The Galaxy, May, 1877 Part 23

On the same day, the committee of Congress, then composed of Messrs.

Middleton (S. C), Boudinot (Penn.), and Rutledge (S. C), reported a modification of Mr. Barton's device. The reports of the several committees were then referred to the Secretary of Congress, and on June 20, 1782, the Secretary reported the following device for an armorial achievement and reverse of the great seal of the United States, which was formally adopted:

Arms. Paleways of thirteen pieces, argent and gules, a chief, azure; the escutcheon on the breast of the American eagle displayed proper, holding in his dexter talon an olive branch, and in his sinister a bundle of thirteen arrows, all proper, and in his beak a scroll inscribed with this motto, _E Pluribus Unum_.

For the Crest. Over the head of the eagle, which appears above the escutcheon, a glory, or, breaking through a cloud, proper, and surrounding thirteen stars forming a constellation, argent, on an azure field.

Reverse. A pyramid unfinished. In the zenith an eye in a triangle, surrounded with a glory, proper. Over the eye these words, _Annuit Coeptis_. On the base of the pyramid the numerical letters MDCCLXXVI. And underneath the following motto, _Novus Ordo Seclorum_.

The interpretation of these devices is as follows: The escutcheon is composed of the chief and pale, the two most honorable ordinaries.

The pieces pale represent the several States, all joined in one solid, compact, and entire, supporting a chief which unites the whole and represents Congress. The pales in the arms are kept closely united by the chief, and the chief depends on that union and the strength resulting from it, for its support, to denote the confederacy of the United States of America, and the preservation of their union through Congress.

The colors of the pales are those used in the flag of the United States of America; white signifies purity and innocence; red, hardiness and valor; and blue, the color of the chief, signifies vigilance, perseverance, and justice.

The olive branch and arrows denote the power of peace and war, which is exclusively vested in Congress. The constellation denotes a new State taking its place and rank among the sovereign powers; the escutcheon is borne on the breast of the American eagle, without any other supporters, to denote that the United States of America ought to rely on their own virtue.

Reverse. The pyramid signifies strength and duration: the eye over it and the motto allude to the many and signal interpositions of Providence in favor of the American cause. The date underneath it is that of the Declaration of Independence; and the words under it signify the beginning of the new era, which commences from that date.

After the ratification of the Const.i.tution, this seal was formally declared to be the seal of the United States, on September 15, 1789, and on March 2, 1799, its custody was given to the Secretary of State, who was empowered to affix it to such commissions, etc., as had previously received the signature of the President.

Lossing, in his "Field Book of the Revolution," has the following, in relation to the origin of the device on the seal: "In a ma.n.u.script letter before me, written in 1818, by Thomas Barritt, Esq., an eminent antiquary of Manchester, England, addressed to his son in this country, is the following statement: 'My friend, Sir John Prestwich, Bart., told me he was the person who suggested the idea of a coat of arms for the American States to an amba.s.sador [John Adams] from thence, which they have seen fit to put upon some of their moneys. It is this he told me--party per pale of thirteen stripes, white and red; the chief of the escutcheon blue, signifying the protection of heaven over the States. He says it was soon afterwards adopted as the arms of the States, and to give it more consequence, it was placed upon the breast of a displayed eagle.'"

But it is far more probable that the colors of the shield were suggested by the stripes and union of the flag, which was adopted nearly a year before Mr. Adams's first visit to Europe. Yet it is worthy of note, in this connection, that the stripes in the flag are arranged alternately red and white, which gives seven of the former and six of the latter; while in the arms they are white and red, thus making seven white and six red pales. In the seal of the Board of Admiralty (now the Navy Department), adopted May 4, 1780, the stripes are arranged as in the flag.

The critical reader will not fail to note a few heraldic lapses in the arms as blazoned by the secretary of Congress, such as the omission of the tincture of the scroll, and the denominating the collection of stars a crest. By a somewhat similar error in the law by which our flag was adopted, no method of arrangement of the stars in the union is prescribed.

