CHAPTER XX.VELOCIPEDAL.

“The year of Jubal E. is come,Return, ye wandering sinners, home.”

“The year of Jubal E. is come,

Return, ye wandering sinners, home.”

In the Southeast, Sherman, flanking Johnston at Dalton in Georgia, forced him through May and June southwards, delivering battles and defeats,—which were not ordered,—at Resaca, Dallas, Pine Lost, and Kenesaw Mountains, until at last he shoved him behind the great southern knob, Atlanta, whose converging iron lines held the main door of the Lower Confederacy. Here Johnston disappeared, and the Confederate powers put a Hood over the head of the assailed Southeast; but all in vain. Sherman, pounding about the iron-covered Hood with heavy blows through July and August, cleft the head-piece in two; and on the 2d of September cast him out, and, seizing the great iron knob, opened wide the door.

On the 15th of November Sherman advanced through Georgia to the sea, taking a swath sixty miles wide, rolling up winrows at Milledgeville, cuttingdown thistles, burdocks, and noxious weeds with his well-whetted scythe, until, on the 21st of December, he reached the farther side of his great hay-field at Savannah. Gathering its crop into one bundle, he despatched it to Mr. Lincoln with this epistle: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns, plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.” Truly cotton now had become very worsted.

In June, that British scorpion, the Alabama,—which had been hatched out at Liverpool in the spring and summer of 1862, while the British telescope was steadily turned in another direction, and which for two years had left its red slime all over the seas, stinging to death, as it wriggled in its venomous course, sixty-four peaceful American vessels,—was, by a single blow from the Kearsarge, sent to a sulphureous grave in the Channel which washed its birthplace. Diplomatic naturalists have ever since been disputing over the species and quality of this reptile; while all agree, that, whether warm blooded or cold, it is not desirable that its kind be perpetuated. Its poisonous carcass is still coiled in offensive knots around the international diplomatic lattice-work of the two nations.

During August, Admiral Farragut pried open the iron-set jaws of Mobile Harbor, drawing its teeth,—Forts Morgan, Gaines, and Powell,—real molars as they were, producing spasms which threatened lockjaw to the obstinate patient.

While the red autumn leaves were falling through the North, Confederate brands were whirled, some out of Canada, others from Northern cities, upon the bankof St. Alban’s, in Vermont, on warehouses in Buffalo, Detroit, and New York, on hotels in Cleveland, and on steamboats on the Lakes. The real sap in the Davis tree was now running down, and the top branches were shedding their crimson colors earthward.

While these paling evidences of the fall were multiplying, Mr. Lincoln was re-elected President, by two hundred and twelve votes out of two hundred and thirty-three. Andrew Johnson, then fifty-six years old, who had both early and late in life handled the goose,—the one kind as acceptably as the other,—and had been himself cruelly plucked through the war by the masked plunderers in Tennessee, was placed in the easy nest of the Vice-Presidency. His first getting in was so awkward, that it was manifest something had turned his head.

Sherman, taking breath at Savannah, again swung his effective scythe through the thin crop, lying between that city and Charleston, which was cut down, like a rank burdock, February 18, 1865. Then turning northwards, he gathered in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina; turned up to the sunlight dank villages, all unused to Northern implements,—cheered as he went by sable faces,—until at last he halted at Fayetteville, March 11, 1865, to take a hearty shake of the hand with his fellow-mowers, General Terry and Admiral Porter. From Wilmington, he again whetted up his keen blade and cleared the Southern field. Johnston, Beauregard, Bragg, and Hardee manifested a disposition to stop him at Bentonville; but a blow sent them reeling from his path, and he went vigorously forward,garnering blessed harvests for his country and himself.

Cotton down.(p. 512)

Meanwhile Grant, through the autumn of 1864, was encompassing Petersburg and drawing zigzag lines around it, that were too much like the short epistles that creditors send to unwilling debtors, to be agreeable. The autumn leaves here fell on busy workers; and among the busiest, the Silent Man, who was casting up long accounts in his head, which only opened to let out smoke. In him, however, there was much fire, American and Greek.

