T. De Witt Talmage Part 9

Too much politics in our food threatened to demoralise our large cities.

The same thing had happened in London, in 1868. We survived it, kept on preaching against it, and giving money to prosecute the guilty. It was an age of pursuit; ministers pursuing ministers, lawyers pursuing lawyers, doctors, merchants, even Arctic explorers pursuing one another, the North Pole a jealous centre of interest. Everything is frozen in the Arctic region save the jealousies of the Arctic explorers. Even the North Pole men were like others. This we discovered in 1884, when, in Washington, the post-mortem trial of DeLong and his men was in progress.

There was nothing to be gained by the controversy. There were no laurels to be awarded by this investigation, because the men whose fame was most involved were dead. It was a quarrel, and the "Jeannette" was the graveyard in which it took place. It was disgraceful.

Jealousy is the rage of a man, also of a woman.

It was evident, in the progress of this one-sided trial, that our legislature needed to have their corridors, their stairways, and their rooms cleaned of lobbyists.

At the State Capital in Albany, one bright spring morning in the same year, the legislature rose and shook itself, and the Sergeant-at-Arms was instructed to drive the squad of lobbyists out of the building. He did it so well that he scarcely gave them time to get their canes or their hats. Some of the lowest men in New York and Brooklyn were among them. That was a spring cleaning worth while. But it was only a little corner of the political arena that was unclean.

I remember how eagerly, when I went to Canada in April, the reporters kept asking me who would be the next President. It would have been such an easy thing to answer if I had only known who the man was. In this dilemma I suggested some of our best presidential timber in Brooklyn as suitable candidates. These were General Sloc.u.m, General Woodford, General Tracey, Mayor Low, Judge Pratt, Judge Tierney, Mr. Stranahan, and Judge Neilson. Some of these men had been seriously mentioned for the office. Honourable mention was all they got, however. They were too unpretentious for the role. It was the beginning of a mud-slinging campaign. New York versus New York--Brooklyn versus Brooklyn.

I long ago came to the conclusion that the real heroes of the world were on the sea. The ambitions of men crowded together on land were incontestably disgusting. On the vast, restless deep men stand alone, in brave conflict with constant danger. I was always deeply impressed by the character of men, as revealed in disasters of the sea. There were many of them during my life-time. The bigger the ships grew, the more dangerous became ocean travel. Our improvements seemed to add to the humour of grim old Neptune. In 1884 the ocean was becoming a great turnpike road, and people were required by law to keep to the right or to the left. A population of a million sailors was on the sea at all times. Some of the ships were too busy to stop to save human lives, as was the case in the disaster of the "Florida." In distress, her captain hailed "The City of Rome," a monster of the deep. But "The City of Rome" had no time to stop, and pa.s.sed on by. The lifeboats of the "Florida" were useless sh.e.l.ls, utterly unseaworthy. The "Florida" was unfit for service. John Bayne, the engineer, was the hero who lost his life to save others. But this was becoming a common story of the sea; for when the "Schiller" went down, Captain Thomas gave his life for others. When the "Central-America" sank, President Arthur's father-in-law perished in the same way. Every shipwreck I have known seems lighted up with some marvellous deed of heroism in man.

In 1884 there was a failure in Wall Street for eight or ten million dollars, and hundreds went down during this shipwreck. By heroism and courage alone were they able to outlive it. To whom did all this money belong? To those who were drowned in the storm of financial sea. But it was only a Wall Street flurry; it did not affect the national ship as it would have done twenty years before. The time had pa.s.sed when Wall Street could jeopardise the commerce of the country. Twenty years before, such a calamity in three days' time would have left all the business of the nation in the dust. It would have crashed down all the banks, the insurance companies, the stock-houses. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans--from coast to coast, everything would have tumbled down.