Notwithstanding that the great seal as adopted had an obverse and a reverse, there is nothing to show that the reverse was ever made. Why this was neglected does not appear of record. Nor does there seem to be any means of ascertaining by what authority one half of the seal is made to do duty for the whole. It is certainly not authorized by any law. Is not its use then by the State department technically illegal?

But this is not all. The seal as originally engraved was in accordance with the requirements of the law, but in 1841, Daniel Webster then being Secretary of State, a new seal was made, probably because the old one had become worn, and for some reasons not now discoverable, several alterations were made in the design. In the shield of the seal thus made, the red pales are twice the width of the white ones, so that it reads heraldically, argent, six pales gules, instead of "palewise of thirteen pieces, argent and gules," as expressed in the adopted report.

In the original, too, the eagle held in his sinister talon a "bundle of thirteen arrows," but the poor bird grasps but a meagre six in the new seal. There was some significance in the former number, all of which is lost in the change. Application to the State department for the reasons for these deviations from the original seal resulted in only the following: "This change does not appear to have been authorized by law, and the cause of it is not known."

Is it possible that an arbitrary alteration can be made in the great seal of the United States by officials temporarily in charge of it? And if so, what is to prevent some future Secretary of State, with notions of his own in regard to heraldic bearings, from discarding the old seal altogether, in favor of some creation of his own? The nation was providentially saved from the artistic efforts of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin; but what guaranty have we for the future?

JOHN D. CHAMPLIN, JR.

DRIFT-WOOD.

THE TIMES AND THE CUSTOMS.

It will be four years in September since the crash of Jay Cooke announced that hard times had come. During the _debacle_ continuing from that day to this, the exposed rascalities of swindling corporations have shown how full the world still is of sheep eager to be fleeced, of geese to be plucked. Government officers prey on the people; the people, on each other; the giant plunderer is the stock company, to whose vast gobblings the pilfering of a Tweed or Winslow is a mere sugar-plum. The individual swindler feels himself a rogue, whereas the chartered thief holds a high head, builds him a palace from the spoils of his victims, and curses their impudence when they complain. They are legion, these mismanaged or fraudulent mining companies, land improvement companies, artificial light companies, normal food companies (for introducing camel-hump steaks to the American breakfast-table), and, above all, railroad companies, savings funds, and life insurance companies.

Satirists lash the sham enterprises--"Universal a.s.sociation for Squaring the Circle," "American and Asiatic Consolidated Perpetual Motion Society," and what not; nowadays the main mischief is done not by these transparent humbugs, but by the genuine companies, that fairly invite trust and then betray it. Salted mines, watered stocks, lying prospectuses, bribed experts, bought legislatures, packed meetings, borrowed dividends, thimble-rig reports--we all know the tricks of "substantial" enterprises. It is not the seedy adventurers, the Jeremy Diddlers and Montague Tiggs of our day, that entrap the thrifty and ruin the intelligent, but the high-toned trust and commercial companies, seeming to be solid. These have wheels within wheels, rings within the ring, whereby many shareholders can be tricked by few; for, as the sh.e.l.lfish has foes that bore through his tough house and suck out the unfortunate tenant within, so credit mobiliers, fast freight lines, super-salaried officers, contractors for supplies, construction agents, and the like, suck out the value of a stock company, and leave the shareholders the sh.e.l.ls. Let not a posterity of _laudatores temporis acti_ sigh over ours as the Golden Age of commercial honesty. It is only the Greenback Age. It is not even the Silver Age, unless, haply, the German Silver--that is to say, the Plated or Pinchbeck Age. We might perhaps style it the Brazen Age, in view of the all-pervading bra.s.s of corporation claqueurs and drummers; or we might very well call it the Shoddy or the Peter Funk Jewelry Age.

