Let me introduce you to a young man who belongs to the Brahmin caste ofNew England.
Bernard C. Langdon, a young man attending Medical Lectures at the school connected with one of our principal colleges, remained after the Lecture one day and wished to speak with the Professor. He was a student of mark,—first favorite of his year, as they say of the Derby colts. There are in every class half a dozen bright faces to which the teacher naturally directs his discourse, and by the intermediation of whose attention he seems to hold that of the mass of listeners. Among these some one is pretty sure to take the lead, by virtue of a personal magnetism, or some peculiarity of expression, which places the face in quick sympathetic relations with the lecturer. This was a young man with such a face; and I found,—for you have guessed that I was the "Professor" above-mentioned,—that, when there was anything difficult to be explained, or when I was bringing out some favorite illustration of a nice point, (as, for instance, when I compared the cell-growth, by which Nature builds up a plant or an animal, to the glass-blower's similar mode of beginning,—always with a hollow sphere, or vesicle, whatever he is going to make,) I naturally looked in his face and gauged my success by its expression.
It was a handsome face,—a little too pale, perhaps, and would have borne something more of fulness without becoming heavy. I put the organization to which it belongs in Section C of Class 1 of my Anglo-American Anthropology (unpublished). The jaw in this class is butslightlynarrowed,—just enough to make the width of the forehead tell more decidedly. The moustache often grows vigorously, but the whiskers are thin. The skin is like that of Jacob, rather than like Esau's. One string of the animal nature has been taken away, but this gives only a greater predominance to the intellectual chords. To see just how the vital energy has been toned down, you must contrast one of this section with a specimen of Section A of the same class,—say, for instance, one of the old-fashioned, full-whiskered, red-faced, roaring-big Commodores of the last generation, whom you remember, at least by their portraits, in ruffled shirts, looking as hearty as butchers and as plucky as bull-terriers, with their hair combed straight up from their foreheads, which were not commonly very high or broad. The special form of physical life I have been describing gives you a right to expect more delicate perceptions and a more reflective nature than you commonly find in shaggy-throated men, clad in heavy suits of muscles.
The student lingered in the lecture-room, looking all the time as if he wanted to say something in private, and waiting for two or three others, who were still hanging about, to be gone.
Something is wrong!—I said to myself, when I noticed his expression.—Well, Mr. Langdon,—I said to him, when we were alone,—can I do anything for you to-day?
You can, Sir,—he said.—I am going to leave the class, for the present, and keep school.
Why, that's a pity, and you so near graduating! You'd better stay and finish this course, and take your degree in the spring, rather than break up your whole plan of study.
I can't help myself, Sir,—the young man answered.—There's trouble at home, and they cannot keep me here as they have done. So I must look out for myself for a while. It's what I've done before, and am ready to do again. I came to ask you for a certificate of my fitness to teach a common school, or a high school, if you think I am up to that. Are you willing to give it to me?
Willing? Yes, to be sure,—but I don't want you to go. Stay; we'll make it easy for you. There's a fund will do something for you, perhaps. Then you can take both the annual prizes, if you like,—and claim them in money, if you want that more than medals.
I have thought it all over,—he answered,—and have pretty much made up my mind to go.
A perfectly gentlemanly young man, of courteous address and mild utterance, but means at least as much as he says. There are some people whose rhetoric consists of a slight habitual understatement. I often tell Mrs. Professor that one of her "I think it's sos" is worth the Bible-oath of all the rest of the household that they "know it's so." When you find a person a little better than his word, a little more liberal than his promise, a little more than borne out in his statement by his facts, a little larger in deed than in speech, you recognize a kind of eloquence in that person's utterance not laid down in Blair or Campbell.
This was a proud fellow, self-trusting, sensitive, with family-recollections that made him unwilling to accept the kind of aid which many students—would have thankfully welcomed. I knew him too well to urge him, after the few words which implied that he was determined to go. Besides, I have great confidence in young men who believe in themselves, and are accustomed to rely on their own resources from an early period. When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the World, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away timid adventurers. I have seen young men more than once, who came to a great city without a single friend, support themselves and pay for their education, lay up money in a few years, grow rich enough to travel, and establish themselves in life, without ever asking a dollar of any person which they had not earned. But these are exceptional cases. There are horse-tamers, born so, as we all know; there are woman-tamers who bewitch the sex as the pied piper bedeviled the children of Hamelin; and there are world-tamers, who can make any community, even a Yankee one, get down and let them jump on its back as easily as Mr. Rarey saddled Cruiser.
Whether Langdon was of this sort or not I could not say positively; but he had spirit, and, as I have said, a family-pride which would not let him be dependent. The New England Brahmin caste often gets blended with connections of political influence or commercial distinction. It is a charming thing for the scholar, when his fortune carries him in this way into some of the "old families" who have fine old houses, and city-lots that have risen in the market, and names written in all the stock-books of all the dividend-paying companies. His narrow study expands into a stately library, his books are counted by thousands instead of hundreds, and his favorites are dressed in gilded calf in place of plebeian sheepskin or its pauper substitutes of cloth and paper.