The princ.i.p.al lesson derived from this panic was to keep excitable men out of Wall Street. While the romance of a failure for hundreds of thousands of dollars is more appealing than a failure for a small sum, the greater the deficit the greater the responsibility. Ferdinand Ward was in this Wall Street crash of 1883. The roseate gla.s.ses of wealth through which he saw the world had made him also see millions in every direction. George L. Seney lost his bank and railroad stock in this failure, but he had given hundreds of thousands to the cause of education, North and South. Some people regretted that he had not kept his fortune to help him out of his trouble. I believe there were thousands of good people all over the country who prayed that this philanthropist might be restored to wealth. There was one man in Wall Street at this time who I said could not fail. He was Mr. A.S. Hatch, President of the New York Stock Exchange. He had given large sums of money to Christian work, and was personally an active church member.

That which I hear about men who are unfortunate makes no impression on me. There is always a great jubilee over the downfall of a financier. I like to put the best phase possible upon a man's misfortune. No one begrudged the wealth of the rich men of the past.

The world was becoming too compressed, it was said; there was not room enough to get away from your troubles. All the better. It was getting to a compactness that could be easily poked up and divinely appropriated. A new cable was landed at Rockport, Ma.s.s., that was to bring the world into closer reunion of messages. We were to have cheaper cable service under the management of the Commercial Cable Company. Simultaneously with this information, the s.s. "America" made the astounding record of a trip from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e of the Atlantic, in six days fourteen hours and eighteen minutes. It was a startling symbol of future wonders. I promised then to exchange pulpits with any church in England once a month. It seemed a possibility, as proposed in Mr. Corbin's scheme of harbours at Montauk Point. There were pauses in the breathless speed we were just beginning at this time. We paused to say farewell to the good men whom we were pa.s.sing by. They were not spectacular. Some of them will no doubt be unknown to the reader.

A gentle old man, his face illumined always by a radiant smile, fell behind. He was Bishop Simpson. We paused to bid him farewell. In 1863, walking the streets of Philadelphia one night with an army surgeon, we pa.s.sed the Academy of Music in that city, where a meeting was being held on behalf of the Christian Commission, the object of which was to take care of wounded soldiers. As we stood at the back of the stage listening, the meeting seemed to be very dull. A speaker was introduced.

His voice was thin, his manner unimpressive. My friend said, "Let's go,"

but I replied, "Wait until we see what there is in him." Suddenly, he grew upon us. The address became adorned with a pathos, a sublimity, and an enthusiasm that overwhelmed the audience. When the speaker sat down, I inquired who he was.

"That is Bishop Simpson," said my informant. In later years, I learned that the Bishop's address that night was the great hour of his life. His reputation became national. He was one of the few old men who knew how to treat young men. He used no gestures on the platform, no climaxes, no dramatic effects of voice, yet he was eloquent beyond description. His earnestness broke over and broke through all rules of rhetoric. He made his audiences think and feel as he did himself. That, I believe, is the best of a man's inner salvation.

In the autumn of the same year we paused to close the chapters of Jerry McCauley's life, a man who had risen from the depths of crime and sin--a different sort of man from Bishop Simpson. He was born in the home of a counterfeiter. He became a thief, an outlaw. By an influence that many consider obsolete and old-fashioned, he became converted, and was recognised by the best men and women in New York and Brooklyn. I knew McCauley. I stood with him on the steps of his mission in Water Street. He was a river thief changed into an angel. It was supernatural, a miracle. McCauley gave twelve years to his mission work. Two years before his death he changed his quarters, converting a dive into a House of G.o.d. What an imbecile city government refused to touch was surrendered to hosannas and doxologies. The story of Jerry McCauley's missionary work in the heart of a wicked section of New York was called romantic. I attest that I am just as keenly sensitive to the beauty of romance as any human being, but there was a great deal that was called romantic in American life in 1884-1885 that was not so. Romance became a roseate mist, through which old and young saw the obligations of life but dimly.

A strange romance of marriage became epidemic in America at this time.