Still, our ancestry were worse beset with quack corporations. Mackay mentions over eighty speculative companies that rose with the South Sea bubble and were all crushed in a bunch by the privy council: one, a company for getting silver out of lead; another, for developing perpetual motion; a third, for insuring householders against losses by servants--capital, $15,000,000; a fourth, "a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but n.o.body to know what it is"--capital, $2,500,000 in 5,000 shares of $500 each, on $10 deposit per share, which deposit nearly a thousand persons actually paid on the first half day the books were opened, so that before night the rascally manager was off with $10,000 booty. Besides the matured projects, many companies existing only on paper were able to sell "privileges to subscribe," when formed, at $200 or $300 each; for in that day of manias people in Great Britain paid premiums for the first chance to put their money into companies for freshening salt water, extracting oil from sunflowers, buying forfeited estates, capturing pirates, insuring children's fortunes, fattening hogs, fishing for wrecks, and importing jacka.s.ses from Spain--which last was surely bringing coals to Newcastle. As for such really solid enterprises as the South Sea bubble, their shares rose to a thousand per cent, above par.

Perhaps another South Sea bubble could not easily be blown; the Darien ca.n.a.l will hardly excite a fever of speculation like William Paterson's Darien project of one hundred and eighty years ago, for which prayers were offered in the Edinburgh churches; we are not likely to see a Mississippi scheme of the sort which caused cooks to struggle with courtiers for places in the Rue de Quinquempoix to buy John Law's shares, while office rents in that stock-jobbing thoroughfare rose from five hundred to sixty thousand livres a year. But our late American experience shows how swift men are to trust their hard-earned gains to corporate enterprises simply on the reputation of the managers.

Insurance frauds and railroad wreckings thrive on the trustfulness of professional men and the narrow scope of tradesmen. The latter find sufficient occupation in the little gains of each day, and often are puzzled how to employ the surplus. To spend it would be unthrifty; to roll it in a napkin, bad stewardship; they are apt to be caught by the popular stock companies or by some scheme of speculation. These glittering prizes also attract sapient "men of business" who have been entrusted with investing the funds of widows and children. From such sources flow the rills that make the mighty rivers of stock enterprises, so that, having gathered up the spare cash of the shopkeepers and the annuitants, their bursting makes wide havoc.

Goodman Thompson's simple skill and joy are to gain five cents here, ten there, a dollar yonder; three customers have bought at nine o'clock to-day, at eleven the sales number fifteen, at noon no fewer than two dozen; whereas at midday yesterday they were only twenty-three. Brooding over these statistics, worthy Thompson fills up the day, the year, the lifetime in modest local glory, until the name of John Thompson, grocer, is taken from his door and put upon his coffin-plate, and John Thompson's son continues the trade in his stead. Absorbed, I say, in such details, some men seem strangely careless what the gross of their gains is, or how secured--their pleasure is "doing business" rather than growing rich, and equal fortunes by bequest would hardly give them the same comfort; others, and the majority, are not so careless, but are as surprisingly stupid, incautious, and gullible in investing their daily gains as they are sharp and shrewd in getting them. That is why they put their trust in treacherous princes of finance and railroad kings; that is why sharpers of good moral character in savings and insurance companies make many victims. It is wonderful how many tradesmen, subtle and sagacious in their callings, thrive in the hard task of driving bargains, only to lose their earnings to palpable knaves, or else by making hap-hazard investments. Their faculty of acc.u.mulation seems like that of the bee or the ant, good only to a given point, and within the use of given methods; it seems to fail when sober judgment on speculative fevers is called for.

But the hard times have temporarily taught first, caution; next, economy. Caution unluckily has run to suspicion, while economy has issued in a dearth of employment: thus the correctives applied to hard times have perpetuated them. People are buying not only less, but sometimes at second hand, so that every trade suffers--unless it be that of the coffin-makers; I never knew anybody who wanted a second-hand coffin. The economy that America usually needs is perhaps less that of refraining from buying than that of turning things to account. The man who needlessly cuts down his expenses is hardly so praiseworthy as the one who only makes every thread yield its best uses.

A national fault of ours is that of not getting the full use of things.