The Reverend Jedediah Langdon, grandfather of our young gentleman, had made an advantageous alliance of this kind. Miss Dorothea Wentworth had read one of his sermons which had been printed "by request," and became deeply interested in the young author, whom she had never seen. Out of this circumstance grew a correspondence, an interview, a declaration, a matrimonial alliance, and a family of half a dozen children. Wentworth Langdon, Esquire, was the oldest of these, and lived in the old family-mansion. Unfortunately, that principle of the diminution of estates by division, to which I have referred, rendered it somewhat difficult to maintain the establishment upon the fractional income which the proprietor received from his share of the property. Wentworth Langdon, Esq., represented a certain intermediate condition of life not at all infrequent in our old families. He was the connecting link between the generation which lived in ease, and even a kind of state, upon its own resources, and the new brood, which must live mainly by its wits or industry, and make itself rich, or shabbily subside into that lower stratum known to social geologists by a deposit of Kidderminster carpets and the peculiar aspect of the fossils constituting the family furniture and wardrobe. Thisslack-waterperiod of a race, which comes before the rapid ebb of its prosperity, is familiar to all who live in cities. There are no more quiet, inoffensive people than these children of rich families, just above the necessity of active employment, yet not in a condition to place their own children advantageously, if they happen to have families. Many of them are content to live unmarried. Some mend their broken fortunes by prudent alliances, and some leave a numerous progeny to pass into the obscurity from which their ancestors emerged; so that you may see on hand-carts and cobblers' stalls names which, a few generations back, were upon parchments with broad seals, and tombstones with armorial bearings.
In a large city, this class of citizens are familiar to us in the streets. They are very courteous in their salutations; they have time enough to bow and take their hats off,—which, of course, no business-man can afford to do. Their beavers are smoothly brushed, and their boots well polished; all their appointments are tidy; they look the respectable walking gentleman to perfection. They are prone to habits,—to frequent reading-rooms, insurance-offices,—to walk the same streets at the same hours,—so that one becomes familiar with their faces and persons, as a part of the street-furniture.
There is one curious circumstance, that all city-people must have noticed, which is often illustrated in our experience of the slack-water gentry. We shall know a certain person by his looks, familiarly, for years, but never have learned his name. About this person we shall have accumulated no little circumstantial knowledge;—thus, his face, figure, gait, his mode of dressing, of saluting, perhaps even of speaking, may be familiar to us; yet who he is we know not. In another department of our consciousness, there is a very familiarname, which we have never found the person to match. We have heard it so often, that it has idealized itself, and become one of that multitude of permanent shapes which walk the chambers of the brain in velvet slippers in the company of Falstaff and Hamlet and General Washington and Mr. Pickwick. Sometimes the person dies, but the name lives on indefinitely. But now and then it happens, perhaps after years of this independent existence of the name and its shadowy image in the brain, on the one part, and the person and all its real attributes, as we see them daily, on the other, that some accident reveals their relation, and we find the name we have carried so long in our memory belongs to the person we have known so long as a fellow-citizen. Now the slack-water gentry are among the persons most likely to be the subjects of this curious divorce of title and reality,—for the reason, that, playing no important part in the community, there is nothing to tie the floating name to the actual individual, as is the case with the men who belong in any way to the public, while yet their names have a certain historical currency, and we cannot help meeting them, either in their haunts, or going to and from them.
To this class belonged Wentworth Langdon, Esq. He had been "dead-headed" into the world some fifty years ago, and had sat with his hands in his pockets staring at the show ever since. I shall not tell you, for reasons before hinted, the whole name of the place in which he lived. I will only point you in the right direction, by saying that there are three towns lying in a line with each other, as you go "down East," each of them with aPortin its name, and each of them having a peculiar interest which gives it individuality, in addition to the Oriental character they have in common. I need not tell you that these towns are Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland. The Oriental character they have in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny gardens round them. The two first have seen better days. They are in perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished, gentility. Each of them is a "paradise of demi-fortunes." Each of them is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any place has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity and private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months of the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both have grand old recollections to fall back upon,—times when they looked forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen in cocked hats, who built their decaying wharves and sent out their ships all over the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port was to be the Tyre or the Carthage of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like Lord Timothy Dexter's, in Newburyport, remain as evidence of the fortunes amassed in these places of old. Other mansions—like the Rockingham House in Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before you mount the broad staircase) show that there was not only wealth, but style and state, in these quiet old towns during the last century. It is not with any thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in a certain sense decayed towns; they did not fulfil their early promise of expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places of their size in any of the three northernmost New England States. They have even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition, and offer the most attractive residences for quiet families, which, if they had been English, would have lived in apalazzoat Genoa or Pisa, or some other Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.
As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant for a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its walls of ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar material prosperity. Still it remains invested with many of its old charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this admirable trio only when it gets a hotel with unequivocal marks of having been built and organized in the present century.
——It was one of the old square palaces of the North, in which Bernard Langdon, the son of Wentworth, was born. If he had had the luck to be an only child, he might have lived as his father had done, letting his meagre competence smoulder on almost without consuming, like the fuel in an air-tight stove. But after Master Bernard came Miss Dorothea Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William Pepperell Langdon, and others, equally well named,—a string of them, looking, when they stood in a row in prayer-time, as if they would fit a set of Pandean pipes, of from three feet upward in dimensions. The door of the air-tight store has to be opened, under such circumstances, you may well suppose! So it happened that our young man had been obliged, from an early period, to do something to support himself, and found himself stopped short in his studies by the inability of the good people at home to furnish him the present means of support as a student.
