer the reve-
nues of India, nominally at least, for the benefit of the
250 GREATER BRITAIN.
Indians, it might be argued that we may fairly keep
on foot such troops as are best fitted to secure her
against attack ; but the argument breaks down when
it is remembered that 70,000 British troops are main-
tained in India from the Indian revenues for that pur-
pose, and that local order is secured by an ample force
of military police. Even if the employment of Sikhs
in times of emergency may be advisable, it cannot be
denied that the day has gone by for permanently over-
awing a people by means of standing armies composed
of their hereditary foes.
In discussing the question of the Indian armies, we
have carefully to distinguish between the theory and
the practice. The Indian official theory says that not
only is the native army a valuable auxiliary to the
English army in India, but that its moral effect on the
people is of great benefit to us, inasmuch as it raises
their self-respect, and offers a career to men who would
otherwise be formidable enemies. The practice pro-
claims that the native troops are either dangerous or
useless by arming them with weapons as antiquated as
the bow and arrow, destroys the moral effect which
might possibly be produced by a Hindoo force by fill-
ing the native ranks with Sikh and Goorkha aliens and
heretics, and makes us enemies without number by
denying to natives that promotion which the theory
holds out to them. The existing system is officially
defended by the most contradictory arguments, and on
the most shifting of grounds. Those who ask why we
should not trust the natives, at all events to the extent
of allowing Bengal and Bombay men to serve, and to
serve with arms that they can use, in bodies which
profess to be the Bengal and Bombay armies, but which
in fact are Sikh regiments which we are afraid to arm,
are told that the native army has mutinied times with-
OUR INDIAN ARMY. 251
out end, that it has never fought well except where,
from the number of British present, it had no choice
but to fight, and that it is dangerous and inefficient.
Those who ask why this shadow of a native army
should be retained are told that its records of distin-
guished service in old times are numerous and splen-
did. The huge British force maintained in India, and
the still huger native army, are each of them made an
excuse for the retention of the other at the existing
standard. If you say that it is evident that 70,000
British troops cannot be needed in India, you are told
that they are required to keep the 120,000 native troops
in check. If you ask, Of what use, then, are the lat-
ter? you hear that in the case of a serious imperial war
the English troops would be withdrawn, and the de-
fense of India confided to these very natives who in
time of peace require to be thus severely held in check.
Such shallow arguments would be instantly exposed
were not English statesmen bribed by the knowledge
that their acceptance as good logic allows us to main-
tain at India's cost 70,000 British soldiers, who in time
of danger would be available for our defense at home.
That the English force of 70,000 men maintained in
India in time of peace can be needed there in peace or
war is not to be supposed by those who remember that
10,000 men were all that were really needed to suppress
the wide-spread mutiny of 1857, and that Russia our
only possible enemy from without never succeeded
during a two years' war in her own territory in placing
a disposable army of 60,000 men in the Crimea.
Another mutiny such as that of 1857 is, indeed, impos-
sible, now that we retain both forts and artillery
exclusively in British hands; and Russia, having to
bring her supplies and men across almost boundless
deserts, or through hostile Afghanistan, would be met
252 GREATER BRITAIN.
at the Khyber by our whole Indian army, concentrated
from the most distant stations at a few days' notice,
fighting in a well-known and friendly country, and
supplied from the plains of all India by the railroads.
Our English troops in India are sufficiently numerous,
were it necessary, to fight both the Russians and our
native army ; but it is absurd that we should maintain
in India, in a time of perfect peace, at a yearly cost to
the people of that country of from fourteen to sixteen
millions sterling, an army fit to cope with the most
tremendous disasters that could overtake the country,
and at the same time unspeakably ridiculous that we
should in all our calculations be forced to set down the
native army as a cause of weakness. The native rulers,
moreover, whatever their unpopularity with their
people, were always able to array powerful levies
against enemies from without; and if our government
of India is not a miserable failure, our influence over
the lower classes of the people ought, at the least, to
be little inferior to that exercised by the Mogul emper-
ors or the Maratta chiefs.
As for local risings, concentration of our troops by
means of the railroads that would be constructed in
half a dozen years out of our military savings alone,
and which American experience shows us cannot be
effectually destroyed, would be amply sufficient to
deal with them were the force reduced to 30,000 men ;
and a general rebellion of the people of India we have
no reason to expect, and no right to resist should it by
any combination of circumstances be brought about.
The taxation required to maintain the present Indian
army presses severely upon what is in fact the poorest
country in the world ; the yearly drain of many thou-
sand men weighs heavily upon us; and our system
seems to proclaim to the world the humiliating fact,
OUR INDIAN ARMY. 253
that under British government, and in times of peace,
the most docile of all peoples need an army of 200,000
men, in addition to the military police, to watch them,
or keep them down.
Whatever the decision come to with regard to the
details of the changes to be made in the Indian army
system, it is at least clear that it will he expedient in
us to reduce the English army in India if we intend it
for India's defense, and our duty to abolish it if we in-
tend it for our own. It is also evident that, after allow-
ing for mere police duties which should in all cases
be performed by men equipped as, and called by the
name of, police the native army should, whatever its
size, be rendered as effective as possible, by instruc-
tion in the use of the best weapons of the age. If
local insurrections have unfortunately to be quelled,
they must be quelled by English troops; and against
European invaders, native troops, to be of the slightest
service, must be armed as Europeans. As the pos-
sibility-of European invasion is remote, it would proba-
bly be advisable that the native army should be gradu-
ally reduced until brought to the point of merely
supplying the body-guards and ceremonial-troops; at
all events, the practice of overawing Sikhs with Hin-
doos, and Hindoos with Sikhs, should be abandoned
as inconsistent with the nature of our government in
India, and with the first principles of freedom.
There is, however, no reason why we should wholly
deprive ourselves of the services of the Indian warrior
tribes. If we are to continue to hold such outposts
as Gibraltar, the duty of defending them against all
comers might not improperly be intrusted wholly or
partly to the Sikhs or fiery little Goorkhas, on the
ground that, while almost as brave as European troops,
they are somewhat cheaper. It is possible, indeed,
VOL. IT. 22
254 GREATER BRITAIN.
that, just as we draw our Goorkhas from independent
Nepaul, other European nations may draw Sikhs from
us. We are not even now the only rulers who employ
Sikhs in war; the Khan of Kokand is said to have
many in his service: and, tightly ruled at home, the
Punjaubees may not improbably become the. Swiss of
Asia.
Whatever the European force to be maintained in
India, it is clear that it should be local. The Queen's
army system has now had ten years' trial, and has
failed in every point in which failure was prophesied.
The officers, hating India, and having no knowledge
of native languages or customs, bring our government
into contempt among the people; recruits in England
dread enlistment for service they know not where;
and Indian tax-payers complain that they are forced
to support an army over the disposition of which they
have not the least control, and which in time of need
would probably be withdrawn from India. Even the
Dutch, they say, maintain a purely colonial force in
Java, and the French have pledged themselves that,
when they withdraw the Algerian local troops, they
will replace them by regiments of the line. England
and Spain alone maintain purely imperial troops at
the expense of their dependencies.
Were the European army in India kept separate from
the English service, it would be at once less costly and
more efficient, while the officers would be acquainted
with the habits of the natives and customs of the
country, and not, as at present, mere birds of passage,
careless of offending native prejudice, indifferent to
the feelings of those among whom they have to live,
and occupied each day of their idle life in heartily
wishing themselves at home again. There are, indeed,
to the existing system drawbacks more serious than
RUSSIA. 255
have been mentioned. Sufficient stress has not hitherto
been laid upon the demoralization of our army and
danger to our home freedom that must result from the
keeping in India of half our regular force. It is hard
to believe that men who have periodically to go through
such scenes as those of 1857, or who are in daily eon-
tact with a cringing dark-skinned race, can in the long
run continue to be firm friends to constitutional liberty
at home ; and it should be remembered that the English
troops in India, though under the orders of the Corn-
man der-in- Chief, are practically independent of the
House of Commons.
It is not only constitutionally that Indian rotation
service is bad. The system is destructive to the dis-
cipline of our troops, and a separate service is the only
remedy.
CHAPTER XIII.
RUSSIA.
FOR fifty years or more, we have been warned that
one day we must encounter Russia, and for fifty years
Muscovite armies, conquering their way step by step,
have been advancing southward, till we find England
and Russia now ail-but face to face in Central Asia.
Steadily the Russians are advancing. Their circular
of 1864, in which they declared that they had reached
their wished-for frontier, has been altogether forgotten ?
and all Kokand, and portions of Bokhara, have been
swallowed up, while our spies in St. Petersburg tell the
Indian Council that Persia herself is doomed. Al-
256 GREATER BRITAIN.
though, however, the distance of the Eussian from the
English frontiers has been greatly reduced of late, it is
still far more considerable than is supposed. Instead
of the Eussian outposts being 100 miles from Peshawur,
as one alarmist has said, they are still 400 ; and Samar-
cand, their nearest city, is 450 miles in a straight line
over the summit of the Hindoo Koosh, and 750 by road
from our frontier at the Khyber. At the same time,
we must, in our calculations of the future, assume that
a few years will see Eussia at the northern base of the
Hindoo Koosh, and in a position to overrun Persia
and take Herat.
It has been proposed that we should declare to Eus-
sia our intention to preserve Afghanistan as neutral
ground ; but there arises this difficulty, that, having
agreed to this plan, Eussia would immediately proceed
to set about ruling Afghanistan through Persia. On
the other hand, it is impossible, as we have already
found, to treat with Afghanistan, as there is no Afghan-
istan with which to treat ; nor can we enter into friendly
relations with any Afghan chief, lest his neighbor and
enemy should hold us responsible for his acts. If we
are to have any dealings with the Afghans, we shall
soon be forced to take a side, and necessarily to fight
and conquer, but at a great cost in men and money.
It might be possible to make friends of some of the
frontier tribes by giving them lands within our borders
on condition of their performing military service and
respecting the lives and property of our merchants ; but
the policy would be costly, and its results uncertain,
while we should probably soon find ourselves embroiled
in Afghan politics. Moreover, meddling in Afghan-
istan, long since proved to be a foolish and a danger-
ous course, can hardly be made a wise one by the fact
of the Eussians being at the gate.
RUSSIA. 257
Many would have us advance to Herat, on the ground
that it is in Afghanistan, and not on the plains of In-
dia, that Russia must be met ; but such is the fierce-
ness of the Afghans, such the poverty of their country,
that its occupation would be at once a source of weak-
ness and a military trap to the invader. Were we to
occupy Herat, we should have Persians and Afghans
alike against us ; were the Russians to annex Afghan-
istan, they could never descend into the plains of India
without a little diplomacy, or a little money from us,
bringing the Afghan fanatics upon their rear. When,
indeed, we .look carefully into the meaning of those
Anglo-Indians who would have us repeat our attempt
to thrash the Afghans into loving us, we find that the
pith of their complaint seems to be that battles arid con-
quests mean promotion, and that we have no one left
in India upon whom we can wage war. Civilians look
for new appointments, military men for employment,
missionaries for fresh fields, and all see their opening
in annexation, while the newspapers echo the cry of
their readers, and call on the Viceroy to annex Afghan-
istan "at the cost of impeachment."
Were our frontier at Peshawur a good one for defense,
there could be but little reason shown for an occupation
of any part of Afghanistan; but, as it is, the question
of the desirability of an advance is complicated by the
lamentable weakness of our present frontier. Were
Russia to move down upon India, we should have to
meet her either in Afghanistan or upon the Indus : to
meet her at Peshawur, at the foot of the mountains
and with the Indus behind us, would be a military
suicide. Of the two courses that would be open to us,
a retreat to the Indus would be a terrible blow to the
confidence of our troops, and an advance to Cabool or
Herat would be an advance out of reach of our railroad
22*
258 GREATER BRITAIN.
communications, and through a dangerous defile. To
maintain our frontier force at Peshawur, as we now do,
is to maintain in a pestilential valley a force which, if
attacked, could not fight where it is stationed, but
would be forced to advance into Afghanistan or retreat
to the Indus. The best policy would probably be to
withdraw the Europeans from Peshawur and Rawul
Pindee, and place them upon the Indus in the hills
near Attock, completing our railroad from Attock to
Lahore and from Attock to the hill station, and to
leave the native force to defend the Khyber and Pesha-
wur against the mountain tribes. We should also
encourage European settlement in the valley of Cash-
mere. On the other hand, we should push a short
railroad from the Indus to the Bholan Pass, and there
concentrate a second powerful European force, with a
view to resisting invasion at that point, and of taking
in flank and rear any invader who might advance upon
the Khyber. The Bholan Pass is, moreover, on the
road to Candahar and Herat; and, although it would
be a mistake to occupy those cities except by the wish
of the Afghans, still the advance of the Russians will
probably one day force the Afghans to ally themselves
to us and solicit the occupation of their cities. The
fact that the present ruler of Herat is a mere^tool of
the Persians or feudatory of the Czar will have no
effect whatever on his country, for if he once threw
himself openly into Russian hands his people would
immediately desert him. So much for the means of
defense against the Russians, but there is some chance
that we may have to defend India against another
Mohammedan invasion, secretly countenanced, but not
openly aided, by Russia. While on my way to England,
I had a conversation on this matter with a well-informed
Syrian Pacha, but notorious Russian-hater. He had
BUSSIA. 259
been telling me that Russian policy had not changed,
but was now, as ever, a policy of gradual annexation ;
that she envied our position in India, and hated us
because our gentle treatment of Asiatics is continually
held up to her as an example. "Russia has attacked
you twice in India, and will attack you there again,"
he said. Admitting her interference in the Afghan
war, I denied that it was proved that she had any in-
fluence in Hindostan, or any hand in the rebellion of
1857. My friend made me no spoken answer, but
took four caskets that stood upon the table, and, set-
ting them in a row, with an interval between them,
pushed the first so that it struck the second, the second
the third, and the third the fourth. Then, looking up,
he said, " There you have the manner of the Russian
move on India. I push No. 1, but you see No. 4
moves. 1 influences 2, 2 influences 3, and 3 influences
4; but 1 doesn't influence 4. Oh, dear me, no! Very
likely *even 1 and 3 are enemies, and hate each other;
and if 3 thought that she was doing 1's work, she
would kick over the traces at once. Nevertheless, she
is doing it. In 1857, Russia certainly struck at you
through Egypt, and probably through Central Asia
also. Lord Palmerston was afraid to send troops
through Egypt, though, if that could have been largely
done, the mutiny could have been put down in half
the time, and with a quarter the cost; and Naua Sahib,
in his proclamation, stated, not without reason, that
Egypt was on his side. The way you are being now
attacked is this: Russia and Egypt are for the mo-
ment hand and glove, though their ultimate objects
are conflicting. Egypt is playing for the leadership of
all Islam, even of Moslems in Central Asia and India.
Russia sees that this game is for the time her game, as
through Egypt she can excite the Turcomans, Afghans,
260 GREATER BRITAIN.
and other Moslems of Central Asia to invade India in
the name of religion and the Prophet, but, in fact, in
the hope of plunder, and can also at the same time
raise your Mohammedan population in Hindostan a
population over which you admit you have absolutely
no hold. Of course you will defeat these hordes when-
ever you meet them in the field; but their numbers
are incalculable, and their bravery great. India has
twice before been conquered from the north, from
Central Asia, and you must remember that behind
these hordes comes Russia herself. Mohammedanism
is weak here, on the Mediterranean, I grant you; but
it is very strong in Central Asia as strong as it ever
was. Can you trust your Sikhs, too? I doubt it."
When I asked the Pacha how Egypt was to put her-
self at the head of Islam, he answered: " Thus. We
Egyptians are already supporting the Turkish empire.
Our tribute is a million (francs), but we pay five mil-
lions, of which four go into the Sultan's privy*purse.
We have all the leading men of Turkey in our pay :
30,000 of the best troops serving in Crete, and the
whole of the fleet, are contributed by Egypt. Now,
Egypt had no small share in getting up the Cretan
insurrection, and yet, you see, she does, or pretends to
do, her best to put it down. The Sultan, therefore, is
at the Viceroy's mercy, if you don't interfere. No one
else will if you do not. The Viceroy aims at being
nominally, as he is really, < the Grand Turk.' Once
Sultan, with Crete and the other islands handed over
to Greece or Russia, the present Viceroy commands
the allegiance of every Moslem people thirty millions
of your Indian subjects included: that is, practically
Russia commands that allegiance Russia practically,
though not nominally, at Constantinople wields the
power of Islam, instead of being hated by every true
HUSSIA. 261
believer, as she would be if she annexed Turkey in
Europe. Her real game is a far grander one than that
with which she is credited." " Turkey is your vassal,"
the Pacha went on to say ; " she owes her existence
entirely to you. Why not use her, then ? Why not
put pressure on the Sultan to exert his influence over
the Asian tribes which is far greater than you believe
for your benefit ? Why not insist on your Euphrates
route? Why not insist on Egypt ceasing to intrigue
against you, and annex the country if she continues
in her present course? If you wish to bring matters
to a crisis, make Abdul Aziz insist on Egypt being
better governed, or on the slave-trade being put down.
You have made your name a laughing-stock here.
You let Egypt half bribe, half force Turkey into
throwing such obstacles in the way of your Euphrates
route that it is no nearer completion now than it ever
was. You force Egypt to pass a law abolishing the
slave-trade and slavery itself, and you have taken no
notice of the fact that this law has never been enforced
in so much as a single instance. You think that you
are all right now that you have managed to force our
government into allowing your troops to pass to and
fro through Egypt, thus making your road through the
territory of your most dangerous enemy. Where would
you be in case of a war with Russia?"
When I pleaded that, if we were refused passage, we
should occupy the country, the Pacha replied : " Of
course you would; but you need not imagine that
you will ever be refused passage. What will happen
will be that, just at the time of your greatest need, the
floods will come down from the mountains and wash
away ten miles of the line, and all the engines will go
out of repair. You will complain : we shall offer to
lay the stick about the feet of all the employes of the
262 GREATER BRITAIN.
line. What more would you have ? Can we prevent
the floods? When our government wished to keep
your Euphrates scheme from coming to anything, did
they say : ' Do this thing, and we will raise Islam against
you'? Oh no! they just bribed your surveyors to be
attacked by the Bedouin, or they bribed a pacha to tell
you that the water was alkaline and poisonous for the
next hundred miles, and so on, till your company was
ruined, and the plan at an end for some years. Your
home government does not understand us Easterns.