On the 24th of March, the Silent Man issued an order for a centripetal movement on Richmond. Lee, in every way tried to break the converging fate. Along the Appomattox River, at Fort Stedman, and at every weak-looking place, he hurled himself against the links of a chain, now slowly drawing around him; but all to no purpose. On the 2d of April Grant broke through Lee’s intrenched lines about Petersburg; and Lee at once disturbed J. Davis, although at church in Richmond, by a sudden notice that Petersburg and Richmond were insecure places, and that he must flee to other refuges, than his old ones. Neither sitting nor lying would now do; and accordingly the head of the Confederacy took to his feet, and fled with the few depraved treasures which had not gone already to corruption. Hurrying through Richmond, he got away as fast as a very un-express train would carry him, over railroads hacked by Sheridan, Stoneman, and Grierson. The next morning General Weitzel entered the capital of the dissolving Confederacy—so long held by brave men—with abody of colored troops,—representatives of that fate which four years before had been ignorantly invoked, and now rapidly fulfilling,—representatives, too, of those one hundred and eighty thousand others, with skins colored like their own, who had given themselves to the service of a Union, whose stripes they had often felt, and whose stars for them had just peeped above the eastern hills and were beginning to sing for joy.

Lee at once commenced a retreat towards the Southwest, hoping to unite his broken forces with Johnston, who, however, was too actively taken up by Sherman to reciprocate his intentions. At Amelia Court-House Sheridan and his centaurs suddenly appeared before the astonished Confederates on the 6th of April, and cut seven thousand away from them. The remainder General Lee dragged forward to Appomattox Court-House, and there delivered them over to the generous justice of his brother-in-arms, the silent-lipped, whose magnanimity was a fit type of the large forbearance of a country, which, wronged by a causeless war,—generated for ends that in other lands would have brought its authors to the place where all ropes terminate,—has to look back on no crosses, but for itself.

A really fine character, a great strategist, and personally brave man, the chief of the Confederate Army, who had delivered such “bloody instructions” to the fathers, became the head of a college, and deals out, it is to be hoped, better lessons to the sons.

This surrender was followed, on the 26th of April by that of Johnston; on the 4th of May, by the remaining Confederate forces under General Dick Taylor; by the miscellaneous taking of Mobile, Selma, Tuscaloosa,and Montgomery, and the unfortunate capture of Mr. J. Davis, whose lean head—made valuable to his captors by a useless expense to the treasury—was, at an additional expense, taken several times to Richmond, and shown to the court in satisfaction of his bail bond, and at last dismissed—to the gibbet of history.

The black cloud, charged with such thunderous bolts, had dissolved, and the blue sky was showing through the rifted masses, when a sudden clap, a hissing sound, a sharp wrenching cry, and there lay the straightened form of Abraham Lincoln.

The victories which he had helped to organize were forgotten; cotton worsted was unheeded; even the terrible struggles with the long, wrestling nightmare, were all lost sight of in the grief for the Great and the Good, whose patriotism had warmed, whose integrity had strengthened, and whose genial humor had kept warm and mellow, the heart and hope of a brave and self-sacrificing nation through the contest just closed,—closed to open upon questions which had need, too, of a Solomon rather than a Jeroboam.

CHAPTER XX.VELOCIPEDAL.

How mixed Blood effervesces.—Of the Causes and Developments of American Fastness.—Unrest in Prisons and at Home.—Time lost in Sleep, etc.—The distressing Hurry of Brains.—Compressing a Cow in a Milk-Pot.—Of Doctors’ Gigs and Apoplectic Whirligigs.—American Stomachs considered.—A general Stomach; how employed and hired out.—Doctors’ Bills.—Clothes Wringers and State Wringers.—“Speedy Trials” secured.—The Common and Un-common Law of the United States considered at length.—Of Dower, and how taken.—Property administered before Death.—Heirs cheated.—Injunctions used.—Illinois Divorces.—Of Prohibited Degrees of Marriage.—Of Fat People and Servants.—Boarding-Houses and Hotels.—American Trade and its Feats at diminishing Quantities.—Fast Americans in Europe.—How they overcome Distances, History, and Landlords.—The ParisGenus.

If “in the midst of life we are in debt,” so in the midst of debt Americans are always lively. Mixed blood seems to discharge rapidly its effervescing ingredients.

Fastness, except in the colors of our cheeks and chintzes and in the movement of our mails, works its curious ways through all manifestations of American civilization. Over a small, old, long-cultivated territory, like most of the European, life moves respectably slow, careful of its savings, gathered up by centuries of work and put out at low rates of interest; across continental stretches like ours, sweeping in wide districts and materials of unbundled, achingplenty, it hastens with panting speed, and can afford to lose everything except time. Our great areas, therefore, make us lively, their vast opportunities, restless, wide-talking, and manifesting the generous coarseness of a large-grained breadth. Out of these alone would come marked characteristics; but when these are further quickened by accelerating activities of discovery in all departments, and by mechanical inventions of vast power in translating man and his products over the earth, the result is rapid brain-work, stimulating action, quick combinations, eruptive and vivacious speech.

M. Varet, a French savan, has ascertained that a fly caught by him in France made three hundred and thirty movements of his wings in a second. This is rapid work; but a Wall Street bull will toss his horns twice as fast.