You will understand now why the young man wanted me to give him a certificate of his fitness to teach, and why. I did not choose to urge him to accept the aid which a meek country-boy from a family without ante-Revolutionary recollections would have thankfully received. Go he must,—that was plain enough. He would not be content otherwise. He was not, however, to give up his studies; and as it is customary to allowhalf-timeto students engaged in school-keeping,—that is, to count a year, so employed, if the student also keep on with his professional studies, as equal to six months of the three years he is expected to be under an instructor before applying for his degree,—he would not necessarily lose more than a few months of time. He had a small library of professional books, which he could take with him.
So he left my teaching and that of my estimable colleagues, carrying with him my certificate, that Mr. Bernard C. Langdon was a young gentleman of excellent moral character, of high intelligence and good education, and that his services would be of great value in any school, academy, or other institution, where young persons of either sex were to be instructed.
I confess, that expression, "either sex," ran a little thick, as I may say, from my pen. For, although the young man bore a very fair character, and there was no special cause for doubting his discretion, I considered him altogether too good-looking, in the first place, to be let loose in a room-full of young girls. I didn't want him to fall in love just then,—and if half a dozen girls fell in love with him, as they most assuredly would, if brought into too near relations with him, why, there was no telling what gratitude and natural sensibility might bring about.
Certificates are, for the most part, like ostrich-eggs; the giver never knows what is hatched out of them. But once in a thousand times they act as curses are said to,—come home to roost. Give them often enough, until it gets to be a mechanical business, and, some day or other, you will get caught warranting somebody's ice not to melt in any climate, or somebody's razors to be safe in the hands of the youngest children.
I had an uneasy feeling, after giving this certificate. It might be all right enough; but if it happened to end badly, I should always reproach myself. There was a chance, certainly, that it would lead him or others into danger or wretchedness. Any one who looked at this young man could not fail to see that he was capable of fascinating and being fascinated. Those large, dark eyes of his would sink into the white soul of a young girl as the black cloth sunk into the snow in Franklin's famous experiment. Or, on the other hand, if the rays of a passionate nature should ever be concentrated on them, they would be absorbed into the very depths of his nature, and then his blood would turn to flame and burn his life out of him, until his cheeks grew as white as the ashes that cover a burning coal.
I wish I had not saideither sexin my certificate. An academy for young gentlemen, now; that sounds cool and unimaginative. A boys' school; that would be a very good place for him;—some of them are pretty rough, but there is nerve enough in that old Wentworth blood; he can give any country fellow, of the common stock, twenty pounds, and hit him out of time in ten minutes. But to send such a young fellow as that out a girl's-nesting! to give this falcon a free pass into all the dove-cotes! I was a fool,—that's all.
I brooded over the mischief which might come out of these two words until it seemed to me that they were charged with destiny. I could hardly sleep for thinking what a train I might have been laying, which might take a spark any day, and blow up nobody knows whose peace or prospects. What I dreaded most was one of those miserable matrimonial misalliances where a young fellow who does not know himself as yet flings his magnificent future into the checked apron-lap of some fresh-faced, half-bred country-girl, no more fit to be mated with him than her father's horse to go in double harness with Flora Temple. To think of the eagle's wings being clipped so that he shall not ever lift himself over the farm-yard fence! Such things happen, and always must,—because, as one of us said awhile ago, a man always loves a woman, and a woman a man, unless some good reason exists to the contrary. You think yourself a very fastidious young man, my friend; but there are probably at least five thousand young women in these United States, any one of whom you would certainly marry, if you were thrown much into her company, and nobody more attractive were near, and she had no objection. And you, my dear young lady, justly pride yourself on your discerning delicacy; but if I should say that there are twenty thousand young men, any one of whom, if he offered his hand and heart under favorable circumstances, you would
"First endure, then pity, then embrace,"
I should be much more imprudent than I mean to be, and you would, no doubt, throw down a story in which I hope to interest you.
I had settled it in my mind that this young fellow had a career marked out for him. He should begin in the natural way, by taking care of poor patients in one of the public charities, and work his way up to a better kind of practice,—better, that is, in the vulgar, worldly sense. The great and good Boerhaave used to say, as I remember very well, that the poor were his best patients; for God was their paymaster. But everybody is not as patient as Boerhaave, nor as deserving; so that the rich, though not, perhaps, the best patients, are good enough for common practitioners. I suppose Boerhaave put up with them when he could not get poor ones, as he left his daughter two millions of florins when he died.
Now if this young man once got into thewide streets, he would sweep them clear of his rivals of the same standing; and as I was getting indifferent to business, and old Dr. Kilham was growing careless, and had once or twice prescribed morphine when he meant quinine, there would soon he an opening into the Doctors' Paradise,—thestreets with only one side to them. Then I would have him strike a bold stroke,—set up a nice little coach, and be driven round like a London first-class doctor, instead of coasting about in a shabby one-horse concern and casting anchor opposite his patients' doors like a Cape-Ann fishing-smack. By the time he was thirty, he would have knocked the social pawns out of his way, and be ready to challenge a wife from the row of great pieces in the background. I would not have a man marry above his level, so as to become the appendage of a powerful family-connection; but I would not have him marry until he knew his level,—that is, again, looking at the matter in a purely worldly point of view, and not taking the sentiments at all into consideration. But remember, that a young man, using large endowments wisely and fortunately, may put himself on a level with the highest in the land in ten brilliant years of spirited, unflagging labor. And even to stand at the very top of your calling in a great city is something,—that is, if you like money and influence, and a seat on the platform at public lectures, and gratuitous tickets to all sorts of places where you don't want to go, and, what is a good deal better than any of these things, a sense of power, limited, it may be, but absolute in its range, so that all the Caesars and Napoleons would have to stand aside, if they came between you and the exercise of your special vocation.