Why don't you put your Eastern affairs into the hands
of your Indian government? You have two routes to
India Egypt and Euphrates valley, and both are prac-
tically in the hands of your only great enemy Russia."
In all that my Syrian friend said of the danger
of our relying too much upon our route across Egypt,
and on the importance to us of the immediate con-
struction of the Euphrates Valley Railway line,, there
is nothing but truth ; but, in his fears of a fresh in-
vasion of India by the Mohammedans, he forgot that
for fighting purposes the Mohammedans are no longer
one, but two peoples; for the Moslem races are
divided into Sonnites and Shiites, or orthodox and
dissenting Mohammedans, who hate each other far
more fiercely than they hate us. Our Indian Moslems
are orthodox, the Afghans and Persians are dissenters,
the Turks are orthodox. If Egypt and Persia play
Russia's game, we may count upon the support of the
Turks of Syria, of the Euphrates valley, and of India.
To unite Irish Catholics and Orangemen in a religious
crusade against the English would be an easy task by
the side of that of uniting Sonnite and Shiite against
India. A merely Shiite invasion is always possible,
but could probably be met with ease, by opposition at
the Khyber, and resistance upon the Indus, followed
BUSSIA. 263
by a rapid advance from the Bholan. Russia herself
is not without her difficulties with the strictest and
most fanatical Mohammedans. Now that she has con-
quered Bokhara, their most sacred land, they hate
her as fiercely as they hate us. The crusade, if she
provokes it, may be upon our side, and British com-
manders in green turbans may yet summon the Faith-
ful to arms, and invoke the Prophet.
It is to be remarked that men who have lived long
in India think that our policy in the East has over-
whelming claims on the attention of our home authori-
ties. Not only is Eastern business to be performed,
and Eastern intrigues watched carefully, but, accord-
ing to these Indian flies, who think that their Eastern
cart-wheel is the world, Oriental policy is to guide
home policy, to dictate our European friendships, to
cause our wars.
No Englishman in England can sympathize with
the ridiculous inability to comprehend our real posi-
tion in India which leads many Anglo-Indians to cry
out that we must go to war with Russia to "keep up
our prestige;" and, on the other hand, it need hardly
be shown that, apart from the extension of trade and
the improvement of communication, we need not
trouble ourselves with alliances to strengthen us in the
East. Supported by the native population, we can
maintain ourselves in India against the world; unsup-
ported by them, our rule is morally indefensible, and
therefore not long to be retained by force of arms.
The natives of India watch with great interest the
advance of Russia; not that they believe that they
would be any better off under her than under us, but
that they would like, at all events, to see some one
thrash us, even if in the end they lost by it; just as a
boy likes to see a new bully thrash his former master,
264 GEE ATE R BUI TAIN.
even though the later be also the severer tyrant.
That the great body of the people of India watch
with feverish excitement the advance of Russia is
seen from the tone of the native press, which is also of
service to us in demonstrating that the mass of the
Hindoos are incapable of appreciating the benefits,
and even of comprehending the character, of our rule.
They can understand the strength which a steady
purpose gives; they cannot grasp the principles which
lie at the root of our half-mercantile, halt-benevolent
despotism.
No native believes that we shall permanently remain
in India; no native really sympathized with us during
the rebellion. To the people of India we English are
a mystery. "We profess to love them, and to be edu-
cating them for something they cannot comprehend,
which we call freedom and self-government; in the
mean time, while we do not plunder them, nor con-
vert them forcibly, after the wont of the Mogul
emperors, we kick and cuff them all round, and
degrade the nobles by ameliorating the condition of
humbler men.
No mere policy of disarmament or of oppression can
be worth much as a system for securing lasting peace,
for if our Irish constabulary cannot prevent the intro-
duction of Fenian arms to Cork and Dublin, how
doubly impossible must it be to guard a frontier of
five or six thousand miles by means of a police force
which itself cannot be trusted ! That prolonged dis-
armament causes our subjects to forget the art of war
is scarcely true, and if true would tell both ways.
The question is not one of disarmament, and suppres-
sion of rebellion : it is that of whether we can raise up
in India a people that will support our rule; and if
this is to be done, there must be an end of cuffing.
RUSSIA. 265
Were the Hindoos as capable of appreciating the
best points of our government as they are of pointing
out the worst, we should have nothing to fear in com-
parison with Russia. Drunken, dirty, ignorant, and
corrupt, the Russian people are no fit rulers for Hin-
dostan. Were our rival that which she pretends to
be, a civilized European Power with "a mission" in
the East; were she even, indeed, an enlightened com-
mercial Power, with sufficiently benevolent instincts
but with no policy outside her pocket, such as England
was till lately in the East, and is still in the Pacific,
we might find ourselves able to meet her with open
arms, and to bring ourselves to believe that her ad-
vance into Southern Asia was a gain to mankind. As
it is, the Russians form a barbarous horde, ruled by a
German emperor and a German ministry, who, how-
ever, are as little able to suppress degrading drunken-
ness and shameless venality as they are themselves
desirous of promoting true enlightenment and educa-
tion. "Talk of Russian civilization of the East!" an
Egyptian once said to me; "why, Russia is an organ-
ized barbarism; why the Russians are why they
are why nearly as bad as we are!" It should be
remembered, too, that Russia, being herself an Asiatic
power, can never introduce European civilization into
Asia. All the cry of "Russia! Russia!" all this
magnifying of the Russian power, only means that, the
English being the strong men most hated by the weak
men of Southern Asia, the name of the next strongest
is used to terrify them. The offensive strength of
Russia has been grossly exaggerated by alarmists, who
forget that, if Russia is to be strong in Bokhara and
Khiva, it will be Bokharan and Khivan strength. In
all our arguments we assume that with three-fourths
of her power in Asia, and with her armies composed
VOL. ii. 23
266 GREATER BRITAIN.
of Asians, Russia will remain a European Power. What-
ever the composition of her forces, it may be doubted
whether India is not a stronger empire than her new
neighbor. The military expenditure of India is equal
to that of Russia ; the homogeneousness of the North-
ern Power is at the best inferior to that of India;
India has twice the population of Russia, five times
her trade, and as large a revenue. To the miserable
military administration of Russia, Afghanistan would
prove a second Caucasus, and by their conduct we see
that the Afghans themselves are not terrified by her
advance. The people with whom an Asiatic prince
seeks alliances are not those whom he most fears.
That the Afghans are continually intriguing with
Russia against us, merely means that they fear us
more than they fear Russia.
Russia will one day find herself encountering the
English or Americans in China, perhaps, but not upon
the plains of Hindostan. Wherever and whenever the
contest comes, it can have but one result. Whether
upon India or on England falls the duty of defense,
Russia must be beaten. A country that was fifty years
conquering the Caucasus, and that could never place a
disposable force of 60,000 men in the Crimea, need
give no fear to India, while her grandest offensive
efforts would be ridiculed by America, or by the Eng-
land of to-day. To meet Russia in the way that we
are asked to meet her means to meet her by corrup-
tion, and a system of meddling Eastern diplomacy is
proposed to us which is revolting to our English na-
ture. Let us by all means go our own way, and let
Russia go hers. If we try to meet the Russian Ori-
entals with craft, we shall be defeated; let us meet
them, therefore, with straightforwardness and friend-
ship, but, if necessary, in arms.
NATIVE STATES. 267
It is not Russia that we need dread, but, by the de-
struction of the various nationalities in Hindostan by
means of centralization and of railroads, we have
created an India which we cannot fight. India her-
self, not Russia, is our danger, and our task is rather
to conciliate than to conquer.
CHAPTER XIV,
NATIVE STATES.
QUITTING Lahore at night, I traveled to Moultan by
a railway which has names for its stations such as
India cannot match. Chunga-Munga, Wanrasharam,
Cheechawutnee, and Chunnoo, follow one another in
that order. During the night, when I looked out into
the still moonlight, I saw only desert, and trains of
laden camels pacing noiselessly over the waste sands ;
but in the morning I found that the whole country
within eye-shot was a howling wilderness. Moultan,
renowned in warlike history from Alexander's time to
ours, stands upon the edge of the great sandy tract
once known as the ''Desert of the Indies." In every
village, bagpipes were playing through the livelong
night. There are many resemblances to the Gaelic
races to be found in India; the Hindoo girl's saree is
the plaid of the Gal way peasantess, or of the Tron-
gate fishwife; many of the hill-tribes wear the kilt;
but the Punjaubee pipes are like those of the Italian
pfiferari rather than those of the Scotch Highlander.
The great sandy desert which lies between the Indus
and Rajpootana has, perhaps, a future under British
268 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
rule. Wherever snowy mountains are met with in
warm countries, yearly floods, the product of the
thaws, sweep down the rivers that take their rise in
the glaciers of the chain, and the Indus is no excep-
tion to the rule. "Were the fall less great, the stream
less swift, Scinde would have been another Cambodia,
another Egypt. As it is, the fertilizing floods pour
through the deep river-bed instead of covering the
land, and the silt is wasted on the Arabian Gulf. ISTo
native State with narrow boundaries can deal with the
great works required for irrigation on the scale that
can alone succeed; but, possessing as we do the coun-
try from the defiles whence the five rivers escape into
the plains to the sandy bars at which they lose them-
selves in the Indian Seas, we might convert the Pun-
jaub and Scinde into a garden which should support a
happy population of a hundred millions, reared under
our rule, and the best of bulwarks against invasion
from the north and west.
At Umritsur I had seen those great canals that are
commencing to irrigate and fertilize the vast deserts
that stretch to Scinde. At Jullundur I had already
seen their handiwork in the fields of cotton, tobacco,
and wheat that blossom in the middle of a wilderness;
and if the whole Punjaub and Indus valley can be made
what Jullundur is, no outlay can be too costly a means
to such an end. There can be no reason why, with
irrigation, the Indus valley should not become as fer-
tile as the valley of the Nile.
After admiring in Moultan, on the one hand, the
grandeur of the citadel which still shows signs of the
terrible bombardment which it suffered at our hands
after the murder by the Sikhs of Mr. Van Agnew in
1848, and, on the other hand, the modesty of the sensi-
tive mimosa which grows plentifully about the city, I
NATIVE STATES. 269
set off by railway for Sher Shah, the point at which
the railway comes to its end upon the banks of the
united Jhelum and Chenab, two of the rivers of the
Punjaub. The railway company once built a station
on the river-bank at Sher Shah, but the same summer,
when the floods came down, station and railway alike
disappeared into the Indus. Embanking the river is
impossible, from the cost of the works which would be
needed; and building wing-dams has been tried, with
the remarkable effect of sending off the river at right
angles to the dam to devastate the country opposite.
The railway has now no station at Sher Shah, but
the Indus-steamer captains pick out a good place to
lie alongside the bank, and the rails are so laid as
to bring the trains alongside the ships. After seeing
nothing but flat plains from the time of leaving Um-
ritsur, I caught sight from Sher Shah of the great
Sooleiman chain of the Afghan Mountains, rising in
black masses through the fiery mist that fills the Indus
valley.
I had so timed my arrival on board the river-boat
that she sailed the next morning, and after a day's un-
eventful steaming, varied by much running aground,
when we anchored in the evening we were in the native
State of Bhawulpore.
While we were wandering about the river-shore in
the evening, I and my two or three European fellow-
travelers, we met a native, with whom one of our num-
ber got into conversation. The Englishman had heard
that Bhawulpore was to be annexed, so he asked the
native whether he was a British subject, to which the
answer was to the effect that he did not know. "To
whom do you pay your taxes?" "To the govern-
ment." "Which government? the English govern-
ment or the Bhawulpore government?" His answer
23*
270 GREATER BRITAIN.
was that he did not care so long as he had to pay
them to somebody, and that he certainly did not
know.
Little as our Bhawulpore friend knew or cared about
the color of his rulers, he was nevertheless, according
to our Indian government theories, one of the people
who ought to be most anxious for the advent of English
rule. Such has been the insecurity of life in Bhawul-
pore, that, of the six last viziers, five have been mur-
dered by order of the Khan, the last of all having been
strangled in 1862; and no native State has been more
notorious than Bhawulpore for the extravagance and
gross licentiousness of the reigning princes. The rulers
of Bhawulpore, although nominally controlled by us,
have hitherto been absolute despots, and have fre-
quently put to death their subjects out of mere whimsy.
For years the country has been torn by ceaseless revo-
lutions, to the ruin of the traders and the demoraliza-
tion of the people; the taxes have been excessive,
peculation universal, and the army has lived at free
quarters. The Khans were for many years in such
dread of attempts upon their lives, that every dish for
their table was tasted by the cooks; the army was
mutinous, all appointments bought and sold, and the
Khans being Mohammedans, no one need pay a debt
to a Hindoo.
Bhawulpore is no exceptional case; everywhere we
hear of similar deeds being common in native States.
One of the native rulers lately shot a man for killing a
tiger that the rajah had wounded ; another flogged a
subject for defending his wife; abduction, adultery,
and sale of wives are common among them. Land is
seized from its holders without compensation being so
much as offered to them; extortion, torture, and denial
of justice are common, open venality prevails in all
NATIVE STATES. 271
ranks, and no native will take the pledged word of his
king, while the revenues, largely made up of forced
loans, are wasted on all that is most vile.
In a vast number of cases, the reigning families have
degenerated to such an extent, that the scepter has
come into the hands of some mere driveler, whom, for
the senselessness of his rule, it has at last been neces-
sary to depose. Those who have made idiocy their
study, know that in the majority of cases the infirmity
is the last stage of the declension of a race worn out
by hereditary perpetuation of luxury, vice, or disease
the effect of vice. Every ruling family in the East,
save such as slave marriages have reinvigorated, is
one of these run-down and exhausted breeds. Not
only unbounded tyranny and extortion, but incredible
venality and corruption, prevail in the greater number
of native States. The Rajah of Travancore, as it is
said, lately requiring some small bungalow to be added
to a palace, a builder contracted to build it for 10,000rs.
After a time, he came to apply to be let oft', and on the
Rajah asking fcim the reason, he said: "Your high-
ness, of the 10,000rs., your prime minister will get
5000rs., his secretary lOOOrs., the baboos in his office
another 2000rs., the ladies of the zenana lOOOrs., and
the commander of your forces 500rs. ; now, the bunga-
low itself will cost 500rs., so where am I to make my
profit?" Corruption, however, pervades in India all
native institutions; it is not enough to show that native
States are subject to it, unless we can prove that it is
worse there than in our own dominions.
The question whether British or native rule be the
least distasteful to the people of India is one upon
which it is not easy to decide. It is not to be expected
that our government should be popular with the Raj-
poot chiefs, or with the great nobles of Oude, but it
272 GREATER BRITAIN.
may fairly be contended that the mass of the people
live in more comfort, and, in spite of the Orissa case,
are less likely to starve, in English than in native ter-
ritory. No nation has at any time ever governed an
alien empire more wisely or justly than we the Pun-
jaub. The men who cry out against our rule are the
nobles and the schemers, who, under it, are left with-
out a hope. Our leveling rule does not even, like other
democracies, raise up a military chieftainship. Our
native officers of the highest rank are paid and treated
much as are European sergeants, though in native
States they would of course be generals and princes.
Want of promotion for sepoys and educated native
civilians, and the degrading treatment of the high-caste
people by the English, were causes, among others, of
the mutiny. The treatment of the natives cannot
easily be reformed; if we punish or discourage such
behavior in our officers, we cannot easily reach the
European planters and the railway officials, while pun-
ishment itself would only make men treat the natives
with violence instead of mere disdain, when out of
sight of their superiors. There is, however, reason to
believe that in many districts the people are not only
well off under our government, but that they know it.
During the native rule in Oude, the population was
diminished by a continual outpour of fugitives. The
British district of Mirzapore Chowhare, on the Oude
frontiers, had a rural population of over 1000 to each
square mile a density entirely owing to the emi-
gration of the natives from their villages in Oude.
Again, British Burmah is draining of her people
Upper Burmah, which remains under the old rulers ;
and throughout India the eye can distinguish British
territories from the native States by the look of pros-
perity which is borne by all our villages.
NATIVE STATES. 273
The native merchants and townsfolk generally are
our friends. It is unfortunately the fact, however, that
the cultivators of the soil, who form three-fourths of
the population of India, believe themselves worse off
under us than in the native States. They say that
they care not who rules so long as their holdings are
secured to them at a fixed rent, whereas under our
system the zemindars pay us a fixed rent, but in many
districts exact what they please from the competing
peasants a practice which, under the native system,
was prevented by custom. In all our future land-set-
tlements, it is to be hoped that the agreement will
be made, not with middlemen, but directly with the
people.
It is not difficult to lay down certain rules for our
future behavior toward the native States. We already
exercise over the whole of them a control sufficient to
secure ourselves against attack in time of peace, but
not sufficient to relieve us from all fear of hostile action
in time of internal revolt or external war. It might be
o
well that we should issue a proclamation declaring
that, for the future, we should invariably recognize
the practice of adoption of children by the native
rulers, as we have done in the case of the Mysore suc-
cession; but that, on the other hand, we should re-
quire the gradual disbandment of all troops not needed
for the preservation of internal peace. We might well
commence our action in this matter by calling upon
the native rulers to bind themselves by treaty no
longer to keep on foot artillery. In the event of an
invasion of Hindostan, a large portion of our European
force would be needed to overawe the native princes
and prevent their marching upon our rear. It is im-
possible to believe that the native States would ever
be of assistance to us except in cases where we could
274 GREATER BRITAIN.
do without their help. During the mutiny, the ISTe-
paulese delayed their promised march to join us until
they were certain that we should beat the mutineers,
and this although the Nepaulese are among our surest
friends. After the mutiny, it came to light that Luck-
now and Delhi then native capitals had been centers
of intrigue, although we had " Residents" at each, and
it is probable that Hyderabad and Cashmere City are
little less dangerous to us now than was Delhi in 1857.
