Greater Britain Part 3

The harbor is illuminated by the colored lanterns of a thousand boats, and the steam-whistles tell of a life that never sleeps. The paddles of the steamers seem not only to beat the water, but to stir the languid air and so provoke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and Wall Street ferries burn so brightly that in the warm glare the eye reaches through the still night to the feathery acacias in the streets of Brooklyn. The view is as southern as the people: we have not yet found America.

CHAPTER V.

CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT.

"Old Cambridge! Long may she flourish!" proposed by a professor in the University of Cambridge, in America, and drunk standing, with three cheers, by the graduates and undergraduates of Harvard, is a toast that sets one thinking.

Cambridge in America is not by any means a university of to-day. Harvard College, which, being the only "house," has engrossed the privileges, funds, and t.i.tles of the university, was founded at Cambridge, Ma.s.s., in 1636, only ninety years later than the greatest and wealthiest college of our Cambridge in old England. Puritan Harvard was the sister rather than the daughter of our own Puritan Emmanuel. Harvard himself, and Dunster, the first president of Harvard's College, were among the earliest of the scholars of Emmanuel.

A toast from the Cambridge of new to the Cambridge of old England is one from younger to elder sister; and Dr. Wendell Holmes, "The Autocrat,"

said as much in proposing it at the Harvard alumni celebration of 1866.

Like other old inst.i.tutions, Harvard needs a ten-days' revolution: academic abuses flourish as luxuriantly upon American as on English soil, and university difficulties are much the same in either country.

Here, as at home, the complaint is that the men come up to the university untaught. To all of them their college is forced for a time to play the high-school; to some she is never anything more than school.

At Harvard this is worse than with ourselves: the average age of entry, though of late much risen, is still considerably under eighteen.

The college is now aiming at raising gradually the standard of entry: when once all are excluded save men, and thinking men, real students, such as those by whom some of the new Western universities are attended, then Harvard hopes to leave drill-teaching entirely to the schools, and to permit the widest freedom in the choice of studies to her students.

Harvard is not blameless in this matter. Like other universities, she is conservative of bad things as well as good; indeed, ten minutes within her walls would suffice to convince even an Englishman that Harvard clings to the times before the Revolution.

Her conservatism is shown in many trivial things--in the dress of her janitors and porters, in the cut of the gra.s.s-plots and college gates, in the conduct of the Commencement orations in the chapel. For the dainty little dames from Boston who came to hear their friends and brothers recite their disquisitions none but Latin programmes were provided, and the poor ladies were condemned to find such names as Bush, Maurice, Benjamin, Humphrey, and Underwood among the graduating youths, distorted into Bvsh, Mavritivs, Beniamin, Hvmphredvs, Vnderwood.

This conservatism of the New England universities had just received a sharp attack. In the Commencement oration, Dr. Hedges, one of the leaders of the Unitarian Church, had strongly pressed the necessity for a complete freedom of study after entry, a liberty to take up what line the student would, to be examined and to graduate in what he chose. He had instanced the success of Michigan University consequent upon the adoption of this plan; he had pointed to the fact that of all the universities in America, Michigan alone drew her students from every State. President Hill and ex-President Walker had indorsed his views.

There is a special fitness in the reformers coming forward at this time.

This year is the commencement of a new era at Harvard, for at the request of the college staff, the connection of the university with the Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts has just been dissolved, and the members of the board of overseers are in future to be elected by the university, instead of being nominated by the State. This being so, the question had been raised as to whether the governor would come in state to Commencement, but he yielded to the wishes of the graduates, and came with the traditional pomp, attended by a staff in uniform, and escorted by a troop of Volunteer Lancers, whose scarlet coats and polish recalled the times before the Revolution.

While the ceremony was still in progress, I had been introduced to several of the foremost rowing men among the younger graduates of Harvard, and at its conclusion I accompanied them to their river. They were in strict training for their university race with Yale, which was to come off in a week, and as Cambridge had been beaten twice running, and this year had a better crew, they were wishful for criticisms on their style. Such an opinion as a stranger could offer was soon given: they were dashing, fast, long in their stroke; strong, considering their light weights, but terribly overworked. They have taken for a rule the old English notions as to training which have long since disappeared at home, and, looked upon as fanatics by their friends and tutors, they have all the fanatic's excess of zeal.