That is what I thought this young fellow might have come to; and now I have let him go off into the country with my certificate, that he is fit to teach in a school for either sex! Ten to one he will run like a moth into a candle, right into one of those girls'-nests, and get tangled up in some sentimental folly or other, and there will be the end of him. Oh, yes! country doctor,—half a dollar a visit,—ride, ride, ride all day,—get up at night and harness your own horse,—ride again ten miles in a snow-storm,—shake powders out of two phials, (pulv. glycyrrhiz., pulv. gum. acac. aa: partes equates,)—ride back again, if you don't happen to get stuck in a drift,—no home, no peace, no continuous meals, no unbroken sleep, no Sunday, no holiday, no social intercourse, but one eternal jog, jog, jog, in a sulky, until you feel like the mummy of an Indian who had been buried in the sitting posture, and was dug up a hundred years afterwards! "Why didn't I warn him about love and all that nonsense?" Why didn't I tell him he had nothing to do with it, yet awhile? Why didn't I hold up to him those awful examples I could have cited, where poor young fellows that could just keep themselves afloat have hung a matrimonial millstone round their necks, taking it for a life-preserver?
All this of two words in a certificate!
Through the silent streets of the city,In the night's unbusy noon,Up and down in the pallorOf the languid summer moon,
I wander and think of the village,And the house in the maple-gloom,And the porch with the honeysucklesAnd the sweet-brier all abloom.
My soul is sick with the fragranceOf the dewy sweet-brier's breath:Oh, darling! the house is empty,And lonesomer than death!
If I call, no one will answer;If I knock, no one will come;—The feet are at rest forever,And the lips are cold and dumb.
The summer moon is shiningSo wan and large and still,And the weary dead are sleepingIn the graveyard under the hill.
We looked at the wide, white circleAround the autumn moon,And talked of the change of weather,—It would rain, to-morrow, or soon.
And the rain came on the morrow,And beat the dying leavesFrom the shuddering boughs of the maplesInto the flooded eaves.
The clouds wept out their sorrow;But in my heart the tearsAre bitter for want of weeping,In all these autumn years.
It is sweet to lie awake musingOn all she has said and done,To dwell on the words she uttered,To feast on the smiles I won,
To think with what passion at partingShe gave me my kisses again,—Dear adieux, and tears and caresses,—Oh, love! was it joy or pain?
To brood, with a foolish rapture,On the thought that it must beMy darling this moment is wakingWith tenderest thoughts of me!
O sleep I are thy dreams any sweeter?I linger before thy gate:We must enter at it together,And my love is loath and late.
The bobolink sings in the meadow,The wren in the cherry-tree:Come hither, thou little maiden,And sit upon my knee;
And I will tell thee a storyI read in a book of rhyme;—I will but feign that it happenedTo me, one summer-time,
When we walked through the meadow,And she and I were young;—The story is old and wearyWith being said and sung.
The story is old and weary;—Ah, child! is it known to thee?Who was it that last night kissed theeUnder the cherry-tree?
Like a bird of evil presage,To the lonely house on the shoreCame the wind with a tale of shipwreck,And shrieked at the bolted door,
And flapped its wings in the gables,And shouted the well-known names,And buffeted the windowsAfeard in their shuddering frames.
It was night, and it is daytime,—The morning sun is bland,The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,In to the smiling land.
The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,In the sun so soft and bright,And toss and play with the dead manDrowned in the storm last night.
I remember the burning brushwood,Glimmering all day longYellow and weak in the sunlight,Now leaped up red and strong,
And fired the old dead chestnut,That all our years had stood,Gaunt and gray and ghostly,Apart from the sombre wood;
And, flushed with sudden summer,The leafless boughs on highBlossomed in dreadful beautyAgainst the darkened sky.
We children sat telling stories,And boasting what we should be,When we were men like our fathers,And watched the blazing tree,
That showered its fiery blossoms,Like a rain of stars, we said,Of crimson and azure and purple.That night, when I lay in bed,
I could not sleep for seeing,Whenever I closed my eyes,The tree in its dazzling splendorAgainst the darkened skies.
I cannot sleep for seeing,With closed eyes to-night,The tree in its dazzling splendorDropping its blossoms bright;
And old, old dreams of childhoodCome thronging my weary brain.Dear foolish beliefs and longings;—I doubt, are they real again?
It is nothing, and nothing, and nothing,That I either think or see;—The phantoms of dead illusionsTo-night are haunting me.
Even before the announcement of the discovery of gold upon the Frazer River and its tributaries, the people of Canada West had induced the Parliament of England to institute the inquiry, whether the region of British America, extending from Lakes Superior and Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains, is not adapted by fertility of soil, a favorable climate, and natural advantages of internal communication, for the support of a prosperous colony of England.