There is one native State, that of Cashmere and
Jummoo, which stands upon a very different footing
from the rest. Created by us as late as 1846, when we
sold this best of all the provinces conquered by us from
the Maharajahs of Lahore to a Sikh traitor, Gholab
Singh, an ex-farmer of taxes, for three-quarters of a
million sterling, which he embezzled from the treasury
of Lahore, the State of Cashmere has been steadily
misgoverned for twenty years. Although our tribu-
tary, the Maharajah of Cashmere forbids English trav-
elers to enter his dominions without leave (which is
granted only to a fixed number of persons every year),
to employ more than a stated number of servants, to
travel except by certain passes for fear of their meet-
ing his wives, to buy provisions except of certain per-
sons, or to remain in the country after the 1st Novem-
ber under any circumstances whatever. He imprisons
all native Christians, prohibits the exportation of grain
whenever there is a scarcity in our territory, and takes
every opportunity that falls in his way of insulting our
government and its officials. Our Central Asian trade
has been ail-but entirely destroyed by the duties levied
by his officers, and Russia is the Maharajah's chosen
friend. The unhappy people of the Cashmere valley,
sold by us, without their consent or knowledge, to a
family which has never ceased to oppress them, petition
NATIVE STATES. 275
us continually for relief, and, by flocking into our Pun-
jaub territory, give practical testimony to the wrongs
they suffer.
In this case of Cashmere, there is ample ground for
immediate repurchase or annexation, if annexation it
can be called to remove or buy out a feudatory family
which was unjustly raised to power by us twenty-two
years ago, and which has broken every article of the
agreement under which it was placed upon the tribu-
tary throne. The only reason which has ever been
shown against the resumption by us of the government
of the Cashmere valley is the strange argument that,
by placing it in the hands of a feudatory, we save the
expense of defending the frontier against the danger-
ous hill-tribes; although the revenues of the province,
even were taxation much reduced, would amply suffice
to meet the cost of continual war, and although our
experience in Central India has shown that many hill-
tribes which will not submit to Hindoo rajahs become
peaceable at once upon our annexation of their coun-
try. Were Cashmere independent and in the hands of
its old rulers, there would be ample ground for its an-
nexation in the prohibition of trade, the hinderance to
the civilization of Central Asia, the gross oppression of
the people, the existence of slavery, and the impris-
onment of Christians ; as it is, the non-annexation of
the country almost amounts to a crime against man-
kind.
Although the necessity of consolidation of our em-
pire and the progressive character of our rule are
reasons for annexing the whole of the native States,
there are other and stronger arguments in favor of
leaving them as they are ; our policy toward the Nizam
must be regulated by the consideration that he is now
the head of the Moslem power in India, and that his
276 GREATER BRITAIN.
influence over the Indian Mohammedans may be made
useful to us in our dealings with that dangerous por-
tion of our people. Our military arrangements with
the Nizam are, moreover, on the best of footings.
Scindia is our friend, and no bad ruler, but some inter-
ference may be needed with the Guicodar of Baroda
and with Holkar. Our policy toward Mysore is now
declared, and consists in respecting the native rule
if the young prince proves himself capable of good
government ; and we might impose similar conditions
upon the remaining princes, and also suppress forced
labor in their States as we have ail-but suppressed
suttee.
In dealing with the native princes, it is advisable
that we should remember that we are no interlopers of
to-day coming in to disturb families that have been for
ages the rulers of the land. Many of the greatest of
the native families were set up by ourselves; and of
the remainder, few, if any, have been in possession of
their countries so long as have the English of Madras
or Bombay.
The Guicodars of Baroda and the family of Holkar
are descended from cowherds, and that of Scindia from
a peasant, and none of them date back much more than
a hundred years. The family of the Nabobs of Arcot,
founded by an adventurer, is not more ancient, neither
is that of Nizam : the great Hyder Ali was the son of
a police-constable, and was unable to read or write.
While we should religiously adhere to the treaties
that we have made, we are bound, in the interests of
humanity, to intervene in all cases where it is certain
that the mass of the people would prefer our rule, and
where they are suffering under slavery or gross op-
pression.
Holkar has permitted us to make a railway across his
NATIVE STATES. 277
territory, but he levies such enormous duties upon
goods in transit as to cramp the development of trade
in a considerable portion of our dominions. Now, the
fact that a happy combination of circumstances enabled
the cowherd, his ancestor, to seize upon a certain piece
of territory a hundred years ago can have given his
descendants no prescriptive right to impede the civili-
zation of India; all that we must aim at is to so im-
prove our governmental system as to make the natives
themselves see that our rule means the moral advance-
ment of their country.
The best argument that can be made use of against
our rule is that its strength and minuteness enfeeble
the native character. When we annex a State, we put
an end to promotion alike in war and learning; and
under our rule, unless it change its character, enlight-
enment must decline in India, however much material
prosperity may increase.
Under our present system of exclusion of natives
from the Indian Civil Service, the more boys we
educate, the more vicious and discontented men we
have beneath our rule. Were we to throw it open to
them, under a plan of competition which would admit
to the service even a small number of natives, we
should at least obtain a valuable body of friends in
those admitted, and should make the excluded feel
that their exclusion was in some measure their own
fault. As it is, we not only exclude natives from
our own service, but even to some extent from that
of the native States, whose levies are often drilled by
English officers. The Guicodar of Baroda's service is
popular with Englishmen, as it has become a custom
that when he has a review he presents each of his
officers with a year's full pay.
Our plan of shutting out the natives from all share
VOL. ii. 24
278 GREATER BRITAIN.
in the government not only makes our rule unpopu-
lar, but gives rise to the strongest of all the argu-
ments in favor of the retention of the existing native
States, which is, that they offer a career to shrewd
and learned natives, who otherwise would spend their
leisure in devising plots against us. One of the ablest
men in India, Madhava Rao, now premier of Travan-
core, was born in our territory, and was senior scholar
of his year in the Madras College. That stTch men as
Madhava Rao and Salar Jung should be incapable of
finding suitable employment in our service is one of
the standing reproaches of our rule.
Could we but throw open our service to the natives,
our government might, with advantage to civiliza-
tion, be extended over the whole of the native States;
for, whether we are ever to leave India or whether we
are to remain there till the end of time, there can be
no doubt but that the course best adapted to raise the
moral condition of the natives is to mould Hindostan
into a homogeneous empire sufficiently strong to stand
by itself against all attacks from without, and inter-
nally governed by natives, under a gradually weakened
control from at home. If, after careful trial, we find
that we cannot educate the people to become active
supporters of our power, then it will be time to make
use of the native princes and grandees ; but it is to be
hoped that the people, as they become well taught,
will also become the mainstay of our democratic
rule.
The present attitude of the mass of the people is
one of indifference and neutrality, which in itself lends
a kind of passive strength to our rule. During the
mutiny of 1857, the people neither aided nor opposed
us; and even had the whole of the land-owners been
against us, as were those of Oude, it is doubtful
NATIVE STATES. 279
whether they could have raised their villagers and
peasants. Were our policemen relatively equal to
their officers and to the magistrates, we should never
hear of native disaffection, but we cannot count upon
the attachment of the people so long as it is possible
for our constables to procure confessions by the bribery
of villagers or the application of pots full of wasps to
their stomachs.
In the matter of the annexation of those native
States which still cumber the earth, we are not alto-
gether free agents. We swallow up States like Bhawul-
pore just as Russia consumes Bokhara. Everywhere
indeed, in Asia, strong countries must inevitably swal-
low up their weaker neighbors. Failure of heirs,
broken treaties, irregular frontiers all these are rea-
sons or assumed reasons for advance ; but the end is
certain, and is exemplified in the march of England
from Calcutta to Peshawur and of Russia from the
Aral to Turkestan. Our experience in the case of the
Punjaub shows that even honest discouragement of
farther advances on the part of the rulers of the stronger
power will not always suffice to prevent annexation.
280 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
CHAPTER XV.
SCTNDE.
Mithun Kote, we steamed suddenly into the
main stream of the Indus, the bed of which is here
a mile and a quarter wide. Although the river at the
time of my visit was rising fast, it was far from being
at its greatest height. In January, it brings down but
forty thousand cubic feet of water every second, but in
August it pours down four hundred and fifty thousand.
The river-bed is rarely covered with running water,
but the stream cuts a channel for itself upon one shore,
and flows in a current of eight or nine miles an hour,
while the remainder of the bed is filled with half-liquid
sand.
The navigation of the Indus is monotonous enough.
"Were it not for the climate, the view would resemble
that on the Maas, near Rotterdam, though with alli-
gators lining the banks instead of logs from the Upper
Meuse; but climate affects color, and every country
has tints of its own. California is golden, New Zea-
land a black-green, Australia yellow, the Indus valley
is of a blazing red. Although every evening the
Beloocjaee Mountains came in sight as the sun sank
down behind them, and revealed their shapes in
shadow, all through the day the landscape was one of
endless flats. The river is a dirty flood, now swift,
now sluggish, running through a country in which
sand deserts alternate only with fields of stone. Vil-
SCINDE. 281
lages upon the banks there are none, and from town
to town is a day's journey at the least. The only life
in the view is given by an occasional sail of gigantic
size and curious shape, belonging to some native craft
or other on her voyage from the Punjaub to Kurrachee.
On our journey down the Indus, we passed hundreds
of ships, but met not one. They are built of timber,
which is plentiful in the Himalayas, upon the head-
waters of the river, and carry down to the sea the prod-
uce of the Punjaub. The stream is so strong, that
the ships are broken up in Scinde, and the crews walk
back 1000 miles along the bank. In building his ships
upon the Hydaspes, and sailing them down the Indus
to its mouth, Alexander did but follow the custom of
the country. The natives, however, break up their
ships at Kotree, whereas the Macedonian intrusted his
to Nearchus for the voyage to the Gulf of Persia and
a survey of the coast.
Geographically, the Indus valley is but a portion of
the Great Sahara. Those who know the desert well,
say that from Cape Blanco to Khartoom, from Khar-
toom to Muscat, from Muscat to Moultan, the desert
is but one ; the same in the absence of life, the same in
such life as it does possess. The Valley of the Nile is
but an oasis, the Gulfs of Persia and of Aden are but
trifling breaks in its vast width. Rainless, swept by
dry hot winds laden with prickly sand, traversed every-
where by low ranges of red and sunburnt rocks, strewn
with jagged stones, and dotted here and there with a
patch of dates gathered about some ancient well, such
is the Sahara for a length of near six thousand miles.
On the Indus banks, the sand is as salt as it is at Suez,
and there are as many petrified trees between Sukkur
and Kurrachee as there are in the neighborhood of
Cairo.
24*
282 GREATER BRITAIN.
Our days on board were all passed upon one plan.
Each morning we rose at dawn, which came about
half-past four, and, watching the starting of the ship
from the bank where she had been moored all night,
we got a cool walk in our sleeping-clothes before we
bathed and dressed. The heat then suffocated us quietly
till four, when we would reassert the majesty of man by
bathing, and attempting to walk or talk till dinner,
which was at five. At dark we anchored, and after
watching the water-turtles at their play, or hunting for
the monstrous water-lizards known as " gos," appar-
ently the ichneumons called in Egypt " gots," or
sometimes fishing for great mud-fish with wide mouths
and powerful teeth, we would resume our sleeping-
clothes (in which, but for the dignity of the Briton in
the eyes of the native crew, we should have dined and
spent the day). At half-past seven or eight, we lay
down on deck, and forgot our sorrows in sleep, or en-
gaged in a frantic struggle with the cockroaches. In
the latter conflict we in our dreams at least were not
victorious, and once in an awful trance I believed my-
self carried off by one leg in the jaws of a gigantic
cockroach, and pushed with his feelers down into his
horrid hole.
Each hour passed on the Indus differs from the
others only in the greater or less portion of it which
is devoted to getting off the sand-banks. After steam-
ing gallantly down a narrow but deep and swift piece
of the river, we would come to a spot at which the
flood would lose itself in crossing its bed from one
bank to the other. Backing the engines, but being
whirled along close to the steep bank by the remaining
portion of the current, we soon felt a shock, the recoil
from which upset us, chairs and all, it being noticeable
that we always fell up stream, and not with our heads
SCINDE. 283
in the direction in which the ship was going. As soon
as we were fairly stuck, the captain flew at the pilot,
and kicked him round the deck a process always
borne with fortitude, although the pilot was changed
every day. The only pilot never kicked was one who
came on board near Bhawulpore, and who carried a
jeweled tulwar, or Afghan scimetar, but even he was
threatened. The kicking over, an entry of the time
of grounding was made by the captain in the pilot's
book, and the mate was ordered out in a boat to sound,
while the native soldiers on board the flats we were
towing began quietly to cook their dinner. The mate
having found a sort of channel, though sometimes it
had a ridge across it over which the steamer could not
pass without touching, he returned for a kedge, which
he fixed in the sand, and we were soon warped up to
it by the use of the capstan, the native crew singing
merrily the while. Every now and then, however, we
would take the ground in the center of the ship, and
with deep water all round, and then, instead of getting
off', we for hours together only pivoted round and round.
One of the Indus boats, with a line regiment on board,
was once aground for a month near Mithun Kote, to
the entire destruction of all the wild boars in the neigh-
borhood.
The kicking of the unfortunate pilots was not a
pleasant sight, but there were sometimes comic inci-
dents attached to our periodic groundings. Once I
noticed that the five men who were constantly sound-
ing with colored poles in different parts of the ship
and flats, had got into a monotonous chorus of "pan-
c he e pot" ("five feet") we drawing only three, so
that we went ahead confidently at full speed, when
suddenly we ran aground with a violent shock. On
the re-sounding of our course by the boat's crew, we
284 GEEATER BRITAIN.
found that our pole-men must, for some time past,
have been guessing the soundings to save the trouble
of looking. These fellows richly deserved a kicking,
but the pilots are innocent of any fault but inability
to keep pace with the rapid changes of the river-course.
Another curious scene took place one day when we
were steaming down a reach in which the river made
many sudden twists and turns. We had on board a
merchant from the Persian Gulf, a devout Moham-
medan. In the afternoon, he carried his praying-carpet
on to the bridge between the paddle-boxes, and there,
turning to the west, commenced to pray. The sun
was on his left, but almost facing him; in an instant,
round whirled the ship, making her course between
two sand-bars, and Mecca and the sun into the bargain
were right behind our worshiper. This was too much
even for his devotion, so, glancing at the new course,
he turned his carpet, and, looking in the fresh direc-
tion, recommenced his prayers. After a minute or
two, back went the ship, and we began again to steer
a southerly course. All this time the Persian kept his
look of complete abstraction, and remained unshaken
through all his difficulties. This seriousness in face of
events which would force into shouts of laughter any
European congregation is a characteristic of a native.
It is strange that Englishmen are nowhere so easily
provoked to loud laughter as in a church or college
chapel, natives at no time so insusceptible of ridicule
as when engaged upon the services of their religions.
The shallowness of the Indus, its impracticability for
steamships during some months of the year, and the
many windings of the stream all these things make
it improbable that the river will ever be largely avail-
able for purposes of trade; at the same time, the Indus
valley must necessarily be the line taken by the com-
SGINDE. 285
merce of the Punjaub, and eventually by that of some
portions of Central Asia, and even of Southern China.
Whether Kurrachee becomes our great Indian port, or
whether our railway be made through Beloochistan, a
safe and speedy road up the Indus valley for troops and
trade is needed.
If we take into consideration the size of India, the
amount of its revenues, and the length of time during
which we have occupied that portion of its extent
which we at present hold, it is impossible to avoid the
conclusion that not even in Australia have railways
been more completely neglected than they have been
in India. We have opened but 4000 miles, or one
mile for every 45,000 people. Nothing has been
touched as yet but the Grand Trunk and great mili-
tary and postal routes, and even these are little more
than half completed. Even the Bombay and Calcutta
mail line and the Calcutta and Lahore lines are hardly
finished ; the Peshawur line and the Indus road not
yet begun. While at home people believe that the
Euphrates Valley Railway is under consideration, they
will find, if they come out to India, that to reach Pe-
shawur in 34 N. latitude they must go to Bombay in
18, if not to Galle in 6. Even if they reach Kurra-
chee, they will find it a month's journey to Peshawur.
While we are trying to tempt the wool and shawls of
Central Asia down to Umritsur and Lahore, the goods
with which we would buy these things are sent round
by the Cape of Good Hope and Calcutta.
It is true that the Indus line will be no easy one to
make. To bridge the river at Mithun Kote or even
at Kotree would be difficult enough, and were it to be
bridged at Sukkur, where there is rock, and a narrow
pass upon the river, the line from Sukkur to Kurra-
chee would be exposed to depredation from the fron-
286 GREATER BRITAIN.
tier tribes. The difficulties are great, but tbe need is
greater, and the argument of the heavy cost of river-
side railroads should not weigh with us in the case of
lines required for the safety of the country. The La-
hore and Peshawur, the Kotree and Moultan, the Ko-
tree and Baroda, and the Baroda and Delhi lines, in-
stead of being set one against the other for comparison,
should be simultaneously completed as necessary for
the defense of the empire, and as forming the trunk
lines for innumerable branches into the cotton- and
wheat-growing districts.
One of the branches of the Indus line will have
to be constructed from the Bholan Pass to Sukkur,
where we lay some days embarking cotton. Sukkur
lies on the Beloochistan side; Roree fort known as
the "Key of Scinde," the seizure of which by us pro-
voked the great war with the Ameers on an island
in mid-stream; and Bukkur City on the eastern or left
bank; and the river, here narrowed to a width of a
quarter of a mile, runs with the violence of a mountain
torrent.
Sukkur is one of the most ancient of Indian cities,
and was mentioned as time-worn by the Greek geog-
raphers, while tradition says that its antiquities
attracted Alexander; but towns grow old with great
rapidity in India, and, once ancient in their look,
never to the eye become in the slightest degree older.