The larger trains of thought thus started will run of themselves with time-table exactness. We shall only accompany a few special excursion ideas a short distance from the main depot.

An impatient unrest under discipline and restrictions, while kept below fever heat by the wet bandages of a self-imposed law, makes jails double punishments for American criminals, and homes often houses for the detention of juveniles under sixteen. Confinements, except to a small class of our married population, is an abridgment of enterprising work, which, if continued beyond a natural law that prescribes sleep to all and a longer period of inactivity to the special class just named, would be a grievance, calling at least for a convention, addresses, and agitation to get rid of.

The distress of hurry which vexes thevis inertiæout of our brains, stirs our intellectual pans continually, so that we do not always get the natural cream of ideas. An American is always working for condensed milk processes; to compress a cow into a milk-pot, or utilize all the herds in his neighborhood on his breakfast-table, in a way unheard of elsewhere. Of course this wide-reaching hurry, which grasps large results and scorns the domestic economies, that occupy the thoughts of people elsewhere, refuses to be concerned for any length of time with the importunities of suffering stomachs.

American stomachs have not time enough to wait on nature. Hence doctors’ gigs and apoplectic whirligigs. A patent stomach that should grind grist for a neighborhood or village, and leave the unstomached worker to avail himself of his accelerating opportunities, would command a high price. It would be hired out around the neighborhood, like a threshing-machine or corn-sheller. In fact, American households might in general be advantageously grouped around or framed into one of these mechanical digesters, with attachments for washing out, ironing, and starching their clothes, and for doing up the wasteful processes of visiting, to economic advantages that would tell on the census. One of the disadvantages would be the discouragement of that branch of American industry, now so largely prosperous, of doctors’ bills, chasing in vain after many of the living and at last only overtaking the administrator of the estate, clean out of breath.

Of course, the benefits of associated wealth and skill have not been overlooked as levers to move enterprises,people’s purses, and sometimes those low-down, coarse adjectives, volcanic in their origin, which, in case of dissatisfaction, erupt over the surface. Universal clothes-wringers are the product of this observation. So other combinations have been and are rapidly forming to wring money out of city, State, and Federal exchequers. It is curious to see how the handles of these joint pumping and pocket-exhausting companies all lie towards the great cities.

Most of the business in the United States, north of Washington, is carried on after an express and accelerated fashion, which is impatient of holidays, and rides over the Fourth of July even, as ruthlessly as an express-train over the human obstruction which thus gets forwarded on his journey out of the United States with a despatch almost enviable to the survivors. Even the Federal Constitution prescribes “speedy trials” as a right, and treats a man as injured who does not go it in a capital way, when on that precipitous road, with a final rush.

The common law of the United States presumes that all are minute-men, and know the quick step; while the uncommon law in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado dispenses with the tedious confinement between the apprehension of the accused and his transporting sentence and uprising. “Delays are dangerous,” is their condensed code.

Members of Congress in A. D. 1900.(p. 520)

The law of dower, as practically enforced, is shaped by the same rapidly revolving lathe, which makes so much of our domestic hollow-ware. The wife spends the principal before her husband’s death, and thus shuns the tedious complications of legal proceedings,which admeasures the dower often to the enterpising lawyer, the bailiffs, and the court clerks.

A marked improvement has also been made in the distribution of estates generally. Among the slow nations of Europe the children generally wait for the unfortunate old people to die before taking their property. This tardy habit is now found to be often productive of great injury to children, especially to those who, snatched away by rapid manners before their begettors, are thus defrauded of their shares. “A bird in the hand” is no longer arara avis, but a domestic fowl cultivated by rapid feeding. Gifts to the living avoid the taxes and discomforts of probate courts, in which it is disagreeable for a family, covered with crape, to sit and see a politician assess the estate upon the heirs.

Fast progress has been made, also, in preventive justice. Injunctions, behind whose shields such old fogies as Lord Eldon, Lord Somers, Lord Thurlow, John Marshall, or William Story were accustomed to hide threatened rights until the danger was over-past, have recently been turned edgewise, and cut down corporations and others obnoxious Fisc-ally or otherwise, or else pressed against them so that they perspired away their adipose stock until they were comfortably ready for a receiver.

The doctrine of divorce, which has puzzled the learned John Miltons in all the sleepy ages that have dozed before us, has been, in many States, simplified, so that he who runs through them may read a decree. Some people have uncharitably supposed that the premiums offered to individual disunions by such Statesas Illinois and Indiana, were devices to draw speculators thither for a day or so; but these are vagrant suspicions that ought not to be allowed on our trains.

