LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 

 '? 
 
 ^ 
 
/ 
 
 XEWTOX BOOTH 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 HIS SPEECHES AND ADDRESSES 
 
 EDITED WITH rSTRODrCTlON ANT) XOTES 3Y 
 
 LAUREN E. CRAXE 
 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 >"ew yors loxdox 
 
 iSqs 
 
 v~ 
 

 Copyright, 1894 
 
 BV 
 
 OCTAVINE C. BOOTH 
 
 Entered at Stationers' Hail, London 
 By G. p. Putnam's Sons 
 
 Electrotyped, Printed and Bound by 
 
 Ubc finlchecbockcc press, IRew ^orh 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 / 
 
 /^' 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction vii 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 Orations and Addresses i 
 
 California in War-Time — Services — Philosophy of Public Opinion, 
 and Fourth of July Speeches — Boyhood Surroundings — Individ- 
 uality — Eloquence — Patriotism — Orations and Addresses. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Political Life 122 
 
 Central Pacific Railroad Company — His Early Friendship for it 
 — Political Conflict Created by its Aggressions — His Course as 
 Leader of the People against them — Features of the Long and 
 Bitter Struggle — His Forecast of the Future Sustained by Results 
 Twenty-five Years Later — Sec. i, The Sacramento Union — Sec. 2, 
 Course as Governor of California — Sec. 3, Services in the United 
 States Senate — Retirement from Political Life. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Lectures 337 
 
 Destruction of Manuscript — Charles James Fox — Morals and 
 Politics. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Magazines — Journals 443 
 
 Index -.511 
 
NEWTON BOOTH 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND TRAITS. 
 
 Every man who during his lifetime has been a pubhc 
 servant and educator, whose speeches and writings have 
 been of such high character and permanent interest as to 
 deserve preservation, has written and spoken his own 
 biography. 
 
 The record of the main incidents in his career are, how- 
 ever, an aid to an understanding of character, while the 
 portrayal of characteristics gives a better knowledge of the 
 man. There have lived men who commanded respect and 
 fame for intellectual qualities only ; others who were ad- 
 mirable also for the cardinal virtues ; and a smaller num- 
 ber possessing high qualities both intellectual and moral, 
 and gifted besides with attributes that endeared them 
 personally to multitudes. Such men are rare, and when 
 they pass away many are eager to learn all that may be 
 told of them. 
 
 In person Newton Booth was a singular blending of 
 grace and power. At first glance he impressed one as tall, 
 slightly built, and almost fragile ; at second, he presented 
 an effect of proportion and of action, with shoulders rela- 
 tively broad, chest deep, and a sinewy ease of movement 
 suggesting muscles of flexible steel. The earlier impres- 
 sion was that of a scholarly presence almost delicate ; the 
 later, of possible strength allied with tireless energy. 
 
Vlll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 He bore himself constantly with a peculiar air of de- 
 liberate leisure, even when physical toil was necessarily 
 great, and mental work almost incessant. 
 
 His countenance, never a mask — always the reflex of 
 his mood, was expressive and remarkable. When in 
 repose, or alight with merriment, the ample forehead was 
 white, the complexion almost fair ; at periods of intense 
 thought, with features set to immobility, the eyes grew 
 darker, and the tints suggested the face of a sun-browned 
 traveller. 
 
 Both his brown hair and full beard of auburn were 
 slightly inclined to curl. His brow was the visible sign of 
 power, his lips expressive whether active or silent. 
 
 His gray eyes were large, luminous, and grave, and 
 lighted up lineaments expressive both of purity of thought 
 and of strength of character. He impressed one as always 
 prepared to look at both sides of every question which 
 confronted him. His eyes were like his mind — steady, 
 fearless, and persuasive ; now sparkling with the fire of 
 oratory, again radiant with the relish of humor or appre- 
 ciation of literary excellence, or with flashing abhorrence 
 of shams and corruption, or scorn of malignant partisan 
 work. 
 
 He never faltered in his keen, deliberate contemplation 
 of the future by the light of all past history, or in his 
 faithful thought for the welfare of his countrymen, whose 
 political perils were his ceaseless dread and inspiration to 
 action, and whose defence against these perils the main- 
 spring of his work and hope. 
 
 So decided were his convictions, and so incisive and 
 disturbing his fearless declarations of them, that he was 
 declared by his enemies to be " an agitator, a demagogue, 
 an alarmist, a communist." His magnificent defence 
 against his detractors may be found in one of his speeches.' 
 
 ' Railroad Problem in American Politics, 
 
INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 The following extract from another will illustrate the 
 nature of his communistic tendencies — it is on a plane of 
 thought which characterizes all of his utterances : 
 
 " It is strange that, in a country where there are hundreds of millions of 
 acres of unsettled land ; in an age when mechanical inventions have tenfold 
 increased the power of production, daily bread and comfortable homes should 
 not be easily within the reach of all. And if it be true now, as is evidenced 
 by the frenzied protests of ' strikes,' and the wailing cry of distress that goes 
 up from cities over a speculative advance in coal, what will be the condition 
 of affairs when our vacant leagues of territory shall swarm with teeming 
 population ? Would you behold the saddest spectacle of this age ? See it 
 in the strong man seeking in vain for a place to earn his daily bread by daily 
 toil. Would you discover the danger that threatens social order ? Find it 
 in the boys of our cities growing up in voluntary or enforced idleness, to 
 graduate into pensioners or outlaws. Whoever will look open-eyed into the 
 future will see that the ' labor question ' ; the question of directing the rising 
 generation into channels of useful employment ; the question of the equita- 
 ble distribution of the burdens and rewards of labor, so that the drones shall 
 not live upon the workers, and honest industry may be certain of its reward ; 
 the question of making labor in fact, what we call it in speech, honorable — 
 not only honorable, but honored, is the social problem, far more important 
 than political questions, to which our age should address itself. It must be 
 intelligently solved, or like the blind Samson it will bring the temple down 
 upon our heads." ' 
 
 It is strange that any one should venture to call such 
 philosophy and warning " demagogism." 
 
 In personal appearance, at least, and in every attribute, 
 he was the reverse of the typical communist. He dressed 
 so faultlessly that none ever recalled to mind his costume. 
 
 Genial always with his friends — careless as a rule of his 
 foes — such was his innate and outward dignity that in a 
 land where it was customary to salute roughly and to use 
 abbreviated Christian names, rarely did any one venture to 
 place a hand upon his shoulder or to greet him other than 
 as " Mr. Booth " ; yet his natural dignity was tempered to 
 the social atmosphere in which he lived, and he rarely gave 
 to ignorance or presumption a rebuke graver than a warn- 
 ing look. 
 
 ' Address delivered in Sacramento, May lo, 1871. 
 
X IN TROD UC TION. 
 
 Few were ever so serene in manner at all times — few so 
 modest, quiet, void of self-assertion. Yet he was often 
 reticent to the verge of exasperating those who did not 
 know him intimately. So natural were these inborn traits 
 that, with a few exceptions, the members of the commu- 
 nity in which he lived scarcely realized his full worth and 
 essential greatness until he was gone ! 
 
 Affable, courteous, willing always to accord to others 
 the full measure of their deserts, he was yet an ever ready 
 champion in the lists against men and influences which he 
 thought dangerous to free institutions. 
 
 In repose he was the embodiment of all that was gentle 
 without being feeble, gracious without being pliant. When 
 aroused to antagonistic action, on the rostrum or in the 
 forum, conscious of integrity of purpose and of his own 
 powers derived from study and thought, and conscious 
 also of the high and broad principles which actuated his 
 every pulsation and utterance, he was 
 
 " Fierce as the midnight, moonlit 
 
 Nubian desert, with all its Lions up." 
 
 His political friends learned to revere — his enemies to 
 fear him. 
 
 Never a politician in the narrow sense of the word, he 
 could fairly be described as a Statesman. He sought and 
 accepted office as the incident, not the aim of his life- 
 work. The pleasure he may have found in public life was 
 that of patriotism more than of gratified ambition. The 
 emoluments of office were no temptation to one whose 
 resources were ample ; the distractions of it a burden to 
 him whose choicest pleasure lay in his library. 
 
 From boyhood he was a thinker as well as a student, 
 ambitious to become an orator and a leader of men, en- 
 amored of learning, steadfast in literary culture. In mature 
 manhood he blended success in each field of action into 
 
INTRODUC TIOJV. xi 
 
 consistent effort against the wrong and in defence of the 
 right, being too thoroughly patriotic to keep silent in the 
 presence of public danger. 
 
 In his addresses and orations he began always in a clear, 
 strong voice, sustained to the close. If the modulated 
 tones were studied, they were void of affectation. The 
 strains of high eloquence were not artificial but natural, 
 although always artistic. Describing Edmund Burke, he 
 said : 
 
 " His speeches are like lenses in receiving the scattered light of the past 
 and concentrating it in a glowing focus upon the future; like prisms ia 
 giving to common subjects the beauties of rainbow tints ; like mirrors, re- 
 flecting the images of all time and all nature." 
 
 In the same lecture occurs the following: 
 
 " There are accomplished debaters, brilliant speakers, able party-leaders 
 — but where is the orator ? — the man whose very presence is magnetic, whose 
 soul is so refulgent with his theme that it glows in his eyes, beams in his 
 face, transfigures his person, blends voice, action, manner, language, thought 
 into a supreme harmony, fuses reason, passion, imagination into one power 
 — that ethereal fire which makes speech electric ? " ' 
 
 Such was his ideal of oratory. Many times he nearly at- 
 tained to it — at times he did so quite. Strong personal 
 magnetism was enhanced by evident earnestness of pur- 
 pose. It was not in his nature, and was beyond his power 
 to simulate, his individuality being too fixed. In Sacra- 
 mento once, to aid a great charity he consented to play 
 in amateur theatricals a leading part in a noted drama. 
 Easy enough it was to commit the text, to understand the 
 character, to master the " stage business " ; but — one 
 rehearsal was enough — he abandoned the effort in laughing 
 despair ! 
 
 ' Lecture on Fox. 
 
xii INTR OD UCTION. 
 
 A successful merchant, an orator by reason of natural 
 eloquence well cultivated, a lawyer from early choice 
 whose legal mind would have made him famous if con- 
 stant to his profession, a scholar of such reading and 
 assimilation that he would have gained the front rank 
 among literary contemporaries if he had devoted himself 
 to literature alone, — he would have failed as an actor. 
 The rugged gold of his nature, refined in the crucible of 
 thought, moulded to spurn deceit, stamped with charac- 
 ters of truth, made him incapable of any phase of counter- 
 feiting. 
 
 Although he possessed, and often exercised, the happy 
 faculty of making unpremeditated short speeches that 
 were delightful, he did not venture, until he was over 
 forty years of age, to deliver a set address, lecture, ora- 
 tion, or political speech without first writing it out, then 
 memorizing it, and finally having the manuscript before 
 him. In later life he had so advanced in oratorical growth 
 that he could lay aside his prepared manuscript and de- 
 pend upon a few leading words written upon a card held 
 concealed in his hand. Later still, after one winter at 
 Washington, he relied entirely upon the inspiration of the 
 moment, even when making sustained speeches. 
 
 His first appearance as a lecturer he signalized by faint- 
 ing before the close, from nervous excitement ; his last by 
 displaying the powers of a confident veteran. 
 
 A lecturer in several churches, he was never a commu- 
 nicant with any, but he accepted and practically followed 
 the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. To give more 
 than scant illustration here of his faith would be to quote 
 unnecessarily ; his writings abound with it. 
 
 " Before the nations of Europe and America, not now as a cloud by day, 
 but a fiery pillar brighter than the brightest noon, moves through the heavens 
 the Holy Bible ! " 
 
 " Nations have risen and fallen, races have perished, a new world has 
 been discovered, a new and divine religion revealed." 
 
INTRODUCTION. ■ xiii 
 
 " The present is musical with the psalms of David, rich with the wisdom 
 of Solomon, holy by the Saviour's death ! " 
 
 "Now, around us moves the grand panorama of the Universe — above us 
 roll the ceaseless ages of the everlasting. Now over all and in all God reigns 
 and rules ! " 
 
 Such extracts from his lectures exemplify his religious 
 faith ! 
 
 Morally brave, physically stoical, patient and cheerful 
 in enduring intense suffering towards the close, uncom- 
 plaining in agony, inspiring those about him to banish 
 sorrow and to put aside grief, he died as he had lived — 
 an embodiment of unconquerable philosophy ! 
 
 In this introduction follows the outline of his biography ; 
 the details will be given in the succeeding chapters : 
 
 Newton Booth was born in Washington County, In- 
 diana, December 30, 1825. His grandfather was a soldier 
 of the Revolution, his father a native of Connecticut. 
 His mother, Hannah Pitts, was born in North Carolina, 
 her father afterwards becoming one of the pioneers of 
 Indiana. His parents married at Salem, Indiana. Both 
 were remarkable for high character and wide influence, 
 and both were of Quaker descent. 
 
 In 1846 he was graduated from Asbury (now De 
 Pauw) University, studied law at Terre Haute, and was 
 admitted to the bar in 1849. At that time the examina- 
 tion of candidates was more severe and searching in 
 Indiana than in any other State in the Union. Although 
 he did not practise his profession much, trying but one 
 case in Indiana and only a few in California, he did not 
 altogether abandon the study of it; and twenty-seven 
 years after his admission, in the United States Senate 
 sitting as a court of impeachment for the trial of William 
 W. Belknap, late Secretary of War, he participated with 
 credit as a lawyer in the great debate on the question of 
 jurisdiction. 
 
2 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 treasure meant more than many battles in the field. The 
 clipper schooner J. W. Chapman had been secretly fitted 
 for the work at San Francisco, and was captured only at 
 the moment of her attempted departure — her hold filled 
 with cannon, arms, and ammunition, and crowded with 
 armed and uniformed men. 
 