The Parliamentary investigation had a wider scope. The select committee of the House of Commons was appointed "to consider the state of those British possessions in North America which are under the administration of the Hudson Bay Company, or over which they possess a license to trade"; and therefore witnesses were called to the organization and management of the Company itself, as well as the natural features of the country under its administration.
On the 31st of July, 1857, the committee reported a large body of testimony, but without any decisive recommendations. They "apprehend that the districts on the Red River and the Saskatchewan are among those most likely to be desired for early occupation," and "trust that there will be no difficulty in effecting arrangements between her Majesty's government and the Hudson Bay Company, by which those districts may be ceded to Canada on equitable principles, and within the districts thus annexed to her the authority of the Hudson Bay Company would of course entirely cease." They deemed it "proper to terminate the connection of the Hudson Bay Company with Vancouver Island as soon as it could conveniently be done, as the best means of favoring the development of the great natural advantages of that important colony; and that means should also be provided for the ultimate extension of the colony over any portion of the adjacent continent, to the west of the Rocky Mountains, on which permanent settlement may be found practicable."
These suggestions indicate a conviction that the zone of the North American continent between latitudes 49° and 55°, embracing the Red River and the Saskatchewan districts, east of the Rocky Mountains, and the area on their western slope, since organized as British Columbia, was, in the judgment of the committee, suitable for permanent settlement. As to the territory north of the parallel of 55°, an opinion was intimated, that the organization of the Hudson's Bay Company was best adapted to the condition of the country and its inhabitants.
Within a year after the publication of this report, a great change passed over the North Pacific coast. The gold discovery on Frazer's River occurred; the Pacific populations flamed with excitement; British Columbia was promptly organized as a colony of England; and, amid the acclamations of Parliament and people, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton proclaimed, in the name of the government, the policy of continuous colonies from Lake Superior to the Pacific, and a highway across British America, as the most direct route from London to Pekin or Jeddo.
The eastern boundary of British Columbia was fixed upon the Rocky Mountains. The question recurred, with great force, What shall be the destiny of the fertile plains of the Saskatchewan and the Red River of the North? Canada pushed forward an exploration of the route from Fort William, on Lake Superior, to Fort Garry, on the Red River, and, under the direction of S.J. Dawson, Esq., civil engineer, and Professor J.Y. Hinde, gave to the world an impartial and impressive summary of the great natural resources of the basin of Lake Winnipeg. The merchants of New York were prompt to perceive the advantages of connecting the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes—with the navigable channels of Northwest America, now become prominent and familiar designations of commercial geography. A report to the New York Chamber of Commerce very distinctly corrected the erroneous impression, that the valleys of the Mississippi and St. Lawrence rivers exhausted the northern and central areas which are available for agriculture. "There is in the heart of North America," said the report, "a distinct subdivision, of which Lake Winnipeg may be regarded as the centre. This subdivision, like the valley of the Mississippi, is distinguished for the fertility of its soil, and for the extent and gentle slope of its great plains, watered by rivers of great length, and admirably adapted for steam-navigation. It has a climate not exceeding in severity that of many portions of Canada and the Eastern States. It will, in all respects, compare favorably with some of the most densely peopled portions of the continent of Europe. In other words, it is admirably fitted to become the seat of a numerous, hardy, and prosperous community. It has an area equal to eight or ten first-class American States. Its great river, the Saskatchewan, carries a navigable water-line to the very base of the Rocky Mountains. It is not at all improbable that the valley of this river may yet offer the best route for a railroad to the Pacific. The navigable waters of this great subdivision interlock with those of the Mississippi. The Red River of the North, in connection with Lake Winnipeg, into which it falls, forms a navigable water-line, extending directly north and south nearly eight hundred miles. The Red River is one of the best adapted to the use of steam in the world, and waters one of the finest prairie regions on the continent. Between the highest point at which it is navigable, and St. Paul, on the Mississippi, a railroad is in process of construction; and when this road is completed, another grand division of the continent, comprising half a million square miles, will be open to settlement."
The sanguine temper of these remarks illustrates the rapid progress of public sentiment since the date of the Parliamentary inquiry, only eighteen months before. Of the same tenor, though fuller in details, were the publications on the subject in Canada and even in England. The year 1859 opened with greatly augmented interest in the district of Central British America. The manifestation of this interest varied with localities and circumstances.
In Canada, no opportunity was omitted, either in Parliament or by the press, to demonstrate the importance to the Atlantic and Lake Provinces of extending settlements into the prairies of Assinniboin and Saskatchewan,—thereby affording advantages to Provincial commerce and manufactures like those which the communities of the Mississippi valley have conferred upon the older American States. Nevertheless, the Canadian government declined to institute proceedings before the English Court of Chancery or Queen's Bench, to determine the validity of the charter of the Hudson's Bay Company,—assigning, as reasons for not acceding to such a suggestion by the law-officers of the crown, that the proposed litigation might be greatly protracted, while the public interests involved were urgent,—and that the duty of a prompt and definite adjustment of the condition and relations of the Red River and Saskatchewan districts was manifestly incumbent upon the Imperial authority.
