It is not likely that the Republicans will carry all before them without a check; but though one Conservative reaction may follow another, although time after time the Democrats may return victorious from the fall elections, in the end Radicalism must inevitably win the day. A party which takes for its watch-word, “The national good,” will always beat the Constitutionalists.
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 Democrats 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, whichcause the position of parties to fluctuate frequently in certain States.
The first reaction against the now triumphant Radicals will probably be based upon the indignation excited 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 concede that, so far as the effects of the use of alcohol are strictly personal, there is no ground for the interference 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 commit 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 alcohol 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 becomeso 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 permitted 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 nation which is admitted to present the greatest mass of education and intelligence with the smallest intermixture 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 population. Bribery, we have been told, reigns supreme in these assemblies; the nation‘s interest is but a phrase; individual selfishness 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 of patriotic sentiment as that which lately furnished a million and a half of volunteers 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 necessary. It cannot be conceived that the American people would allow its institutions to be stultified and lawitself 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, not 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 fail 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 America 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 convention, 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 thecaféwaiters met in their congress, it was “Messieurs les Garçons-limonadiers.”
The pomological convention was an extremely jovialone, all the horticulturists being whisky-growers themselves, and having a proper wish to compare their own with their neighbors’ “Bourbon” 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 temperance State of Maine, many might be inclined to think that caucuses, if not exactly vessels of grace, were decidedly “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 moment to be the weaker, and which evidently helps to create the evils against which its authors are protesting. 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 Christian name.” “Wall, Sambo, is yourmastera Christian?” 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 readers 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, Ishould, for my part, look forward with anxiety to the result.
The organization of the 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 “Democracy” 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.
IHADlanded 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 venerableman; 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 Brehon 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 theymay 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 ourselves 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 system, 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 Radicals 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 oppression 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 inEnglish hands. The very language that they are compelled to speak is hateful, even to men who know no other. With an impotent spite which would be amusing were it not very sad, a resolution was carried by acclamation through both houses of the Fenian congress, at Philadelphia, this year, “that the word ‘English’ 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 merchant, 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 nevertheless supplying America with that which she never before possessed—a criminal and pauper class. Of ten thousand 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.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, except, 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 Scotland 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 English, 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 Roman 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 territory 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 rebellion, in the hearts of the Republicans. It is impossible to spend much time in New England without becoming 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 onthese Alabama claims. That we should refuse an arbitration upon the whole question is to them inexplicable, 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 future 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 compromised 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. Arbitration 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 etiquette—for on that ground we decline to refer to arbitration a point which to America appears essential. It looks to the world as though we offer to submit to the umpire chosen those points only on which we are already 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, couldnot 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 differences 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 American 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 representus 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 understand 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, “I‘d 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 swallowed up. IhateEngland, 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?” 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 Americans 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.
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 aTimes’ leader, or a speech in Parliament from a minister of the Crown, cuts to the heart, wounding terribly. A nation, 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 promoted 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;and, again, at the time of theTrentaffair, 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 theTrentaffair: “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.”
WEare 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.Since then, the city has been shaken to pieces by earthquakes, 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 Rica. 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 to 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 comes 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 thedearer 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, destroying 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 Englanders 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 continue to exist, it will be at the price of being no longer English, but Red Indian? It is certain that the English families long in the land have the features of the extirpated race; on the other hand, in the negroesthere 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 immigrant 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 themselves 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 gauntAmerican, 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 country, home, and friends, to seek new fortunes in America, 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 possession 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 contented; or, if not this, at all events too busy to complain of such ills as they profess to labor under. Among contented men, his equals both in intelligence and 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 several 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 SteMarie. In Wisconsin there is a Norwegian population 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 characteristic of the Scandinavian public buildings. The Norwegians 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 America—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, surmounted 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, who tried to found a new France in the desert; but in1856 the leader died, and his people dispersed themselves 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 the gradual destruction of race is of great moment to the world. Christianity will gain by the change; but which of its many branches will receive support is a question which only admits of an imperfect answer. Arguingà 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 themselves, 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, indeed, 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 disturbingcause is the presence of New Yorkers; in the metropolis 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 newspapers 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 prospering, 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, Supernaturalism is advancing with great strides. The Shakers are strong in thought, the Spiritualists in wealth and numbers; Communism gains ground, but not Polygamy—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 way out of infinite multiplication of creeds but by their total extirpation. Oneness of purposeand 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 religionists assure us that in all truth consists their sole religion.