 That secret secession organization the " Knights of the 
 Golden Circle" was in constant and menacing session; 
 plots had been formed to capture the arsenal at Benicia, 
 seize Fort Point and Alcatraz, and declare California out 
 of the Union ; and danger threatened from Oregon, from 
 Nevada, from Salt Lake, and from Arizona. The great 
 mines of Nevada were just discovered, and attracted 
 there multitudes of adventurous men, a large proportion 
 of them Secessionists. On June 4, 1861, the rebel flag, 
 guarded by one hundred armed men fortified in a stone 
 building, floated all day at Virginia City. 
 
 The gravest danger, however, lay in the possibility of 
 the disloyal element creating a public sentiment that 
 would sweep the Pacific States out of the Union. The 
 Democrats never had failed to carry California politically, 
 and it was evident that her loyalty depended upon a dis- 
 ruption of the Democratic party as organized — dominated 
 as it was by an able minority of men anxious to aid the 
 " Sunny South " to establish an empire whose corner-stone 
 should be treason, whose dower slavery. 
 
 These Secessionists were, in the main, earnest, educated, 
 practical, sincere, and brave men, skilled in political work, 
 pro-slavery by inherited conviction, a disturbing element 
 in a free State at any time, a dangerous force in a crisis. 
 Accustomed to rule, bold in utterance, implacable, in- 
 tolerant, confident, and aggressive, they added to those 
 qualities the arts of conspirators — intellectual, energetic, 
 wary. Openly eloquent for disunion, they were silently 
 active to accomplish it. Controlling the Legislature in 
 1859, thsy passed a law to divide the State, authorizing 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 3 
 
 the people of the southern part of Cahfornia to erect 
 themselves into a slave-holding territory. The " Bear 
 Flag " had been again floated at Sonoma, was displayed 
 also at Los Angeles and San Bernardino ; months before 
 the bombardment of Sumter a Pacific Republic flag was 
 raised at Stockton ' ; the Palmetto flag floated for a time 
 in San Francisco.'' 
 
 The secret arrival of General Sumner, April 25, 1861, 
 and his instantaneously superseding Gen. A. S. Johnston 
 in command at Alcatraz ^ was as timely as fortunate. 
 
 The above brief resume is necessary for adequate com- 
 prehension of the work done by loyal men in California. 
 Those who know best, best know that for a time her fate 
 trembled in the balance because public sentiment was 
 wavering. If that great journal, the Sacramento Union, 
 its able contemporaries, the Bidletijt and the Call at San 
 Francisco, the Enterprise at Virginia, Nevada, had vacil- 
 lated for the moment ; or if men such as E. D. Baker, 
 Thomas Starr King, F. P. Tracy, Henry Edgerton, Ad- 
 dison M. Crane, Edward Stanley, A. P. Catlin, Gen. James 
 Shields, and many others — prompt, eloquent, patriotic, de- 
 termined — had advocated secession and a Pacific Republic, 
 or had maintained the silence of timidity, a terrible 
 chapter would have been added to the history of the 
 rebelhon. 
 
 Among the first — and among the latest — to give im- 
 pulse to patriotism by stirring eloquence, fervent appeal, 
 denunciation of treason, logic applied to lessons drawn 
 from history, exposure of the hideous features of the 
 slave-holders' conspiracy, comparison of the present with 
 the past, and analysis of the future by the light of both, 
 was Newton Booth. 
 
 He had declared what public opinion was in essence, 
 and he knew how to create it ! 
 
 ' January, 1861. * February, 1861. 
 
 ^ The only actual fort in California, then. 
 
4 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " Public opinion — what is that but the bold utterance of the few who 
 think what they say, dare to say what they think, and seek what they want, 
 and the silent acquiescence of the many who are too indolent for thought or 
 too timid for action." ' 
 
 It was impossible for him now to falter or to doubt. 
 Influences surrounding him always were such as never in- 
 culcate treason or cripple courage. Those circumstances 
 in life which tended to form his character, develop and 
 fix the attributes of his manhood, may be partly portrayed 
 in his own language : 
 
 " If any of you grew up, as I did, near the frontier, you will have ob- 
 served the operation of social forces in your own experience. Thirty-five 
 years ago, in what was then the ' Far West,' almost everything consumed 
 on a farm was raised on it. There was some barter. Butter and eggs were 
 exchanged for sugar and coffee. Tea was a luxury, kept for cases of sick- 
 ness. Wool came from the sheep's back into the house, and never left it 
 until it went out on the backs of the boys and girls. It was carded, spun, 
 and woven by hand. The flax went from the field to the breaker, from the 
 breaker to hackle and loom. At the farm I best remember the trough was 
 still in the farmyard, and the remains of the vat were to be seen, where not 
 many years before deer-skins and cow-hides had been tanned, and the lap- 
 stone was still kept which had been in family use for making shoes from 
 home-tanned leather. I remember the first threshing-machine — a horse- 
 power — brought into our neighborhood. It made its appearance about the 
 same time the first piano came into the village. Both were generally re- 
 garded as evidences of extravagant innovation, likely to break their owners. 
 All this has been changed." "^ 
 
 Again : 
 
 " The ambition, the dream, the aspiration of boyhood, — all live in the fires 
 of manhood ! . . . A love of freedom, of personal independence, was 
 a part of the heritage of the American people. That love was expanded by 
 the grandeur of the scenery amid which they dwelt ! " ^ 
 
 Such being his expressed thought, it is clear that he 
 was conscious always of natural impulse to strength in 
 simplicity, truth in political strife, death in defence of 
 liberty. 
 
 ' Lecture on " Morals and Politics," 
 
 ^ Address before California State Grange, Oct. 17, 1873. 
 
 ^ Lecture, " The Present Hour." 
 
ORA TIONS AND ADDRESSES. 5 
 
 His idea of the value of our national holiday was that 
 it offered better opportunity to teach abstract and 
 precious political truth and principles than the stump or 
 the lecture platform. Speaking of it he said : 
 
 " The theme would have long since grown old, if a great theme could 
 grow old. It is fadeless as the stars ; fresh as the flowers. Like the morn- 
 ing star it is ever robed in beauty ; like the night always crowned with glory. 
 Truth is not a century plant blooming but once in a hundred years." ' 
 
 In this volume only two of his Fourth-of-July orations 
 are given entire — the one immediately preceding threat- 
 ened rebellion, the other next following its opening guns. 
 All the others might well be published — none are repeti- 
 tions. 
 
 In i860 he procured an invitation to deliver an oration 
 at Stockton. The war-cloud in the East had made him 
 alert and anxious. He wanted to reach as large a public 
 as possible of thinking farmers and miners, at a city bor- 
 dering upon the industries of both ; and a great assem- 
 blage gathered to hear him. 
 
 His eloquent opening — in itself a whole oration — and 
 the closing sentence of that opening, " May he bear aloft 
 the tidings that our country is still by dishonor untouched, 
 from treason free," were but deliberate prelude to the 
 real aim of the orator, which was to incite loyal feeling of 
 permanent character by discussing " the leading features of 
 American polity'' \ and the meaning of the effort was 
 embodied in his declaration : 
 
 " It is a narrow view of history to suppose that the American Revolution 
 began at the Declaration of Independence and was finished at the close of 
 that war. It was, IT IS, the struggling for fuller utterance of ideas that are 
 as old as the first battle-fields of freedom ; and it will not be complete 
 while there is one battle for freedom to be fought on tented field or in. 
 resounding Senate ! " 
 
 Referring to threats of disunion : 
 
 ^Oration, Sacramento, 1877. 
 
6 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " The people everywhere are true. All (5ver the land millions of patriotic 
 pulses keep time with the great national heart that is throbbing beneath the 
 framework of the government." 
 
 Such inspiring, cheering words were needed greatly 
 then in all the Union, — nowhere more than in California. 
 
 Throughout the war he spoke often, clearly, forcibly. 
 At Michigan Bluff, in 1861, his address was so symmetrical 
 and splendid, so inspiring to the mountaineers to whom 
 he spoke, and throughout the State, that it requires pe- 
 rusal as a whole — quotation will not serve. 
 
 The following year, 1862, just when the cry was ring- 
 ing, 
 
 " We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more ! " 
 
 he delivered an address on "The Debit and Credit of 
 the War," which received deserved appreciation and heart- 
 felt thanks from Union men ; for rebels were then, and 
 continued to be until the surrender of Lee, rife with in- 
 tent, and at times almost ripe for action on the Pacific 
 Coast. 
 
 In that address he predicted the destruction of slavery 
 as the result of slave-holders' treason ; six months after- 
 ward the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. In the 
 same address he also said : 
 
 " How imperishable is the idea of country ! . . . What is our coun- 
 try? Not alone the land and the sea, the lakes and rivers, and valleys and 
 mountains — not alone the people, their customs and laws — not alone the 
 memories of the past, the hopes of the future ; it is something more than all 
 these combined. It is a divine abstraction. You cannot tell what it is, but 
 let its flag rustle above your head — you feel its living presence in your 
 hearts ! " 
 
 He also said then : 
 
 "Not now, but future generations will rise up and call this one blessed, 
 because it gave its most precious blood to preserve a Union that shall lead 
 the vanguard of the nations, and whose hands will scatter blessings in the 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 7 
 
 pathway of humanity forever and forevermore ! The War of the Revolution 
 was fought for Independence — Union was its incident. This is fought for 
 Union, and must cement it forever! It is a war for the Union, and shall 
 baptize it with a like eternity ! " 
 
 Such utterance would have been an easy after-thought. 
 It was given when Lincoln and his Cabinet and his Gen- 
 erals were gravely doubtful — given nearly three years 
 before Grant received Lee's sword at Appomattox. 
 
 Twenty-nine years after, yielding to solicitation after 
 retirement from public life, he addressed the National 
 Encampment of the Soldiers of the Grand Army, at 
 Sacramento. In closing, he said : 
 
 " America has given to the world two men matchless in purity of character 
 and loftiness of purpose. Two stars have appeared in the highest heaven in 
 the constellation of great men, whose light, with ever increasing refulgence, 
 will stream to the remotest age — Washington and Lincoln ! " 
 
 Such was the patriotism of Newton Booth ! 
 
 Of his orations and addresses, given upon invitation, 
 particular mention would be superfluous. They will be 
 appreciated when read. They embody a liberal addition 
 to higher education to one who studies them. 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE RED BLUFF LODGE, NO. 76, I. O, O. F., OF CALIFORNIA, 
 APRIL 26, i860. 
 
 Now, while the shadows of death lie darkly around our 
 pathway ; when the households of our friends and brothers 
 are clad in mourning, and our own hearts are touched 
 with grief, ours is not a festival of joy, but rather of love.* 
 
 ' Two active members of the Lodge had recently suffered a severe bereave- 
 ment : Mr. Goodrich, in the loss of one of his children ; and Captain Johnston 
 in the loss of two, burying the last the morning of the celebration. 
 
8 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 From the graves of the loved ones flowers will spring up, 
 as memorials of affection and emblems of hope. Year by- 
 year, day by day, hour by hour, we too are drawing nearer 
 and nearer to the gates of darkness that open upon the 
 solemn mysteries of the invisible world. 
 
 " And our hearts, though stout and brave, 
 Still, like muffled drums, are beating 
 Funeral marches to the grave." 
 
 In one of those strangely beautiful dreams, of high- 
 wrought, poetic fancy, such as he alone could describe, 
 De Quincey imagines himself transported to the silent 
 streets of a great city of the dead, that floats above the 
 coral floors of the ocean, beneath the calm, glassy waters 
 of a tropical sea. 
 
 "Away in cerulean depths, the translucid atmosphere of water stretched 
 like an air-woven awning above dome and tower and minaret — above peace- 
 ful human dwellings, privileged from molestation forever — the gleam of 
 marble altars sleeping in everlasting sanctity — belfries where pendulous bells 
 are swinging, waiting in vain for the summons which shall awaken their 
 marriage peals — and above silent nurseries where the children are all asleep, 
 and have been asleep for five generations ! " 
 
 Does not this picture beautifully symbolize and aptly 
 represent the distant past, when viewed disconnected and 
 apart from our own lives ? There it lies behind us, in the 
 dim, shadowy land, the great encampment, the silent city 
 of the dead. Its high works of art — its splendid temples 
 and palaces and monuments — its peaceful homes and 
 gleaming altars and far-reaching streets — all are there ; 
 but over all, the unbroken stillness of death. The sound 
 of the hammer is hushed ; the noise of activity and life is 
 gone. No more the din of preparation, the bustle of 
 labor, the shoutings of the captains, the marshalling of 
 hosts, the war of change, the outburst of revolution, the 
 conflict of improvement and decay. The work is com- 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 9 
 
 plete. The workmen have gone to their rests, and the 
 children are all asleep ! 
 
 To that land of dim enchantment, how prone are we all 
 to look back. If, in our mysterious progress through life, 
 our eyes are necessarily fixed with curiosity and awe upon 
 the curtained, cloudy future, into whose depths our paths 
 are leading we know not whither, still and ever do we 
 turn, with reverence and with love, to the great past that 
 lies behind our lives, over which our race has marched, 
 from the beginning of time — marked with the footprints 
 of all humanity — grand in its achievements, splendid in 
 its attainments, holy in its memories ! There the patri- 
 archs lived, there the martyrs died ; there the heroes 
 fought and poets sang ; oh ! what shall the future give us 
 to atone for the glories that have passed away ? Will 
 there be another age of chivalry and high romance — 
 another line like the prophets — another race like the 
 Titans, who built the pyramids? Will the days of the 
 Athenian schools ever return ? Will there be another 
 Socrates to drink immortality from the hemlock, and Plato 
 to wreathe his tomb with garlands from the skies ? Will 
 the earth listen to the song of another Homer, or requiem 
 of another Mozart ? Will the ages to come produce new 
 Raphaels to draw, Angelos to build, and Titians to color ? 
 Will the continents tremble beneath the tread of another 
 Napoleon ? Will humanity bear another Shakespeare, to 
 mirror the universe in his single mind ; or Washington, to 
 illumine all the ages with the sunlike purity of his soul? 
 Or did the world become commonplace when we were 
 born ? — must the race hereafter bring forth common men, 
 and reproduce prosaic times? 
 