Rowing and other athletics, with the exceptions of skating and base ball, are both neglected and despised in America. When the smallest sign of a reaction appears in the New England colleges, there comes at once a cry from Boston that brains are being postponed to brawn. If New Englanders would look about them, they would see that their climate has of itself developed brains at the expense of brawn, and that if national degeneracy is to be long prevented, brawn must in some way be fostered.

The high shoulder, head-voice, and pallor of the Boston men are not incompatible with the possession of the most powerful brain, the keenest wit; but it is not probable that energy and talent will be continued in future generations sprung from the worn-out men and women of to-day.

The prospect at present is not bright; year by year Americans grow thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived. aelian's Americans, we may remember, though they were greatly superior to the Greeks in stature, were inferior to them in length of life. The women show even greater signs of weakness than the men, and the high, undulating tones which are affectation in the French, are natural to the ladies of America; little can be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive dancing in overheated rooms.

The American summer, often tropical in its heat, has much to answer for, but it is the winter which makes the saddest havoc among the younger people, and the boys and girls at school. Cooped up all day in the close air of the heated school-house, the poor children are at night made to run straight back to the furnace-dried atmosphere of home. The thermometer is commonly raised indoors to eighty or ninety degrees Fahr.

The child is not only baked into paleness and sweated bit by bit to its death, but fed meantime, out of mistaken kindness, upon the most indigestible of dainties--pastry, hot dough-nuts, and sweetmeats taking the place of bread, and milk, and meat--and is not allowed to take the slightest exercise, except its daily run to school-house. Who can wonder that spinal diseases should prevail?

One reason why Americans are pale and agueish is that, as a people, they are hewers of primeval forest and tillers of virgin soil. These are the unhealthiest employments in the world; the sun darts down upon the hitherto unreached mould, and sets free malarious gases, against which the new settlers have no antidotes.

The rowing men of Harvard tell me that their clubs are still looked on somewhat coldly by the majority of the professors, who obstinately refuse to see that improved physical type is not an end, but a means, toward improvement of the mental faculties, if not in the present, at least in the next generation. As for the moral training in the virtues of obedience and command, for which a boat's crew is the best of schools, that is not yet understood at Harvard, where rowing is confined to the half dozen men who are to represent the college in the annual race, and the three or four more who are being trained to succeed them in the crew. Rowing in America is what it was till ten years since at old Cambridge, and is still at Oxford--not an exercise for the majority of the students, but a pursuit for a small number. Physical culture is, however, said to be making some small progress in the older States, and I myself saw signs of the tendency in Philadelphia. The war has done some good in this respect, and so has the influx of Canadians to Chicago. Cricket is still almost an unknown thing, except in some few cities. When I was coming in to Baltimore by train, we pa.s.sed a meadow in which a match was being played. A Southerner to whom I was talking at the time, looked at the players, and said with surprise: "Reckon they've got a wounded man ther', front o' them sticks, sah." I found that he meant the batsman, who was wearing pads.

One of the most brilliant of Harvard's thinkers has taken to carpentrying as a relief to his mental toil; her most famed professor is often to be found working in his garden or his farm; but such change of work for work is possible only to certain men. The generality of Americans need not only exercise, but relaxation; still, with less physical, they possess greater mental vitality then ourselves.

On the day that follows Commencement--the chief ceremony of the academic year--is held once in three summers the "Alumni Celebration," or meeting of the past graduates of Harvard--a touching gathering at all times, but peculiarly so in these times that follow on the losses of the war.

The American college informal organizations rest upon the unit of the "cla.s.s." The "cla.s.s" is what at Cambridge is called "men of the same year,"--men who enter together and graduate together at the end of the regular course. Each cla.s.s of a large New England college, such as Harvard, will often possess an a.s.sociation of its own; its members will dine together once in five years, or ten--men returning from Europe and from the far West to be present at the gathering. Harvard is strong in the affections of the New England people--her faults are theirs; they love her for them, and keep her advantages to themselves, for in the whole list of graduates for this year I could find only two Irish names.