In Sukkur I first saw the Scindee cap, which may
be described as a tall hat with the brim atop ; but the
Scindees were not the only strangely-dressed traders
in Sukkur and Roree: there were high-capped Per-
sians, and lean Afghans with long gaunt faces and
high cheek-bones, and furred merchants from Central
Asia. It is even said that goods find their way over-
land from China to Sukkur, through Eastern Persia
SGINDE. 287
and Beloochistan, the traders preferring to come round
four thousand miles than to cross. the main chain of
the Himalayas or pass through the country of the
Afghans.
In ancient times there was considerable intercourse
between China and Hindostan; at the end of the
seventh century, indeed, the Chinese invaded India
through Nepaul, and captured five hundred cities. It
is to be hoped that the next few years may see a rail-
way built from Rangoon to Southern China, and from
'Calcutta to the Yang-tse-Kiang, a river upon which
there are ample stores of coal, which would supply the
manufacturing wants of India.
After viewing from a lofty tower the flat country
in the direction of Shikapore, we spent one of our
Sukkur evenings upon the island of Roree watching
the natives fishing. Casting themselves into the river
on the top of skins full of air, or more commonly on
great earthenware pitchers, they floated at a rapid pace
down with the whirling stream, pushing before them
a sunken net which they could close and lift by the
drawing of a string. About twice a minute they
would strike a fish, and, lifting their head, would im-
pale the captive on a stick slung behind their back,
and at once lower again the net in readiness for fur-
ther action.
Sukkur, like seven other places that I had visited
within a year, has the reputation of being the hottest
city in the world, and the joke on the boats of the
Indus flotilla is that Moultan is too hot to bear, and
Sukkur much hotter; but that Jacobabad, on the
Beloochee frontier, near Sukkur, is so hot that the
people come down thence to Sukkur for the hot season,
and find its coolness as refreshing as ordinary mortals
do that of Simla. Hot as is Sukkur, it is fairly beaten
288 GREATER BRITAIN.
by a spot at the foot of the Ibex Hills, near Sehwan.
I was sleeping on the bridge with an officer from Pe-
shawur, when the crew were preparing to put off from
the bank for the day's journey. We were awakened
by the noise ; but, as we sat up and rubbed our eyes, a
blast of hot wind came down from the burnt-up hills,
laden with fine sand, and of such a character that 1 got
a lantern for it was not fully light and made my way
to the deck thermometer. I found it standing at 104,
although the hour was 4*15 A.M. At breakfast-time,
it had fallen to 100, from which it slowly rose, until
at 1 P.M. it registered 116 in the shade. The next
night, it never fell below 100. This was the highest
temperature I experienced in India during the hot
weather, and it was, singularly enough, the same as
the highest which I recorded in Australia. No part
of the course of the Indus is within the tropics, but it
is not in the tropics that the days are hottest, although
the nights are generally unbearable on sea-level near
the equator.
At Kootree, near Hydrabad, the capital of Scinde,
where the tombs of the Ameers are imposing, if far
from beautiful, we left the Indus for the railway, and,
after a night's journey, found ourselves upon the sea-
shore at Kurrachee.
OVEELAND ROUTES. 289
CHAPTER XVI.
OVERLAND ROUTES.
OF all the towns in India, Kurrachee is the least
Indian. With its strong southwesterly breeze, its
open sea and dancing waves, it is to one coming from
the Indus valley a pleasant place enough; and the
climate is as good as that of Alexandria, though there
is at Kurrachee all the dust of Cairo. For a stranger
detained against his will to find Kurrachee bearable
there must be something refreshing in its breezes:
the town stands on a treeless plain, and of sights
there are none, unless it be the sacred alligators at
Muggur Peer, where the tame "man-eaters" spring
at a goat for the visitor's amusement as freely as the
Wolfsbrunnen trout jump at the gudgeon.
There is no reason given why the alligators' pool
should be reputed holy, but in India places easily
acquire sacred fame. About Peshawur there dwell
many hill-fanatics, whose sole religion appears to con-
sist in stalking British sentries. So many of them
have been locked up in the Peshawur jail that it has
become a holy place, and men are said to steal and
riot in the streets of the bazaar in order that they may
be consigned to this sacred temple.
The nights were noisy in Kurrachee, for the great
Mohammedan feast of the Mohurrum had commenced,
and my bungalow was close to the lines of the police,
who are mostly Belooch Mohammedans. Every even-
ing, at dusk, fires were lighted in the police-lines and
VOL. ii. 25
290 GREATER BRITAIN.
the bazaar, and then the tomtom-ing gradually in-
creased from the gentle drone of the daytime until
a perfect storm of "tom-a-tom, tomtom, tom-a-tom,
tomtom," burst from all quarters of the town, and
continued the whole night long, relieved only by
blasts from conch-shells and shouts of " Shah Hassan !
Shah Hoosein! Wah Allah ! Wah Allah!" as the per-
formers danced round the flames. I heartily wished
myself in the State of Bhawulpore, where there is a
license-tax on the beating of drums at feasts. The
first night of the festival I called up a native servant
who "spoke English," to make him take me to the
fires and explain the matter. His only explanation was
a continual repetition of "Dat Mohurrum, Mohamme-
dan Christmas-day." When each night, about dawn,
the tomtom-ing died away once more, the chokedars
or night watchmen woke up from their sound
sleep, and began to shout "Ha ha!" into every room
to show that they were awake.
The chokedars are well-known characters in every
Indian station: always either sleepy and useless, or
else in league with the thieves, they are nevertheless
a recognized class, and are everywhere employed. At
Rawul-Pindee and Peshawur, the chokedars are armed
with guns, and it is said that a newly-arrived English
officer at the former place was lately returning from a
dinner-party, when he was challenged by the chokedar
of the first house he had to pass. Not knowing what
reply to make, he took to his heels, when the chokedar
fired at him as he ran. The shot woke all the choke-
dars of the parade, and the unfortunate officer received
the fire of every man as he passed along to his house
at the farther end of the lines, which he reached, how-
ever, in perfect safety. It has been suggested that, for
the purpose of excluding all natives from the lines at
OVERLAND ROUTES. 291
night, there should be a shibboleth or standing parole
of some word which no native can pronounce. The
word suggested is " Shoeburyness."
Although chokedars were silent and tomtom-ing
subdued during the daytime, there were plenty of
other sounds. Lizards chirped from the walls of my
room, and sparrows twittered from every beam and
rafter of the roof. When I told a Kurrachee friend
that rny slippers, my brushes, and soldier's writing-
case had all been thrown by me on to the chief beam
during an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge the enemy,
he replied that for his part he paraded his drawing-
room every morning with a double-barreled gun,
and frequently fired into the rafters, to the horror of
his wife.
In a small lateen-rigged yacht lent us by a fellow-
traveler from Moultan, some of us visited the works
which have long been in progress for the improvement
of the harbor of Kurrachee, and which form the sole
topic of conversation among the residents in the town.
The works have for object the removal of the bar which
obstructs the entrance to the harbor, with a view to
permit the entry of larger ships than can at present
find an anchorage at Kurrachee.
The most serious question under discussion is that
of whether the bar is formed by the Indus silt or
merely by local causes, as, if the former supposition is
correct, the ultimate disposition of the ten thousand
millions of cubic feet of mud which the Indus annu-
ally brings down is not likely to be affected by such
works as those in progress at Kurrachee. When a
thousand sealed bottles were lately thrown into the
Indus for it to be seen whether they would reach the
bar, the result of the "great bottle trick," as Kurra-
chee people called it, was that only one bottle reached
292 GREATER BRITAIN.
and not one weathered a point six miles to the south-
ward of the harbor. The bar is improving every year,
and has now some twenty feet of water, so that ships
of 1000 tons can enter except in the monsoon, and the
general belief of engineers is that the completion of
the present works will materially increase the depth of
water.
The question of this bar is not one of merely local
interest: a single glance at the map is sufficient to
show the importance of Kurrachee. Already rising at
an unprecedented pace, having trebled her shipping
and quadrupled her trade in ten years, she is destined
to make still greater strides as soon as the Indus Rail-
way is completed, and finally when the Persian Gulf
route becomes a fact to be the greatest of the ports
of India.
That a railway must one day be completed from
Constantinople or from some port on the Mediterra-
nean to Bussorah on the Persian Gulf is a point which
scarcely admits of doubt. From Kurrachee or Bom-
bay to London by the Euphrates valley and Constanti-
nople is ail-but a straight line, while from Bombay to
London by Aden and Alexandria is a wasteful curve.
The so-called "Overland Route" is half as long again
as would be the direct line. The Red Sea and Isthmus
route has neither the advantage of unbroken sea nor
of unbroken land transit; the direct route with a
bridge near Constantinople might be extended into a
land road from India to Calais or Rotterdam. The
Red Sea line passes along the shores of Arabia, where
there is comparatively little local trade ; the Persian
Gulf route would develop the remarkable wealth of
Persia, and would carry to Europe a local commerce
already great. At the entrance of the Persian Gulf,
near Cape Mussendoom or Ormuz, we should establish
OVERLAND ROUTES. 293
a free port on the plan of Singapore. In 1000 A.D.,
the spot now known as Ormuz was a barren rock, but
a few years of permanent occupation of the spot as a
free port changed the barren islet into one of the
wealthiest cities in the world. The Red Sea route
crosses Egypt, the direct route crosses Turkey; and it
cannot be too strongly urged that in war time "Egypt'*
means Russia or France, while " Turkey" means Great
Britain.
In any scheme of a Constantinople and Gulf rail-
road, Kurrachee would play a leading part. Not only
the wheat and the cotton of the Punjaub and of the
then irrigated Scinde, but the trade of Central Asia
would flow down the Indus, and it is hardly too much
to believe that the silks of China, the teas of Northern
India, and the shawls of Cashmere will all of them one
day find in Kurrachee their chief port. The earliest
known overland route was that by the Persian Gulf.
Chinese ships traded to Ormuz in the fifth and seventh
centuries, bringing silk and iron, and it may be doubted
whether any of the Russian routes will be able to com-
pete with the more ancient Euphrates valley line of
trade. Shorter, passing through countries well known
and comparatively civilized, admitting at once of the
use of land and water transport side by side, it is far
superior in commercial and political advantages to any
of the Russian desert roads. A route through Upper
Persia has been proposed, but merchants of experience
will tell you that greater facilities for trade are ex-
tended to Europeans in even the "closed" ports of
China than upon the coasts of Persia, and the pros-
pect of the freedom of trade upon a Persian railroad
would be but a bad one, it may be feared.
The return of trade to the Gulf route will revive the
glory of many fallen cities of the Middle Ages. Ormuz
25*
294 GREATER BRITAIN.
and Antioch, Cyprus and Rhodes, have a second his-
tory before them; Crete, Brindisi, and Venice will
each obtain a renewal of their ancient fame. Alexan-
der of Macedon was the first man who took a scientific
view of the importance of the Gulf route, but we have
hitherto drawn but little profit from the lesson con-
tained in his commission to Nearchus to survey the
coast from the Indus to the Euphrates. The advan-
tage to be gained from the completion of the railway
from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf will not fall
only to the share of India and Great Britain. Holland
and Belgium are, in proportion to their wealth, at the
least as greatly interested in the Euphrates route as
are we ourselves, arid should join us in its construction.
The Dutch trade with Java would be largely benefited,
and Dutch ports would become the shipping-places for
Eastern merchandise on its way to England and north-
east America, while, to the cheap manufactures of
Liege, India, China, and Central Asia would afford the
best of markets. If the line were a double one, to the
west and north of Aleppo, one branch running to Con-
stantinople and the other to the Mediterranean at Scan-
deroon, the whole of Europe would benefit by the Per-
sian trade, and, in gaining the Persian trade, would
gain also the power of protecting Persia against Rus-
sia, and of thus preventing the dominance of a crush-
ing despotism throughout the Eastern world. In a
thousand ways, however, the advantages of the line
to all Europe are so plainly manifest, that the only
question worth discussing is the nature of the difficul-
ties that hinder its completion.
The difficulties in the way of the Gulf route are po-
litical and financial, and both have been exaggerated
without limit. The project for a railway from Con-
stantinople to the Persian Gulf has been compared to
OVERLAND ROUTES. 295
that for the construction of a railroad from the Mis-
souri to the Pacific. In 1858, the American line was
looked on as a mere speculator's dream, while the Eu-
phrates Railway was to be commenced at once; ten
years have passed, and the Pacific Railway is a fact,
while the Indian line has been forgotten.
It is not that the making of the Euphrates line is a
more difficult matter than that of crossing the Plains
and Rocky Mountains. The distance from St. Louis
to San Francisco is 1600 miles, that from Constanti-
nople to Bussorah is but 1100 miles; or from Scande-
roon to Bussorah only 700 miles. From London to
the Persian Gulf is not so far as from New York to
San Francisco. The American line had to cross two
great snowy chains and a waterless tract of consider-
able width : the Indian route crosses no passes so lofty
as those of the Rocky Mountains or so difficult as those
of the Sierra Nevada, and is well watered in its whole
length. On the American line there is little coal, if
any, while the Euphrates route would be plentifully
supplied with coal from the neighborhood of Bagdad.
When the American line was commenced, the pro-
posed track lay across unknown wilds: the Constanti-
nople and Persian Gulf route passes through venerable
towns, the most ancient of all the cities of the world,
and the route itself is the oldest known highway of
trade. The chief of all the advantages possessed by
the Indian line which is wanting in America is the
presence of ample labor on all parts of the road.
Steamers are already running from Bombay and Kur-
rachee to the Persian Gulf; others on the Tigris, and
a portion of the Euphrates ; there is a much-used road
from Bagdad to Aleppo; and a Turkish military road
from Aleppo to Constantinople, to which city a direct
railroad will soon be opened ; and a telegraph-line be-
296 GREATER BRITAIN.
longing to an English company already crosses Asian
Turkey from end to end. Notwithstanding the facili-
ties, the Euphrates Eailway is still a project, while the
Atlantic and Pacific line will be opened in 1870.
"Were the financial difficulties those which the sup-
porters of the line have in reality to meet, it might be
urged that there will be a great local traffic between
Bussorah, Bagdad, and Aleppo, and from all these
cities to the sea, and that the government mail sub-
sidies will be huge, and the Indian trade, even in the
worst of years, considerable. Were the indifference
of Belgium, Germany, and Holland such that they
should refuse to contribute toward the cost of the line,
its importance would amply warrant a moderate addi-
tion to the debt of India.
The real difficulties that have to be encountered are
political rather than financial; the covert opposition of
France and Egypt is not less powerful for evil than is
the open hostility of Russia. Happily for India, how-
ever, the territories of our ally Turkey extend to the
Persian Gulf, for it must be remembered that for rail-
way purposes Turkish rule, if we so please, is equiva-
lent to English rule. As it happens, no active measures
are needed to advance our line; but, were it otherwise,
such intervention as might be necessary to secure the
safety of the great highway for Eastern trade with
Europe would be defensible were it exerted toward a
purely independent government.
The pressure to be put upon the Ottoman Porte
must be direct and governmental. For a private com-
pany to conduct a great enterprise to a successful con-
clusion in Eastern countries is always difficult; but
when the matter is political in its nature, or, if com-
mercial, at least hindered on political grounds, a
private company is powerless. It is, moreover, the
OVERLAND ROUTES. 297
practice of Eastern governments to grant concessions
of important works which they cannot openly oppose,
but which in truth they wish to hinder, to companies
BO formed as to be incapable of proceeding with the
undertaking. When others apply, the government
answers them that nothing further can be done : " the
concession is already granted."
Whatever steps are taken, a bold front is needed.
It might even be advisable that we should declare
that the Euphrates Valley Railway through the Turk-
ish territory from Constantinople arid Scanderoon
through Aleppo to Bagdad and Bussorah, and suffi-
cient military posts to insure its security in time of
war, are necessary to our tenure of India, and that
we should call upon Turkey to grant us permission to
commence our work, on pain of the withdrawal of our
protection.
Our general principle of non-interference is always
liable to be set aside on proof of the existence of a
higher necessity for intervention than for adherence to
our golden rule, and it may be contended that suffi-
cient proof has been shown in the present instance.
Whether public action is to be taken, or the matter to
be left to private enterprise, it is hard to resist the
conclusion that the Direct Route to India is one of the
most pressing of the questions of the day.
When, in company with my fellow-passengers from
Moultan, I left Kurrachee for Bombay, we had on
board the then Commissioner of Scinde, who was on
his way to. take his seat as a member of Council at
Bombay. A number of the leading men of Scinde
came on board to bid farewell to him before he
sailed, and among them the royal brothers who, but
for our annexation of the country, would be the
reigning Ameers at this moment.
298 GREATER BRITAIN.
Nothing that I had seen in India, even at Umritsur,
surpassed in glittering pomp the caps and baldrics of
these Scindee chieftains; neither could anything be
stranger than their dress. One had on a silk coat of
pale green shot with yellow, satin trowsers, and velvet
slippers with curled peaks; another wore a jacket of
dark amber with flowers in white lace. A third was
clothed in a cloth of crimson striped with amber ; and
the Ameer himself was wearing a tunic of scarlet silk
and gold, and a scarf of purple gauze. All wore the
strange-shaped Scindian hat; all had jeweled dirks,
with curiously-wrought scabbards to hold their swords,
and gorgeously embroidered baldrics to support them.
The sight, however, of no number of sapphires, tur-
quoises, and gold clothes could have reconciled me to
a longer detention in Kurrachee; so I rejoiced when
our bespangled friends disappeared over the ship's
side to the sound of the Lascars' anchor-tripping
chorus, and left the deck to the "Proconsul" and
ourselves.
CHAPTER XVII.
BOMBAY.
CROSSING the mouths of the Gulfs of Cutch and
Cambay, we reached Bombay in little more than two
days from Kurrachee; but as we rounded Colaba Point
and entered the harbor, the setting sun was lighting
up the distant ranges of the Western Ghauts, and by
the time we had dropped anchor it was dark, so I slept
on board.
BOMBAY. 299
I woke to find the day breaking over the peaked
mountains of the Deccan, and revealing the wooded
summits of the islands, while a light land breeze rip-
pled the surface of the water, and the bay was alive
with the bright lateen sails of the native cotton-boats.