European cities, for example, earn millions a year by selling their street dirt. American cities pay millions to get rid of it. In Europe it dresses sterile soil; in America it is dumped into channels to obstruct navigation. One can almost admire the humble Paris _chiffoniers_, as being a guild employed in redeeming to a hundred services what has been thrown away as useless--they rescue vast fortunes yearly. On the Pennsylvania oil lands twenty men put up a derrick, sink a test well, and fail. Sixteen out of the twenty reorganize, sink a new well within fifty rods of the other, build a new derrick, and never touch the old one, leaving it to rot. The expense of this kind of machinery is great; and yet out of the abandoned derricks in the oil regions you could almost build a timber track from Corry to New York. It is, I say, almost a national trait to acc.u.mulate what will be left to rust unused--although it is doubtless not American ladies alone that fill their wardrobes with garments never worn out. When a European friend of mine came to travel in this country, one of his first surprises was the hundreds of miles of expensive fences he saw enclosing very ordinary fields; next he noted the unused ground along the tracks of railroads. "That land would all be covered with vegetables in our country," he said. At his hotels he thought there was more wasted in labor, food, and superfluities than would have sufficed to reduce the cost of living by a third; indeed, I fancy he believed that despite our cry of "hard times" and "enforced economy," the sheer current _waste_ of America would pay the national debt in a year.

VICTOR HUGO.

What freshness and fecundity in the veteran poet who signalizes his seventy-sixth birthday by publishing the "Legende des Siecles"!

Hugoesque alike in its grand apostrophes and its gentle idyls, in its resounding declamation and its simple pathos, this new outcome of an old mint has every coin stamped with the image and superscription of its creator--Hugo's in thought, feeling, audacious style, easy versification, quaint novelty of metaphor; Hugo's in its cadence by turns joyous and mournful, now in sonorous, thrilling ballads of battle, anon in charming genre fireside pictures, here riotous in rhetoric, there pedantic in research, everywhere lofty in aspiration, though pushing oddity almost to madness.

Through all his works, what a mixture of genius and grotesqueness, of majesty and absurdity in that wonderful man! Take his "Ninety-Three"--a novel monstrously nonsensical and surprisingly splendid--a novel demonstrating that to pa.s.s from the ridiculous to the sublime, as well as the other way, needs but a step. With what magnetic power one of its first incidents, the rushing about of the loose gun on shipboard, is wrought out! You begin by despising the frivolity of the scene, and momentarily wait to see the writer ludicrously break down in his preposterous attempt at imposing on your credulity. By degrees the situation is filled in till each successive objection of skepticism is somehow spirited away, and even the foreign reader, sympathetically following the working of the French mind, is startled at his own yielding. This episode of the roving cannon ranks with the devil-fish scene in the "Toilers of the Sea," where also the reader finds appreciative horror overcoming his first impulse of contemptuous incredulity.

Or, again, if you take the boat scene in "Ninety-Three," between the sailor and count, you agree, at the end, that it is not overstrained.

Yet think of that frail skiff in the open British Channel, with the waves running high, and say if the scene was possible. When Halmalo put down his oars and the old man stood up at full height in the bow, the boat must have swung into the trough of the sea and capsized in an instant; if lack of steering failed to upset her, the old man's performance would have done so; but we forget that trifle in the dramatic intensity of the situation. The learned Sergeant Hill, talking with a young law student regarding the will of "Clarissa Harlowe," told him, "You will find that not one of the uses or trusts in it can be supported." A sergeant of artillery would be equally severe on the evolutions and skirmishes in "Ninety-Three"; but the genius of Hugo triumphs over such blunders, like Shakespeare's over the seaports in Bohemia.