Here, at the Alumni Celebration, a procession was marshaled in the library in which the order was by cla.s.ses; the oldest cla.s.s of which there were living members being called the first. "Cla.s.s of 1797!" and two old white-haired gentlemen tottered from the crowd, and started on their march down the central aisle, and out bareheaded into the blaze of one of the hottest days that America had ever known. "Cla.s.s of 1800!"

missing two years, in which all the graduates were dead; and out came one, the sole survivor. Then came "1803," and so on, to the stalwart company of the present year. When the cla.s.ses of 1859 and 1860, and of the war-years were called, those who marched out showed many an empty sleeve.

The present triennial celebration is noteworthy not only for the efforts of the university reformers, but also for the foundation of the Memorial Hall, dedicated as a monument to those sons of Harvard who fell while serving their country in the suppression of the late rebellion. The purity of their patriotism hardly needed ill.u.s.tration by the fire of young Everett, or the graceful speech of Dr. Holmes. Even the splendid oratory of Governor Bullock could do little more than force us to read for ourselves the Roll of Honor, and see how many of Harvard's most distinguished younger men died for their country as privates of Ma.s.sachusetts Volunteers.

There was a time, as England knows, when the thinking men of Boston, and the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more of almost equal fame, morally seceded from their country's councils, and were followed in their secession by the younger men. "The best men in America stand aloof from politics," it was said.

The country from which these men seceded was not the America of to-day: it was the Union which South Carolina ruled. From it the Cambridge professors "came out," not because they feared to vex their nerves with the shock of public argument and action, but because the course of the slaveholders was not their course. Hating the wrongs they saw but could not remedy, they separated themselves from the wrong-doers; another matter, this, from the "hating hatred" of our culture cla.s.s in England.

In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When America was first brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the n.o.blest blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging on the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks, and marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Aga.s.siz, and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From Oberlin almost every male student and professor marched, and the university teaching was left in the women's hands. Out of 8000 school-teachers in Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were drafted, 3000 volunteered for the war. Everywhere the teachers and their students were foremost among the Volunteers, and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at one.

The fierce pa.s.sions of this day of wakening have not been suffered to disturb the quiet of the academic town. Our English universities have not about them the cla.s.sic repose, the air of study, that belong to Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts. Those who have seen the lanes of Leyden, and compared them with the noisy Oxford High Street, will understand what I mean when I say that our Cambridge comes nearest to her daughter-town; but even the English Cambridge has a bustling street or two, and a weekly market-day, while Cambridge in New England is one great academic grove, buried in a philosophic calm which our university towns can never rival so long as men resort to them for other purposes than work.

It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the oldness of New England is to be remarked. Although her people are everywhere in the vanguard of all progress, their country has a look of gable-ends and steeple-hats, while their laws seem fresh from the hands of Alfred. In all England there is no city which has suburbs so gray and venerable as are the elm-shaded towns round Boston: Dorchester, Chelsea, Nahant, and Salem, each seems more ancient than its fellow; the people speak the English of Elizabeth, and joke about us, "---- speaks good English for an Englishman."

In the country districts, the winsome villages that nestle in the dells seem to have been there for ten centuries at least; and it gives one a shock to light on such a spot as b.l.o.o.d.y Brook, and to be told that only one hundred and ninety years ago Captain Lathrop was slain there by Red Indians, with eighty youths, "the flower of Ess.e.x County," as the Puritan history says.

The warnings of Dr. Hedges, in reference to the strides of Michigan, have taken the New Englanders by surprise. Secure, as they believed, in their intellectual supremacy, they forgot that in a Federal Union the moral and physical primacy will generally both reside in the same State.

The Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts, at one time the foremost upholder of the doctrine of State rights, will soon be seen once more acting as its champion--this time on behalf of herself and her five sister States.