 History is the expression of the powers and capabilities, 
 the wants, aspirations, and necessities of humanity. It is 
 the unfolding of man's nature — the mapping out of his 
 being upon the canvas of time ; and when history is com- 
 plete, it will present a great picture of humanity fully dis- 
 
lO NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 closed. We are passionate, aggressive, impatient of re- 
 straint ; we have that feeling of revenge which Lord Bacon 
 calls a sense of wild justice ; and the red pathway of war, 
 attesting the universality of these feelings, is traceable 
 through all the past. We have the divine instinct of 
 order; the craving for society; the yearning for fellow- 
 ship — and states, governments, and laws embody and rep- 
 resent this portion of our nature. We are ideal, creative ; 
 have the sense of the beautiful, and desire for dominion — 
 and music and song, painting and architecture, the steam- 
 engine, the power-loom and printing-press are the result. 
 We are prone to evil, weak in the presence of temptation ; 
 and every age brings forth a new harvest of crime, reveal- 
 ing the dark background of our nature. We are religious ; 
 have the desire to worship, the mysterious sense of the 
 invisible presence, the inward prompting to reverence ; 
 and mythologies and systems, the creations of Asgard, 
 Valhalla and Olympus ; the adoration of idols, the sun, 
 the moon, and the Great Spirit, flow out from that feeling 
 which finds its highest exercise in the presence of revealed 
 truth. 
 
 Whatever has been, shall be. In the changes of circum- 
 stance, man remains the same. Let us open the Book of 
 Job, the oldest book in the world, and the four thousand 
 years that separate us from him vanish in an instant. 
 The suggestions of worldly wisdom and cunning are as 
 shortsighted as though they were made yesterday at 
 Washington, at San Francisco, or at Red Bluff ; while our 
 hearts tremble at the touches of his pathos, and our souls 
 are awed by his visions of sublimity, as though his own 
 fingers swept the chords, and his own hand drew the 
 curtain. 
 
 Let us sit down to talk with Plato ; how fresh and com- 
 panionable he seems ! He is as modern as we are — sym- 
 pathizes with all our difficulties, thoughts, and questionings 
 — is engaged in solving the very problems that baffle us. 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. II 
 
 Dead for twenty-five hundred years, he can even instruct 
 us upon the subjects that humanity has been thinking 
 about ever since he died. Let us go in imagination to an 
 Athenian theatre, and the audience are moved to laughter 
 and melted to tears by the same touches of humor and 
 pathos that move and melt us now. Stand we in fancy 
 in the crowd before a Roman forum, and see how the old 
 Roman hearts that have been dust for two thousand years 
 thrilled beneath the fiery sweep of an orator who might 
 have stood a model for a Chatham or a Clay. 
 
 Thus beneath the change of relations, the shifting of 
 forms, the growths and decays of society, the current of 
 humanity flows on the same. We are continually meet- 
 ing with old ideas in new shapes. The German mystic 
 finds his philosophy anticipated by the dreams of a Brah- 
 min devotee of a traditional age. The age of Chivalry 
 has gone, but the spirit that animated it remains, and the 
 same feeling that prompted the Knight to the rescue of 
 the Sepulchre, sends Kane and his devoted followers upon 
 their mission of love to the depths of an eternal winter. 
 The pyramids stand in the lone waste of drear antiquity, 
 mournful monuments of a lost art and perished strength ; 
 but that art and that strength find new form and embodi- 
 ment in the Steam Engine, moving the machinery of the 
 nations' commerce with its tireless arm, while the pulses 
 of the world's industry keep time with the throbbings of 
 its iron heart. 
 
 There is an old fable, or it may be the tradition of a 
 grand truth, that Prometheus stole the fires of heaven and 
 conferred the gift upon mortals. And to-day the fable is 
 realized, the truth reappears. The lightning-winged mes- 
 senger of the skies is the servant of man, and soon the 
 great globe, with its mountains and continents and oceans, 
 will dissolve into nothingness beneath the stroke of the 
 Electrician's wand — when Europe, Asia, Africa, and the 
 twin-born Americas shall meet together face to face, eye 
 
12 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 to eye, and talk to each other in that universal language, 
 the click of the telegraph ! 
 
 But in all history, what principle is so old and so young, 
 so universal in its development, so multiform and ever- 
 present in its action, as the great truth of Human Broth- 
 erhood. It is not a type lost in one age to reappear in 
 another ; it is the great truth for whose development and 
 perfect unfolding all the ages were made — and every page 
 in history contains the record of its struggles and its trials, 
 its triumphs and defeats. Free, unrestrained, all its forms 
 are beautiful and its influence beneficent. Shut up, im- 
 prisoned, confined, it bursts its way in fiery earthquake 
 terrors, like the French Revolution. Its earliest, purest, 
 and simplest form is seen in the family circle, at the fire- 
 side of home ; its grandest manifestation is witnessed in 
 the State, — civil government, armed with the awful pre- 
 rogatives of sovereignty, and radiant with the attributes 
 of justice. It is this principle of human brotherhood that 
 we as Odd Fellows, feebly it may be, humbly we confess, 
 and imperfectly, but still in some degree and honestly, — 
 it is this principle we claim to embody and represent. 
 
 Institutions, like that at whose instance we have to-day 
 convened, are as old as the records of time. Differing, 
 doubtless, in their internal organization, — differing widely 
 in the great objects they were designed to accomplish, 
 there have always been orders and associations, bound to- 
 gether by the mystic ties of a common brotherhood, from 
 whose counsels and deliberations, from whose shrines and 
 inner sanctuaries, the great world was shut out. 
 
 Even in sacred writ we read of something analogous to 
 this, in the institution of a particular order of men to 
 whose care were committed the rites, ceremonies and mys- 
 teries of religion, who had charge of the sacred vessels of 
 the temple, who alone could lift the veil of the sanctuary 
 and stand in the holy of holies. 
 
 In the early ages of profane history, the learned men 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 1 3 
 
 of Greece were accustomed to travel into Egypt to be 
 initiated into the Egyptian schools — schools set apart 
 from the world, cherishing the sciences and arts, and im- 
 parting their teachings only through impressive ceremonies 
 and under solemn vows. 
 
 The chosen youth of Greece, as a mark of particular 
 favor, were initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. There, 
 surrounded by awe-inspiring associations, they were taught 
 the great truths of life — truths deemed too sacred for the 
 knowledge of the multitude ; impressed with a sense of 
 the duties they owed to their country, their fellow-men, 
 and themselves, and sent forth, members of a mysterious 
 brotherhood, to illustrate by their life and conversation 
 the purity of the teachings they had received. Almost 
 three thousand years ago, Pythagoras gathered his dis- 
 ciples together in darkness and secrecy ; curtained in mys- 
 tery, the world shut out, he instructed them in the use 
 and meaning of symbols — taught them the high truths of 
 mathematics, the facts of astronomy, the unity of God, 
 the harmony of natural law ; filled their souls with the 
 love of virtue, and inspired them with the hope of immor- 
 tality. And have we not to-day, active in our midst, in 
 the Masonic fraternity, an institution claiming an exist- 
 ence older than any on the earth save the Jewish church ? 
 
 The universal existence of this principle of association 
 may at least prove that it responds to a legitimate want 
 of humanity, and that it will continue to find an embodi- 
 ment in some form while human nature remains the same. 
 
 The time has indeed gone by when the Most High re- 
 veals His will to a particular order of men. The ark of the 
 covenant is no longer sealed. There is no longer a neces- 
 sity, as in the days of the Egyptian Magi, to set apart 
 schools distinct from the world to cherish and cultivate 
 the arts and sciences, lest their knowledge should perish 
 from the earth. Free inquiry, a free press, and free schools 
 have made these as free, as accessible, and imperishable as 
 
14 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 the air. Science, as in the days of Pythagoras, is no longer 
 driven to the fastness of secret places to inculcate her les- 
 sons. Her votaries are not now proscribed ; she has come 
 out from the cloister, mingles in the daily pursuits of men, 
 and is the handmaid of their labors. The unity of God, 
 the harmony of natural law, the immortality of the soul, 
 are no longer truths taught only in symbols, and whose 
 knowledge constitutes the seal of a favored brotherhood. 
 American youth need no Eleusinian rites to impress upon 
 them the duty of patriotism ; for we have a country to love, 
 whose institutions challenge our admiration, and whose 
 honor it is our highest privilege to cherish and protect. 
 
 But still the heart remains the same. Still does it en- 
 shrine lofty truths in beautiful symbols, and recognize the 
 emblem as the shadow of the invisible. Still is it awed 
 into reverence and lifted into rapture by impressive forms 
 and ceremonies. The principal of fraternization is strong 
 as ever, and the associations it forms find new ties, new 
 objects, other purposes, and other duties. There are tears 
 to be dried, fountains of sorrow to be closed, and fountains 
 of love to be opened. There is distress to be relieved, 
 sickness to be visited, the dead to be buried, the orphan to 
 be educated, social virtue to be improved ; man is to be 
 brought into a closer acquaintance with his fellow-man, 
 his mind enlightened — in a word, the true fraternal rela- 
 tion is to be cultivated and perfected. 
 
 Such is the aim of Odd Fellowship. Based upon cer- 
 tain truths that are alike axioms among all nations, tongues, 
 and kindreds, it claims no religious sanction for its teach- 
 ings ; it aspires to no political power ; it does not trace its 
 history back through volumes of legendary lore, or hold 
 its patent from the hands of kings. Its works are the seal 
 of its birthright ; its mission, to do good in the daily walks 
 of life. It is essentially humanitarian. It proposes to re- 
 spond to the common wants and common duties of com- 
 mon humanity. It recognizes man as he is, in himself 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 15 
 
 helpless, liable to sickness, exposed to difficulty and dan- 
 ger — social intercourse is as necessary to his well-being as 
 the breath of his nostrils. It is its purpose to adapt itself 
 to the age in which it is encamped — a practical, toiling 
 age ; to offer social recreation from the monotony of daily 
 toil, to impart great truths under the teachings of beau- 
 tiful symbols, inculcate the lessons of virtue under impres- 
 sive forms and ceremonies ; to protect us in danger, assist 
 us in sickness, soften, as far as may be, the trials and suf- 
 ferings inseparable from human life, and when we are gone, 
 afford an asylum to protect those whom we love from the 
 peltingsof the pitiless storm. 
 
 Men of well-assured wealth, men of leisure and high 
 social position, who have access to the rich stores of liter- 
 ature and exquisite productions of art, may never need its 
 solaces or appreciate its kindly aids. It is to earnest men 
 — men who bear life's burdens and responsibilities, and 
 who sometimes grow tired of the load — to the great body 
 of privates in the army of life, that it is most commended, 
 and to these it is a very present counsellor and friend. 
 
 There are those whom too much learning hath made 
 mad. There are those whose lofty Byronic natures look 
 only with scorn upon the affairs of every-day life. There 
 are those whose minds are so elevated into the regions of 
 intellectual abstraction, that they are frozen into a cold 
 scepticism and are incredulous of all that is good and gen- 
 erous in human nature. There are those who are proudly 
 self-reliant in the consciousness of their own strength. 
 There are those, all of whose aims are bounded by the cir- 
 cle of self. Odd Fellowship is for none such. It does not 
 meet the wants of their natures. Its birth was among the 
 poor, and we love it the better for its lowly origin ; it was 
 not more lowly than the manger where the Child-Saviour 
 was born ! Its ministerings are among common men, and 
 we love it the better for it, for our own hearts keep time 
 with the stirring march of democracy ! 
 
l6 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Forty-one years ago to-day, on the twenty-sixth day of 
 April, 1819, Thomas Wildey, John Welsh, John Duncan, 
 John Cheatam, and Richard Busworth met at the house of 
 William Lupton," Sign of the Seven Stars," Second Street, 
 in the city of Baltimore, to organize a lodge of Odd Fel- 
 lows. They were humble, obscure men ; without the aids 
 of learning or advantages of wealth. They had no am- 
 bitious designs — no aspirations for fame, or expectation of 
 personal emolument. They were poor, and had realized 
 in their own lives the necessity for counsel in health and 
 consolation in sickness. These they could furnish to each 
 other. They had few friends — they could draw the closer 
 to each other, and their hearts beat the truer " for a' 
 that." 
 
 There was the origin of the institution, the anniversary 
 of whose nativity we have met to-day to celebrate. For- 
 ty-one years have gone — a brief space in history, but a 
 long period in the life of man. There are those here who 
 can remember so far back, but the gray hairs have gath- 
 ered where the sunny curls clustered, and eyes bright with 
 the dreams of boyhood are dimmed with the memories of 
 years. Forty and one years ! A full generation has passed 
 over the globe. How the world has changed ! Then, what 
 a wilderness of solitude was this spot — the unknown de- 
 pendency of a Spanish throne. Then our whole country 
 was ringing with fierce declamation over the admission of 
 Missouri — Missouri herself the western frontier, the ultima 
 Thule of civilization. Napoleon was fretting out the rem- 
 nant of his days in his ocean prison, and a poor collier of 
 Killingworth was elaborating in his own brain the thought 
 that was to mature itself into the railway locomotive, and 
 change the destiny of the world ! 
 
