The public spirit with which the merchants came forward 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 law-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 Committees of San Francisco we can see the descendants of the justice-loving Germans of the time of Tacitus, Ifound 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 theRocky Mountain News, I had heard the story of the early settlers’ land-law in Missouri; in Stanton‘s office in Denver 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 José, I heard details of the settlers’ custom-law—the Californian “grand-coûtumier,” 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 custom, 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 members, but they never scrupled to hang willful offendersagainst 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 Cæsar, 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 between 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 detailsat 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. Sometimes 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 Homestead Act were both many and strange. Men were required 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 thirteen.” “That will 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—another of the requirements of the act. It is a singular mark of deference to the traditions of a Puritan ancestry that such accomplished liars as the Western landsharks 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 prospect of almost immediate realization. To turn their money over often, at whatever risk, is with these menan 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 nearest 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. Rowdyism is being put down as the God-fearing Northerners 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 has 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 theGazetteexpressed, “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. Puta 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 escaped;” 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 committee 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, thoughalways 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 Committee 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 Europe, 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.
THEfirst 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 youthere.” 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 monsters, 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 remainder 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 progress of those ninety years was shown in the foundationof 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 Buena, from Mission Dolores on the bay of San Francisco, and San José, 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 flourishing 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 Auburn, Greenwood, Cypress Grove, Hollywood, Oak Hill, are names not more full of poetry than are theplaces 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 Francisco 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 violentlydisturbed by subterranean forces. The earthquake of last year has left its mark upon Montgomery Street and the plaza, for it frightened the San Franciscans 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 a long 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 Baltimore 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 and families in hotels, to avoid the cost and trouble of an establishment.Those who have houses pay rough unkempt Irish girls from £6 to £8 a month, with board, “outings” when they please, and “followers” unlimited.
The hotel boarding has much to do with the somewhat 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, American 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 rowdies. 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 Southernerand a Pennsylvanian 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 temperature there was under seventy degrees. This fog retarded by a hundred years the discovery of San FranciscoBay. The entrance to the Golden Gate is narrow, and the mists hang there all day. Cabrillo, Drake, Viscaino, 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 advantages. 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 sentiment 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 Federal 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 largeensign 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 brain at inventing machines to peel apples and milk cows, but they intend to tunnel through the mountains 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 and 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 unreasoning 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 Scandinavians 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,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 dominant; 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 fashionable” 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 flourishing in California, and it seems probable that the church which gains the day in California will eventually be that of the whole Pacific.
On Montgomery Street are some of the finest buildings in all America; the “Occidental Hotel,” the “Masonic 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 exploded, blowing down a portion of the club, and breaking 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 morning, I read in theAltaa report from a chemist thattraces 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 Manzanilla, where the cook had taken the flask from a merchant‘s office, emptied it of its contents, the character of which was unknown to him, and filled it with common vegetable oil.
Since the great explosion at Aspinwall, nitro-glycerin has been the nightmare of Californians. For earthquakes 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 standing in ordinary temperatures, the odds are that it undergoes 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 José, “The Garden City,” and chief town of the fertile 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 José, 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 streamsdown 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 Bavarian—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 saddle, 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 question 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 commencing to kick and back toward the cliff. Springing off, we found that the girths had been slackened by the Mexican groom, and that the steep bit of mountain 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, composed of crimson cinnabar, show bravely in the torch-glare, we worked our way through the tunnels to the topmost lode and open air.
Bidding good-by to what I could see of my 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 towering 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 mountains 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 overspread 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.
“THEIndians begin to be troublesome again in Trinity County.One man and a Chinamanhave been killed, and a lady crippled for life.”
That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the English to colored races was not less strong in Californiathan 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 theAlta Californianof 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 theAlta, 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 repented of their offer to “show me around,” for, incomprehensible 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 performance, 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 twoA.M.By the “performance” 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 thecrowd 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 gesture.
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 subordinating 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 gentleman (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 countyposse. The soldiers wore paint in rings of various colors, put on so deftly, that of nose, of eyes, of mouth, no trace could be discovered; 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, pavilions, 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 notlong 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 decorous 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; teawas 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 beyond the purse of a traveler seven thousand miles from home, and twelve thousand from his next supplies. 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 something 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 prejudiced 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, explained that they came not on business, but on pleasure, we were suffered to pass in among the silent, melancholy gamblers. Not a word was heard, beyond every now arid 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 andhappy 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 dealings 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 hunting 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 ourselves in Europe; noted instances are the close resemblance of Père 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 theNew York Immigration Commission, and the London “Société Française 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 distressed, finding work for the unemployed, receiving the immigrants from China when they land, and shipping 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 outward-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 Californian, from the governor of the State to the Mexican boy who cleans his shoes.