Were the six New England Commonwealths grouped together in a single State, it would still have only three-fourths of the population of New York, and about an equal number of inhabitants with Pennsylvania. The State of Rhode Island is one-fourth the size of many a single Californian county. Such facts as these will not be long lost sight of in the West, and when a divergence of interests springs up, Ohio will not suffer her voice in the Senate to continue to be neutralized by that of Connecticut or Rhode Island. Even if the Senate be allowed to remain untouched, it is certain that the redistribution of seats consequent upon the census of 1870 will completely transfer political power to the central States. That New England will by this change inevitably lose her hold upon the destinies of the whole Union is not so clear. The influence for good of New England upon the West has been chiefly seminal; but not for that the less enormous. Go into a State such as Michigan, where half the people are immigrants--where, of the remaining moiety, the greater part are born Westerners, and apparently in no way of New England--and you will find that the inhabitants are for the most part earnest, G.o.d-fearing men, with a New England tone of profound manliness and conviction running through everything they say and do. The colleges in which they have been reared are directed, you will find, by New England professors, men trained in the cla.s.sic schools of Harvard, Yale, or Amherst; the ministers under whom they sit are, for the most part, Boston men; the books they read are of New England, or old English of the cla.s.s from which the writers of the Puritan States themselves have drawn their inspiration. To New England is chiefly due, in short, the making of America a G.o.dly nation.

It is something in this age to come across a people who believe strongly in anything, and consistently act upon their beliefs: the New Englanders are such a race. Thoroughly G.o.d-fearing States are not so common that we can afford to despise them when found; and nowhere does religion enter more into daily life than in Vermont or Ma.s.sachusetts.

The States of the Union owe so huge a debt of grat.i.tude to New England, that on this score alone they may refrain from touching her with sacrilegious hands. Not to name her previous sacrifices, the single little State of Ma.s.sachusetts--one-fourth the size of Scotland, and but half as populous as Paris--sent during the rebellion a hundred and fifty regiments to the field.

It was to Boston that Lincoln telegraphed when, in 1861, at a minute's notice, he needed men for the defense of Washington. So entirely were Southerners of the opinion that the New Englanders were the true supporters of the old flag, that "Yankee" became a general term for loyalists of any State. America can never forget the steady heroism of New England during the great struggle for national existence.

The unity that has been the chief cause of the strength of the New England influence is in some measure sprung from the fact that these six States are completely shut off from all America by the single State of New York, alien from them in political and moral life. Every Yankee feels his country bounded by the British, the Irish, and the sea.

In addition to the h.o.m.ogeneousness of isolation, the New Englanders, like the Northern Scotch, have the advantages of a bad climate and a miserable soil. These have been the true agents in the development of the energy, the skill, and fort.i.tude of the Yankee people. In the war, for instance, it was plain that the children of the poor and rugged Northeastern States were not the men to be beaten by the lotus-eaters of Louisiana when they were doing battle for what they believed to be a righteous cause.

One effect of the poverty of soil with which New England is afflicted has been that her sons have wandered from end to end of the known world, engaging in every trade, and succeeding in all. Sometimes there is in their migrations a religious side. Mormonism, although it now draws its forces from Great Britain, was founded in New England. At Brindisi, on my way home, I met three Yankees returning from a Maine colony lately founded at Jaffa, in expectation of the fulfillment of prophecy, and destruction of the Mohammedan rule. For the moment they are intriguing for a firman from the very government upon the coming fall of which all their expectations have been based; and these fierce fanatics are making money by managing a hotel. One of them told me that the Jaffa colony is a "religio-commercial speculation."

New England Yankees are not always so filled with the Puritan spirit as to reject unlawful means of money-making. Even the Ma.s.sachusetts common schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out their black sheep into the world. At Center Harbor, in New Hampshire, I met with an example of the "Yankee sp.a.w.n" in a Maine man--a shrewd, sailor-looking fellow. He was sitting next me at the ordinary, and asked me to take a gla.s.s of his champagne. I declined, but chatted, and let out that I was a Britisher.

"I was subject to your government once for sixteen months," my neighbor said.

"Really! Where?"

"Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner there. And very lucky, too."

"Why so?" I asked.

"Because, if the American government had caught me, they would have hanged me for a pirate. But _I wasn't a pirate_."

With over-great energy I struck in, "Of course not."