In feudal countries, where purity of blood is carefully guarded,—inasmuch as the descents to property are the rule and not descents from it as in America,—legists declare that a woman may not marry her cousin, her uncle, her grandfather, or even her father,—a wise enough restriction, perhaps, for such benighted folks, and where care in marrying often leaves the female part of the household to the dangerous company of these relations until far on in life. But with us women are not shut up to any such necessities, except in Utah, where they may, in the course of a respectably long life, marry through every genealogical degree without knowing it. In other parts they are as necessary as insurance companies, and so marry very soon; so that silver weddings are often seen at an early age, while golden matrimonies are more frequent than maternities or patrimonies. To every thoughtful man, who moves about our rapidly dissolving surfaces, where the railroad car is the kaleidoscope which turns up the bits of humanity in new combinations, a wife is necessary to put up a monument over him; for moving on is such a fixed law,—the only fixed thing in America, except debt and live corruption,—that while he was turning his majority, all his family relations would have gone to other States.

The two curiosities in the United States are fat people and servants. Both run away in a velocipedal hurry; the former into sharp bargains, and the latter into independent powers which dictate treaties andmake alliances like other self-governing communities. An American family is like a South Carolina regiment, all officers and no privates; a boarding-house, a Swiss confederacy, in which the cantons, wedged into neutralizing elements, get forward like a stool braced every-way and equipoised into an aching discomfort; and a hotel, like twenty GermanBundsentangled by contrarious independent interests that knot themselves into teasing discontents, and fret into jars which hold a variety of unpreserved, acidulating fruits. The freest joke in all America is one of its large hotels, which fancies Axminster carpets and chandeliers in a large parlor, and numerous discomforts packed in ever-dwindling rooms, to be happiness. But then the “gentlemanly proprietor” makes up for all this in the bills, which convince all the guests, that they must have enjoyed themselves and at an American rate of speed.

Trade has also had its great advances, not only in the figures which stand in merchants’ magazines like pyramids, with bases always widening downwards, but in the dwindling measures, quarts, gallons, pecks, and bushels, and the waning qualities which sharpen upwards to steady apexes. How to make up in the bill what is taken from the body is a critical study, in which most tradesmen have, without any prizes offered by outsiders, become great proficients. If that man is a public benefactor who makes two blades grow in the place of one, surely he may be rewarded with a passing notice, who takes all the steel out of the one sent to him for repairs, and then divides up the instrument into several blades. Making water into wine, chalk into milk, chemicals into as many varieties of drinkables asthere are days of the year, and diluting articles deemed too strong when left to their raw native vigor, so as to adapt them to our weakened constitutions, attest the beneficent designs of manufacturers and merchants upon Americans of plethoric habits. Peabodies shelling out to poorbodies furnish examples of abundant charity not so widely touching as these.

To make a small measure go twice as far as a large one is more than a feat; it approaches creation. What may in time be considered a double bed, it is impossible yet to foresee; but certain it is, that while single beds are increasing to an alarmingly wide extent, their narrowness is becoming such as to require a new definition of a line to avoid disagreeable collisions.

Mercantile failures, elsewhere hurtful, are with us hurried on into vivacious benefits, dividing up, before the expiration of the credits given, the accumulated profits which otherwise might accumulate in stagnating dulness in the firm. A steady increase of wages is solving, too, those perplexing theories how to balance capital and labor; a weekly distribution of earnings keeping down injudicious balances in the bank.

The frequent jumps of men from low places into high ones, with a celerity very pleasing to their families and often to their creditors, show that the world is governed too much; for acting on this Jeffersonian maxim, most of these ready leapers leave off the governing part and expend their activities in securing, along with their weak salaries, strong flying benefits, which only light on the vigilant.

While the velocipedal ways of Americans thus cut across their own country, it is in foreign fields thatthey are most striking and cutting. Crossing the well-worn paths of Europe, scattering high-premium gold on those jolly fellows, landlords and waiters, they ridge its old historic surfaces with little histories which the facetious persons, who catch sight of them as they whiz through histories, which they leave grandly behind them and all unknown, retail with as much glee, as the travellers themselves once did saleratus, fine-cut nails, or bobinet. Their scant intellectual stores and unfurnished stock of knowledge, so far from embarrassing, only enable them to spin on faster. Mythology, paintings, biographies, architecture, are soon wound up on their clean spindles.

Another class, like aeronautic vessels, have gaseous heads and heavy undergearing, which enable them to run over and run down everything abroad by swift-moving slangs. They always float by the bad air of their own heads, and are apt to anchor in vicious soils. These they can-can. The spent money surprises the hotel squeezers; the spent morals astonish themselves by the ease with which they lose their little all.