European ethics were being imported, and the romance of European liberty swept over us. A parental despotism was responsible. The newspapers of the summer of 1884 were full of elopements. They were long exciting chapters of domestic calamity. My sympathies were with the young fellow of seven hundred dollars income, married to a millionaire fool who continually informed him how much better her position was before she left home; the honeymoon a bliss of six months, and all the rest of his life a profound wish that he had never been born; his only redress the divorce court or the almshouse. The poetry of these elopements was false, the prose that came after was the truth. Marriage is an old-fashioned business, and that wedding procession lasts longest that starts not down the ladder out of the back window, but from the front door with a benediction.

But, morally and politically, we were in a riot of opinion against which I constantly protested. Politically, we were without morals.

The opposing Presidential candidates in 1884 were Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine. It was the wonder of the world that the American people did not make Mr. Blaine President. There was a world-wide amazement also at the abuse which preceded Mr. Cleveland's election. The whole thing was a spectacle of the ignorance of men about great men. All sorts of defamatory reports were spread abroad about them. Men of mind are also men of temperament. There are two men in every one man, and for this reason Mr. Blaine was the most misunderstood of great men. To the end of his brilliant life calumny pursued him. There were all sorts of reports about him.

One series of reports said that Mr. Blaine was almost unable to walk; that he was too sick to be seen; that death was for him close at hand, and his obituaries were in type in many of the printing offices.

The other series of reports said that Mr. Blaine was vigorous; went up the front steps of his house at a bound; was doing more work than ever, and was rollicking with mirth. The baleful story was ascribed to his enemies, who wanted the great man out of the world. The rea.s.suring story was ascribed to his friends, who wanted to keep him in the ranks of Presidential possibilities.

The fact is that both reports were true. There were two Mr. Blaines, as there are two of every mercurial temperament. Of the phlegmatic, slow-pulsed man there is only one. You see him once and you see him as he always is. Not so with the nervous organisation. He has as many moods as the weather, as many changes as the sky. He is bright or dull, serene or tempestuous, cold or hot, up or down, January or August, day or night, Arctic or tropical. At Washington, in 1889, I saw the two Blaines within two hours. I called with my son to see the great Secretary of State at his office, and although it was his day for seeing foreign diplomats, he received us with great cordiality. His face was an illumination; his voice resonant; his manner animated; he was full of gesticulation. He walked up and down the room describing things under discussion; fire in his eye, spring in his step. Although about fifty-nine years of age, he looked forty-five, and strong enough to wrestle with two or three ordinary men. He had enough vitality for an athlete.

We parted. My son and I went down the street, made two or three other calls, and on the way noticed a carriage pa.s.sing with two or three people in it. My attention was startled by the appearance in that carriage of what seemed a case of extreme invalidism. The man seemed somewhat bolstered up. My sympathies were immediately aroused, and I said to my son, "Look at that sick man riding yonder." When the carriage came nearer to us, my son said, "That is Mr. Blaine." Looking closely at the carriage I found that this was so. He had in two hours swung from vigour to exhaustion, from the look of a man good for twenty years of successful work to a man who seemed to be taking his last ride. He simply looked as he felt on both occasions. We had seen the two Blaines.

How much more just we would be in our judgment of men if we realised that a man may be honestly two different men, and how this theory would explain that which in every man of high organisation seems sometimes to be contradictory! Aye, within five minutes some of us with mercurial natures can remember to have been two entirely different men in two entirely different worlds. Something said to us cheering or depressing; some tidings announced, glad or sad; some great kindness done for us, or some meanness practised on us have changed the zone, the pulsation, the physiognomy, the physical, the mental, the spiritual condition, and we become no more what we were than summer is winter, or midnoon is midnight, or frosts are flowers.