The many woods coming down in rich green masses
into the sea itself lent a singular softness to the view,
and the harbor echoed with the capstan-songs of all
nations, from the American to the Beloochee, from the
Swedish to the Greek.
The vegetation that surrounds the harbor, though
the even mass of green is broken here and there by
the crimson cones of the "gold mohur" trees, resem-
bles that of Ceylon, and the scene is rather tropical
than Indian, but there is nothing tropical and little
that is Eastern in the bustle of the bay. The lines of
huge steamers, and forests of masts backed by the still
more crowded field of roofs and towers, impress you
with a sense of wealth and worldliness from which
you gladly seek relief by turning toward the misty
beauty of the mountain islands and the Western
Ghauts. Were the harbor smaller, it would be lovely;
as it is, the distances are over-great.
Notwithstanding its vast trade, Bombay for purposes
of defense is singularly weak. The absence of bat-
teries from the entrance to so great a trading port
strikes eyes that have seen San Francisco and New
York, and the marks on the sea-wall of Bombay Castle
of the cannon-balls of the African admirals of the
Mogul should be a warning to the Bombay merchants
to fortify their port against attacks by sea, but act as a
reminder to the traveler that, from a military point of
view, Kurrachee is a better harbor than Bombay, the
approach to which can easily be cut off, and its people
starved. One advantage, however, of the erection of
300 GREATER BRITAIN.
batteries at the harbor's mouth would be, that the
present fort might be pulled down, unless it were
thought advisable to retain it for the protection of the
Europeans against riots, and that in any case the
broad space of cleared ground which now cuts the
town in half might be partly built on.
The present remarkable prosperity of Bombay is
the result of the late increase in the cotton-trade, to
the sudden decline of which, in 1865 and 1866, has
also been attributed the rain that fell upon the city
in the last-named year. The panic, from which Bom-
bay has now so far recovered that it can no longer be
said that she has "not one merchant solvent," was
chiefly a reaction from a speculation-madness, in which
the shares in a land-reclamation company which never
commenced its operations once touched a thousand
per cent., but was intensified by the passage of the
English panic-wave of 1866 across India and round
the world.
Not even in Mississippi is cotton more completely
king than in Bombay. Cotton has collected the hun-
dred steamers and the thousands of native boats that
are anchored between the Apollo Bunder and Maza-
gon; cotton has built the great offices and stores of
seven and eight stories high ; cotton has furnished the
villas on Malabar Hill, that resemble the New Yorkers'
cottages on Staten Island.
The export of cotton from India rose from five mil-
lions' worth in 1859 to thirty-eight millions' worth in
1864, and the total exports of Bombay increased in
the same proportion, while the population of the city
rose from 400,000 to 1,000,000. We are accustomed
to look at the East as standing still, but Chicago itself
never took a grander leap than did Bombay between
1860 and 1864, The rebellion in America gave the
BOMBAY. 301
impetus, but was not the sole cause of this prosperity;
and the Indian cotton-trade, though checked by the
peace, is not destroyed. Cotton and jute are not the
only Indian raw products the export of which has in-
creased suddenly of late. The export of wool increased
twentyfold, of tobacco, threefold, of coffee, sevenfold
in the last six years ; and the export of Indian tea in-
creased in five years from nothing to three or four
hundred thousand pounds. The old Indian exports,
those which we associate with the term "Eastern
trade," are standing still, while the raw produce trade
is thus increasing: spices, elephants' teeth, pearls,
jewels, bandannas, shellac, dates, and gum are all de-
creasing, although the total exports of the country
have trebled in five years.
India needs but railroads to enable her to compete
successfully with America in the growth of cotton, but
the development of the one raw product will open out
her hitherto unknown resources.
While staying at one of the great merchant-houses
in the Fort, I was able to see that the commerce of
Bombay has not grown up of itself. With some ex-
perience among hard workers in the English towns, I
was, nevertheless, astonished at the work got through
by senior clerks and junior partners at Bombay.
Although at first led away by the idea that men who
wear white linen suits all day, and smoke in rocking-
chairs upon the balcony for an hour after breakfast,
cannot be said to get through much work, I soon
found that men in merchants' houses at Bombay work
harder than they would be likely to do at home.
Their day begins at 6 A.M., and, as a rule, they work
from then till dinner at 8 or 9 P.M., taking an hour
for breakfast, and two for tiffin. My stay at Bombay
was during the hottest fortnight in the year, and twelve
VOL. ii. 26
302 GREATER BRITAIN.
hours' work in the day, with the thermometer never
under 90 all the night, is an exhausting life. English-
men could not long survive the work, but the Bombay
merchants are all Scotch. In British settlements, from
Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay, for every
Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up
to wealth from small beginnings without external aid,
you find ten Scotchmen. It is strange, indeed, that
Scotland has not become the popular name for the
United Kingdom.
Bombay life is not without its compensation. It is
not always May or June, and from November to March
the climate is ail-but perfect. Even in the hottest
weather, the Byculla Club is cool, and Mahabaleswar
is close at hand, for short excursions, whenever the
time is found; while the Bombay mango is a fruit
which may bear comparison with the peaches of Salt
Lake City, or the melons of San Francisco. The
Bombay merchants have not time, indeed, to enjoy the
beauties of their city, any more than Londoners have
to visit Westminster Abbey or explore the Tower;
and as for "tropical indolence," or "Anglo-Indian
luxury," the bull-dogs are the only members of the
English community in India who can discover any-
thing but half-concealed hardships in the life. Each
dog has his servant to attend to all his wants, and,
knowing this, the cunning brute always makes the
boy carry him up the long flights of stairs that lead
to the private rooms over the merchants' houses in
the Fort.
Bombay bazaar is the gayest of gay scenes. Be-
sides the ordinary crowd of any "native town," there
are solemn Jains, copper-colored Jews, white-coated
Portuguese, Persians, Arabs, Catholic priests, bespan-
gled nautch girls, and grinning Seedees. The Parsees
BOMBAY. 303
are strongest of all the merchant peoples of Bombay
in numbers, in intelligence, and in wealth. Among
the shopkeepers of their race, there is an over-promi-
nence of trade shrewdness in the expression of the
face, and in the shape even of the head. The Louvre
bust of Richelieu, in which we have the idea of a
wheedler, is a common type in the Parsee shops of the
Bombay bazaar. The Parsee people, however, what-
ever their looks, are not only in complete possession
of Bombay, but are the dark-skinned race to which we
shall have to intrust the largest share in the regenera-
tion of the East. Trading as they do in every city be-
tween Galle and Astrakan, but everywhere attached
to the English rule, they bear to us the relative posi-
tion that the Greeks occupy toward Russia.
Both in religion and in education, the Parsees are,
as a community, far in advance of the Indian Moham-
medans, and of the Hindoos. Their creed has become
a pure deism, in which God's works are worshiped as
the manifestations or visible representatives of God
on earth, fire, the sun, and the sea taking the first
places; although in the climate of Bombay prayers to
the sun must be made up of more supplications than
thanksgivings. The Parsee men are soundly taught,
and there is not a pauper in the whole tribe. In the
education and elevation of women, no Eastern race
has as yet done much, but the Parsees have done the
most, and have paved the way for further progress.
In the matter of the seclusion of women, the Parsee
movement has had some effect even upon others than
Parsees, and the Hindoos of Bombay City stand far
before even those of Calcutta in the earnestness and
success of their endeavors to promote the moral eleva-
tion of women. Nothing can be done toward the re-
generation of India so long as the women of all classes
304 GREATER BRITAIN.
remain in their present degradation; and although
many native gentlemen in Bombay already recognize
the fact, and act upon it, progress is slow, since there
is no hasis upon which to begin. The Hindoos will
not send their wives to schools where there are Euro-
pean lady teachers, for fear of proselytism taking
place ; and native women teachers are not yet to be
found; hence all teaching must needs be left to men.
Nothing, moreover, can be done with female children
in Western India, where girls are married at from five
to twelve years old.
I had not been two days in Bombay when a pla-
card caught my eye, announcing a performance at the
theater of " Borneo and Juliet, in the Maratta tongue ;"
but the play had no Friar Lawrence, no apothecary,
and no nurse ; it was nothing but a simple Maratta
love-tale, followed by some religious tableaux. In the
first piece an Englishman was introduced, and repre-
sented as kicking every native that crossed his path
with the exclamation of " Damned fool :" at each repe-
tition of which the whole house laughed. It is to be
feared that this portion of the play was " founded upon
fact." On my way home through the native town at
night, I came on a marriage procession better than any
that I had seen. A band of fifers were screaming the
most piercing of notes in front of an illuminated house,
at which the horsemen and carriages were just arriving,
both men and women clothed in jeweled robes, and
silks of a hundred colors, that flashed and glittered in
the blaze of the red torches. The procession, like the
greater number of the most gorgeous ceremonials of
Bombay, was conducted by Parsees to celebrate the
marriage of one of their own people ; but it is a curious
fact that night marriages were forced upon the Parsees
by the Hindoos, and one of the conditions upon which
THE MOHURRUM. 305
the Parsees were received into India was, that their
marriage processions should take place at night.
The Caves of Elephanta have been many times
described. The grandest sight of India, after the Taj,
is the three-faced bust of the Hindoo Trinity, or God
in his threefold character of Creator, Preserver, and
Destroyer. No Grecian sculpture* that I have seen so
well conveys the idea of Godhead. The Greeks could
idealize man, the Italians can paint the saint, but the
builders of Elephanta had the power of executing the
highest ideal of a pagan god. The repose which dis-
tinguishes the heads of the Creator and Preserver is
not the meditation of the saint, but the calm of un-
bounded power; and the Destroyer's head portends not
destruction, so muchxas annihilation, to the world.
The central head is, in its mysterious solemnity, that
which the Sphinx should be, and is not, but one at-
tribute alone is common to the expression of all three
faces, the presence of the Inscrutable.
CHAPTER XYIIL
THE MOHURRUM.
ALTHOUGH Poonah is the ancient Maratta capital,
and a thoroughly Hindoo city, it is famed throughout
India for the splendor with which its people celebrate
the Mohammedan Mohurrum, so I timed my visit in
such a way as to reach the town upon the day of the
"taboot procession."
The ascent from the Konkan, or flat country of
26*
306 GREATER BRITAIN.
Bombay, by the Western Ghauts to the table-land of
the Deccan, known as the Bhore Ghaut incline, in
which the railway rises from the plain 2000 feet into
the Deccan, by a series of steps sixteen miles in length,
is far more striking as an engineering work than the
passage of the Alleghanies on the Baltimore and Ohio
track, and as much inferior to the Sierra Nevada rail-
way works. The views from the carriage windows are
singularly like those in the Kaduganava Pass between
Columbo and Kandy ; in fact, the Western Ghauts are
of the same character as the mountains of Ceylon, the
hills being almost invariably either flat-topped or else
rent by volcanic action into great pinnacles and needle-
peaks.
The rainy season had not commenced, and the vege-
tation that gives the Ghauts their charm was wanting,
although the "mango showers" were beginning, and
spiders and other insects, unseen during the hot wea
ther, were creeping into the houses to seek shelter from
the rains. One of the early travelers to the Deccan
told the good folks at home that after the rains the
spiders' webs were so thickly laced across the jungle
that the natives of the country were in the habit of
hiring elephants to walk before them and force a pas-
sage ! At the time of my visit, neither webs nor jun-
gle were to be seen, and the spiders were very harm-
less-looking fellows. One effect of the approaching
monsoon was visible from the summit of the Ghaut, for
the bases of the mountains were hid by the low clouds
that foretell the coming rains. The inclines are held
to be unsafe during the monsoon, but they are not so
bad as the Kotree and Kurrachee line, which runs only
" weather permitting," and is rendered useless by two
hours' rain a fall which, luckily for the shareholders,
occurs only about once in every seven years. On the
THE MOHURRUM. 307
Bliore Ghaut, on the contrary, 220 inches in four
months is not unusual, and "the rains" here take the
place of the avalanche of colder ranges, and carry away
bridges, lines, and trains themselves; but in the dry
season there is a want of the visible presence of diffi-
culties overcome, which detracts from the interest of
the line.
At daybreak at Poonah, the tomtom-ing, which had
lasted without intermission through the ten days' fast,
came to a sudden end, and the police and European
magistrates began to marshal the procession of the
taboo ts, or shrines, in the bazaar.
A proclamation in English and Maratta was posted
on the walls, announcing the order of the procession
and the rules to be enforced. The orders were that
the procession to the river was to commence at 7 A.M.
and to end at 11 A.M., and that tomtom-ing, except
during those hours, would not be allowed. The ta-
boots of the light cavalry, of three regiments of native
infantry, and of the followers of three English regi-
ments of the line, and of the Sappers and Miners, were,
however, to start at six o'clock; the order of preced-
ence among the cantonment or regimental taboots was
carefully laid down, and the carrying of arms for-
bidden.
When I reached the bazaar, I found the native
police were working in vain in trying to force into line
a vast throng of bannermen, drummers, and saints,
who surrounded the various taboots or models of the
house of AH and Fatima where their sons Hassan and
Hoosein were born. Some of the shrines were of the
size and make of the dolls'-houses of our English
children, others in their height and gorgeousness re-
sembled the most successful of our burlesques upon
Guy Fawkes : some were borne on litters by four men ;
308 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
others mounted on light carts and drawn by bullocks,
while the gigantic taboot of the Third Cavalry re-
quired six buffaloes for its transport to the river. Many
privates of our native infantry regiments had joined
the procession in uniform, and it was as strange to me
to see privates in our service engaged in howling round
a sort of Maypole, and accompanying their yells with
the tomtom, as it must have been to the English in
Lucknow in 1857 to hear the bands of the rebel regi-
ments playing "Cheer, boys, cheer."
Some of the troops in Poonah were kept within
their lines all day, to be ready to suppress disturbances
caused by the Moslem fanatics, who, excited by the
Mohurrum, often run amuck among their Hindoo
neighbors. In old times, quarrels between the Son-
nites and Shiites, or orthodox and dissenting Mussul-
mans, used to be added to those between Mohammed-
ans and Hindoos at the season of the Mohurrum, but
except upon the Afghan border these feuds have ail-
but died out now.
At the head of the procession marched a row of
pipers, producing sounds of which no Highland regi-
ment would have felt ashamed, followed by long-
bearded, turban-wearing Marattas, on foot and horse-
back, surrounding an immense pagoda-shaped taboot
placed on a cart, and drawn by bullocks ; boys swing-
ing incense walked before and followed, and I remarked
a gigantic cross a loan, no doubt, from the Jesuit
College for this Mohammedan festivity. After each
taboot there came a band of Hindoo "tigers" men
painted in thorough imitation of the jungle king, and
wearing tiger ears and tails. Sometimes, instead of
tigers, we had men painted in the colors worn by
" sprites" in an English pantomime, and all sprites
and tigers danced in the fashion of the medieval
THE MOHURRUM. 309
mummers. Behind the tigers and buffoons there fol-
lowed women, walking in their richest dress. The
nautch girls of Poonah are reputed the best in all the
East, but the monotonous Bombay nautch is not to be
compared with the Cashmere nautch of Lahore.
Some taboo ts were guarded on either side by sheiks
on horseback, wearing turbans of the honorable green
which denotes direct descent from the Prophet, though
the genealogy is sometimes doubtful, as in the case of
the Angel Gabriel, who, according to Mohammedan
writers, wears a green turban, as being an "honorary"
descendant of Mohammed.
Thousands of men and women thronged the road
down which the taboots were forced to pass, or sat in
the shade of the peepul trees until the taboot of their
family or street came up, and then followed it, dancing
and tomtom-beating like the rest.
Poonah is famed for the grace of its women and the
elegance of their gait. In the hot weather, the saree
is the sole garment of the Hindoo women, and lends
grace to the form without concealing the outlines of
the trunk or the comely shapes of the well-turned
limbs. The saree is eight yards long, but of such soft
thin texture that it makes no show upon the person.
It is a singular testimony to the strength of Hindoo
habits, that at this Mohammedan festival the Moham-
medan women should all be wearing the long seamless
saree of the conquered Hindoos.
In the Mohurrum procession at Poonah there was
nothing distinctively Mohammedan. Hindoos joined
in the festivities, and " Portuguese," or descendants of
the slaves, half-castes, and native Christians who at the
time of the Portuguese occupation of Surat assumed
high-sounding names and titles, and now form a large
proportion of the inhabitants of towns in the Bombay
310 GREATER BRITAIN.
Presidency. The temptation of a ten days' holiday is
too great to be resisted by the prejudices of even the
Christians or Hindoos.
The procession ended at the Ghauts on the river-
side, where the taboots, one after the other, made
their exit from ten days of glory into unfathomable
slush; and such was the number of the "camp ta-
boots," as those of the native soldiers in our service
are styled, and the " bazaar taboots," or city con-
tributions, that the immersion ceremonies were not
completed when the illumination and fireworks com-
menced.
After dark, the bazaar was lit with colored fires,
and with the ghostly paper-lanterns that give no light;
and the noise of tomtoms and fire-crackers recom-
menced in spite of proclamations arid police-rules.
Were there in Indian streets anything to burn, the
Mohurrum would cause as many fires in Hindostan as
Independence-day in the United States; but, although
houses are burnt out daily in the bazaars, they are
never burnt down, for nothing but water can damage
mud. We could have played our way into Lucknow
in 1857 with pumps and hoses at least as fast as we
contrived to batter a road into it with shot and shell.
During the day I had been amused with the say-
ings of some British recruits, who were watching the
immersion ceremonies, but in the evening one of them
was in the bazaar, uproariously drunk, kicking every
native against whom he stumbled, and shouting to an
officer of another regiment, who did not like to inter-
fere: "I'm a private soldier, I know, but I'm a gentle-
man ; I know what the hatmosphere is, I do; and I
knows a cloud when I sees it, damned if I don't." On
the other hand, in some fifty thousand natives holiday-
making that day, many of them Christians and low-
THE MOHUREUM. 311
caste men, with no prejudice against drink, a drunken
man was not to be seen.