 Time, that blights so many hopes and brings so many 
 sorrows, is still unfolding the great plans of Providence — 
 it may be, realizing the one great hope of our race. 
 
 Forty-one years have gone ; and to-day the successors 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 1 7 
 
 of Thomas Wildey and his companions have met together 
 to celebrate the anniversary of their meeting on the 
 26th of April, 18 19. That humble lodge has increased to 
 two thousand ; its five founders to a quarter of a million 
 followers ; their first voluntary contribution to buy can- 
 dles, paper, and perhaps a pot of beer, has grown to an 
 annual income of more than a million of dollars ; and to- 
 day this great army of peace, two hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand strong, gathers its soldiers together in their various 
 encampments, wherever the flag of our country floats — 
 from the shores of the Atlantic and the Gulf, to this bright 
 land, where the east fades into the west, and the golden 
 clouds of the evening are piled against the morning's 
 gates ! 
 
 No dreamers, laggarts, or idlers are these two hundred 
 and fifty thousand ; but patient-minded, earnest-hearted, 
 strong-armed men — men who have grown strong from 
 labor, patient in trials, and earnest from continual wrest- 
 ling with difficulties. What are their aims, their objects, 
 their purposes now, that they should be banded together 
 in this phalanx of Friendship, Love, and Truth ? Forty- 
 one years ago our Association constituted a society for 
 mutual aid and relief ; but prosperity has brought new 
 duties and responsibilities. In this age, whatever stands 
 still, recedes ; whatever ceases to grow, dies. Ours is no 
 age of idle speculation ; no time for day-dreams and empty 
 shows and parades. All things now are subjected to the 
 rigid tests of utility. It may be that we have become too 
 practical, too utilitarian, too material, too mechanical ; but 
 such are the characteristics of the time in which we live. 
 Time was, when the poet went to nature for inspiration, 
 and saw only the beautiful in her forms. Now the me- 
 chanic penetrates her arcana, robs her of her secrets 
 to press them into the service of the arts. Time was, 
 when the elements were represented only in beautiful 
 shapes of the fancy, in Fairies and Undines, Fawns and 
 
1 8 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Satyrs — creatures to amuse the hours of leisure. Now 
 the elements are the slaves of man's will — they toil in the 
 workshop and drudge on the farm, with sinews that never 
 tire, and frames that never grow old. 
 
 What is the mission of Odd Fellowship in this toiling, 
 practical age ? It has outgrown its pupilage, it has entered 
 its manhood ; what is the work for it to do ? 
 
 In the associations of the olden time, wherein we see 
 the types of our Order, the principle of fraternity which 
 animated them all was yet modified and controlled by the 
 spirit of the age in which it was made manifest. They 
 were associations for the favored few — for the elect of 
 wealth, learning, philosophy, and social position. Few 
 were deemed worthy of an elevation to the truths they 
 taught and principles they professed. Their privileges 
 constituted the badge of a social aristocracy. Broader 
 ideas now prevail. Whatever is good enough for the few 
 is not too good for the many. The tendency of our age 
 is not to concentrate, but to diffuse — not to garner up, but 
 to scatter broadcast. And if our Order would maintain 
 its position and aid in the progressive development of the 
 idea it represents, it must vindicate the doctrine of social 
 democracy. 
 
 And what is social democracy ? It is not the barren 
 doctrine that all men are politically equal, and entitled to 
 civil liberty ; but that higher teaching that all men are 
 brothers, with claims upon our sympathy and love. It is 
 no phrase set to catch the ear of the multitude, nor the 
 watchward of a revolutionary party, tired of the restraints 
 of law. It is no mere abstraction, no bare negation, but 
 a living principle warm with love. Prescriptive only of 
 error, destructive only of wrong, it is conservative of 
 every right of humanity, and progressive in the knowl- 
 edge and power of the truth. Recognizing all men as the 
 offspring of the same parent, bound together by the ties 
 of a common nature, common sufferings and hopes, a 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 19 
 
 common death and immortality, it laughs to scorn the 
 miserable distinctions of rank and fashion, and proclaims 
 the broad doctrine of universal equality — that the seal of 
 humanity set upon a living being by the hand of God, is 
 his title-deed to all the rights and privileges of the race. 
 High among these is the right to labor, the privilege 
 to enjoy ! 
 
 The kind Creator gives unto all the sunshine and the 
 air, the beauty of the landscape, the freshness of the 
 morning, the splendor of the noon, the glory of the sun- 
 set, and mystic blazonry of the midnight. For all. He 
 hangs His bow in the clouds, and opens the volume of 
 His promise. But upon the productions of man's labor, 
 upon the gifts of society, there rests a ban and a curse. 
 Of the children of toil, how many are there who are free 
 from the fear of want ? Of the sons of labor, how many 
 can feel their souls expand to their full stature in the 
 blessed sunlight of independence? In the great army of 
 industry, how often are the fallen crushed, the wounded 
 left to die ? While the earth produces bountifully, stimu- 
 lated to tenfold production by the division of labor and 
 the inventions of the arts, want remains, ghastly as ever ; 
 misery stretches her pale hands for alms, and the cry of 
 distress is never hushed. Listening to the cry, wealth is 
 twice cursed, cursing him who has, and him who has not 
 — the rich with pride, and the poor with envy. 
 
 Must it ever continue? Shall fortune always blindly 
 distribute her gifts — work for the many, luxury for the 
 few ? the sweat of toil for me, its fruits and flowers for 
 another ? — starvation and surfeit, abundance and penury, 
 side by side, and we, the children of the same Father, and 
 the earth our common heritage ! 
 
 To war against this disparity and injustice — to elevate 
 the dignity of labor — to enrich it with the blessings it 
 creates, is the duty that lies plainly before us, the object 
 for which we must never cease to struggle. If we falter 
 
20 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 through supineness or neglect, or fear of the world's carp- 
 ing criticism, the sceptre of our power and the crown of 
 our prosperity will depart from us forever. 
 
 We shall not struggle without aid. Good men every- 
 where will aid us. The inventions in mechanical arts, 
 more and more requiring skill in their use and uniting the 
 labor of brain and hand, will aid us. Labor-saving ma- 
 chinery, year by year bringing what was the monopoly of 
 the rich within the reach of the poor, will aid us. A cheap 
 press, sending its streams of literature by every man's 
 door, will aid us. The growing, expanding, resistless im- 
 pulse of the popular heart is with us. And God's immu- 
 table laws, swaying from the heavens to the tides of 
 humanity on the earth, will aid us in this sacred work. 
 
 We cannot all attain the gift or the curse of riches — the 
 golden privileges, or gilded chains of wealth. But in the 
 charmed circle where we meet, want must never come, — 
 the fear of it must be banished. There must be diffused 
 round all the healthful atmosphere of conscious indepen- 
 dence. Associated together, we can have schools, libraries, 
 and cabinets of art. Meeting together frequently, we 
 can cultivate the social affections and amenities of life by 
 a closer acquaintance and companionship with each other. 
 Surrounded by symbols, and listening to the teachings of 
 the good, we can keep alive in our hearts the sense of the 
 beautiful and reverence for the true. True to ourselves 
 and each other, we can taste the joys that wealth cannot 
 give or take away, which flow from disinterested friendship. 
 
 Oh ! in this toiling age — when Gold is king, when Com- 
 merce makes the law — when Trade has everywhere her 
 marts, and Mammon builds his temples to the skies, — oh ! 
 build one altar to Friendship. Kindle upon it the sacred 
 flame that always grows brighter as the night grows 
 darker ; that, pure in the sunlight of prosperity, in the 
 darkness of adversity is holy. May that flame shed its 
 light around the pathway of you all, and beam its soft 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 21 
 
 -effulgence on your pillow, when flesh and spirit part, and 
 the eye closes on earth's scenes forever ! 
 
 Shall the bright ideal of human brotherhood, imper- 
 fectly typified and faintly revealed in the associations 
 of the past and the present, ever be fully realized ? Shall 
 the spirit of fraternity, as yet veiled and dimly made 
 manifest, ever shine forth in the imperishable glory of its 
 nature ? All races preserve the tradition of a golden age, 
 when there was no law but honor, no rule but love. Is it 
 a dream of the past, or prophecy of the future ? Shall it 
 ever return, will it ever be fulfilled ? 
 
 I have spoken of the State, of civil government, as the 
 most august form in which the spirit of fraternity has yet 
 revealed itself. I am aware there is a pernicious philoso- 
 phy, which teaches that the natural condition of man is 
 one of warfare against his fellow-man. That men, fearing 
 each other, met together and each agreed to yield a por- 
 tion of his natural rights, that he might obtain protection 
 against the savage propensities of his neighbors. And 
 this is the doctrine of the law writers. The theory is 
 absurd, as the assumption is false. In truth, man is 
 created for society. It is his normal condition. The in- 
 stincts of his nature demand it, and government is the 
 necessary result of the structure of his being. 
 
 Nor is this instinct confined to man. The birds of the air 
 live in flocks. Is it not settled in council when the cranes 
 and wild pigeons go south ? The bees have their queen ; 
 and where among men has royalty greater respect, or higher 
 prerogative? The ants have their colonies, and where 
 is the theory of the division of labor better illustrated? 
 Wild horses and buffaloes live in herds and have their 
 leaders, and beavers and prairie dogs have their villages. 
 
 But with man, society is something more than instinct, 
 government something higher tnan a necessity. In all 
 governments, however fallen, there is still present the idea 
 of the government of the Most High ; and in all law there 
 
22 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 is the reflection, dim, distorted it may be, still the reflec- 
 tion of that eternal, harmonious unchanging law, by which 
 He governs and keeps in order the universe He rules. 
 Thus in early forms, governments always claim to be es- 
 tablished by divine will, and laws arrogate the sanction of 
 revelation. And still, and always there is an invisible, 
 indescribable power in the idea of law. Impalpable as 
 light, it is strong as a barrier of steel. It does not restrain 
 so much by the fear of its penalties as by the mysterious 
 power with which it is clothed — clothed because it is the 
 out-giving of the State and in the State there is something 
 divine. 
 
 Oh ! shall the State ever truly reflect the image of the 
 divine government, and justify the love we all lavish 
 upon the country of our birth, wherever and whatever it 
 may be ? 
 
 Let us, my brothers, make our Association a model 
 republic. No conflict of interest, no jarring of discord — 
 each member moving in his appropriate sphere to the 
 accomplishment of his appointed purpose. Laws founded 
 upon justice, administered in love. Harmonious within, 
 active without, let our existence become a living reality in 
 the nineteenth century. 
 
 In the army of Thebes there was a legion called The 
 Faithful, all the soldiers of which had sworn eternal con- 
 stancy to each other. No man was admitted to their 
 ranks save his life had been pure and his courage tried. 
 Their charge had always been the signal of victory, but at 
 last, in a disastrous battle, they all fell — each man dying 
 at the post of his duty, preferring death to defeat ! 
 
 In the battle of life, brothers, be ye like the Legion of 
 The Faithful — friends to each other, true to the cause. 
 It is right — it is honorable — it is blessed, to strengthen 
 the weak, to bind up the wounded, to bury the dead ; but 
 it is glorious, unspeakably glorious, to keep the flag flying 
 and to conquer in the fight ! 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 23 
 
 ORATION 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE CITY OF STOCKTON, CAL., JULY 4, 1860. 
 
 We have met together in the golden sunhght of this 
 midsummer day, in this bright land where the air breathes 
 softest and the sun shines fairest — almost in hearing- of 
 the dashing of the Pacific, and in sight of the white out- 
 line of the Sierra Nevada — we, children of the fathers of 
 the Republic, Americans by birth and adoption, Califor- 
 nians from choice, and freemen by the grace of the ever- 
 living God, to join with each other in the celebration of 
 our Nation's Jubilee and one of the World's Festivals of 
 Freedom. 
 
 Apart from the associations that make this day sublime 
 in all the annals of time, connecting it with events more 
 important to humanity than any that have ever trans- 
 pired, except the birth, the life, the sufferings and death 
 of Him who expired upon Calvary — apart from the 
 deathless declarations, heroic achievements, and the 
 Martyr's blood, that have separated this day from all 
 others in the calendar, and emblazoned it in history — 
 apart from all this, it is endeared to all of our hearts and 
 memories by our own personal recollections and ex- 
 periences. How often in the days that are gone, in our 
 old homes, amid the scenes of our birth and childhood, 
 have we joined in festivities like this with the old friends 
 and neighbors, now far distant or long dead ! How brightly 
 rose the sun upon this day in the season of our boyhood ! 
 How our hearts then swelled beneath the rustling flag — 
 how our spirits rose to ecstasy at the sound of the ringing 
 bells and roaring cannon — how our pulses thrilled under 
 the piercing fife and clamorous drum, the music that led 
 the old Continentals to victory and to death ! With 
 what reverent eyes we gazed upon the little band of gray- 
 haired revolutionary soldiers that led the long procession 
 — those bending forms, who in the days of stalwart youth 
 
24 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 had taken sharp aim with Morgan, had hid in swamp 
 and fought from ambush with Marion, had scaled the 
 desperate rampart with old Mad Antony, had charged at 
 Princeton, or had suffered under the eye of the Great 
 Chief at Valley Forge ! 
 