The air was full of political clamour and strife in the election of 1884. Never in this country was there a greater temptation to political fraud, because, after four month's battle, the counting of the ballots revealed almost a tie. I urged self-control among men who were angry and men who were bitter. The enemies of Mr. Blaine were not necessarily the friends of Mr. Cleveland. The enemies of Mr. Cleveland were bitter, but they were afraid of Mr. Blaine; for he was a giant intellectually, practically, physically, and he stood in the centre of a national arena of politics, prepared to meet all challenge. Mr. Cleveland never really opposed him. He faced him on party issues, not as an individual antagonist. The excitement was intense during the suspense that followed the counting of the ballots, and Mr. Cleveland went into the White House amidst a roar of public opinion so confused and so vicious that there was no certainty of ultimate order in the country. In after years I enjoyed his confidence and friendship, and I learned to appreciate the stability and reserve of his nature. In a Milestone beyond this, I have recalled a conversation I had with him at the White House, and recorded my impressions of him. Above the clamour of these troublesome times, I raised my voice and said that in the distant years to come the electors of New York, Alabama, and Maine, and California, would march together down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington for the discharge of the great duties of the Electoral College.

The storm pa.s.sed, and the Democrats were in power. It was the calm that follows an electrical disturbance. The paroxysm of filth and moral death was over.

Mr. Vanderbilt, converted into a philanthropist, gave five hundred thousand dollars to a medical inst.i.tute, and the world began to see new possibilities in great fortunes. That a railroad king could also be a Christian king was a hopeful tendency of the times. These were the acts that tended to smother the activities of Communism in America.

In the previous four years the curious astronomer had discovered the evolution of a new world in the sky, and so while on earth there were convulsions, in the skies there were new beauties born. With the rising sun of the year 1885, one of our great and good men of Brooklyn saw it with failing eyesight. Doctor Noah Hunt Schenck, pastor of St. Ann's Episcopal Church, was stricken. For fifteen years he had blessed our city with his benediction. The beautiful cathedral which grew to its proportions of grandeur under Doctor Schenck's pastorate, stood as a monument to him.

A few weeks later Schuyler Colfax, speaker of the House of Representatives, pa.s.sed on. In the vortex of political feeling his integrity was attacked but I never believed a word of the accusations.

Ten millions of people hoped for his election as President. He was my personal friend. When the scandal of his life was most violent, he explained it all away satisfactorily in my own house. This explanation was a confidence that I cannot break, but it made me ever afterwards a loyal friend to his memory. He was one of those upon whom was placed the burden of living down a calumny, and when he died Congress adjourned in his honour. Members of the legislature in his own country gathered about his obsequies. I have known many men in public life, but a more lovable man than Schuyler Colfax I never knew. The generous words he spoke of me on the last Sabbath of his life I shall never forget. The perpetual smile on his face was meanly caricatured, and yet it was his benediction upon a world unworthy of him.

In 1885, from far away over the sea came m.u.f.fled thunder tones of war and rebellion. The deadly nightshade was indigenous to our times. The dynamite outrages at Westminster Hall and the House of Commons were explosions we in America heard faintly. Their importance was exaggerated. A hundred years back, the kings of England, of France, of Russia who died in their beds were rare. The violent incidents of life were less conspicuous as the years went on. What riots Philadelphia had seen during the old firemen's battle in the streets! And those theatrical riots in New York, when the military was called out, and had to fire into the mob, because the friends of Macready and Forrest could not agree as to which was the better actor!

An alarming number of disputes came up at this time over wills. The Orphan Courts were over-worked with these cases. I suggested a rule for all wills: one-third at least to the wife, and let the children share alike. When a child receives more than a wife, the family is askew. A man's wife should be first in every ambition, in every provision.

One-third to the wife is none too much. The worst family feuds proceed from inequality of inheritance.

This question of rights under testamentary gifts of the rich was not so important, however, as the alarming growth in our big cities of the problem of the poor. The tenement house became a menace to cleanliness.

Never before were there so many people living in unswept, unaired tenements. Stairs below stairs, stairs above stairs, where all the laws of health were violated. The Sanitary Protective League was organised to alleviate these conditions. Asiatic cholera was striding over Europe, and the tenement house of America was a resting place for it here.