It is impossible to overestimate the harm done to
the English name in India by the conduct of drunken
soldiers and " European loafers." The latter class con-
sists chiefly of discharged railway guards and runaway
sailors from Calcutta, men who, traveling across
India and living at free quarters on the trembling
natives, become ruffianly beyond description from the
effect upon their originally brutal natures of the pos-
session of unusual power.
The popularity of Mohammedan festivals such as
that of the Mohurrum has been one of the many
causes which have led us to believe that the Moham-
medans form a considerable proportion of the popula-
tion of Hindostan, but the census in the Northwest
Provinces revealed the fact that they had there been
popularly set down as three times as numerous as they
are, and it is probable that the same is the case through-
out all India. Not only are the Indian Mohammedans
few, but their Mohammedanism sits lightly on them:
they are Hindoos in caste distinctions, in ceremonies,
in daily life, and ail-but Hindoos in their actual wor-
ship. On the other hand, this Mohurrum showed me
that the Hindoos do not scruple to attend the com-
memoration of Hassan and Hoosein. At Benares there
is a temple which is used in common by Mohammedans
and Hindoos, and throughout India, among the low-
caste people, there is now little distinction between
the religions. The descendants of the Mohammedan
conquerors, who form the leading families in several
native States, and also in Oude itself, are among the
most dangerous of our Indian subjects, but they ap-
pear to have but little hold upon the humble classes
of their fellow-worshipers, and their attempts to stir
312 GREATER BRITAIN.
up their people to active measures against the English
have always failed. On the other hand, we have
hitherto somewhat ignored the claims upon our
consideration of the Indian Mohammedans and still
more numerous hill-tribes, and permitted our govern-
ments to act as though the Hindoos and the Sikhs
were the only inhabitants of Hindostan.
CHAPTER XIX.
ENGLISH LEAKNING.
THE English traveler who crosses India from Cal-
cutta to Bombay is struck with the uncivilized condi-
tion of the land. He has heard in England of palaces
and temples, of art treasures and of native poetry, of
the grace of the Hindoo maidens, of Cashmere shawls,
of the Taj, of the Pearl Mosque, of a civilization as
perfect as the European and as old as the Chinese.
When he lands and surveys the people, he finds them
naked barbarians, plunged in the densest ignorance
and superstition, and safe only from extermination be-
cause the European cannot dwell permanently in the
climate of their land. The stories we are told at home
are in no sense false: the Hindoos, of all classes, are
graceful in their carriage; their tombs and mosques
are of extraordinary beauty, their art patterns the de-
spair of our best craftsmen ; the native poetry is at
least equal to our own, and the Taj the noblest build-
ing in the world. Every word is true, but the whole
forms but a singularly small portion of the truth. The
ENGLISH LEARNING. 313
religious legends, the art patterns, the perfect manner
and the graceful eye and taste seem to have descended
to the Hindoos of to-day from a generation whose
general civilization they have forgotten. The poetry
is confined to a few members of a high-caste race, and
is mainly an importation from abroad ; the architec-
ture is that of the Moslem conquerors. Shan Jehan,
a Mohammedan emperor and a foreigner, built the
Taj; Akbar the Great, another Turk, was the designer
of the Pearl Mosque; and the Hindoos can no more be
credited with the architecture of their early conquerors
than they can with the "railways and bridges of their
English rulers, or with the waterworks of Bombay City.
The Sikhs are chiefly foreigners; but of the purely
native races, the Rajpoots are only fine barbarians, the
Bengalees mere savages, and the tribes of Central In-
dia but little better than the Australian aborigines or
the brutes. Throughout India there are remains of an
early civilization, but it has vanished as completely as
it has in Egypt; and the Cave-temples stand as far
from the daily life of Hindostan as the Pyramids do
from that of Egypt.
It is to be feared that the decline has been extremely
rapid since the day when we arrived in India. Just as
it is almost impossible, by any exertion of the mind, to
realize in Mexico the fact that the present degraded
Aztecs are the same people whom the Spaniards found,
only some three hundred years ago, dwelling in splen-
did palaces, and worshiping their unknown gods in
golden temples through the medium of a sacred tongue,
so now it is difficult to believe that the pauperized in-
habitants of Orissa and the miserable peasantry of Oude
are the sons of the chivalrous warriors who fought in
the last century against Clive.
The truth is, that in surveying Oriental empires
VOL. ii. 27
314 GREATER BRITAIN.
from a distance, we are dazzled by the splendor of the
kings and priests; drawing near, we find an oppressed
and miserable slave class, from whose hard earnings
the wealth of the great is wrung; called on to govern
the country, we extinguish the kings and priests in
the fashion in which Captain Hodson, in 1857, shot
the last sons of the Imperial family of India in a dry
ditch, while we were transporting the last Mogul,
along with our native thieves, in a convict-ship to
British Burmah. There remains the slave class, and
little else. We may select a few of these to be our
policemen and torturers-in-chief, we may pick another
handful to wear red coats and be our guards and the
executioners of their countrymen; we may teach a
few to chatter some words' of English, and then,
calling them great scoundrels, may set them in our
railway stations and our offices ; but virtually, in an-
nexing any Eastern country, we destroy the ruling
class, and reduce the government to a mere imperial-
ism, where one man rules and the rest are slaves. No
parallel can be drawn in Europe or North America to
that state of things which exists wherever we carry
our^arms in the East: were the President and Congress
in America, and all the wealthy merchants of the great
towns, to be destroyed to-morrow, the next day would
see the government proceeding quietly in the hands of
another set every bit as intelligent, as wise, and good.
In a lesser degree, the same would be the case in
England or in France. The best example that could
be given nearer home of that which occurs continually
in the East would be one which would suppose that
the Emperor and nobility in Russia were suddenly de-
stroyed, and the country left in the hands of the British
ambassador and the late serfs. Even this example
would fail to convey a notion of the extent of the
ENGLISH LEARNING. 315
revolution which takes place on the conquest by
Britain of an Eastern country; for in the East the
nobles are better taught and the people more ignorant
than they are in Russia, and the change causes a
more complete destruction of poetry, of literature,
and of art.
It being admitted, then, that we are in the position
of having, in Hindostan, a numerous and ignorant,
but democratic people to govern from without, there
comes the question of what should be the general
character of our government. The immediate ques-
tions of the day may be left to our subordinates in
India ; but the direction and the tendencies of legis-
lation are matters for us at home. There can be
nothing more ridiculous than the position of those of
our civilians in India who, while they treat the natives
with profound contempt, are continually crying out
against government from at home, on the ground set
forth in the shibboleth of " India for the Indians." If
India is to be governed by the British race at all, it
must be governed from Great Britain. The general
conditions of our rule must be dictated at London by
the English people, and nothing but the execution of
our decrees, the collection of evidence, and the framing
of mere rales, left to our subordinates in the East.
First among the reforms that must be introduced
from London is the general instruction in the English
language of the native population. Except upon a
theory that will fairly admit of the forcing upon a
not unwilling people of this first of all great means of
civilization, our presence in India is wholly indefensi-
ble. Unless also that be done, our presence in India,
or that of some nation stronger than us and not more
scrupulous, must endure forever; for it is plainly im-
possible that a native government capable of holding
316 GEE ATE R BRITAIN.
its own against Russia and America can otherwise be
built up* in Hindostan. Upon the contrary supposi-
tion, namely, that we do not intend at any time to
quit our hold on India, the instruction of the people
in our language becomes still more important. Upon
the second theory, we must teach them English, the
language of the British government; upon the first,
English, the language of the world. Upon either
theory, we must teach them English. Nothing can
better show the trivial character of the much-talked-
of reforms introduced into India in the last few years,
since our Queen has assumed the imperial throne of
Hindostan, than the fact that no progress whatever
has been made in a matter of far more grave import-
ance than are any number of miles of railway, canal,
or Grand Trunk roads. Our civilians in India tell us
that, if you teach the natives English, you expose
them to the attacks of Christian missionaries, and us
to revolt an exposure which speaks not too highly of
the government which is forced to make it. Our mili-
tary officers, naturally hating the country to which
they now are exiled, instead of being sent as formerly
of their own free will, tell you that every native who
can speak English is a scoundrel, a liar, and a thief,
which is, perhaps, if we except the Parsees, not far
from true at present, when teaching is given only to
a few lads, who thus acquire a monopoly of the offices
in which money passes through native hands. Their
opinion has. no bearing whatever upon a general in-
struction of the people, under which we should evi-
dently be able to pick our men, as we now pick them
for all employments in which a knowledge of English
is not required.
A mere handful of Spaniards succeeded in natural-
izing their language in a country twice as large as
ENGLISH LEARNING. 317
Europe : in the whole of South America, the Central
States, and Mexico. Not only there, but in the United
States, the Utes and Comanches, wild as they are,
speak Spanish, while their own language is forgotten.
In the west of Mexico there is no trace of pure Spanish
blood, there is even comparatively little mixture yet
Spanish, and that of the best, is spoken, to the ex-
clusion of every other language, in Manzanillo and
Acapulco. This phenomenon is not confined to the
Western world. In Bombay Presidency, five millions
of so-called Portuguese who, however, for the most
part are pure Hindoos speak a Latin tongue, and
worship at the temples of the Christian God. French
makes progress in Saigon, Dutch in Java. In Canada,
we find the Huron Indians French in language and
religion. English alone, it would seem, cannot be
pressed upon any of the dark-skinned tribes. In New
Zealand, the Maories know no English; in ISTatal, the
Zulus; in India, the Hindoos. The Dutch, finally ex-
pelled from South Africa in 1815 and from Ceylon in
1802, have yet more hold by their tongue upon the
natives of those lands than have the English masters
of them since the Dutch expulsion.
To the early abolition or total non-existence of
slavery in the British colonies, we may, perhaps, trace
our unfortunate failure to spread our mother-tongue.
Dutch, Portuguese, Spaniards, all practiced a slavery
of the widest kind; all had about them not native
servants, frequently changing from the old master to
the new, and passing unheeded to whatever service
money could tempt them to engage in, but domestic
slaves, bred up in the family, and destined, probably,
to die within the house where they were reared, to
whom the language of the master was taught, because
your Spanish grandee, with power of life and death
27*
318 GREATER BRITAIN.
over his family slaves, was not the man to condescend
to learn his servants' tongue in order that his com-
mands should be more readily understood. Another
reason may have caused the Portuguese and other
dominant races of the later middle ages to have in-
sisted that their slaves should learn the language of
the master and the government; namely, that in learn-
ing the new, the servile families would speedily forget
the older tongue, and thus become as incapable of
mixing in the conspiracies and insurrections of their
brother natives as Pyreriean shepherd dogs of con-
sorting with their progenitors, the wolves. Whatever
their reasons, however, the Spaniards succeeded where
we have failed.
The greatest of our difficulties are the financial.
E"o cheap system is workable by us, and our dear sys-
tem we have not the means to work. The success of
our rule immediately depends upon the purity and good
feeling of the rulers, yet there are villages in British
India where the people have never seen a white man,
and oft' the main roads, and outside the district towns,
the sight of a European official is extremely rare.
To the inhabitants of the greater portion of rural
India, the governor who symbolizes British rule is a
cruel and corrupt Hindoo policeman; himself not im-
probably a Bengal mutineer in 1857, or drawn from
the classes whom our most ignorant sepoys themselves
despised. It is not easy to see how this vital defect can
be amended, except by the slow process of raising up
a native population that we can trust and put in office,
and this is impossible unless we encourage and reward
the study of the English tongue. The most needed of
all social reforms in India, an improvement in the pres-
ent thoroughly servile condition of the native women,
could itself in no way be more easily brought about
ENGLISH LEARNING. 319
than by the familiarization of the Hindoos with Eng-
lish literature ; and that greatest of all the curses of
India, false- swearing in the courts, would undoubtedly
be both directly and indirectly checked by the intro-
duction of our language. The spread of the English
tongue need be no check to that of the ancient clas-
sical languages of the East; the two studies would go
hand in hand. It is already a disgrace to us that while
we spend annually in India a large sum upon our chap-
lains and church schools, we toss only one-hundredth
part of the sum a paltry few thousands of rupees to
the native colleges, where the most venerable of lan-
guages Sanscrit, Arabic, and Persian are taught by
the men who alone can thoroughly understand them.
At the moment when England, Germany, and America
are struggling for the palm in the teaching of Oriental
literature when Oxford, Edinburgh, and London are
contending with each other, and with Berlin, Yale, and
Harvard, in translating and explaining Eastern books
our government in India is refusing the customary help
to the publication of Sanscrit works, and starving the
teachers of the language.
So long as tbe natives remain ignorant of the
English tongue, they remain ignorant of all the civil-
ization of our time ignorant alike of political and
physical science, of philosophy and true learning. It
is needless to say that, if French or German were
taught them instead of English, they would be as
well off in this respect; but English, as the tongue of
the ruling race, has the vast advantage that its acqui-
sition by the Hindoos will soon place the government
of India in native hands, and thus, gradually relieving
us of an almost intolerable burden, will civilize and
set free the people of Hindostan.
320 GREATER BRITAIN.
CHAPTER XX.
INDIA.
"ALL general observations upon India are necessarily
absurd," said to me at Simla a distinguished officer of
the Viceroy's government; but, although this is true
enough of theories that bear upon the customs, social
or religious, of the forty or fifty peoples which make
up what in England we style the "Hindoo race," it has
no bearing on the consideration of the policy which
should guide our actual administration of the Empire.
England in the East is not the England that we
know. Flousy Britannia, with her anchor and ship,
becomes a mysterious Oriental despotism, ruling a
sixth of the human race, nominally for the natives'
own good, and certainly for no one else's, by laws and
in a manner opposed to every tradition and every pre-
judice of the whole of the various tribes of which this
vast population is composed scheming, annexing,
out-manoeuvring Russia, and sometimes, it is to be
feared, out-lying Persia herself.
In our island home, we plume ourselves upon our
hatred of political extraditions : we would scorn to ask
the surrender of a political criminal of our own, we
would die in the last ditch sooner than surrender those
of another crown. What a contrast we find to this
when we look at our conduct in the East ! During the
mutiny of 1857, some of our rebel subjects escaped
into the Portuguese territory at Goa. We demanded
INDIA. 321
their extradition, which the Portuguese refused. We
insisted. The offer we finally accepted was, that they
should be transported to the Portuguese settlement at
Timor, we supplying transports. An Indian trans-
port conveying these men to their island grave, but
carrying the British flag, touched at Batavia in 1858,
to the astonishment of the honest Dutchmen, who
knew England as a defender of national liberty in
Europe.
Although despotic, our government of India is not
bad ; indeed, the hardest thing that can be said of it is
that it is too good. We do our duty by the natives
manfully, but they care little about that, and we are
continually hurting their prejudices and offending
them in small things, to which they attach more im-
portance than they do to great. To conciliate the Hin-
doos, we should spend 10,000 a year in support of
native literature to please the learned, and 10,000 on
fireworks to delight the wealthy and the low-caste peo-
ple. Instead of this, we worry them with municipal
institutions and benevolent inventions that they cannot
and will not understand. The attempt to introduce
trial by jury into certain parts of India was laudable,
but it has ended in one of those failures which discredit
the government in the eyes of its own subordinates.
If there is a European foreman of jury, the natives
salaam to .him, and ask: "What does the sahib say?"
If not, they look across the court to the native barris-
ters, who hold up fingers, each of which means lOOrs.,
and thus bid against each other for the verdict, for,
while natives as a rule are honest in their personal or
individual dealings, yet in places of trust railway
clerkships, secretaryships of departments, and so on
they are almost invariably willing to take bribes.
Throughout India, such trials as are not before a
322 GREATER BRITAIN.
jury are conducted with the aid of native assessors as
members of the court. This works almost as badly as
the jury does, the judge giving his decision without
any reference to the opinion of the assessors. The
story runs that the only use of assessors is, that in an
appeal where the judge and assessors had agreed
the advocate can say that the judge " has abdicated his
functions, and yielded to the absurd opinion of a couple
of ignorant and dishonest natives," or, if the judge
had gone against his client in spite of the assessors
being inclined the other way, that the judge "has de-
cided in the teeth of all experienced and impartial na-
tive opinion, as declared by the voices of two honest
and intelligent assessors."
Our introduction of juries is not an isolated instance
of our somewhat blind love for "progress." If in the
already-published portions of the civil code for in-
stance, the parts which relate to succession, testament-
ary and intestate you read in the illustrations York
for Delhi, and Pimlico for Sultanpore, there is not a
word to show that the *ode is meant for India, or for
an Oriental race at all. It is true that the testamentary
portion of the code applies at present only to European
residents in India ; but the advisability of extending it
to natives is under consideration, and this extension
is only a matter of time. The result of over-great
I rapidity of legislation, and of unyielding adherence to
English or Roman models in the Indian codes, must be
1 that our laws will never have the slightest hold upon
the people, and that, if we are swept from India, our
laws will vanish with us. The Western character of
our codes, and their want of elasticity and of adapta-
bility to Eastern conditions, is one among the many
causes of our unpopularity.
The old-school Hindoos fear that we aim at subvert-
INDIA. 323
ing all their dearest and most venerable institutions,
and the free-thinkers of Calcutta and the educated na-
tives hate us because, while we preach culture and
progress, we give them no chance of any but a subordi-
nate career. The discontent of the first-named class
we can gradually allay, .by showing them the ground-
lessness of their suspicions; but the shrewd Bengalee
baboos are more difficult to deal with, and can be met
only in one way namely, by the employment of the
natives in offices of high trust, under the security af-
forded by the infliction of the most degrading penal-
ties on proof of the smallest corruption. One of the
points in which the policy of Akbar surpassed our own
was in the association of qualified Hindoos with his
Mohammedan fellow-countrymen in high places in his
government. The fact, moreover, that native govern-
ments are still preferred to British rule, is a strong ar-
gument in favor of the employment by us of natives;
for, roughly speaking, their governmental system dif-
fers from ours only in the employment of native officers
instead of English. There is not now existent a thor-
oughly native government; at some time or other, we
have controlled in a greater or less degree the govern-
ments of all the native States. To study purely native
rule, we should have to visit Caboul or Herat, and
watch the Afghan princes putting out each other's
eyes, while their people are engaged in never-ending
wars, or in murdering strangers in the name of God.