 Alas ! where now is the grand army of American free- 
 dom, the hosts that fought and bled and suffered for the 
 privileges we enjoy and forget ? In all our land to-day, 
 of the Army of the Revolution but a few scores are left. 
 Wonderful men ! To them it has been given to watch the 
 growth of an empire, to see the star of its destiny travel 
 westward from the Mississippi to the Pacific, its popula- 
 tion increase from three to thirty millions, its component 
 parts from thirteen to thirty-three States. They have 
 seen three generations pass over the globe. They were 
 contemporaries with Mirabeau and Danton, Marat and 
 Robespierre. They heard the first news of the young 
 French officer. Napoleon Bonaparte, at Marengo, and saw 
 that daring spirit climbing the heights of ambition and 
 grasping at the sceptre of universal empire, to die at last 
 in his sea-girt isle — Prometheus chained to the rock ! 
 And they have seen his house remount the throne, and 
 all Europe tremble at the very name of that banished dust. 
 They have known four monarchs on the British throne. 
 They have seen the dominion of the western world glide 
 from the nerveless hands of Spain — Poland blotted from 
 the map — Russia, from the clouds of semi-barbarism, 
 looming up into the grand proportions of the coming 
 power of Europe. They can remember Fulton and the 
 first steamboat. They were old men when the railroad 
 was invented ; and in their boyhood, steam was first 
 known as a practical mechanical force. What a great arc 
 of history do their lives take in ! They have celebrated 
 the day when the death of Washington hung over the 
 nation like a pall — when their hearts were rejoiced by 
 Perry's victory, saddened by the fall of Lawrence, and 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 25 
 
 exultant in the thought of Jackson at New Orleans. 
 With us they have turned over the pages of history made 
 memorable by Palo Alto, Monterey, Buena Vista, Cerro 
 Gordo, Cherubusco, and Mexico. They have seen the 
 triumviri grow up from striplings, to wrestle like giants 
 for the palm of intellect, making the names of Calhoun, 
 Clay, and Webster clasjsic throughout the world, then go 
 to rest in the long and dreamless sleep that awaits us all. 
 They have seen all this, event upon event, change on 
 change, the experiences of a thousand years crowded into 
 history since they were born, and still they linger among 
 us here and there — precious living mementos of the past. 
 Not much longer will the earth hold them. The sands 
 of their lives are wasting very fast ; and soon, very soon, 
 the last survivor shall come up on this day to his coun- 
 try's altar — gone the leader's voice, the comrade's arm, 
 the chieftain's towering form ! Alone with another race 
 of men, then shall his spirit mount on wings of love to 
 join the hosts above ! Oh, as he rises, may the mantle of 
 purity from their generation fall upon ours ! Oh, may he 
 bear aloft the tidings that our country is still by dishonor 
 untouched, from treason free ! 
 
 I desire to discuss briefly and succinctly, if I am able, 
 the leading features of American polity — tJie leading 
 features of American polity — American polity as contra- 
 distinguished from European. 
 
 The subject is a broad one, too broad and exhaustless 
 for the limits of a single address. The subject is a grand 
 one, too grand to demand the flowers of ornament and 
 finish of rhetoric. Would that I could present it in its 
 simple grandeur, its plain and unadorned magnificence, 
 its sublime simplicity. The subject is a glorious one — 
 full of pride to the American, full of interest to the 
 scholar, full of love to the patriot. Oh, may it continue 
 a just source of pride, of interest, and of love, till the last 
 syllable of recorded time ! 
 
26 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 It is the theory of European politics that all popular 
 rights are concessions from the throne. The American 
 theory is that all powers of the government are conces- 
 sions from the people. The one deduces from above, the 
 other builds from beneath. The one goes to Magna 
 Charta and kingly promises for its tenure, the other to 
 inalienable birthrights for its foundation. Each is con- 
 sistent with itself. The European system proposes, for 
 its great object, social order ; implicit obedience to author- 
 ity, and religious respect for what it terms vested rights. 
 The American holds, for its supreme good, the develop- 
 ment of the individual ; the fullest unfolding of his best 
 nature in the exercise of his highest powers and capacities. 
 In Europe the government assumes to be a higher power, 
 endowed with superior wisdom to guide and control the 
 masses ; in America, the masses give form and character 
 to the government. The European seeks the order of the 
 people through the power of the nation ; the American 
 seeks national power through the strength of the people. 
 With the European, the State is the great object of solici- 
 tude ; with the American, the man. 
 
 Both of these ideas are fully represented on the stage 
 of human affairs, and the pages of future history are to be 
 filled with their conflicts and triumphs. Which is the 
 true theory ? Which is the most consistent with the 
 peace and progress of humanity ? These are questions 
 to be calmly asked and dispassionately answered. Let 
 us seek for a solution, if possible, in past experience and 
 philosophy. 
 
 Government is a necessity of our nature. It is an in- 
 stinct — the same that causes birds to live in flocks, wild 
 animals in herds ; that gives the bees their queens, and 
 the ants their colonies. In every condition of society 
 men organize into governments as inevitably as minerals 
 tend to crystallize, or the pine assumes its shape. Savage 
 tribes, sailors shipwrecked upon uninhabited islands, cara- 
 
OR A TIONS AND ADDRESSES. 27 
 
 vans upon the desert, companies of emigrants crossing the 
 plains, silver-hunters in Washoe, Mormons in Utah, — all 
 recognize some species of authority and law. So universal 
 is this prompting of our nature, so strong this necessity 
 of our being, that if it were possible to collect together 
 the abandoned and the vile, the inmates of our jails and 
 penitentiaries, the murderers, felons, and outcasts of society, 
 and banish them all to some inhospitable and unvisited 
 land, they would erect among themselves some system of 
 government and adopt some code of law. 
 
 Forms of government are the growth of time. Phi- 
 losophers, statesmen, and theorists may speculate, reason, 
 and dream ; but history and experience only build institu- 
 tions. Among savage tribes, government always assumes 
 the form of a military chieftaincy. In that rude state of 
 society, property has little necessity for protection by 
 law — its forms are too simple. The bow and arrow, skins 
 of the panther and bear, the store of dried venison and 
 acorns, the canoe and the wigwam, are not held by titles 
 of parchment, but by possession, defended when neces- 
 sary by force. There, too, individual wrongs are left to 
 the redress of the wild justice of personal revenge. But 
 the necessity for thorough organization in the wars with 
 neighboring tribes, requires a government that gives bold- 
 ness, quickness, unity, and decision in action, and that 
 form is — a military despotism. There, also, the rites and 
 ceremonies of religious superstition are invoked to give 
 sacredness to the person of the leader and sanction to his 
 will; and the "medicine-man," the prophet, is associated 
 with him in authority, sometimes represented in his own 
 person, the chief being priest as well as king. As the 
 tribe increases in power, and successful forays and 
 military incursions are made upon neighboring people, 
 the chief divides the conquered hunting grounds among 
 his leading warriors, and these become a kind of savage 
 aristocracy — a privileged rank. 
 
-28 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 In this rude outline of savage government you may see 
 distinctly traced the lineaments of the proudest monarchies 
 of Christian, civilized Europe. What is Alexander of 
 Russia, at his coronation in Moscow, surrounded by the 
 nobility of his Court, in the presence of Tartar tribes and 
 unnumbered hosts of subjects from every part of his great 
 empire — in all the blaze of wealth, the splendor of regal 
 magnificence, the pomp of religious ceremony, and display 
 of military enthusiasm, mounting the throne of his fathers 
 and claiming, by the will of God, to be the head of the 
 empire and the church — what is he, but on a grander 
 scale, the savage chief who is the leader of his tribe, and 
 the only recognized interpreter between his people and 
 the Great Spirit they worship ? And what are the nobility 
 of England — the world's proudest and best aristocracy — 
 with their princely revenues and estates, their munificent 
 liberality, their scholastic cultivation, and refined taste — 
 what are these but the civilized representatives of the 
 rude warriors of the forest, who are privileged, above their 
 tribe, to sit around the council fires of their chiefs? Why, 
 the very name king is derived from the Tartar khan ; and 
 the titles of nobility — duke, earl, count, baron — can be 
 directly traced to a half-barbarous period of history. All 
 kingly government is a compromise between the civiliza- 
 tion of the present and the barbarism of the past age ; 
 and the fact that monarchical institutions still endure 
 among enlightened people, only shows how power and 
 authority intrench themselves in custom, and survive the 
 necessity that called them into being. Because these in- 
 stitutions are anachronisms, not in unison with the spirit 
 of the age, wherever they now exist there is an implied 
 antagonism between the government and the people. 
 Even in England — the freest, noblest, most powerful king- 
 dom in the world — the people themselves, loyal as they are, 
 express this fact in the very name they give themselves. 
 They are not citizens, but subjects — retaining, thus, the 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 29 
 
 badge of old servitude to power and present vassalage to 
 tradition — while on the continent every throne is girt 
 round with bayonets, until Europe swarms with more than 
 three million soldiers. Think of that ! Three millions of 
 men, taken from the sweets of home and the delights of 
 their families, to enforce kingly prerogative ! Three mil- 
 lions of armed men, draining the life-blood of industry, 
 to enforce social order ! And what kind of an order is it, 
 when the powers that be tremble at the falling leaf, and 
 when a whisper may bring down the avalanche ! What 
 kind of an order is it, when the sovereign of France, the 
 most sagacious man of Europe, the wisest of rulers, a 
 man inheriting genius, and disciplined in adversity to 
 hold with equal hand the reins of power, claiming to un- 
 derstand the spirit of his age and " the logic of events," — 
 when he signalizes his elevation to the throne by the ban- 
 ishment of two thousand men for political sentiments, 
 and maintains his position by a network of espionage 
 that keeps spies upon every household — by corrupting 
 public opinion, proscribing free speech, and manacling the 
 press ? What kind of order, when the peace of a conti- 
 nent, almost of the civilized world, hangs upon the life of 
 a single man ? Why, suppose for an instant, that the 
 attack of Orsini upon the life of Louis Napoleon had 
 been successful, where would have been the arm strong 
 enough to maintain the stability of European affairs ? 
 Or, if to-day the Emperor of the French should fall, as 
 he may fall, by the poignard of the assassin, or visitation 
 of sudden disease, who can predict the lawless violence, 
 the scenes of anarchy and devastation that would ensue ? 
 Who fails to see that to-day all Europe is upon a mine 
 that a moment may explode ? How softly they move ! — 
 what skill of diplomacy ! — what nice handling of the bal- 
 ance of power ! Austria decayed, bankrupt, an incubus 
 upon human rights, is to be maintained intact as a poise 
 to the pov/er of France. Austria must hold Hungary 
 
30 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 and Venice as a bulwark against revolution. England 
 mu^t increase taxation, strengthen her coast defences, and 
 probably resort to the press-gang to fill her navy, because 
 France has an army of five hundred thousand men. 
 Prussia must be ready for war, because Napoleon has an- 
 nexed Savoy. Spain stirs the old embers of her military 
 enthusiasm, in hope of a league of the Latin races ; while 
 Russia, the grim old giant in the icy fastness of the 
 North, consolidates his power, and everywhere maintains 
 the iron rule of military discipline, waiting for the auspi- 
 cious moment when the secret hatred of England and 
 France shall flash into open rupture, and he can take up 
 his capital at the long coveted Golden Horn ! 
 
 Yet tell me, what cause of quarrel have the people and 
 races of Europe ? What difference of interest is there 
 between the people of Sardinia and Austria ? What 
 advantage is it to the ten million Germans of Aus- 
 tria that nine million Hungarians and three million Ital- 
 ians should be held subjects to the crown of Hapsburg? 
 How many English homes will be blessed by a continen- 
 tal war? How much happier will the Russian people be 
 when their Czar shall issue his edicts from the Darda- 
 nelles ? None, none, none ! No, the evils that afflict and 
 the terrors that menace the welfare of Europe arise from 
 the policy and structure of government — a policy and 
 structure not the expression of enlightened sentiment, 
 but the tradition and relic of old barbarism. 
 
 What a commentary it is upon monarchical govern- 
 ment, when the royal house of England is afiflicted with 
 hereditary insanity — and when it has been said that the 
 Queen is kept moving from Buckingham to Osborne, and 
 from Osborne to Windsor, and from Windsor to Scot- 
 land, to suppress the symptoms of that terrible malady, 
 whose seeds nature planted in her constitution, and which 
 a future King may inherit with his crown ! What a com- 
 mentary it is when the English Court put on mourning 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 3 1 
 
 ■for the death of the King of Naples, a monster who made 
 his whole kingdom a land of pillage and house of woe 
 and upon whom nature set the seal of her hatred in the 
 loathsome disease of which he died ; when Victoria her- 
 self, a model as she is of private and domestic excellence, 
 is still proud to trace her royal lineage from the Italian 
 house of Este — a house that has filled more thrones than 
 the Caesars, and whose most celebrated members were the 
 poisoners Alexander, Caesar, and Lucretia Borgia ! What 
 a commentary it is, when the King of Prussia lapses not 
 into the kingly madness of a Lear, but into helpless, 
 hopeless imbecility and blear-eyed idiocy ! What a terri- 
 ble commentary it is, when the young King of Naples, of 
 the family of the Bourbons, the most royal house in 
 Europe, can take off the blessing of nature from the fair 
 fields of Italy and blast them with the curse of royalty, 
 when his prisons are filled with the noblest of his subjects, 
 when no calling is so high as to be above his hatred, no 
 pursuit so humble to be beneath his oppression ! 
 
 Thanks be to Him the recoil has come ; and while we 
 are rejoicing in our freedom, let us not forget that the 
 gallant Garibaldi and his bold compatriots to-day are 
 struggHng for Italy. May the God of battles, who gave 
 our fathers victory, smile upon their banners and bless 
 their arms with success ! While the kings and rulers of 
 Europe are parcelling their dominions, and weighing their 
 prerogatives, and balancing their powers, may the unseen 
 spirit of the people make itself felt in majesty and in awe! 
 Its time must come ; it may sleep through the ages, but 
 it cannot die. There are agencies strong enough to re- 
 press the flames of ^tna and Vesuvius ! Then beware 
 the earthquake ! Tyranny, oppression, tradition may 
 restrain the uprising of popular power, but it bides its 
 time. It waits with gathering strength — it comes at last, 
 stronger than the outbursting tempest, stronger than up- 
 bursting volcano, stronger than all things save the roused 
 
32 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 wrath of GOD ; and institutions, gray with antiquity, go 
 down before it, as the oak of a thousand years is scathed 
 by the hghtning, or the city that centuries have built is 
 swallowed by the earthquake. 
 