"A poet is a world shut up in a man," says the "Legende," whose own variety of theme helps to justify the definition. We have here the majestic conceptions of the "Mur des Siecles," the "Vanished City," the "Hymn to Earth," the "Epic of the Worm"; therewith we also have the music and beauty of the "Groupe des Idylles." On one page the reader is touched with sympathy by the "Cemetery of Eylau" and the "Guerre Civile"; on another he is stirred by the scorn in the "Anger of the Bronze," or by the hate in "Napoleon III. after Sedan":

_Cet homme a pour prison l'ignominic immense, On pouvait le tuer, mais on fut sans clemence._

The city whose praise Victor Hugo never tires of sounding, and that has adored and lampooned him for almost half a century, breaks out in a prolonged concord of eulogy for these old-age strains, which recall no little of the force, fire, and finish of twenty, forty years ago. Well may the Parisians laud this man of mingled ruggedness and delicacy, whose imagination has not yet lost its boldness with age, nor the heart its warmth--the bard, in mockery of whom, nevertheless, they were lately repeating with gusto the comical parody of a local wit:

_Oh, huho, Hugo! ou huchera-t-on ton nom Justice encore rendue que ne t'a-t-on?

Et quand sera-ce qu'au corps qu' Academique on nomme, Grimperas-tu de roc en roc, rare homme?_

EVOLUTIONARY HINTS FOR NOVELISTS.

We have Sheridan's authority that an oyster may be crossed in love--in fact, Miss Zimmern has written a story about an oyster that actually was a prey to the tender pa.s.sion; we have Shakespeare's authority that a hind will die of it, if she unfortunately seeks to be mated with a lion; while it is a regular thing in the land of the cypress and myrtle (if Lord Byron can be trusted) for the rage of the vulture to madden to crime.

Still it was reserved for Darwin himself to give the great modern cue to novelists in their study of human nature, by his "Descent of Man,"

where he says that "injurious characters tend to reappear through reversion, such as blackness in sheep; and with mankind some of the worst dispositions which occasionally without any a.s.signable cause make their reappearance in families, _may perhaps he reversions to a savage state_ from which we are not removed by many generations. _This view seems recognized in the common expression that such men are the 'black sheep of the family.'_"

Now, whatever we may think of the odd logic of this pa.s.sage, it clearly stakes out a ground and preempts a claim for evolution as applied to romantic literature. None of us could really blame the modern lover if, in making a woful ballad to his mistress's eyebrow, he should slyly but anxiously examine whether that eyebrow contained "a few hairs larger than the rest, corresponding to the vibrissae of the lower animals." This does occur in some eyebrows, we know; and as it is also clear from the authorities first quoted, and many more that might be cited, that the lower animals are capable of human pa.s.sions, the cautious and scientifically disposed lover of the modern epoch can hardly be asked to take a mere manifestation of the heavenly instinct as proof of many grades of removal, in his Dulcinea, from the condition of the oyster, the hind, or, alas! the vulture.

Hence, even in protesting that his lady's beauty hangs on the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an aethiop's ear, naturally the modern Romeo may not avoid a glance to see whether his Juliet's ear contains that fatal auricular "blunt point" denoting a.s.similation to the lower animals. And so it is with the work henceforth laid out for novelists: the stereotyped heroine, with coral lips, pearly teeth, eyes of a gazelle, raven locks, swan-like neck, and so on, should be carefully guarded from too great animal resemblances, and above all from "rudiments" or signs of reversion.

Perhaps it would be going too far to announce bluntly that "Lady Amarantha's toes had not the remotest indication of ever having been webbed," or to put on record the official declaration of Fifine, the maid, that her fair mistress never had been able to erect her ears; still the novelists might do well to take note of those two or three points in which Mr. St. George Mivart and Mr. Wallace have pointed out the great distinctions between men and apes, and so adroitly work them up in those personal descriptions which form a delicious part of modern novels, as to give their heroes and heroines a pedigree impregnable to the most critically scientific scrutiny. Hints, also, I think, might be gathered from the treatment of love on the evolution hypothesis, which has been essayed by no less an authority than Herbert Spencer, who has besides traced the changes in the methods of expressing pa.s.sionate emotions by gestures and cries, as our humble ancestry developed to women and men.

Physiology, too, is not the only department into which the novelist of the future must extend his studies. Under the doctrine of evolution, s.e.xual selection is at the basis of the variation of species; and what new fields are open to the novelist, when he reflects for a moment that his main task is only to depict the prosperities and adversities attending such a mutual selection on the part of Albert and Angelina!

PHILIP QUILIBET.