This decision, added to the indisposition of Lower Canada to the policy of westward expansion, is understood to have convinced Sir E.B. Lytton that annexation of the Winnipeg basin to Canada was impracticable, and that the exclusive occupation by the Hudson's Bay Company could be removed only by the organization of a separate colony. The founder of British Columbia devoted the latter portion of his administration of the Colonial Office to measures for the satisfactory arrangement of conflicting interests in British America. In October, 1858, he proposed to the directors of the Hudson's Bay Company that they should be consenting parties to a reference of questions respecting the validity and extent of their charter, and respecting the geographical extent of their territory, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The Company "reasserted their right to the privileges granted to them by their charter of incorporation," and refused to be a consenting party to any proceeding which might call in question their chartered rights.
Under date of November 3, 1858, Lord Caernarvon, Secretary of State for the Colonies, by the direction of Sir E.B. Lytton, returned a dispatch, the tenor of which is a key not only to Sir Edward's line of policy, but, in all probability, to that of his successor, the Duke of Newcastle. Lord Caernarvon began by expressing the disappointment and regret with which Sir E.B. Lytton had received the communication, containing, if he understood its tenor correctly, a distinct refusal on the part of the Hudson's Bay Company to entertain any proposal with a view of adjusting the conflicting claims of Great Britain, of Canada, and of the Company, or to join with her Majesty's government in affording reasonable facilities for the settlement of the questions in which Imperial no less than Colonial interests were involved. It had been his anxious desire to come to some equitable and conciliatory agreement, by which all legitimate claims of the Company should be fairly considered with reference to the territories or the privileges they might be required to surrender. He suggested that such a procedure, while advantageous to the interests of all parties, might prove particularly for the interest of the Hudson's Bay Company. "It would afford a tribunal preeminently fitted for the dispassionate consideration of the questions at issue; it would secure a decision which would probably be rather of the nature of an arbitration than of a judgment; and it would furnish a basis of negotiation on which reciprocal concession and the claims for compensation could be most successfully discussed."
With such persuasive reiteration, Lord Caernarvon, in the name and at the instance of Sir E.B. Lytton, insisted that the wisest and most dignified course would be found in an appeal to and a decision by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, with the concurrence alike of Canada and the Hudson's Bay Company. In conclusion, the Company were once more assured, that, if they would meet Sir E.B. Lytton in finding the solution of a recognized difficulty, and would undertake to give all reasonable facilities for trying the validity of their disputed charter, they might be assured that they would meet with fair and liberal treatment, so far as her Majesty's government was concerned; but if, on the other hand, the Company persisted in declining these terms, and could suggest no other practicable mode of agreement, Sir E.B. Lytton held himself acquitted of further responsibility to the interests of the Company, and proposed to take the necessary steps for closing a controversy too long open, and for securing a definitive decision, due alike to the material development of British North America and to the requirements of an advancing civilization.
The communication of Lord Caernarvon stated in addition, that, in the case last supposed, the renewal of the exclusive license to trade in any part of the Indian territory—a renewal which could be justified to Parliament only as part of a general agreement adjusted on the principles of mutual concession—would become impossible.
These representations failed to influence the Company. The Deputy-Governor, Mr. H.H. Barens, responded, that, as, in 1850, the Company had assented to an inquiry before the Privy Council into the legality of certain powers claimed and exercised by them under their charter, but not questioning the validity of the charter itself, so, at this time, if the reference to the Privy Council were restricted to the question of the geographical extent of the territory claimed by the Company, in accordance with a proposition made in July, 1857, by Mr. Labouchere, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, the directors would recommend to their shareholders to concur in the course suggested; but must decline to do so, if the inquiry involved not merely the question of the geographical boundary of the territories claimed by them, but a challenge of the validity of the charter itself, and, as a consequence, of the rights and privileges which it professed to grant, and which the Company had exercised for a period of nearly two hundred years. Mr. Barens professed that the Company had at all times been willing to entertain any proposal that might be made to them for the surrender of any of their rights or of any portion of their territory; but he regarded it as one thing to consent for a consideration to be agreed upon to the surrender of admitted rights, and quite another to volunteer a consent to an inquiry which should call those rights in question.
A result of this correspondence has been the definite refusal of the Crown to renew the exclusive license to trade in Indian territory. The license had been twice granted to the Company, under an act of Parliament authorizing it, for periods of twenty-one years,—once in 1821, and again in 1838. It expired on the 30th of May, 1859. In consequence of this refusal, the Company must depend exclusively upon the terms of their charter for their special privileges in British America. The charter dates from 1670,—a grant by Charles II. to Prince Rupert and his associates, "adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay,"—and is claimed to give the right of exclusive trade and of territorial dominion to Hudson's Bay and tributary rivers. By the expiration of the exclusive license of Indian trade, and the termination in 1859 of the lease of Vancouver's Island from the British government, the sway and influence of the Company are greatly restricted, and the feasibility of some permanent adjustment is proportionately increased.