But of all the fast classes in America, that is the most velocipedal which, having expressed themselves through the modish follies of the largest American cities, are transported to the stronger vices of Paris. Tired of tapping the younger trees of American growth, they spend the rest of their precious lives in pecking assiduously the rotten parts of foreign woods, content with the phosphoric slime of decay and dissolving maturities.

CHAPTER XXI.PUZZLES AND CROSS-READINGS; OR, JOHNSON’S ENTERTAINMENTS.APRIL 14, 1865, TO MARCH 4, 1869.

Puzzles about Hemp and Paper.—Weak Brains at rest.—The Return of the Holders of Sabres and Guns.—Our Dead.—Fighters become Workers.—A Modern Sisyphus rolls a Stone up Hill.—How it rolled back.—The Interpretation by Congress of its own Rights.—Southern Delegates declined.—Puzzles solved.—Vetoing made easy.—The New Orleans Riots.—The Zigzag Journey of the President to the Tomb of Douglas.—The Fenian Republic in Union Square.—The Sham-rock compared with other Rocks.—The French Moths in Mexico; and how they were singed.—Amnesties and Pardons.—Scripture outdone.—Forgiveness forced upon the Unrepenting.—Results of Congressional Reconstruction.—The President tried and one found wanting.—Value of one Vote.—Alaska and St. Thomas.—Chicago, unalarmed, goes on dis-pairing but not despairing.—The Narrow Escapes of New York.—Fiske-Ville.—Johnson gets Mudd out of the Dry Tortugas.

Where to find hemp enough to suspend those who had supported the overwhelmed Confederacy was the first puzzle that presented itself to the furious patriotism of the constitutional Substitute. This, however, soon gave place to the still more difficult one, where to find paper enough to pardon them.

Four of the assassins of the good man were effectively deprived of any further earthly abuse of their weak brains, maudlin sentiments, and passions; the otherswere sent between stone walls or to the dry sands of the Tortugas.

The heroic holders of the sabre and musket,—their stern, sad work now done, bore them back,—draped in sable for the comrades who slept in trenched glory along the furrowed parallel, in the storm-swept field, or on the banks of the Mississippi, the Chickahominy and James,—back to the plough, to the workshop, to the peaceful businesses of life, to reunions with those whose busy fingers and busier hearts had forwarded to them love messages and mindful tokens while absent.

The army of fighters was disbanded into battalions of workers.

On the 29th of May the new President commenced the Sisyphus business of Southern reconstruction; first rolling to the top of the hill the stone of a provisional government for North Carolina, which, of course, rolled back again, covered by the old shells of the Confederacy. By the middle of July he had tugged up the same stone under different names, as Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina, only to find it rolling down speedily, hurting the colored people and Union whites, and creating a butternut-colored atmosphere all around it. The entertainment was too often repeated to be jocose, except to Mr. Johnson, who believed in a detached idea industriously pursued. The delegates to Congress under his scheme, who presented themselves at Washington, in December, 1865, were found to be all of the saffron complexion and hue. They had already forgotten that there had been any war, and only remembered their ancient rights, and were ready to draw back pay, oranything else back, except declarations of not having been in the least wrong in the late little unpleasantness. Congress read their own privileges, rights, and duties in quite a different way; declared their exclusive right, as representatives of the people, to deal with the new puzzles; passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill for the protection of the colored property of the South, the Civil Rights Bill, and the proposed Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment. While they believed in the dead past burying its dead, they did not embrace the idea of its burying the living with them.

Mr. Johnson now studied the Art of Vetoing Made Easy; and from his cross-readings began to add immensely to the American official archives by Xanthippe messages, whose unlovely words have greatly embossed the rich cabinets of vituperative specimens, for a long time accumulating at Washington.

The Irish Republic in America.(p. 529)

In July, 1866, a riot was created in New Orleans,—the counterpart of the pat-riot disturbances in New York three years before,—in which thirty-four loyal colored and three loyal colorless people were added to the Crescent cemeteries. The citizens who had participated in the bonfires and illuminations, on the arrival of Farragut and Porter in 1862 were mercifully spared. In August following, the acting President, accompanied by Mr. Seward,—whose wonderful pen through the silent diplomatic struggle abroad, which ran parallel with the armed strife at home, cannot be alluded to with scant praise,—set out for Chicago, to lay the corner-stone of a monument to the powerful dike-breaker. Never was a journey so long. The road thither seemed to have got intoxicated andreeled and tumbled all over the West; while the jerky speeches, hiccuping along the wavy ways, endeavored in vain to catch up with and to find the President.