Natives might more safely be employed to fill the
higher than the lower offices. It is more easy to find
honest and competent native governors or councilmen
than honest and efficient native clerks and policemen.
Moreover, natives have more temptations to be corrupt,
and more facilities for being so with safety, in low posi-
tions than in high. A native policeman or telegraph
324 GREATER BRITAIN.
official can take his bribe without fear of detection by
his European chief; not so a native governor, with
European subordinates about him.
The common Anglo-Indian objections to the employ-
ment of natives in our service are, when examined,
found to apply only to the employment of incompetent
natives. To say that the native lads of Bengal, edu-
cated in our Calcutta colleges, are half educated and
grossly immoral, is to say that, under a proper system
of selection of officers, they could never come to be
employed. All that is necessary at the moment is that
we should concede the principle by appointing, year
by year, more natives to high posts, and that, by hold-
ing the civil service examinations in India as well as
in England, and by .establishing throughout India
well-regulated schools, we should place the competent
native youths upon an equal footing with the English.
That we shall ever come to be thoroughly popular
in India is not to be expected. By the time the old
ruling families have died out, or completely lost their
power, the people whom we rescued from their oppres-
sion will have forgotten that the oppression ever ex-
isted, and as long as the old families last, they will
hate us steadily. One of the documents published in
the G-azette of India, while I was at Simla, was from the
pen of Asudulla Muhamadi, one of the best-known
Mohammedans of the Northwest Provinces. His griev-
ances were the cessation of the practice of granting
annuities to the " sheiks of noble families," the con-
ferring of the " high offices of Mufti, Sudr'-Ameen,
and Tahsildar," on persons not of " noble extraction,"
" the education of the children of the higher and lower
classes on the same footing, without distinction," "the
desire that women should be treated like men in every
respect," and "the formation of English schools for
INDIA. 325
the education of girls of the lower order." He ended
his State paper by pointing out the ill effects of the
practice of conferring on the poor " respectable berths,
thereby enabling them to indulge in luxuries which
their fathers never dreamt of, and to play the upstart;"
and declared that to a time-honored system of class
government there had succeeded "a state of things
which I cannot find words to express." It is not likely
that our rule will ever have much hold on the class
that Asudulla represents, for not only is our govern-
ment in India a despotism, but its tendency is to
become an imperialism, or despotism exercised over a
democratic people, such as we see in France, and are
commencing to see in Russia.
We are leveling all ranks in India; we are raising
the humblest men, if they will pass certain examina-
tions, to posts which we refuse to the most exalted of
nobles unless they can pass higher. A clever son of
a bheestie, or sweeper, if he will learn English, not
only may, but must rise to be a railway baboo, or
deputy-collector of customs ; whereas for Hindoo rajahs
or Mohammedan nobles of Delhi creation, there is no
chance of anything but gradual decline of fortune.
Even our Star of India is democratic in its working:
we refuse it to men of the highest descent, to confer it
on self-made viziers of native States, or others who
were shrewd enough to take our side during the
rebellion. All this is very modern, and full of " prog-
ress," no doubt; but it is progress toward imperialism,
or equality of conditions under paternal despotism.
Not only does the democratic character of our rule
set the old families against us, but it leads also to the
failure of our attempt to call around us a middle class,
an educated thinking body of natives with something
to lose, who, seeing that we are ruling India for her
VOL. ii. 28
326 GREATER BRITAIN.
own good, would support us heart and soul, and form
the best of bucklers for our dominion. As it is, the
attempt has long been made in name, but, as a matter
of fact, we have humbled the upper class, and^failed
to raise a middle class to take its place. "We have
crushed the prince without setting up the trader in his
stead.
The wide-spread hatred of the English does not
prove that they are bad rulers ; it is merely the hatred
that Easterns always bear their masters ; yet masters
the Hindoos will have. Even the enlightened natives
do not look with longing toward a future of self-govern-
ment, however distant. Most intelligent Hindoos would
like to see the Russians drive us out of India, not that
any of them think that the Russians would be better
rulers or kinder men, but merely for the pleasure of
seeing their traditional oppressors beaten. What, then,
are we to do ? The only justification for our presence
in India is the education for freedom of the Indian
races ; but at this moment they will not have freedom
at a gift, and many Indian statesmen declare that no
amount of education will ever fit them for it. For a
score of centuries the Hindoos have bribed and taken
bribes, and corruption has eaten into the national char-
acter so deeply, that those who are the bes^t of judges
declare that it can never be washed out. The analogy
of the rise of other races leads us to hope, however,
that the lapse of time will be sufficient to raise the
Hindoos as it has raised the Huns.
The ancients believed that the neighborhood of frost
and snow was fatal to philosophy and to the arts ; to
the Carthaginians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians, the in-
habitants of Gaul, of Germany, and of Britain were
rude barbarians of the frozen Forth, that no con-
ceivable lapse of time could convert into anything
INDIA. 327
much better than talking bears a piece of empiricism
which has a close resemblance to our view of India.
It is idle to point to the tropics and say that free com-
munities do not exist within those limits: the map
of the world will show that freedom exists only in the
homes of the English race. France, the authoress of
modern liberty, has failed as yet to learn how to retain
the boon for which she is ever ready to shed her blood ;
Switzerland, a so-called free State, is the home of the
worst of bigotry and intolerance; the Spanish re-
publics are notoriously despotisms under democratic
titles; America, Australia, Britain, the homes of our
race, are as yet the only dwelling-spots of freedom.
There is much exaggeration in the cry that self-
government, personal independence, and true manli-
ness can exist only where the snow will lie upon the
ground, that cringing slavishness and imbecile sub-
mission follow the palm-belt round the world. If free-
dom be good in one country, it is good in all, for there
is nothing in its essence which should limit it in time
or place : the only question that is open for debate is
whether freedom an admitted good is a benefit
which, if once conferred upon the inhabitants of the
tropics, will be maintained by them against invasion
from abroad and rebellion from within ; if it be given bit
by bit, each step being taken only when public opinion
is fully prepared for its acceptance, there can be _no
fear that freedom will ever be resigned without a
struggle. We should know that Sikhs, Kandians,
Scindians, Marattas, have fought bravely enough for
national independence to make it plain that they will
struggle to the death for liberty as soon as they can be
made to see its worth. It will take years to efface the
stain of a couple of hundred years of slavery in the
negroes of America, and it may take scores of years to
328 GREATER BRITAIN.
heal the deeper sores of Hindostan ; but history teaches
us to believe that the time will come when the Indians
will be fit for freedom.
Whether the future advent of a better day for India
be a fact or a dream, our presence in the country is
justifiable. Were we to quit India, we must leave her
to Russia or to herself. If to Russia, the political
shrewdness and commercial blindness of the Northern
Power would combine to make our pocket suffer by
loss of money as much as would our dignity by so plain
a confession of our impotence; while the unhappy
Indians would discover that there exists a European
nation capable of surpassing Eastern tyrants in cor-
ruption by as much as it already exceeds them in dull
weight of leaden cruelty and oppression. If to her-
self, unextinguishable anarchy would involve our East-
ern trade and India's happiness in a hideous and lasting
ruin.
If we are to keep the country, we must consider
gravely whether it be possible properly to administer
its affairs upon the present system whether, for in-
stance, the best supreme government for an Eastern
empire be a body composed of a chief invariably re-
moved from office just as he begins to understand his
duty, and a council of worn-out Indian officers, the
whole being placed in the remotest corner of Western
Europe, for the sake of removing the government from
the " pernicious influence of local prejudice."
India is at this moment governed by the Indian
Council at Westminster, who are responsible to no-
body. The Secretary of State is responsible to Par-
liament for a policy which he cannot control, and the
Viceroy is a head-clerk.
India can be governed in two ways; either in India
or in London. Under the former plan, we should
INDIA. 329
leave the bureaucracy in India independent, preserving
merely some slight control at home a control which
should, of course, be purely parliamentary and Eng-
lish ; under the other plan which is that to which it
is to be hoped the people of England will command
their representatives to adhere India would be gov-
erned from London by the English nation, in the inter-
ests of humanity and civilization. Under either system,
the Indian Council in London would be valuable as an
advising body; but it does not follow, because the
Council can advise, that therefore they can govern, and
to delegate executive power to such a board is on the
face of it absurd.
"Whatever the powers to be granted to the Indian
Council, it is clear that the members should hold
office for the space of only a few years. So rapid is
the change that is now making a nation out of what
was ten years ago but a continent inhabited by an
agglomeration of distinct tribes, that no Anglo-Indian
who has left India for ten years is competent even to
advise the rulers, much less himself to share in the
ruling, of Hindostan. The objection to the govern-
ment of India by the Secretary of State is, that the
tenant of the office changes frequently, and is generally
ignorant of native feelings and of Indian affairs. The
difficulty, however, which attends the introduction of a
successful plan for the government of India from Lon-
don is far from being irremovable, while the objection
to the paternal government of India by a Viceroy is
that it would be wholly opposed to our constitutional
theories, unfitted to introduce into our Indian system
those democratic principles which we have for ten
years been striving to implant, and even in the long
run dangerous to our liberties at home.
One reason why the Indian officials cry out against
28*
330 GREATER BRITAIN.
government from St. James's Park is, because they
deprecate interference with the Viceroy ; but were the
Council abolished, except as a consultative body, and
the Indian Secretaryship of State made a permanent
appointment, it is probable that the Viceroy would be
relieved from that continual and minute interference
with his acts which at present degrades his office in
native eyes. The Viceroy would be left considerable
power, and certainly greater power than he has at
present, by the Secretary of State; that which is es-
sential is merely, that the power of control, and re-
sponsible control, should lie in London. The Viceroy
would, in practice, exercise the executive functions,
under the control of a Secretary of State, advised by
an experienced Council and responsible to Parliament,
and we should possess a system under which there
would be that conjunction of personal responsibility
and of skilled advice which is absolutely required for
the good government of India.
To a scheme which involves the government of In-
dia from at home, it may be objected that India can-
not be so well understood in London as in Calcutta.
So far from this being the case, there is but little doubt
among those who best know the India of to-day, that
while men in Calcutta understand the wants of the
Bengalee, and men in Lahore the feelings of the Sikh,
India, as a whole, is far better understood in England
than in any presidency town.
It must be remembered, that with India within a day
of England by telegraph, and within three weeks by
steam, the old autocratic Governor-General has become
impossible, and day by day the Secretary of State in
London must become more and more the ruler of
India. Were the Secretary of State appointed for a
term of years, and made immovable except by a direct
INDIA. 331
vote of the House of Commons, no fault could be
found with the results of the inevitable change : as it
is, however, a council of advice will hardly be suffi-
cient to prevent gross blundering while we allow India
to be ruled by no less than four. Secretaries of State in
a single year.
The chief considerations to be kept in view in the
framing of a system of government for India are briefly
these : a sufficient separation of the two countries to
prevent the clashing of the democratic and paternal
systems, but, at the same time, a control over the
Indian administration by the English people active
enough to insure the progressive amelioration of the
former; the minor points to be borne in mind are that
in India we need less centralization, in London more
permanence, and, in both, increased personal responsi-
bility. All these requirements are satisfied by the plan
proposed, if it be coupled with the separation of the
English and Indian armies, the employment of natives
in our service, and the creation of new governments
for the Indus territories and Assam. Madras, Bom-
bay, Bengal, Assam, the Central Provinces, Agra, the
Indus, Oude, and Burmah would form the nine presi-
dencies, the Viceroy having the supreme control over
our officers in the native States, and not only should
the governors of the last seven be placed upon the
same footing with those of Madras and Bombay, but
all the local governors should be assisted by a council
of ministers who should necessarily be consulted, but
whose advice should not be binding on the governors.
The objections that are raised against councils do not
apply to councils that are confined to the giving of ad-
vice, and the ministers are needed, if for no other pur-
pose, at least to divide the labor of the Governor, for
all our Indian officials are at present overworked.
332 GREATER BRITAIN.
This is not the place for the suggestion of improve-
ments in the details of Indian government. The
statement that all general observations upon India are
necessarily absurd is not more true of moral, social,
educational, and religious affairs than of mere govern-
mental matters: "regulation system" and " non-regu-
lation system;" "permanent settlement" and "thirty
years' settlement;" native participation in govern-
ment, or exclusion of natives each of these courses
may be good in one part of India and bad in another.
On the whole, however, it may be admitted that our
Indian government is the best example of a well-
administered despotism, on a large scale, existing in
the world. Its one great fault is over-centralization;
for, although our rule in India must needs be despotic,
no reason can be shown why its despotism should be
minute.
The greatest of the many changes in progress in the
East is that India is being made that a country is
being created under that name where none has yet
existed ; and it is our railroads, our annexations, and
above all our centralizing policy that are doing the
work. There is reason to fear that this change will
be hastened by the extension of our new codes to the
former "non-regulation provinces," and by govern-
ment from at home, where India is looked upon as
one nation, instead of from Calcutta, where it is known
to be still composed of fifty ; but so rapid is the change,
that already the Calcutta people are as mistaken in at-
tempting to laugh down our phrase "the people of
India," as we were during the mutiny when we be-
lieved that there was an "India" writhing in our
clutches. "Whether the India which is being thus
rapidly built up by our own hands will be friendly
to us, or the reverse, depends upon ourselves. The
DEPENDENCIES. 333
two principles upon which our administration of the
country might be based have long since been weighed
against each other by the English people, who, reject-
ing the principle of a holding of India for the acquisi-
tion of prestige and trade, have decided that we are to
govern India in the interest of the people of Hindostan.
We are now called on to deliberate once more, N but
this time upon the method by which our principle is
to be worked out. That our administration is already
perfect can hardly be contended so long as no officer
not very high in our Indian service dares to call a na-
tive "friend." The first of all our cares must be the
social treatment of the people, for while by the Queen's
proclamation the natives are our fellow-subjects, they
are in practice not yet treated as our fellow-men.
CHAPTER XXL
DEPENDENCIES.
WHEN, on my way home to England, I found myself
off Mocha, with the Abyssinian highlands in sight, and
still more when we were off Massowah, with the peaks
of Talanta plainly visible, I began to recall the accounts
which I had heard at Aden of the proposed British
colony on the Abyssinian table-lands, out of which the
home government has since been frightened. The
question of the desirability or the reverse of such a
colony raises points of interest on which it would be
advisable that people at home should at once take up
a line.
334 GREATER BRITAIN.
As it has never been assumed that Englishmen can
dwell permanently even upon high hills under the
equator, the proposition for European colonization or
settlement of tropical Africa may be easily dismissed,
but that for the annexation of tropical countries for
trade purposes remains. It has hitherto been accepted
as a general principle regulating our intercourse with
Eastern nations, that we have a moral right to force
the dark-skinned races to treat us in the same fashion
as that in which we are treated by our European neigh-
bors. In practice we even now go much further than
this, and inflict the blessings of Free Trade upon the
reluctant Chinese and Japanese at the cannon's mouth.
It is hard to find any law but that of might whereby
to justify our dealings with Burmah, China, and
Japan. We are apt to wrap ourselves up in our new-
found national morality, and, throwing upon our
fathers all the blame of the ill which has been done
in India, to take to ourselves credit for the good; but
it is obvious to any one who watches the conduct of
our admirals, consuls, and traders in the China seas,
that it is inevitable that China should fall to us as India
fell, unless there should be a singular change in opinion
at home, or unless, indeed, the Americans should be
beforehand with us in the matter. To say this, is not
to settle the disputed question of whether in the pres-
ent improved state of feeling, and with the present
control exercised over our Eastern officials by a disin-
terested press at home, and an interested but vigilant
press in India and the Eastern ports, government of
China by Britain might not be for the advantage of
the Chinese and the world, but it is at least open to
serious doubt whether it would be to the advantage of
Great Britain. Our ruling classes are already at least
sufficiently exposed to the corrupting influences of
DEPENDENCIES. 335
power for us to hesitate before we decide that the
widening of the national mind consequent upon the
acquisition of the government of China would out-
weigh the danger of a spread at home of love of abso-
lute authority, and indifference to human happiness
and life. The Americans, also, it is to be hoped, will
pause before they expose republicanism to the shock
that would be caused by the annexation of despotically-
governed States. In defending the Japanese against
our assaults, and those of the active but unsuccessful
French, they may unhappily find, as we have often
found, that protection and annexation are two words
for the same thing.
Although the disadvantages are more evident than
the advantages of the annexation for commercial pur-
poses of such countries as Abyssinia, China, and Japan,
the benefits are neither few nor hard to find. The
abstract injustice of annexation cannot be said to exist
in the cases of Afghanistan and Abyssinia, as the sen-
timent of nationality clearly has no existence there, and
as the worst possible form of British government is
better for the mass of the people than the best con-
ceivable rule of an Abyssinian chief. The dangers of
annexation in the weakening and corrupting of our-
selves may not unfairly be set off against the blessings
of annexation to the people, and the most serious ques-
tion for consideration is that of whether dependencies
can be said " to pay." Social progress is necessary to
trade, and we give to mankind the powerful security
of self-interest that we will raise the condition of the
people, and, by means of improved communications,
open the door to civilization.
It may be objected to this statement that our exag-
gerated conscientiousness is the very reason why our
dependencies commercially are failures, and why it is
336 GREATER BRITAIN.
useless for us to be totaling up our loss and profits
while we willf ally throw away the advantages that our
energy has placed in our hands. If India paid as well
as Java, it may be shown, we should be receiving from
the East 60 millions sterling a year for the support of
our European officials in Hindostan, and the total reve-
nue of India would be 200 or 250 millions, of which 80
millions would be clear profit for our use in England;
in other words, Indian profits would relieve us from
all taxation in England, and leave us a considerable
and increasing margin toward the abolition of the
debt. The Dutch, too, tell us that their system is more
agreeable to the natives than our own clumsy though
well-meant efforts for the improvement of their condi-
tion, which, although not true, is far too near the truth
to allow us to rest in our complacency.