There is no necessity for repeating here the voluminous argument for and against the charter of the Hudson's Bay Company. The interest of British colonization in Northwest America far transcends any technical inquiry of the kind, and the Canadian statesmen are wise in declining to relieve the English cabinet from the obligation to act definitely and speedily upon the subject. The organization of the East India Company was no obstacle to a measure demanded by the honor of England and the welfare of India; and certainly the parchment of the Second Charles will not deter any deliberate expression by Parliament in regard to the colonization of Central British America. Indeed, the managers of the Hudson's Bay Company are always careful to recognize the probability of a compromise with the government. The late letter of Mr. Barens to Lord Caernarvon expressed a willingness, at any time, to entertain proposals for the surrender of franchises or territory; and in 1848, Sir J.H. Pelly, Governor of the Company, thus expressed himself in a letter to Lord Grey:—"As far as I am concerned, (and I think the Company will concur, if any great national benefit would be expected from it,) I would be willing to relinquish the whole of the territory held under the charter on similar terms to those which it is proposed the East India Company shall receive on the expiration of their charter,—namely, securing the proprietors an interest on their capital of ten per cent."
At the adjournment of the Canadian Parliament and the retirement of theDerby Ministry, in the early part of 1859, the position and prospects ofEnglish colonization in Northwest America were as follows:—
1. Vancouver's Island and British Columbia had passed from the occupation of the Hudson's Bay Company into an efficient colonial organization. The gold-fields of the interior had been ascertained to equal in productiveness, and greatly to exceed in extent, those of California. The prospect for agriculture was no less favorable,—while the commercial importance of Vancouver and the harbors of Puget's Sound is unquestionable.
2. The eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and the valleys of the Saskatchewan and Red River were shown by explorations, conducted under the auspices of the London Geographical Society and the Canadian authorities, to be a district of nearly four hundred thousand square miles, in which a fertile soil, favorable climate, useful and precious minerals, fur-bearing and food-yielding animals, in a word, the most lavish gifts of Nature, constituted highly satisfactory conditions for the organization and settlement of a prosperous community.
3. In regard to the Hudson's Bay Company, a disposition prevailed not to disturb its charter, on condition that its directory made no attempts to enforce an exclusive trade or to interfere with the progress of settlements. All parties anticipated Parliamentary action. Letters from London spoke with confidence of a bill, drafted and in circulation among members of Parliament, for the erection of a colony between Lakes Superior and Winnipeg and the eastern limits of British Columbia, with a northern boundary resting on the parallel of 55°; and which, although postponed by a change of ministry, was understood to represent the views of the Duke of Newcastle, the successor of Sir E.B. Lytton.
4. In Canada West, a system of communication from Fort William to Fort Garry, and thence to the Pacific, was intrusted to a company—the "Northwest Transit"—which was by no means inactive. A mail to Red River, over the same route, was also sustained from the Canadian treasury; and Parliament, among the acts of its previous session, had conceded a charter for a line of telegraph through the valleys of the Saskatchewan, with a view to an extension to the Pacific coast, and even to Asiatic Russia.
Simultaneously with these movements in England and Canada, the citizens of the State of Minnesota, after a winter of active discussion, announced a determination to introduce steam-navigation on the Red River of the North. Parties were induced to transport the machinery and cabins, with timber for the hull of a steamer, from the Upper Mississippi, near Crow Wing, to the mouth of the Cheyenne, on the Red River, where the boat was reconstructed. The first voyage of the steamer was from Fort Abercrombie, an American post two hundred miles northwest of Saint Paul,down northto Fort Garry, during the month of June. The reception of the stranger was attended by extraordinary demonstrations of enthusiasm at Selkirk. The bells of Saint Boniface rang greeting, and Fort Garry blasted powder, as if the Governor of the Company were approaching its portal. This unique, but interesting community, fully appreciated the fact that steam had brought their interests within the circle of the world's activities.
This incident was the legitimate sequel to events in Minnesota which had transpired during a period of ten years. Organized as a Territory in 1849, a single decade had brought the population, the resources, and the public recognition of an American State. A railroad system, connecting the lines of the Lake States and Provinces at La Crosse with the international frontier on the Red River at Pembina, was not only projected, but had secured in aid of its construction a grant by the Congress of the United States of three thousand eight hundred and forty acres a mile, and a loan of State credit to the amount of twenty thousand dollars a mile, not exceeding an aggregate of five million dollars. Different sections of this important extension of the Canadian and American railways were under contract and in process of construction. In addition, the land-surveys of the Federal government had reached the navigable channel of the Red River; and the line of frontier settlement, attended by a weekly mail, had advanced to the same point. Thus the government of the United States, no less than the people and authorities of Minnesota, were represented in this Northwest movement.
Still, its consummation rests with the people and Parliament of England. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton was prepared with a response to his own memorable query,—"What will he do with it?" Shall the Liberal party be less prompt and resolute in advancing the policy, announced from the throne in 1858, of an uninterrupted series of British colonies across the continent of North America? This will be determined by the Parliamentary record of 1860.
Once on a time a maiden dwelt with her father,—they two, and no more,—in a rude log-cabin on the skirts of a grand old Western forest,—majestic mountains behind them, and the broad, free prairie in front.
Cut off from all Christian companionship and the informing influences of civilized arts, all their news was of red men and of game, their entertainments the ever-varying moods of Nature, their labors of the rudest, their dangers familiar, their solacements simple and solitary. Alone the sturdy hunter beat the woods all day, on the track of panthers, bears, and deer; alone, all day, his pretty daughter kept the house against perils without and despondency within,—the gun and the broom alike familiar to her hand.