 Happy is the land, blest is that people, where this spirit 
 is not restrained by force until it bursts its way in terror; 
 where its influences are life-giving like the air of spring, 
 not devastating like the storm ; where individual thought 
 and action are free, and government the spontaneous re- 
 sult of free thought : And that is the theory of American 
 politics. Develop manhood in the individuals, and let 
 government be the reflection, the embodimeut, the incar- 
 nation of the spirit of the mass. 
 
 " The world is governed too much." " That govern- 
 ment is best which governs least." It is the business of 
 government to punish crimes and conduct the business 
 necessarily incident to political organization, and let 
 social order be the result of individual worth. We have 
 no union of church and state, for the spheres of their 
 duties are distinct, and both are better, and one is holier, 
 when they do not lean on each other for support. We 
 have no standing armies, for the government needs none 
 to enforce her laws at home ; and we know that in danger 
 from abroad, the call of our country will rally from moun- 
 tain and dale, from valley and hillside, millions of citizens 
 — soldiers, who for her sake will go to their graves as joy- 
 ously as e'er a bridegroom went to the chamber of his love, 
 and pour out their life's blood in her defence freely — freely 
 as I give these words unto the air, feeling in their heart 
 of hearts, dulci, diilci, patria inori. 
 
 We have no entangling alliances, no fears of unsettling 
 the balance of power, for its foundations are broad as 
 popular right. 
 
 " No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, 
 But the whole boundless continent is ours." 
 
OR A TIONS AND ADDRESSES. 33 
 
 I know we have political broils, disgraceful scenes in Con- 
 gress, threats of dissolution and dismemberment ; even 
 these are better than the dead-sea calm of despotism. 
 They are but foam upon the waves — they will pass away 
 with the hour. The people everywhere are true. All 
 over the land, millions of patriotic pulses keep time with 
 the great national heart that is throbbing beneath the 
 framework of the government, Oh, may it throb while 
 the sun stands and the earth rolls, and may its last pulsa- 
 tion mark the moment when time and eternity are lost in 
 the being of GOD ! 
 
 It must be true that free institutions are the natural 
 expression of humanity in its best estate. It must be that 
 free homes, unrestricted property, wealth passing from 
 hand to hand, are better things than the feudal possessions 
 and lordly privileges of a Metternich, a Westminster, and 
 a Derby. It must be that the diffusion of knowledge, 
 popular intelligence and free thought, are more to be de- 
 sired even than the congregated learning of a Gottingen, 
 a Cambridge, and an Oxford — that a church, faithful only 
 to its God, is holier than a church loyal to the state — that 
 a free people, under their own vines and fig-trees, pros- 
 perous and happy, is a grander sight and more pleasing 
 to the eye of Omnipotence, than the genius of a Shake- 
 speare, a Voltaire, and a Goethe. I know that sometimes 
 the popular spirit flashes out as a consuming fire ; that in 
 popular governments there is sometimes disregard of law ; 
 that there are crimes by mobs ; that vested rights, the 
 sacredness of property, and yet greater sacredness of per- 
 son, have been violated by popular fury ; but if all these 
 were collected together, they would not fill pages, where 
 monarchical oppression has written volumes in blood. I 
 know there are some good men who despair of the Re- 
 public, and some wise men who hold there is a levelling 
 tendency in democratic institutions that destroys the 
 highest order of intellect : that in a republic, public opin- 
 
 3 
 
34 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 ion becomes a tyrant over individual thought ; and they say 
 the American mind is unequal to the production of a work 
 of genius. But they have not judged us aright. They 
 have been looking for free thought to flow in the channels 
 custom has hewn through the centuries, and its course has 
 been like the sweeping current of the river, through devi- 
 ous winding, over plunging cataract and foaming rapids. 
 They have expected us to write books — we have been 
 building States. They have expected us to paint Trans- 
 figurations and Madonnas — we have subdued the wilder- 
 ness. They have been waiting for an Iliad or Paradise 
 Lost — we have extemporized an empire on the Pacific. 
 They have looked for a beautiful development of mind, 
 like the blossoming tree under the pruning hand of the 
 gardener — and we have been growing up like the pine of 
 the mountains or gnarled oak of the forest, that, nurtured 
 only by the elements, pierce the earth with their roots and 
 twine them among the rock, to fling out their arms to the 
 thunder and breast the storms of a thousand years. 
 
 But nature is wiser than men. Men looked for a Saviour 
 to come in clouds of glory — He came in the manger. They 
 sought for highest truth in the teachings of star-eyed 
 philosophy — it came in the lives of the poor fishermen of 
 Galilee. They expected the blessings of progress and 
 refinement from the productions of the fine arts, the 
 vaulted temple, the speaking marble and painting, elo- 
 quent with beauty — it came in the works of the brawny- 
 armed inventors in mechanics. 
 
 Nature everywhere teaches democracy ; and political 
 truth is not the coinage of the brain of genius, nor the 
 discovery of courts and senates, but the outspoken instinct 
 of the popular heart. In all history, that voice has sought 
 to be heard. Wise men, confiding in the devices of their 
 own hearts, have disregarded it. In the conflicts of the 
 ages it has been lost ; but it rang out trumpet-toned in 
 glorious 'Seventy-six. 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 35 
 
 It is a narrow view of history to suppose that the 
 American Revolution began at the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence and was finished at the close of the war. It was, 
 it is, the struggling for fuller utterance of ideas that are 
 as old as the first battle-fields of freedom ; and it will not 
 be complete while there is one battle for freedom to be 
 fought on tented field or in the resounding senate. 
 Wherever genius has spoken, or a martyr died, or a 
 soldier triumphed for political truth, there has been its 
 prophet, its victim, and its hero. Here it received its 
 baptismal name and strongest impulse. It is a current in 
 human affairs that will widen and deepen and strengthen 
 in future history. You and I, and all of us, are actors in 
 it, and its future triumphs may not be less glorious than 
 its past achievements. 
 
 If there be one here whose life shall stretch as far into 
 the future as does that of the soldier of 'Seventy-six into 
 the past, what a country will he behold in ours if we, the 
 men of to-day, are true to ourselves and the teachings of 
 our fathers. The dream of the first Napoleon, to con- 
 solidate all Europe into one empire, will be eclipsed in the 
 destiny of the " Imperial Republic," containing wider 
 territory and greater elements of wealth, power, and 
 grandeur than all Europe combined. 
 
 It is true that expanse of territory, and powerful 
 nations, are not essential to the birth and nurture of great 
 men. Scotland had her Bruce, Switzerland her Tell. 
 Attica — that made the history of Greece the glory of the 
 world — where Plato lived and Socrates died, Pericles 
 triumphed and -^schylus sang — was not as large as San 
 Joaquin County. But great political principles should be 
 represented by great national powers ; and in the future 
 conflicts of freedom, the victory should be decided by the 
 giant arm of the Republic of the West. Oh ! may that 
 arm be nerved with right, clothed with strength, con- 
 secrated to justice. May each circling sun shine here 
 
36 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 upon a people more free, more powerful, more happy, 
 more blessed — the leader of the nations, the champion of 
 truth, the hope of mankind ! And when at the Last Day 
 the roll of the nations shall be called — when Egypt shall 
 come up in the dusky garments of the night — Greece, 
 radiant in the glory of Intellect — Rome, mailed and pano- 
 plied in Arms — Italy, lustrous in the beauty of Art — 
 Germany, clothed in the starry vesture of Poetry — France, 
 gemmed and jewelled with Philosophy and Science — Eng- 
 land, clad in the majesty of Law and splendor of Com- 
 merce — may America come robed in Truth, sandalled with 
 Peace, girdled with the Stars of Light, and crowned with 
 the Diadem of Freedom ! 
 
 But if we prove ourselves unworthy the priceless heri- 
 tage of freedom ; if we betray the cause we should die to 
 save ; if anarchy and disunion " come down on us like 
 night " ; if that divine abstraction we worship as our 
 country be utterly destroyed — still, somewhere, in the ages 
 to come, through some race, the cause of Freedom must 
 triumph. Jehovah, when He made man in His own 
 image, higher than all governments, nobler than all insti- 
 tutions, pledged His right arm for its support. It is the 
 cause of Right. Circumstances may obscure, but can no 
 more destroy it " than clouds can blot the sun from the 
 universe." Amid the storms of Time, the tempest shock 
 of War, the blinding mists of Error, and darkening clouds 
 of Fate — still from His throne on high He reigns supreme ; 
 and still, in sunshine and in storm, the soul of man glasses 
 His awful for^n ! 
 
 REMARKS 
 
 BEFORE THE UNION CLUB, SACRAMENTO, CAL., MAY, 1861. 
 
 I am always reluctant to respond to a call to make a 
 speech, from a conviction on my part that talking is not 
 my forte. I used once to belong to a club, any member 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. ^^ 
 
 of which, when called upon for a song, if he could not or 
 would not sing, could only make his peace by teUing a 
 story. Perhaps, acting on the same rule, you will accept 
 from me a story in lieu of a speech. But my story will 
 not have even the merit of novelty, for you will all remem- 
 ber having seen it in Noah Webster's spelling-book. It 
 was about an old farmer who, in walking through his 
 orchard, found a rude boy in one of his trees. He ex- 
 postulated with the boy, but he only laughed in return. 
 He then threw tufts of grass at him, but the boy pelted 
 him back with apples ; and, finally, the old man was driven 
 to try what virtue there was in stones, and that brought 
 the young rascal bawling and sprawling to the ground. 
 
 Sirs, it has been our fortune, or rather misfortune, to 
 see that schoolboy fable exemplified upon a giant scale in 
 our day and our country. Our esteemed relative, the 
 venerable Uncle Samuel, walking through his orchard, 
 has found a very rude boy in his apple tree ; and when 
 the old man entreats him to come down, the young devil 
 begins to pelt him with " dornicks " with which his pocket 
 has been filled. I suppose it has been ascertained by this 
 time that that is a game which two can play at, and that 
 there are stones to be received as well as thrown, and I 
 shall be very much mistaken if the result of this contro- 
 versy does not verify the moral of the old fable. 
 
 This coercive policy, as some have been pleased to term 
 it, this policy of force, has not been adopted from choice, 
 nor is it the result of calm deliberation and counsel. It 
 is the inexorable necessity of the hour ; it is the terrible 
 logic of events, that have brought about this bloody 
 sequence. Think of it a moment. What has been done ? 
 Mints have been plundered, arsenals have been seized, 
 forts have been attacked, the flag had been dishonored, 
 and armed bands had threatened the Capital itself. 
 Treason had clutched the Republic by the throat. There 
 was no time for deliberation. The treason must be struck 
 
38 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 down and crushed out, though it should roll back the 
 tide of our material prosperity for a hundred years. Bet- 
 ter, infinitely better, that the national existence should 
 cease — cease as it came, amid the thunders of an honora- 
 ble warfare — than that we should live to become a byword 
 and a reproach, a hissing and a scorn. Why, we have 
 been told by one of the most distinguished citizens of 
 Sacramento, a man whose genius and accomplished intel- 
 lect it is my pride to admire, that if Union is war, and 
 disunion is peace, he is for disunion, and, I apprehend, 
 the argument for disunion was never before so plainly 
 and sententiously stated. But whoever expects disunion 
 to be followed by a permanent and enduring peace, takes 
 counsel of his hopes, and whoever believes the Union is 
 continual war, takes counsel of his fears. 
 
 Disunion ! What is it ? Separation to-day, but to- 
 morrow disintegration into petty States — miserable jarring 
 States, each compelled to keep up its army and navy, 
 thousands of irritating questions between them, leading 
 to continual warfare. The difference between Union and 
 Disunion, as a question of peace and war, is this : With 
 Union, we may have a sharp, severe struggle — while with 
 Disunion, there would never be peace. Union with war 
 is like one of those sharp fevers that the system can throw 
 off and rebuild itself in manly vigor, but Disunion is like 
 one of those maladies that fasten themselves upon the 
 very bones and joints, and leave no moment of ease, but 
 every day a living death. What is it they ask when they 
 talk of disunion ? This is no common treason, no petty 
 conspiracy which, like that of Catiline, can be told in a 
 few pages of history. This is a giant rebellion, the most 
 august treason of all time. What hopes do they ask us 
 to blast ? 
 
 Only last year what a career opened before the Repub- 
 lic. It was the dream of the first Napoleon to consolidate 
 all Europe into one Empire. What a magnificent concep- 
 
ORA TIONS AND ADDRESSES. 39 
 
 tion was that ! But daring and grand as it was, it will be 
 eclipsed and darkened by the glorious destiny of this 
 American Union if only we are true to it and keep it true 
 to the stars. It has a climate more varied, resources more 
 inexhaustible, and a great and intelligent people speaking 
 one language and learned in the lessons of freedom from 
 their infancy. 
 
 Would to God that this Union could have been held 
 together by the moral ties of mutual love, and of common 
 hopes, by the material ties of common interest and com- 
 mercial intercourse. But rather than that this Union 
 should be broken in a moment of passion, let it be girdled 
 with steel welded in the furnace of battle. For I tell you 
 that in time the real union of love and of the ties of 
 interest will grow up again as it was. The war of the 
 rebellion will be long and bloody, for the resources of the 
 South have been wonderfully underrated ; but about the 
 ultimate result there can be no doubt. 
 