The Dutch system having been well weighed at
home, and deliberately rejected by the English people
as tending to the degradation of the natives, the ques-
tion remains how far dependencies from which no
profits are exacted may be advantageously retained for
mere trade purposes. At this moment, our most flour-
ishing dependencies do not bear so much as their fair
share of the expenses of the empire : Ceylon herself
pays only the nominal and not the real cost of her de-
fense, and Mauritius costs nominally <150,000 a year,
and above half a million really in military expenses, of
which the colony is ordered to pay 45,000 and grum-
bles much at paying it. India herself, although charged
with a share of the non-effective expenses of our army,
escapes scot-free in war-time, and it is to be remarked
that the throwing upon her of a small portion of the
cost of the Abyssinian war was defended upon every
ground except the true one namely, that as an inte-
gral part of the empire she ought to bear her share in
DEPENDENCIES. 337
imperial wars. It is true that, to make the constitu-
tional doctrine hold, she also ought to be consulted,
and that we have no possible machinery for consulting
her a consideration which of itself shows our Indian
government in its true light.
Whether, indeed, dependencies pay or do not pay
their actual cost, their retention stands on a wholly dif-
ferent footing from that of colonies. Were we to leave
Australia or the Cape, we should continue to be the
chief customers of those countries: were we to leave
India or Ceylon, they would have no customers at all;
for, falling into anarchy, they would cease at once to
export their goods to us and to consume our manufac-
tures. When a British Governor of ISTew Zealand wrote
that of every Maori who fell in war with us it might
be said that, "from his ignorance, a man had been de-
stroyed whom a few months' enlightenment would
have rendered a valuable consumer of British manu-
factured goods," he only set forth with grotesque sim-
plicity considerations which weigh with us all; but
while the advance of trade may continue to be our
chief excuse, it need not be our sole excuse for our
Eastern dealings even for use toward ourselves.
Without repeating that which I have said with respect
to India, we may especially bear in mind that, although
the theory has suffered from exaggeration, our depend-
encies still form a nursery of statesmen and of war-
riors, and that we should irresistibly fall into national
sluggishness of thought, were it not for the world-wide
interests given us by the necessity of governing and
educating the inhabitants of so vast an empire as our
own.
One of the last of our annexations was close upon
our bow as we passed on our way from Aden up the
Red Sea. The French are always angry when we
VOL. ii. 29
338 GREATER BRITAIN.
seize on places in the East, but it is hardly wonderful
that they should have been perplexed about Perim.
This island stands in the narrowest place in the sea, in
the middle of the deep water, and the Suez Canal
being a French work, and Egypt under French influ-
ence, our possession of Perim becomes especially un-
pleasant to our neighbors. Not only this, but the
French had determined themselves to seize it, and
their fleet, bound to Perim, put in to Aden to coal.
The Governor had his suspicions, and, having asked
the French admiral to dinner, gave him unexception-
able champagne. The old gentleman soon began to
talk, and directly he mentioned Perim, the Governor
sent a pencil-note to the harbor-master to delay the
coaling of the ships, and one to the commander of a
gunboat to embark as many artillerymen and guns as
he could get on board in two hours, and sail for Perim.
"When the French reached the anchorage next day,
they found the British flag flying, and a great show of
guns in position. Whether they put into Aden on their
way back to France, history does not say.
Perim is not the only island that lies directly in the
shortest course for ships, nor are the rocks the only
dangers of the Red Sea. One night about nine o'clock,
when we were off the port of Mecca, I was sitting on
the fo'castle, right forward, almost on the sprit, to
catch what breeze we made, when I saw two country
boats about 150 yards on the starboard bow. Our
three lights were so bright that I thought we must be
seen, but as the boats came on across our bows, I gave
a shout, which was instantly followed by " hard a-port !"
from the Chinaman on the bridge, and by a hundred
yells from the suddenly awakened boatmen. Our helm
luckily enough had no time to act upon the ship. I
threw myself down under a stancheon, and the sail
FRANCE IN THE EAST. 339
and yard of the leading boat fell on our deck close to
my head, and the boats shot past us amid shouts of
"fire," caused by the ringing of the alarm-bell. When
we had stopped the ship, the question came had we
sunk the boat ? We at once piped away the gig, with
a Malay crew, and sent it off to look for the poor
wretches but after half an hour, we found them our-
selves, and found them safe except for their loss of
canvas and their terrible fright. Our pilot questioned
them in Arabic, and discovered that each boat had on
board 100 pilgrims ; but they excused themselves for
not having a watch or light, by saying that they had
not seen us ! Between rocks and pilgrim-boats, Red
Sea navigation is hard enough for steamers, and it is
easy to see which way its difficulties will cause the
scale to turn when the question lies between Euphrates
Railway and Suez Canal.
CHAPTER XXII.
FRANCE IN THE EAST.
IT is no longer possible to see the Pyramids or even
Heliopolis in the solitary and solemn fashion in which
they should be approached. English "going out" and
"coming home" are there at all days and hours, and
the hundreds of Arabs selling German coins and
mummies of English manufacture are terribly out of
place upon the desert. I went alone to see the Sphinx,
and, sitting down on the sand, tried my best to read
the riddle of the face, and to look through the rude
340 ORE A TEE BRITAIN.
carving into the inner mystery ; but it would not do,
and I came away bitterly disappointed. In this modern
democratic railway-girt world of ours, the ancient has
no place; the huge Pyramids may remain forever, but
we can no longer read them. A few months may see
a cafe chantant at their base.
Cairo itself is no pleasant sight. An air of dirt and
degradation hangs over the whole town, and clings to
its people, from the donkey-boys and comfit-sellers to
the pipe-smoking soldiers and the money-changers who
squat behind their trays. The wretched fellaheen, or
Egyptian peasantry, are apparently the most miserable
of human beings, and their slouching shamble is a
sad sight after the superb gait of the Hindoos. The
slave-market of Cairo has done its work ; indeed, it is
astonishing that the English should content themselves
with a treaty in which the abolition of slavery in
Egypt is decreed, and not take a single step to
secure its execution, while the slave-market in Cairo
continues to be ail-but open to the passer. That the
Egyptian government could put down slavery if it
had the will, cannot be doubted by those who have
witnessed the rapidity with which its officers act in
visiting doubtful crimes upon the wrong men. During
my week's stay in Alexandria, two such cases came to
my notice : in the first, one of my fellow-passengers
unwittingly insulted two of the Albanian police, and
was shot at by one of them with a long pistol. A
number of Englishmen, gathering from the public
gaming-houses on the great square, rescued him, and
beat off' the cavasses, and the next morning marched
down to their Consulate and demanded justice. Our
acting Consul went straight to the head of the police,
laid the case before him, and procured the condemna-
tion of the man who shot to the galleys for ten years,
FRANCE IN THE EAST. 341
while the policeman who had looked on was imme-
diately bastinadoed in the presence of the passenger.
The other case was one of robbery at a desert village,
from the tent of an English traveler. When he com-
plained to the sheik, the order was given to bastinado
the head men and hold them responsible for the amount.
The head men in turn gave the stick to the house-
holders, and claimed the sum from them ; while these
bastinadoed the vagrants, and actually obtained from
them the money. Every male inhabitant having thus
received the stick, it is probable that the actual culprit
was reached, if, indeed, he lived within the village.
" Stick-backsheesh" is a great institution in Egypt,
but the Turks are not far behind. When the British
Consulate at Bussorah was attacked by thieves some
years ago, our Consul telegraphed the fact to the
Pacha of Bagdad. The answer came at once : " Basti-
nado forty men" and bastinadoed they were, as soon
as they had been selected at random from the popu-
lation.
Coming to Egypt from India, the Englishman is
inclined to believe that, while our Indian government
is an averagely successful despotism, Egypt is mis-
governed in an extraordinary degree. As a matter of
fact, however, it is not fair to the King of Egypt that
we should compare his rule with ours in India, and it
is probable that his government is not on the whole
worse than Eastern despotisms always are. Setting up
as a "civilized ruler," the King of Egypt performs the
duties of his position by buying guns which he uses
in putting down insurrections which he has fomented,
and yachts for which he has no use; and he appears to
think that he has done all that Peter of Russia him-
self could have accomplished, when he sends a young
Egyptian to Manchester to learn the cotton-trade, or to
29*
342 GREATER BRITAIN.
London to acquire the principles of foreign commerce,
and, on his return to Alexandria, sets him to manage
the soap-works or to conduct the viceregal band. The
aping of the forms of " Western civilization," which in
Egypt mean* French vice, makes the Court of Alexan-
dria look worse than it is : we expect the slave-market
and the harem in the East, but the King of Egypt
superadds the Trianon, and a bad imitation of Mabile.
The Court influence shows itself in the action of
the people, or rather the influence at work upon the
Court is pressing also upon the people. For knavery,
no place can touch the modern Alexandria. One
word, however, is far from describing all the infamies
of the city. It surpasses Cologne for smells, Benares
for pests, Saratoga for gaming, Paris itself for vice.
There is a layer of French " civilization " of the
worst kind over the semi-barbarism of Cairo; but
still the town is chiefly Oriental. Alexandria, on the
other hand, is completely Europeanized, and has a
white population of severity or eighty thousand. The
Arabs are kept in a huge village outside the fortifica-
tions, and French is the only language spoken in the
shops and hotels. Alexandria is a French town.
It is evident enough that the Suez Canal scheme has
been from the beginning a blind for the occupation of
Egypt by France, and that, however interesting to the
shareholders may be the question of its physical or
commercial success, the probabilities of failure have
had but little weight with the French government.
The foundation of the Message rie Company with na-
tional capital, to carry imaginary mails, secured the
preponderance of French influence in the towns of
Egypt, and it is not certain that we should not look
upon the occupation of Saigon itself as a mere blind.
Of the temporary success of the French policy there
FRANCE IN THE EAST. 343
can be no doubt ; the English railway-guards have
lately been dismissed from the government railway
line, and a huge tricolor floats from the entrance to
the new clocks at Suez, while a still more gigantic one
waves over the hotel ; the King of Egypt, glad to find
a third Power which he can play off, when necessary,
against both England and Russia, takes shares in the
canal. It is when we ask, " What is the end that the
French have in view?" that we find it strangely small
by the side of the means. The French of the present
day appear to have no foreign policy, unless it is a sort
of desire to extend the empire of their language, their
dance-tunes, and their fashions ; and the natural wish
of their ruler to engage in no enterprise that will out-
last his life prevents their having any such permanent
policy as that of Russia or the United States. An
Egyptian Pacha hardly put the truth too strongly
when he said, " There is nothing permanent about
France except Mabile."
The Suez Canal is being pushed with vigor, although
the labor of the hundreds of Greek and Italian navvies
is very different to that of the tens of thousands of im-
pressed fellaheen. The withdrawal from the Com-
pany of the forced labor of the peasants has demon-
strated that the King is at heart not well disposed
toward the scheme, for the remonstrances of England
have never prevented the employment of slave labor
upon works out of which there was money to be made
for the viceregal purse. The difficulty of clearing and
keeping clear the channel at Port Said, at the Medi-
terranean end, is well known to the Pacha and his
engineers : it is not difficult, indeed, to cut through
the bar, nor impossible to keep the cutting open, but
the effect of the great piers will merely be to push the
Nile silt farther seaward, and again and again new
344 GREATER BRITAIN.
bars will form in front of the canal. That the canal
is physically possible no one doubts, but it is hard to
believe that it can pay. Even if we suppose, more-
over, that the canal will prove a complete success, the
French government will only find that it has spent
millions upon digging a canal for England's use.
The neutralization of Egypt has lately been pro-
posed by writers of the Corntist school, but to what
end is far from clear. "The interests of civilization"
are the pretext, but, when summoned by a Comtist,
"civilization" and "humanity" generally appear in a
French shape. Were we to be attacked in India by
the French or Russians, no neutralization would pre-
vent our sending our troops to India by the shortest
road, and fighting wherever we thought best. If we
were not so attacked, neutralization, as far as we are
concerned, would be a useless ceremony. If France
goes beyond her customary meddlesomeness and set-
tles down in Egypt, we shall evidently have to dislodge
her, but to neutralize the country would be to settle
her there ourselves. It would be idle to deny that the
position of France in the East is connected with the
claim put forth by her to the moral leadership of the
world. The " chief power of Europe" and "leader of
Christendom" must needs be impatient of the domi-
nance of America in the Pacific and of Britain in the
East, and seeks by successes on the side of India to
bury the memories of Mexico. One of the hundred
"missions of France," one of the thousand " Imperial
ideas," is the " regeneration of the East." Treacherous
England is to be confined to her single island, and bar-
barous Russia to be shut up in the Siberian snows.
England may be left to answer for herself, but before
we surrender even Russia to the Comtist priests, we
should remember that, just as the Russian despotism
FRANCE IN THE EAST. 345
is dangerous to the world from the stupidity of its bar-
barism, so the French democracy is dangerous through
its feverish sympathies, blundering "humanity," and
unlimited ambition.
The present reaction against exaggerated national-
ism is in itself a sign that our national mind is in a
healthy state ; but, while we distrust nationalism be-
cause it is illogical and narrow, we must remember
that "cosmopolitanism" has been made the excuse for
childish absurdities, and a cloak for desperate schemes.
Love of race, among the English, rests upon a firmer
base than either love of mankind or love of Britain,
for it reposes upon a subsoil of things known : the
ascertained virtues and powers of the English people.
For nations such as France and Spain, with few cares
outside their European territories, national fields for
action are, perhaps, too narrow, and the interests of
even the vast territories inhabited by the English race
may, in a less degree, be too small for English thought ;
but there is India, and the responsibility of the abso-
lute government of a quarter of the human race is no
small thing. If we strive to advance ourselves iujthe
love of truth, to act justly towards Ireland, and to
govern India aright, we shall have enough of work to
occupy us for many years to c.ome, and shall leave a
greater name in history than if we concerned ourselves
with settling the affairs of Poland. If we need a wider
range for our sympathies than that which even India
will supply, we may find it in our friendships with the
other sections of the race; and if, unhappily, one re-
sult of the present awakening of England to free life
should be a return of the desire to meddle in the affairs
of other folk, we shall find a better outlet for our en-
erg} T in aiding our Teutonic brethren in their struggle
for unity than in assisting Imperial France to spread
Benoitonisme through the world.
346 GREATER BRITAIN.
We cannot, if we would, be indifferent spectators of
the extravagances of France : if she is at present weak
in the East, she is strong at home. At this moment,
we are spending ten or fifteen millions a year in order
that we may be equal with her in military force, and
we hang upon the words of her ruler to know whether
we are to have peace or war. Although it may not be
wise for us to declare that this humiliating spectacle
shall shortly have an end, it is at least advisable that
we should refrain from aiding the French in their pro-
fessed endeavors to obtain for other peoples liberties
which they are incapable of preserving for themselves.
If the English race has a " mission" in the world,
it is the making it impossible that the peace of man-
kind on earth should depend upon the will of a single
man.
CHAPTER XXIII.
M
THE ENGLISH.
IN America we have* seen the struggle of the dear
races against the cheap the endeavors of the English
to hold their own against the Irish and Chinese. In
New Zealand, we found the stronger and more ener-
getic race pushing from the earth the shrewd and labo-
rious descendants of the Asian Malays; in Australia,
the English triumphant, and the cheaper races excluded
from the soil not by distance merely, but by arbitrary
legislation; in India, we saw the solution of the prob-
lem of the officering of the cheaper by the dearer race.
Everywhere we have found that the difficulties which
THE ENGLISH. 347
impede the progress to universal dominion of the Eng-
lish people lie in the conflict with the cheaper races.
The result of our survey is such as to give us reason
for the belief that race distinctions will long continue,
that miscegenation will go but little way toward blend-
ing races ; that the dearer are, on the whole, likely to
destroy the cheaper peoples, and that Saxondom will
rise triumphant from the doubtful struggle.
The countries ruled by a race whose very scum and
outcasts have founded empires in every portion of the
globe, ev^en now consist of 9J millions of square miles,
and contain a population of 300 millions of people.
Their surface is five times as great as that of the em-
pire of Darius, and four and a half times as large as
the Roman Empire at its greatest extent. It is no ex-
aggeration to say that in power the English countries
would be more than a match for the remaining nations
of the world, whom in the intelligence of their people
and the extent and wealth of their dominions they al-
ready considerably surpass. Russia gains ground stead-
ily', we are told, but so do we. If we take maps of the
English-governed countries and of the Russian coun-
tries of fifty years ago, and compare them with the
English and Russian countries of to-day, we find that
the Saxon has outstripped the Muscovite in conquest
and in colonization. The extensions of the United
States alone are equal to all those of Russia. Chili,
La Plata, and Peru must eventually become English;
the Red Indian race that now occupies those countries
cannot stand against our colonists; and the future of
the table-lands of Africa and that of Japan and of China
is as clear. Even in the tropical plains, the negroes
alone seem able to withstand us. No possible series
of events can prevent the English race itself in 1970
numbering 300 millions of beings of one national
348 GREATER BRITAIN.
character and one tongue. Italy, Spain, France, Rus-
sia become pigmies by the side of such a people.
Many who are well aware of the power of the Eng-
lish nations are nevertheless disposed to believe that
our own is morally, as well as physically, the least
powerful of the sections of the race, or, in other words,
that we are overshadowed by America and Australia.
The rise to power of our southern colonies is, however,
distant, and an alliance between ourselves and America
is still one to be made on equal terms. Although we
are forced to contemplate the speedy loss of our manu-
facturing supremacy as coal becomes cheaper in
America and dearer in Old England, we have never-
theless as much to bestow on America as she has to
confer on us. The possession of India offers to our-
selves that element of vastness of dominion which, in
this age, is needed to secure width of thought and no-
bility of purpose ; but to the English race our posses-
sion of India, of the coasts of Africa, and of the ports of
China offers the possibility of planting free institutions
among the dark-skinned races of the world.
The ultimate future of any one section of our race,
however, is of little moment by the side of its triumph
as a whole, but the power of English laws and English
principles of government is not merely an English
question its continuance is essential to the freedom
of mankind.
Steaming up from Alexandria along the coasts of
Crete and Arcadia, and through the Ionian Archipel-
ago, I reached Brindisi, and thence passed on through
Milan toward home. This is the route that our Indian
mails should take until the Euphrates road is made.
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