The distinctive feature of these American philosophical and religious systems is their gigantic width: for instance, every human being who admits that disembodied 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.” According to these ardent proselytizers, every poet, every man with a grain of imagination in his nature, is a “Spiritualist.” They claim Plato, Socrates, Milton, Shakspeare, 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. Theodore (Parker), St. Ralph (Waldo Emerson), St. Emma (Hardinge), all figure in their calendar. It is a noteworthy fact that the saints are mostly resident in New England.
The tracts published at theSpiritual Clarionoffice, Auburn, New York, put forward Spiritualism as a religion 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 therappings 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 supernatural, 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 intervals, 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 Radical 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 feeling in the few, and subscription to some one of the Episcopalian churches—Catholic, Anglican, or Methodist—among the many, coupled with real indifference. Neither the tendency to unity of creeds nor that toward infinite multiplication of beliefs has yet made thatprogress 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 mountains 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 English element has given language and history to that land, America offers the English race the moral directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue. Through America, England is speaking to the world.
PANAMAis a picturesque time-worn Spanish city, that rises abruptly from the sea in a confused pile of decaying bastions and decayed cathedrals, while a dense jungle of mangrove and bamboo threatens to bury it in rich greenery. The forest is filled 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 alternation of shower-bath, and vapor-bath with sickly sun. On the first night of my stay, there was a lunar rainbow, 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 pelican, parrots, monkeys, pearls, shells, flowers, greencocoa-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, consisting 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 theretraite. The French invalids from Acapulco, 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 railroad and steamship traffic, Panama may hold its own against the other isthmus cities; but when the canal iscut, 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 Wellington—a distance in all of some 6600 miles; but our actual course was nearer 7000. When off the Galapagos 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 Pitcairn 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 pureEnglish, 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 mutineers, who had been the first to climb our sides, announced 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 parties of the islanders, and upon which they require arbitration. He had been under the impression that we were a man-of-war, as we had fired two guns on entering 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 judicially 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 cannotrevive. 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 British 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 commercial treaty with the magistrate, who agreed to supply 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 tobacco 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 aSunday at Home, or aBritish Workman?” Our books and papers having been ransacked, Moses Young prepared 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? Howmuch 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 crinoline 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 British 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, sinking 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,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 extremely 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 himself,” 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 throughthe French Pass—a narrow passage filled with fearful whirlpools—to 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.
PLACEDin 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.
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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 tothe 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 mountain-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 destroyers of the New Zealand coasting ships: a steamer was lost here a week before my visit, and the harbormaster‘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 inferior 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?” Iasked. “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 accordingly cried “Woman!” and won, he loyally returning the coin, and walking off minus a paper.
When I reached that particular gin-palace which was known asthehotel, 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 voyage 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 single rose—“an English rosebud”—culled from a plant that had been brought from the Old Country in a clipper 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.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 hundred 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 hundred 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 richness; 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 thesteamer in which I came down from Nelson is worth recording 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 locality; from Nelson to The Buller, they charged 6d. a drink, but, once in the river, the price rose to 1s., at which it remained until the ship left port upon her return 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 confessed 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 clotheswhich 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 constables handled their loaded rifles, I came to the conclusion that the road-menders must be a gang of prisoners. 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 prisoners 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; assaulting 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 who 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 asingle 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 something of more serious crime than that for which these “runners” were convicted. “Sticking-up,” as highway 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 commenced 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 committed, it was believed, by a gang known as “The Thugs.” Mr. George Dobson, the government surveyor, 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, without touching at The Buller or The Grey; and when the ship was signaled, the excitement of the population 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,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 tomakea 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 noyounger sonsof 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 shootingand 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 machine, 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 California or Chili. This was not the only man of education whom I myself found upon the diggings, as I met with a Christchurch man, who, however, had left Oxford 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-splitting 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 onlyquestion; and want of coined money need be no hinderance, 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, 170 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 between 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 existence 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 inthe world, except those at the sources of the Indus, but close about them have been found tree-ferns of thirty and forty 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, unknown, they say, except at this lonely spot—the Rockwood lily—a bushy plant, with a round, polished, concave 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 grandeur 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 Zealand rivers, subjects to freshets, which fill its bed to a great depth with a surging, foaming flood. Some ofthe victims of the Waimakiriri 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. At 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.