In America, as in Australia, there is a violent prejudice 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 appeal to the Californian Democrats may or may not be true: “What for Democlat allee timee talkee dam Chinaman? Chinaman allee samee Democlat; no likeenigger, no likee injun.” “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 of work, which the “meanest” of the whites of the Pacific States refuse to perform. Politically, this is slavery. 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 colonist 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 numberssteadily increase. In 1852, Governor Bigler, in his message, recommended the prohibition of the immigration 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 number 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 visible in our mercantile marine: the ships are manned with motley crews of Bombay lascars, Maories, Negroes, Arabs, Chinamen, Kroomen, and Malays. There are no British or American seamen now, except boys who are to be quartermasters some day, and experienced 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 lascars 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 peoples.
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. 228THE BRIDAL VEIL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY.—P. 228
“INfront 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 productions. 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 consideration 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 arethree 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 irrigation, 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 vegetables 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.”
EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY.—P. 228.EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY.—P. 228.
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 without 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 breadstuffs. 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 earthquakes, to be the foremost port on the Pacific side; if,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 agricultural and pastoral interior, is as certain as it must inevitably be brilliant. Whether the chief town of the Pacific States will in time develop into one of the commercial 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 arguments 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 importance 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 nocase 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 government than Japan—Pennsylvania and 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 Belgium 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 merchants 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, our race seems marching westward to universal 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 probably,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 government: were gold, for instance, found in surface diggings 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 discoveries 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 London 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 always lie in union. The West, sympathizing in the main with the Southerners upon the slavery question,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 railroad. America, of all countries, alone shares the future of both Atlantic and Pacific, and she knows her interests too well to allow such an advantage to be thrown away. Uncalculating 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 rebellion, 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 future 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 England, 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.
INcompany 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 passengers who sought refuge from the stifling heat upon the upper and hurricane decks, more than half were diggers returning with a “pile” to their homes in the Atlantic 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 “Independence” 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 California, and a Juarez man, in the very bay where Cavendish lay in wait for months for the “great Manilla ship”—the Acapulco galleon.
When Girolamo Benzoni visited the Mexican Pacific coast, he confused the turtle with the “crocodile,” describing 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 festering lagoon, the banks of which swarm with thesmaller 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 sailcloth 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 Mexicans, under Alvarez, occupied the town at night, and carried off even the fruit. When I asked about supplies, the answer was sweeping: “Ah, mon Dieu, monsieur, cettessacrrréeeecanaille de Alvarez nous vole tout. Nous n‘avons que de l‘eau fraîche, et Alvarez va nous emporter la fontaine aussi quelque nuit. Ce sont des voleurs, voyez-vous, ces Méchicanos.” 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 anniversary of the issue, one year before, of Marshal Bazaine‘s famous order of the day, directing the instant execution, 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“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 English 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 vanishes, 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 I have seen a column of Washington news headed, “Seward ordersLewisNapoleon 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 conceived 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 peopleare 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 thousand 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 between 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 legssome!” 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 shallin any way gain fresh footing or influence upon American 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 portions 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 Americans 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 Catholics, 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 realized in the triumph of such a Catholicism as theirs any more than in the success of that of the Philadelphia 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 thousand, and is growing fast. The French “mission” inMexico was the making of that great country a further field for the Latin immigration; and when the Californians 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, consistent, 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 behind 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 mightier continent than Calypso‘s isle.
AMONGour 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 Philadelphia, 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 wasnot;” for one nation, and not for thirty-six, or forty-five. The Wigwam declared that the Washington government had no constitutional right to deny representation in Congress to any State. The Republicans ask how, if this constitutional provision is to be observed, the government of the country is to be carriedon. The Wigwam laid it down as a principle, that Congress has no power to interfere with the right possessed by each State to prescribe qualifications for the elective franchise. The Radicals say that State sovereignty 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 consolidation 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 executive; between the village municipality and Congress, between the cabinet and the district council of selectmen, 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 Republic as they are dangerous to her future.
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 commonwealth; a citizen of Pennsylvania 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 upset; but the political fabric built upon a slavery foundation in such “free” States as New York and Maryland 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 Constitution 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 toour race, and supported by local majorities, not by foreign bayonets. Although possessed of the whole military power of the nation, the Republicans refuse to endanger 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 New England and the West, in a war conducted to a triumphant issue under the leadership of Republican Congressmen and generals. The apparent magnanimity 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 Border 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 franchise 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 franchise 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 matter 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 representatives; 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 they succeeded in so doing. The States, as States, werenever in rebellion; there was only a powerful rebellion 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 wasting 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 narrowest 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 constitution of the Senate are matters to which the Republicans will turn their attention as soon as the country is rested from the war. It is not impossible that a lifetime 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 NewYorkers. 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.