After a lecturing trip in the spring of 1885 through Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, I returned to Brooklyn, delighted with the confidence with which the people looked forward to the first Cleveland administration. On the day that $50,000,000 was voted for the River and Harbour Bill, both parties sharing in the spoils, American politics touched bottom. There were symptoms of recuperation in Mr.

Cleveland's initiative. Belligerency was abandoned as a hopeless campaign.

The graceful courtesy with which President Arthur bowed himself out of the White House was unparalleled. Never in my memory was a sceptre so gracefully relinquished. Nothing in his three-and-a-half years of office did him more credit. I think we never had a better President than Mr.

Arthur. He was fortunate in having in his Cabinet as chief adviser Mr.

Frederick T. Frelinghuysen.

My office as a minister compelled me to see, first and foremost, the righteous uplift of the events as I pa.s.sed along with them. These were not always the most conspicuous elements of public interest, but they comprised the things and the people I saw.

I recall, for instance, chief amongst the incidents of Mr. Cleveland's administration, that the oath of office was administered upon his mother's Bible. Many people regarded this as mere sentimentality. To me it meant more than words could express. The best of Bibles is the mother's. It meant that the man who chose to be sworn in on such a book had a grateful remembrance. It was as though he had said, "If it had not been for her, this honour would never have come to me." For all there is of actual solemnity in the usual form of taking an oath, people might just as well be sworn in on a city directory or an old almanac. But, as I said then, I say now--make way for an administration that starts from the worn and faded covers of a Bible presented by a mother's hand at parting.

Mr. Blaine's visit to the White House to congratulate the victor, his cordial reception there, and his long stay, was another bright side of the election contest. There must have been a good deal of lying about these two men when they were wrestling for the honours, for if all that was said had been true the scene of hearty salutation between them would not only have been unfit, but impossible.

All this optimism of outlook helped to defeat the animosity of the previous campaign. A crowning influence upon the national confusion of standards was the final unanimous vote in Congress in favour of putting General Grant on the retired list, with a suitable provision for his livelihood, in view of a malady that had come upon him. It had been a long, angry, bitter debate, but the generous quality of American sympathy prevailed. Men who fought on the other side and men who had opposed his Presidential policy united to alleviate his sickness, the pulsations of which the nation was counting. President Arthur's last act was to recommend General Grant's relief, and almost the first act of Mr.

Cleveland's administration was to ratify it. Republics are not ungrateful. The American Republic subscribed about $400,000 for the relief of Mrs. Garfield; voted pensions for Mrs. Polk and Mrs. Tyler; some years ago subscribed $250,000 for General Grant, and increased it by vote of Congress in 1885. The Conqueror on the pale horse had already taken many prisoners among the surviving heroes of the war. It was fitting that he should make his coming upon the great leader of the Union Army as gentle as the south wind.

There was a surplus of men fit for official position in America when the hour of our new appointments arrived. There were hundreds of men competent to become ministers to England, to France, to Germany, to Russia; as competent as James Russell Lowell or Mr. Phelps. This was all due to the affluence of American inst.i.tutions, that spread the benefits of education broadcast. I remember when Daniel Webster died, people said, "We shall have no one now to expound the const.i.tution," but the chief expositions of the const.i.tution have been written and uttered since then. There were pigmies in the old days, too. I had a friend who, as a stenographer some years ago, made a fortune by knocking bad grammar out of the speeches of Congressmen and Senators, who were illiterate.

They said to him haughtily, "Stenographer, here are a couple of hundred dollars; fix up that speech I made this morning, and see that it gets into the Congressional Record all right. If you can't fix it up, write another."

In 1885, there were plenty of women, too, who understood politics. There were mean and silly women, of course, but there was a new race springing up of grand, splendid, competent women, with a knowledge of affairs. The appointment of Mr. c.o.x as Minister to Turkey was a compliment to American literature. In consequence of a picturesque description he gave of some closing day in a foreign country, he was facetiously nicknamed "Sunset c.o.x." I rechristened him "Sunrise c.o.x." When President Tyler appointed Washington Irving as Minister to Spain, he set an example for all time. Men of letters put their blood into their inkstands, but the sacrifice is poorly recognised.