Commissioned to illumine the murk wilderness around her with the glow of her Christian loveliness and faith, Nature had touched her with inspirations of refinement, with a culture as unconscious as the growing of the grass, and the clear intuitions of a spiritual life full of heaven-born inclinations. Nature, too, had endowed her with fine lines of beauty, attitudes of grace, movements of dignity and love, and all the charmfulness that had learned its shapes from flowers and its arts from birds. Nature's officers, the elements, had bestowed on her each his appropriate gift,—the Air its crispness, the Earth its variety, the Sun its brightness and its ruddy glow, the very Water from the well its freshness and its fluent forms; the stars repeated their friendliness in her eyes, the grass dimpled her pliant feet, the breeze tossed her brown hair in triumphs of the unstudied becoming, and from the wildness all about her she had her wit and her delightful ways; Morning lent her her cheerfulness, Evening her pensiveness, and Night her soul.
But Night, that had given her the Christian soul, true and wise, self-reliant and aspiring, brought also the surprise and the peril that should put it to the proof; for once, when the hunter was belated on his path, and sudden midnight had caught him beyond the mountain, far from the rest of his hearth and the song of his darling, came the red Pawnees, a treacherous crew,—doubly godless because ungrateful, who had broken the hunter's bread and slept on the hunter's blanket,—and laid waste his hearth, and stole away his very heart. For they dragged her many a fearful mile of darkness and distraction, through the black woods, and grim recesses of the rocks; and there they stripped her naked, and bound her to a stake, as the day was breaking. But the Christian heart was within her, and the Christian soul upheld her, and the Christian's God was by her side; and so she stood, and waited, and was brave.
And here still she stands, as the sculptor's soul sat down before her, in a vision of faith and tenderness, to receive her image,—stands and waits for the pity and the help of you and me, her brothers and her lovers. We long to rescue her and take her to our hearts; we are touched by her predicament, as Michelet tells us the heart of the beholder is moved by the bound Andromeda of Puget,—that great artist in whom dwelt the suffering soul of a depraved age, and who all his life long sculptured forlorn captives,—"Ah, would I had been there to rescue the darling!"
But we are told of the Andromeda, that, unconscious and almost dead, she knows not where she is, nor who has come to set her free; for, paralyzed by the chafing of her chains, and even more by fear, she cannot stand, and seems utterly exhausted.
Not so with our Andromeda. Horror possesses her, but indignation also; she is terrified, but brave; she shrinks, but she repels; and while all her beautiful body trembles and retreats, her countenance confronts her captors, and her steady gaze forbids them. "Touch me not!" she says, with every shuddering limb and every tensely-braced muscle, with lineaments all eloquent with imperious disgust,—"Touch me not!"
Her lips quiver, and tears are in her eyes, (we do not forget that it is of marble we are speaking,—therearetears in her eyes,) but they only linger there; she is not weeping now; her chin trembles, and one of her hands is convulsively clenched,—but it is with the anguish of her sore besetting, not the spasm of mortal fear. Though Heaven and Earth, indeed, might join to help her, we yet know that the soul of the maiden will help itself,—that her hope clings fast, and her courage is undaunted, and her faith complete.
Among her thronged emotions we look in vain for shame. Her nakedness is a coarse chance of her overwhelming situation, for which she is no more concerned than for her galled wrists or her dishevelled hair. What is it to such a queen as she, that the eyes of grinning brutes are blessed by her perfect beauties?
The qualities which constitute true greatness in a statue such as this are, if we apprehend them aright,—first, that sublime simplicity of Idea which omnipotently sways the beholder, and alike inspires his coarseness or his culture; next, that personality, that moving humanness of feeling, which holds him by his very heart-strings, and makes him forget its marble, to accept its flesh and blood; and, finally, that wondrous skill of nice manipulation, which, neglecting nothing in the myriad of anatomical and physiological details,—not even the faintest sigh or the dimmest tremor,—tells, fibre by fibre, a tale that all may read, and comes to us with a story "to hold children from play and old men from the chimney-corner."
Tried by this definition, we believe the "White Captive" proves its claim to genuine greatness, and that it will presently take its place, with the world's consent, in the front rank of modern statues,—good among the best, in the flesh-and-bloodness and the soul of it. It is original, it is faithful, it is American; our women may look upon it, and say, "She is one of us," with more satisfaction than the Greek women could have derived from the Venus de' Medici, with its insignificant head and its impossible spine.
Especially true to the American type, as compared in statues with the familiar Greek, the head of the "White Captive" is large; but that it is too large, or in excess of the least of a thousand female heads that have been gathered around it since it was first exposed to the public scrutiny, we have failed to discover in repeated and careful examinations; and we are constrained to commend such as may be exercised on that point to the critical flippancies of the jaunty gentlemen who find the hips at once too broad and too narrow, the bosom too full and too young, the arms too meagre and too stout.
We call the attention of our readers to a series of twelve photographic views of forest and lake scenery published by Mr. J.W. Black, Boston, from negatives taken by Mr. Stillman in the Adirondack country. The points of view are chosen with the fine feeling of an artist, and the tangled profusion and grace of the forest, with the moment's whim of sunfleck and shadow, are given with exquisite delicacy. Whatever the all-beholding sun could see in those woodland depths we have here,—sketches of the shaggy Pan snatched at unawares in sleep. One may study these pictures till he becomes as familiar as a squirrel with fern and tree-bark and moose-wood and lichen, till he knows every trunk and twig and leaf as intimately as a sunbeam.