 What is it this rebellion is fighting ? It is in arms 
 against the moral sentiments of the civilized world, and 
 against the sound conservative loyal sentiment in their 
 own midst. It wars against the memories of the past 
 and the hopes of the future. It wars against the sturdy 
 patience of the East, the indomitable courage of the 
 North, and the fiery and impetuous valor of the West, 
 and I tell you the result is already written in the books 
 of fate, and Jeff. Davis can no more change it than he can 
 tear out the iron leaves of the book of destiny. 
 
 But there arises a practical question. This war, for war 
 there must be, is fought for us. It is fought for you and 
 for me, and shall we not bear our proportion of the bur- 
 thens? We are the only State really benefited by the 
 war, and may look forward with hope to the increased 
 impetus it is to give to the interests of California. Is it 
 right that we should enjoy these benefits and not share 
 the burthens? What can we do ? If we cannot contribute 
 
40 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 men, and we are so far away that there will be no call on 
 us for men, we can at least give the sinews of war ; we can 
 furnish money. What is it they are giving at the East, 
 and how small a sacrifice comparatively is asked from our 
 hands ? 
 
 Have you not read, and did not your blood kindle 
 while you read, of that young lad who came to the recruit- 
 ing office, and when he said he was not of age, was told 
 that he could not enlist without his father's consent. 
 " But," said the lad, " I have no father." " Well, then," 
 said the officer, " you must have your mother's consent." 
 And the old mother came with him to the office and said, 
 " He is my last, my all, but I give him to my country ! " 
 Have not you read, and was not your heart in your throat 
 while you read, of that young Massachusetts boy who 
 fell in the streets of Baltimore, and while his life was ebb- 
 ing away, he was asked why one so young should leave 
 his home, and could only whisper with dying lips : " The 
 Flag ! " Have you not read, and did not your cheeks 
 crimson while you read, of that other son of Massachu- 
 setts, who, while his life blood was ebbing, sprang up and, 
 gazing around, exclaimed, " God bless the stars and 
 stripes ! " Yes, God bless the stars and stripes ! May 
 they wave in triumph above the smoke of battle and the 
 clash of arms, till they shall again float in peace from the 
 Lakes to the Gulf, and from sea to sea ! 
 
 ORATION 
 
 DELIVERED IN MICHIGAN BLUFF, CAL., JULY 4, 1861. 
 
 The place where we have assembled is eloquent with 
 the voice of Freedom. Liberty is Nature's gospel, and 
 mountains are among the grandest of its teachers.' Moun- 
 tains were consecrated by the presence of God, when He 
 
 ' The celebration was on the top of " Sugar Loaf," an eminence that 
 commands a magnificent view of mountain scenery. 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 4I 
 
 revealed himself to Moses upon Sinai ; they were baptized 
 with the blood of our Saviour when he died upon Calvary. 
 They are associated with the grandest passages of history. 
 In their rocky fastnesses, freedom has ever taken refuge 
 in her weakness, until she could grow strong enough to 
 battle for her rights upon the plains. To-day, before 
 these great altars Nature has built to Liberty, in this 
 favored region that has never known the presence of a 
 King, or footprint of a Slave, we have gathered together, 
 without one pulse of trembling for our country's fate, 
 without one thrill of fear for its destiny, with no fore- 
 boding of eventual danger from lurking lightnings in 
 gathering clouds ; we are not here to celebrate a Nation's 
 Birthday, not to contemplate its grave ! 
 
 But to-day, this Anniversary so dear to our personal 
 recollections, so sacred by national associations, so hal- 
 lowed in all history, comes to us under circumstances of 
 more deep and portentous interest than ever before. 
 
 We have met together in peace. Nature smiles upon 
 us. We are in the midst of our summer harvest. The 
 year is plentiful. Our gardens are blooming, our orchards 
 and vineyards bending with ripening fruit. Our State is 
 growing in population and wealth. We are still laying 
 bare the golden treasures of the mountains, and develop- 
 ing the agricultural riches of the plains — but our hearts 
 are ill at ease. Again " our brethren are in the field. 
 Every breeze that sweeps from the East brings to our 
 ears clash of resounding arms." Armies are mustering, 
 such as the Continent has never known before, — not now 
 to repel foreign invasion, or carry the terrors of the Re- 
 public into unfriendly lands, but sons of the sires who 
 fought at Bunker Hill and Yorktown, at Moultrie and 
 Saratoga, have met in deadly conflict over the torn and 
 bloody garments of the Nation's glory, around the tomb 
 of Washington. 
 
 To-day, while our Capital is an armed camp, the Na- 
 
42 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 tional Congress in convened. Not now to discuss measures 
 of fiscal policy, or foreign relations, or the organization of 
 Territories, but while their halls are draped in mourning 
 for the loss of that popular chieftain, statesman, and 
 patriot, who was called from us in the hour of peril, they 
 are to deliberate upon the awfully solemn question — what 
 shall we do that the Nation may be saved ? 
 
 In the presence of this, all the questions that have 
 arisen in our history since the organization of the Govern- 
 ment sink into comparative insignificance ; even that of 
 our independence, decided eighty-five years ago, was 
 scarcely so important. For the separation of the Ameri- 
 can Colonies from the British Crown, was simply a question 
 of time. By their growth, the Colonies must one day have 
 fallen from the parent stem. The bigotry of an ignorant 
 King, and the want of practical statesmanship in his min- 
 isters, precipitated an event which no wisdom and no 
 statesmanship could have postponed more than one 
 generation. The Colonies were driven to achieve their 
 independence by war, when it might eventually have been 
 attained in peace, but Heaven be praised for that war. 
 It vitalized and intensified the principles upon which it 
 was fraught until they became a part of the blood and 
 brain and living tissue of the Republic. It gave unity 
 to the National life — solidity to the National character ; 
 it gave us the great names and sacred memories of 
 the Revolution, and it gave to all time the name that 
 illumines all the ages with its sun-like purity — the peerless 
 Washington. 
 
 But the question to be decided now, is one neither of 
 time nor manner. It is far above all considerations of 
 peace or war. It is, shall this people have a Constitu- 
 tional Republican Government ? Shall we have an Amer- 
 ican Continental policy ? Shall we go forward in the 
 enjoyment of freedom, or backward toward feudal des- 
 potism ? For if the Government established by our fathers 
 
ORA TIONS AND ADDRESSES. 43 
 
 is to dissolve " like the baseless fabric of a vision " at the 
 first touch of organized resistance — if it can be overthrown 
 at the will and pleasure of a factious minority, then was 
 the Declaration of Independence a mistake — then was the 
 blood of the Revolution shed in vain — then is the Consti- 
 tution a mere Utopian scheme, a piece of rhetorical fine 
 writing, for the business and purposes of Government not 
 worth the parchment on which it is written. 
 
 Let us for a few moments go back to the days when 
 the Constitution was framed — let us see how it brought 
 order out of chaos — strength out of weakness, and we may 
 learn to estimate the wisdom of its provisions, and its 
 priceless value to this people. 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that when the war of the 
 Revolution was over, our fathers had overcome the diffi- 
 culties in their path, and entered at once upon a career of 
 prosperity. 
 
 In the first years of peace, the trying nature of their 
 position more clearly revealed itself than ever before. A 
 war develops within a people a feverish and impulsive 
 strength ; it kindles the fires of martial spirit until the 
 patriotism of the whole country is ablaze with military 
 enthusiasm. While it continues, no individual sacrifice 
 seems too great for the general good. In the presence of 
 an armed foe life and property are held as nothing, and 
 love of country rises to the most sublime and disinterested 
 efforts. Active resistance is easier than passive endurance. 
 And this is as true of individual men as of nations. In 
 the first presence of calamity the soul puts on all its 
 strength ; but after the struggle is over the hour of weak- 
 ness and despondency comes. In cases of loss of fortune 
 or means, when fire has consumed house and goods, when 
 the landslide has filled up the mine, the man arises to 
 acts of heroic energy. His spirit grapples with misfortune, 
 with the determination to conquer it. But, afterwards, 
 when the excitement is over, when the old routine is re- 
 
44 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 sumed, when his loss presses home upon him, when debts 
 harass and duns annoy, when he finds his business 
 crippled and his family stripped of the comforts of life, 
 then, unless he is made of steel, his heartstrings begin to 
 break and his spirits to sink. And it was in a condition 
 like this our country was left when the war of the Revolu- 
 tion closed. Poor at the commencement of the struggle, 
 at its close it was bankrupt. The public expenses of the 
 war were about one hundred and seventy millions of dol- 
 lars — a sum whose value then, compared with the value 
 of money to-day, would be equal to five hundred million 
 dollars. The population of the States was about equal to 
 the present population of the State of New York, and the 
 entire wealth of the country not so great as that of the 
 Empire State now. But the actual public outlay was only 
 a small proportion of the pecuniary losses of the war. 
 Property has been destroyed, business broken up, industry 
 paralyzed, the currency so deranged that forty dollars of 
 Continental paper were only worth one dollar in silver — 
 and this in the face of law, making it a legal tender — 
 while paper issued by the State of Virginia was afterwards 
 redeemed by the payment of one dollar for a thousand. 
 The number of soldiers in the Federal forces in the Revo- 
 lution averaged about fifty thousand men (the same ratio 
 to population to-day would give us an army of five hun- 
 dred thousand), and this was a great drain upon the pro- 
 ductive capacity of the country. The public debts of the 
 General and State Governments when peace was concluded 
 amounted to seventy millions of dollars — a crushing sum 
 to the people upon whom it rested in the hour of their 
 weakness and poverty. The friendly alliance of France, 
 which had been a resource for money as a last resort, was 
 withdrawn. How poor was the Confederacy, then ! Con- 
 gress established a Mint, " but its operations were confined 
 to the coinage of a few tons of copper cents ! Oh ! that 
 the gold fields of California could have been anticipated 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 45 
 
 then ! The whole army was discharged except eighty 
 men in garrison at Pittsburgh and West Point. The ex- 
 penses of the General Government for the year 1783 were 
 estimated at four hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars. 
 In addition to this, for the payment of interest and instal- 
 ment on public debt, about three millions of dollars were 
 asked from the States — in all, about the sum the Govern- 
 ment now expends every month in time of peace. Yet, 
 so weak was the Government and so poor the people, that 
 this demand was not complied with or enforced. 
 
 Great Britain, who had felt our strength in war, saw our 
 weakness in peace, and refused to comply with her treaty 
 and withdraw her garrisons from our frontiers. We had 
 political independence, it is true, but we had scarcely any- 
 thing else. Is it strange that there were repinings and 
 discontents ? Is it wonderful that there were many who 
 looked back to the comparatively affluent days of the 
 Colonies with regret ? The country was in debt to the 
 officers of the army and could not pay. Soldiers who 
 had shed their blood upon her battle-fields found that 
 they must spend the balance of their days amid the hard- 
 ships of poverty, while private fortunes for the most part 
 were in the hands of those who least deserved them — the 
 harpies who had grown rich by army contracts and specu- 
 lations upon their country's distress. But greater perhaps 
 than all these calamities was the disheartening conviction 
 that the Government, as then organized, was a failure. 
 Acts of Congress were mere recommendations to the 
 States, which they could assent to or annul ; there was no 
 binding sanction to laws ; nullification was practical ; 
 secession was threatened ; the public mind seemed to be 
 demoralized. There were schemes about dividing the 
 country into two or three confederacies ; there were specu- 
 lations about the absolute sovereignty of States ; there 
 were propositions to place the country under the protec- 
 tion of a European power ; there were advocates of 
 
46 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 monarchy, and a strong tendency towards total anarchy. 
 The northern counties of North Carolina, in defiance of 
 authority, organized themselves into an insurgent State 
 under the name of Frankland, and an armed rebellion 
 gathered headway in Massachusetts under the leadership 
 of Daniel Shay, a former officer of the Revolution, until 
 it was sympathized with by one third of the population 
 of that State. Its forces intimidated loyal citizens, broke 
 up State courts, and threatened the State capitol. 
 
 The country was aroused to a sense of danger and im- 
 pending dissolution, and it resolved to do then what is 
 the first duty of the Government now — put down armed 
 rebellion by force of arms ; resolved to do then that which 
 we must maintain to-day — establish a National Govern- 
 ment — one whose theory would forbid secession or nulli- 
 fication, whose authority should flow directly from the 
 whole people, and whose laws should operate directly 
 upon all the people ; a Government clothed with the 
 attributes of justice and armed with the prerogatives of 
 sovereignty. A Convention met to frame a Constitution 
 — Washington presided over it, Franklin, Madison, Hamil- 
 ton, Pinckney, Sherman, and the leading men of the 
 States were members of it. No parliamentary body ever 
 met that embodied more political wisdom and practical 
 sagacity. Their deliberations were long and difficult. 
 There were jealousies between the large and small States, 
 between the free and slave States, to be reconciled. States 
 claiming indefinite property in unsettled territories were 
 to be propitiated. National order was to be secured and 
 popular rights protected. The first resolution passed was 
 that we must have a National Government. The first 
 words agreed upon are : 
 
 " We, the People of the United States, hi order to form a 
 more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure Domestic 
 Tranquillity, provide for the Commofi Defence, promote the 
 General Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to our- 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 47 
 
 selves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Con- 
 stitutiojt for the United States of America. '' 
 
 What a grand ring do the old words have ! There is 
 not a flaw of secession in them ! 
 