This year was made memorable by the establishment of a wonderful republic for Ireland in Union Square, New York, and the quiet election, without any votes, of Mr. Roberts to be its head; an Irish invention, for the easy solution of that perplexing question of how to get enough votes, most praiseworthy. The novel mode of raising an army, and of replenishing a treasury, whose invisible outflow was so steady and well regulated that it never perplexed Wall Street, were admirable illustrations of the good-nature of the friendly sons and daughters of Saint Patrick.

The sham-rock, on which they touched poured out streams as abundant as the rock which Moses struck. Indeed, it was almost as good a milch cow as Plymouth Rock.

In February, 1867, the French moths,—hatched out in 1862 in a Napoleonic fancy nest, and darting off into Mexico, through whose chronic flames they played with the usual results,—were terribly scorched in a candle sent out by Mr. Seward. The head moth, Maximilian, fascinated by the gilt of an imperial candelabra, was so burnt, that he disappeared like the vagaries of South American empire, which hovered on the wings of that other Gallic moth, that now flits around the gas-jets of the Tuileries.

Mr. Johnson’s amnesties and pardons are too numerous for anything but a calculating-machine. He began May 29, 1865, and only ended March 4, 1869.Tired of cross-reading the Constitution, he betook himself to Scripture, and, with his mode of interpretation, spelt out a duty to forgive all of the unrepentant, including Mr. J. Davis, the prize-taking Breckenridge, and other conspicuous sinners.

In spite of the semi-weekly vetoes, however, which obliged Congress to pass all laws twice, it contrived to reconstruct all of the lately disorganizing and disorganized States except Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas. Some very poor Northern timber and unconstitutional braces were wrought into the hastily constructed and urgently needed fabrics, which, however, it is to be hoped, will be speedily removed. Angry with the solution of the puzzles, the President attempted to read athwart the Tenure of Office Act Mr. Stanton’s war duties, for which, March 5, 1869, he was requested by the House of Representatives to appear before the Senate and make answer. From March 29th to May 16th his trial lasted, interflecked by some fine veins of forensic eloquence, and at last bringing out the value of a single vote,—that which prevented conviction,—for the benefit of future electoral harangues.

The restless,leverleverpen of Mr. Seward pried up new territory for the screaming eagle to light upon,—the distant and hazy Alas-ka, rich in ices and other cool reasons, and St. Thomas the Danish, whose abundant lemons may, when well mixed, allay, without quenching, our thirst for foreign drinks.

These speculations did not, it is needless to add, discourage Chicago. Always dis-pairing individuals, she never despaired for herself. Her courts granted four hundred and sixty-eight divorces during 1868; but notwithstandingthe untoward fact, her unchecked population sang on more loudly consoling lullabies to her well-rocked and increasing cradles of grain. Efforts were made the same year to annex New York to the Erie Railway and to change its name to Fisk-ville. These efforts might have succeeded, but that the attention of the leading proprietor was diverted to the Pacific; and the motion for the expected change was postponed to a later term of the Supremest Court in the city of New York.

The last feat of Mr. Johnson was to get Mudd out of the Dry Tortugas.

Getting Mudd out of the Dry Tortugas.(p. 533)

CHAPTER XXII.TAKEN FOR GRANTED; OR, WHAT IS EXPECTED OF GRANT AND THE AMERICAN FUTURE.MARCH 4, 1869, TO ——.

The supposed Difficulties of writing History in advance considered, and the Popular Delusions on the Subject disposed of.—Lively Expectations of what our future Presidents, Cabinet Members, Foreign Ministers, etc., etc., will be and do.—What Citizens will be exempt from Executing and Garroting the Laws.—The Public Debt to disappear.—The Ways considered.—Cut up into Dividends and no more heard of.—What is expected of Common Schools and Sunday Schools in improving Public Men and their Speeches.—Certain Occupations to be dispensed with.—The Uses to which their Pursuers are to be put.—Improvements in Judges, Injunctions, and Court-Houses.—Extension of Efforts of Society for preventing Cruelty to Animals, to Employers, etc.—Woman’s Rights discussed from various Aspects.—Men and Women equal,—especially Women.—How any Differences between them are to be disposed of.—How Children are to be utilized before they get to be Twenty-one and lose their Activities.—The new Arts and Sciences to be taught.—Secretary of the Treasury to regulate the Fashions, and how.—The President and Sunday Schools.—All Mining to be transferred to Wall Street.—Advance Sheets of Reports for 1969.—What our Railway System is to be.—Grumbling and Patriotism.—Of the Future of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.—A Pax Vobiscum.