Some of us were faintly urging world-wide peace, but around the night sky of 1885 was the glare of many camp fires. Never were there so many wars on the calendar at the same time. The Soudan war, the threat of a Russo-English war and of a Franco-Chinese war, the South-American war, the Colombian war--all the nations restless and arming. The scarlet rash of international hatred spread over the earth, and there were many predictions. I said then it was comparatively easy to foretell the issue of these wars--excepting one. I believed that the Revolutionist of Panama would be beaten; the half-breed overcome by the Canadian; that France would humble China, but that the Central American war would go on, and stop, and go on again, and stop again, until, discovering some Washington or Hamilton or Jefferson of its own, it would establish a United States of South America corresponding with the United States of North America. The Soudan war would cease when the English Government abandoned the attempt to fix up in Egypt things unfixable. But what would be the result of the outbreak between England and Russia was the war problem of the world. The real question at issue was whether Europe should be dominated by the lion or the bear.

In the United States we had no internal frictions which threatened us so much as rum and gambling. In Brooklyn we never ceased bombarding these rebellious agents of war on the character of young men. Coney Island was once a beautiful place, but in the five years since that time, when it was a garden by the sea, the races at Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay had been established. In New York and Brooklyn pool rooms were open for betting on these races. In ten years' time I predicted that no decent man or woman would be able to visit Coney Island. The evil was stupendous, and the subject of Coney Island could no longer be neglected in the pulpit.

Betting was a new-fashioned sort of vice in America in 1885; it was just becoming a licensed relaxation for young boys. As the years went on, it has grown to great distinction in all forms of American life, but it was yet only at its starting point in this year. Looking over an address I made on this subject, I find this statement:

"What a spectacle when, at Saratoga, or at Long Branch, or at Brighton Beach, the horses stop, and in a flash $50,000 or $100,000 change hands--mult.i.tudes ruined by losses, others, ruined by winnings." Many years afterwards the money involved in racing was in the millions; but in 1885, $100,000 was still a good bit. There were three kinds of betting at the horse races then--by auction pools, by French mutuals, and by what is called bookmaking--all of these methods controlled "for a consideration." The pool seller deducted three or five per cent. from the winning bet (incidentally "ringing up" more tickets than were sold on the winning horse), while the bookmaker, for special inducement, would scratch any horse in the race. The jockey also, for a consideration, would slacken speed to allow a prearranged winner to walk in, while the judges on the stand turned their backs.

It was just a swindling trust. And yet, these race tracks on a fine afternoon were crowded with intelligent men of good standing in the community, and frequently the parasols of the ladies gave colour and brilliancy to the scene. Our most beautiful watering places were all but destroyed by the race tracks. To stop all this was like turning back the ocean tides, so regular became the habit of gambling, of betting, of being legally swindled in America. No one was interested in the evils of life. We were on the frontier of a greater America, a greater waste of money, a greater paradise of pleasure.

Some notice was taken of General Grant's malady, mysteriously p.r.o.nounced incurable. The bulletins informed us that his life might last a week, a day, an hour--and still the famous old warrior kept getting better. One moment Grant was dying, the next he was dining heartily at his own dinner table. This was one of the mysteries of the period. Personally, I believe the prayers of the Church kept him alive.

In April, 1885, the huge pedestal for the wonderful statue of Liberty, presented to us by the citizens of France, was started. That which Congress had ignored, and the philanthropists of America had neglected, the ma.s.ses were doing by their modest subscription--a dollar from the men, ten cents from the children. All Europe wrapped in war cloud made the magnificence and splendour of our enlightened liberty greater than ever. It was time that the gates of the sea, the front door of America, should be made more attractive. Castle Garden was a gloomy corridor through which to arrive. I urged that the harbour fortresses should be terraced with flowers, fitting the approach to the forehead of this continent that Bartholdi was to illumine with his Coronet of Flame.