Most people suppose that it is difficult to write history in advance. There is no greater delusion. Facts—even when we can get at them and are sure of them, which seldom happens—are great obstructions to a narrative. They involve sudden leapsinto unforeseen depths of human action, perplexing struggles through very dynastic uncertainties, or ascents to unexpected developments of character, trying to one’s judgment and patience, and often hurtful to one’s pride of opinion. Our preconceptions, unverified by a set of obstinate facts, are distressed by the unsatisfactory contradictions. We halt dissatisfied on a dusty road, which the tramp of events has worn smooth, and left nothing to novelty or an industrious fancy.

Besides, the great majority of readers are partisans, and have a right to be disappointed at and to blame those unreasoning conclusions, which slide inevitably out of realities. They confront sternly those facts, which affront them, by insisting on happening in a way or order different from their expectations or wishes. Hitherto, we have been obliged to conform to the hard conditions thus inherent in actual chronicles, and have been forced to submit our readers to these annoying certainties.

We can, however, now dismiss these tantalizing fixities of events, which have run before us, and left us the wearisome business of catching up to them; and leaving them to overtake us, if they can, to write up a future history of events, which ought to happen, and which will greatly disappoint the sanguine expectations of Americans if they do not. The excuse for failure will be lessened by the outlined path which we here stretch downward into the wooded future.

We take it for granted, then, that all our future Presidents will be the very best and most competent men in the nation, spontaneously acclamated to the office, andnot wrung out by industrious party conventions for political ends. Uncommitted to committees or political sponsors, and unweighted by onerous gratitude to ex-working party canvassers, they will naturally hereafter pensively appoint to Cabinet places and diplomatic posts statesmen of pre-eminent ability, patriotism, and integrity, who will as modestly wait to be invited in, as the same class now, when in, stand as if hopelessly deaf, to be distinctly invited out. That they will reluctantly, if at all, subject weak citizens to the pains and penalties of executing and garroting the laws, or the slow and unpractised, to the heavy tasks of carrying the public burdens.

The public debt will naturally disappear. Perhaps some fortunate speculator in petroleum or Erie stock will pay it off, rather than have it in the way, or see it left to bear the market inopportunely. The secret of making money scarce will lead doubtless to the discovery of making it plenty; and then the public debt, being of no use to anybody, will naturally stand aside, as poor relations in times of plenty. Besides, gentlemen being selected, not for their own interests, but for the public good, will, it is to be expected, donate their salaries to a sinking fund, which will carry it off, as some companies do their stockholders’ dividends, to unfathomed bottoms. In fact, if the debt could be cut up into dividends, nothing more would be heard of it. If the whole truth may be safely told, the difficulty in the extinguishment of the debt will not be so much in its undoubted disappearance, as in settling upon that plan among the numbers presented, which will be permitted to hurry it out of sight.

Of course, when the Federal obligations quit, the State and city debts will not have the face to remain behind.

These subjects out of the way, members of Congress, being then gentlemen, as well as educated, capable, and honest men, dragged unwillingly from and not into business, will deal with the few remaining topics with a wise silence,—and this course we take forgrant-edgrant-ednow; or else will discuss them and not each other, or the encyclopædia of unrelated questions, the publication of which now so enhances the price of paper.

This improvement in our Congressional debates will have a corresponding advantage, also, to those foreigners who, desirous of learning our system, venture upon the speeches made at the Capitol, and, hopelessly misled by the terms employed, and the ferocious adjectives that commit horrible murders on almost every paragraph, confound our geography with that of the Cannibal Islands. We also take it for granted, that our public men will wait for events to justify the crude speculations, which they toss out in conversations with reporters, before cruelly amusing the good-natured public with their vaticinations. Possibly, too, the spread of common schools and Sunday schools, teaching grammar and morality, may lead to the disuse by our print-rushing politicians of styles of speech quite incomprehensible, and of words so raw in outline and so destitute of middle letters as to lead profane people to fancy that they are imitations of their own heedless expressions. Of course, in the better days now dawning, “rings” will only be used to tie quadrupeds to posts, or to restrain vicious bipeds in state prisons.Combinations to do good and increase the general happiness will naturally supplant those curious American circles, whose peripheries are not equidistant from the centre, but which consist in fact only of a centre, and that centre, self.

Happiness, and not wealth, being thus the main pursuit, of course many kinds of occupations, now called business, such as brokers, money-lenders, etc., will cease, and those now engaged in these so-called pursuits—of others, will look after the poor to minister unto them and not to take them in. The superior claims of charity upon the fortunate, who are now living, will naturally be enhanced by the fact that, being at present in the world, they cannot reasonably expect to live much longer than 1970, and may quit much earlier, leaving some selfish heirs not disposed to divide except for an equivalent.

Many judges being released from their present arduous duties of so administering law as to get re-elected—for then no one will value an office so much a sinecure—will have some time, especially in New York, to study law; and some courts of appeal can be repealed. The only injunctions issued will be oral, delivered, not to railroad speculators, but to indiscreet juveniles, unwarily betrayed into their first and last offence. The expense of court-houses being thus partially saved, it is expected, that the small unventilated places in which law is peddled out will be enlarged, and a humane effort be thus made to save the exposed lives of suitors, lawyers, jurors, and judges.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will naturally, with larger means, extendits operations, and embrace employers, suffering from servants of independent ways, from domestics who take six evenings in the week out, and allow their mistress one, and who, for certain discreet considerations, not worth mentioning here, permit those, who divide their estates with them, to occupy a portion of the same house, on condition of not interfering with their separate apartments.

We also take it for granted, that woman’s rights will not be wrongfully urged or withheld; but will be so adjusted, that the public will ascertain what some people would ask for, if they did not become incomprehensible through abundant talking, or what—considering the modesty of the applicants—they really ought to have, although they do not clamor for it in a way that makes some suspect, that men are either to be extinguished outright, or else kept for a few hundred years on probation, until they shall have learned to be respectful, just, and unmanlike.

In this coming good time, men and women are to be equal,—especially the women. If any differences are discovered in any way between them, these differences are to be submitted to conventions chosen by the wisest women, and the differences either to be entirely suppressed, or the dissenters all expelled from the United States. Uniformity is to be secured at all hazards. If necessary, ballot-boxes will be attached to cradles; and women, by any cause confined from active canvassing, will be allowed to vote twice at the next election, in order to bring up their rights to a point where nature left them.

We further take it for granted, that children willthen be content to be vivacious; will be left to the witching ways, the pulpy and dewy freshness of the morning glory of life, until they shall have gradually come to the ripe maturities of action; that they will not fall from grace into the condemnation of mischievous notice; will not daily burst into astonishing feats of memory or attainment before reluctant, domestic audiences, nor carry on social insurrections against the United States of their begettors until they have achieved their independence, nor hold a Fourth of July every day in the year.

Should reform in this direction not take place as just anticipated, then we shall expect that infantile precocities will be utilized before they shall have evaporated into the insipidities of manhood and womanhood. At present, it is well understood, children are anachronisms, sadly out of place, squandering uselessly their best powers without any corresponding responsibilities; legally treated as minors, when they are in fact majors; denied the legal rights to marry until they reach a period when marriage is tame and idle, and the means to support a wife are exhausted; prohibited from going to Congress and being Presidents, while full of original ideas and administrative ability, and allowed to go when they have oozed away through the leakages of active growths all capacity, and become just—what we see them at Washington; and wasting in pantalets the money which, if suffered, they might earn better than the old heads which are now only figure-heads.

We shall not be surprised to see, if not during Grant’s time, at least before the century runs out, aconstitutional amendment relieving aged Americans—those, for example, who have attained the ripe, very ripe age of twenty-one—from the duties and cares of office, and securing to the public the benefit of young vigorous intellects, varying from twelve to seventeen years of age.

The happy results of this change will be apparent—to any infant mind. Short-jacketed M. C.’s will impart new vivacity to Congressional debate; young ministers to foreign courts will be able to acquire, if they do not know, some language beside the American, and be able to converse with those with whom they have business,—an un-speakable luxury now. Active, bustling infants will give a new ardor to journalism, and produce a more enterprising corps of wide-awake, newspaper correspondents, to keep up the stock of telegraph companies by information which, being constantly in advance of the facts, would fairly represent and be fitting types of, the infantile correspondents themselves, and necessitate additional contradictions. As territorial governors, obliged to take hazardous journeys on our railways,—which often intervene and prevent older men from reaching their destination,—they would be nimble enough to get out of the wreck, or perhaps smart enough to keep their deaths secret, and have their ancestors draw their salary,—thus accomplishing, although not present, the principal business of that office. Then, too, how much livelier would things go on in our churches, if, instead of the dull, old elders, deacons, or vestrymen, now seldom elected before they reach the great age of thirty, and who, when they were boys, were smart enough, althoughnot as alert as their own boys now, were allowed to rest their stiffer awkward limbs in their pews, and ecclesiastical affairs were managed by their youngers? The sick would be visited by cheerful, round-faced persons, bright with the health which would be brought as a living fact to the invalid; widows would be comforted by the presence of dark-haired and hopeful youths, and not depressed by the aspect of people encumbered with wives and the chilling experience of at least a score and a half of years; while the poor would receive liberally from those who well know, that the best use for money is to keep it in vigilant circulation.

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