 And among the last clauses adopted was this : " This 
 Constitution, and the laws of the United States which 
 shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made 
 or which shall be made under authority of the United 
 States, shall be the supreme law of the land, and the 
 Judges of every State shall be bound thereby, anything 
 in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary 
 notwithstanding." The Constitution, as agreed upon, 
 was submitted to the ordeal of public discussion. Every 
 clause was canvassed, every word weighed. It was rati- 
 fied by the vote of the people. It was accepted by every 
 State as the supreme law. Every day since has demon- 
 strated its wisdom. Its history is its eulogy. Under its 
 beneficent operation, a nation distracted at home, scofTed 
 at abroad, in seventy years has overleaped ten centuries 
 of history, and grown to be one of the great powers of 
 the earth, and seems destined to become, in the lifetime 
 of a child now born, in the life of some one who is present 
 here to-day, first among the great — the imperial nation of 
 the world ! And there are men living who can remember 
 when this Government was organized. Why, think of it ! 
 It was one hundred and seventy years from the landing 
 of the Pilgrims until the adoption of the Constitution. In 
 that one hundred and seventy years the country had 
 attained a population of three millions ; its settlements, 
 with difficult communications and restricted intercourse, 
 reaching along the Atlantic seaboard and back to the 
 Alleghanies. It had no foreign commerce worthy the 
 name. In seventy years its population had increased to 
 thirty millions — its settlements span the continent — its 
 commerce searches the world — for internal trade it num- 
 bers more miles of railroad than all the world beside ; and 
 
48 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 soon the lightning will flash intelligence from sea to sea 
 in the twinkling of an eye, and this was to be the fore- 
 runner of one to come after it mightier than it — of those 
 bands of iron that were to girdle the nation with a zone 
 of love, and wed the Atlantic to the Pacific with an indis- 
 soluble marriage-tie ! 
 
 Do you expect to theorize a Government into existence 
 now that shall improve upon these magnificent results? 
 Has the Union proved a failure, that secession must be 
 tried ? It is a part of the blessed history of the Constitu- 
 tion under which we have so prospered, that it has struck 
 down no man's rights, it has infringed upon no man's 
 liberty ; it has impressed no man into its service by land 
 or upon sea ; it has never laid a finger's weight upon any 
 citizen ; it has had no tax-gatherers in our midst to devour 
 our substance ; it has sent out no dreaded conscriptions to 
 carry terror to our homes. We have grown so accustomed 
 to its beneficence that we are as forgetful of its blessings 
 as we are of God's great gifts, the sunshine and the air. 
 We enjoy them without a thought of whence they came, 
 or where our thanks are due. Against a Government so 
 benignant, a sway so mild, when was the hand of rebel- 
 lion ever uplifted before ? History is full of the records 
 of revolutions ; men have been driven to desperation by 
 famine, they have been goaded to resistance by tyranny, 
 they have taken up arms to redress violated rights ; but 
 when before, since the world began, in time of peace and 
 unexampled prosperity, did men undertake to overthrow 
 a government whose burdens were so light that its re- 
 strictions were never felt or thought of — as the perfectly 
 sound man never thinks of the beating of his heart or play 
 of his lungs ? Yet this is the madness and wickedness of 
 the rebellion whose bloody footprints we are called upon 
 to trace to-day — a rebellion whose wickedness and mad- 
 ness are only excelled by its folly. Why, think of it — an 
 Administration is inaugurated whose term of ofifice is for 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 49 
 
 bare four years; it can command a majority in neither 
 house of Congress ; it can pass no law, make no important 
 appointment ; yet, to unseat that Administration, the pil- 
 lars of the Republic are to be grasped and the temple 
 shaken to its foundation — party friends and party foes to 
 be involved alike in common and irretrievable ruin. 
 
 See for one moment how the very suspicion that the 
 Government would not be strong enough to withstand 
 the attack demoralized the public mind, and how close a 
 parallel do the events of '61 draw to those of '']6. Again 
 the propriety of a monarchy and protectorate was dis- 
 cussed ; again States were to be broken in twain ; Southern 
 Indiana and Illinois were to be detached ; Western Vir- 
 ginia and Eastern Tennessee were to go off ; again there 
 were to be two or three or half a dozen confederacies ; New 
 England was to be " left out " ; New York was to become 
 a free and independent city ; there was to be a confederacy 
 of the Mississippi Valley ; there was to be a Pacific Re- 
 public ; — it was as if the sun should hesitate and waver in 
 his attraction and the bewildered planets should lose their 
 orbits. 
 
 How did the first guns that were fired from Fort 
 Sumter awake the nation to a sense of the destiny that 
 was slipping from its hands, and scatter into thin air all 
 these chimeras and speculations? That was an awful 
 moment when those guns were fired — when no man knew 
 whether their reverberations were to roll over the nation's 
 grave or arouse its spirit to a deathless life. That was the 
 crisis in our history. The world stood mute with expec- 
 tation. The popular pulse ceased to beat — the public 
 heart stood still. Humanity and all generations to come 
 awaited the result — then it was to be known whether we 
 had a Government or not. The President's proclamation 
 came. It was greeted with shouts of derisive laughter by 
 Jeff. Davis and his counsellors ; but its words fell like 
 sheets of flame upon loyal spirits. Hundreds of thou- 
 
50 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 sands of men rushed to arms, ready to die in defence of 
 the country and its flag ! They 
 
 " Came as the winds come when forests are rended ; 
 Came as the waves come when navies are stranded ! " 
 
 From that hour the fate of the Republic was safe. The 
 nation that numbers so many devoted sons is not doomed. 
 Whatever are to be the events of the war, the country in 
 its integrity is to be preserved. The meteor flag is not to 
 disappear ; its starry folds are to gleam bright through the 
 conflict ! There is to be an arm still strong enough to 
 carry it first among the great — highest among the proud ! 
 
 I am not insensible to the disasters of war — to the ag- 
 gravated horrors of civil war. Already has the nation 
 experienced a foretaste of its bitterness. Homes are 
 divided, families arrayed against each other ; the curling 
 locks of youth and gray hairs of age have been dabbled 
 in blood ! To-day thousands of anxious hearts are in 
 bleeding suspense for the loved ones who have gone to 
 the war. At this very moment the battle may be raging. 
 We can see in the future burning villages, devastated fields, 
 cities destroyed, commerce broken up ; we can hear the 
 mad imprecation, the shriek of the wounded, the dying 
 groan ! The heart-broken sobs of the mothers will be 
 heard in all the land ; widows will go in mourning through 
 every street ; fathers will be brought down in sorrow to 
 the grave, and sisters and loved ones will watch and wait 
 and wait and watch for the manly forms that will come no 
 more. God, in His infinite mercy, spare us the agonies 
 of a prolonged strife ! 
 
 But, sad and terrible as the picture is, it would be a 
 sight more terrible and awful to humanity to see a nation, 
 freighted with the world's best hopes, silently go to pieces 
 upon the dark sea of time when there was no storm, its 
 timbers falling apart from very rottenness. It would be a 
 spectacle angels might weep to see — the best government 
 ever devised overthrown and no arm raised in its defence 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 51 
 
 — the black flag of treason raised and the star-spangled 
 banner lowered in its presence to trail in the dust before 
 it ! That would indicate that patriotism was dead, that 
 heroic virtue was extinct, that manly courage had deserted 
 the race. Better the land should become a howling wilder- 
 ness, an arid desert — better anything than this moral death 
 which would write our country another Sodom in history 
 — a great Gomorrah in infamy. But the grand uprising 
 we have witnessed, this overflow of patriotism and sublime 
 forgetfulness of self, makes our age a great epoch in all 
 history — links it with ''j6. It proves that the old stock 
 has not deteriorated. There is enough of noble blood in 
 this people to feed the life of a dozen empires for a thou- 
 sand years. There are those who say that a war cannot 
 prevent a separation, that, therefore, it is wicked and cruel 
 on the part of the Government, tending only to inflame 
 and confirm a spirit of hostility and mutual hate. But in 
 this matter the Government has had no choice — it has been 
 compelled to fight, fight for its very existence, or basely 
 abandon every object for which it was established. Besides, 
 the authors of this objection assume the very question in 
 issue. We know the Union cannot now be preserved 
 without force ; we are going to try the experiment whether 
 it can be preserved with force or not. We believe the 
 experiment is worth the trial. We are not without some 
 evidences of the efficacy of the remedy to be employed. 
 Where would Maryland have been to-day but for the dis- 
 play of armed force ? Where would Missouri have been, 
 loyal though the mass of her people are ? Kentucky, God 
 bless her gallant heart, seems loyal to the core, but, with 
 her faithless, covenant-breaking Governor, she is none the 
 worse for being grappled with hooks of steel to Indiana 
 and Ohio. Do you not believe that Virginia might have 
 been preserved if the Government had not trusted her 
 professions of neutrality too long? The appeal to arms 
 was not made by the Government ; but it has been made. 
 The question must be fought out — and God forefend the 
 
52 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 right ! But they tell us — You can never subjugate six 
 milHons of people. Who talks of subjugation? No sane 
 man and loyal citizen. Every part of the confederacy is 
 to be protected in its constitutional enjoyments — absolute 
 equality is everywhere to prevail. No State is to be de- 
 prived of any prerogative, and no citizen of his rights, but 
 all these are to be guaranteed and defended. Subjugation 
 is the variest nightmare dream — preservation is the object 
 of the gathering hosts of freemen ! 
 
 How base would it be to desert Andy Johnson and Par- 
 son Brownlow, and hundreds of thousands of loyal men 
 and women, whose voices are drowned by the clamors of 
 madness, to the tender mercies of a secession mob. Who- 
 ever expects a peaceful separation of this country forgets 
 that " Union is as much the body of the nation as Liberty 
 is its soul." He might as well expect to tear asunder the 
 living body of a man without one shriek of agony, one 
 convulsion of nature. No ! if the limbs part now, they 
 part in blood ! Why, if it were possible to accomplish 
 peaceable separation, the next day would find the sec*:ions 
 at war over the settlement. Is it not better to fight in the 
 Union and for it than out of it and over its dismembered 
 fragments? The Union may cost a sharp and severe 
 struggle, but disunion would be followed by continual 
 wars. Why, look at the policy of Europe, whose states 
 are compelled to maintain great standing armies on account 
 of their mutual hatreds and distrusts. Do you wish to see 
 that policy inaugurated upon the American continent — 
 rival States separated by imaginary lines, ever ready to 
 refer their difificulties to the bloody arbitrament of the 
 sword, instead of the peaceful solution of the ballot ? The 
 question of peace or war is, whether this generation shall 
 fight a good fight in defence of noble institutions or be- 
 queath a hundred fruitless wars to generations to come. 
 Think of Italy ! — with what tears and anguish would she 
 regain her lost union ; what sufferings has she endured ; 
 through what a night of sorrow has she travelled since that 
 
OR A TIONS AND ADDRESSES. 53 
 
 union was lost ; how freely would she pour out her best 
 blood to cement it again. History still weeps over the 
 dismemberment of living Poland. It is pointed at as 
 the crime of nations. The stain of murder is upon the 
 garments of the powers that shared in it. But that was a 
 dismemberment accomplished by invading armies, by an 
 overpowering force, by strangers and foes ; but what name 
 shall history invent for the crime when she tells the story 
 of a nation whose living body was broken and torn in 
 pieces by her own children ? Nations have died from de- 
 crepitude of age, by the violence of foreign wars, by the 
 diseases of all-pervading vice ; but, that a country in the 
 bloom of youth, in whom was centred the best hopes of 
 humanity, should be done to death by the swords of her 
 own sons, would be a tragedy more awful than the world 
 has ever witnessed, save when darkness came at noonday, 
 when the stones were rent, and nature was convulsed over 
 the agony of a dying Saviour ! 
 
 It must not be. This cup must pass from us. Cost 
 what it may, the Union must be preserved. All nations 
 have their trials, let us be thankful that ours has come 
 while the traditions of the Revolution are fresh. The 
 ordeal must be passed. We must come out of this fur- 
 nace without the smell of fire upon our garments. Again 
 we must enter upon a career of prosperity and peace, and 
 may each circling sun shine here upon a people more 
 happy, more powerful, more blessed — the leader of the 
 nations, the hope of the world. 
 
 SPEECH, 
 
 DEBIT AND CREDIT OF THE WAR. 
 DELIVERED AT SACRAMENTO, CAL., AUGUST I4, 1862. 
 
 Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : When De 
 Tocqueville was in the United States — it was about the 
 year 1835 — the political parties of this country were divided 
 
54 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 over the questions of a National Bank and a Protective 
 Tariff. These subjects, which were measures of fiscal 
 policy and did not involve any of the distinctive principles 
 upon which our Government was founded and on which 
 it stood in bold opposition to the traditions of Europe 
 and the world, were yet discussed with a bitterness and 
 rancor that often destroyed personal friendship and de- 
 spoiled the amenities of social life. Indeed it was only a 
 few years before this that Calhoun had threatened to 
 break up the Union and destroy the Government on a 
 mere question of the rate of duties upon imports. It is 
 true that in the discussion he evoked the dogma of State 
 rights, but this was rather a weapon with which he fought, 
 than the principle for which he contended ; for when the 
 compromise was agreed upon by which the tariff was to 
 be reduced gradually to a strictly revenue standard, Cal- 
 houn expressed himself satisfied, and always claimed that 
 he had gained a moral and substantial triumph over the 
 Administration of General Jackson, though cer*-.ainly the 
 doctrine that the States individually have rights superior 
 to the nation at large was never conceded. 
 
 In view of the vehemence of discussion and intensity 
 of feeling about matters that seemed to him so ephemeral 
 and comparatively trivial, De Tocqueville said that he 
 knew not whether he should most pity the violence of 
 party spirit over questions of so little importance, or ad- 
 mire the greatness of a country whose general prosperity 
 afforded questions of no greater importance for parties to 
 quarrel about. 
 
 But even then, in that day of unexampled peace, pros- 
 perity, and growing power, De Tocqueville dreaded the 
 future. The mountain was quiet ; its sides, green, bloom- 
 ing, and beautiful ; its summit white with unsullied snow, 
 but within slumbered volcanic fires — fires that have 
 burst forth in our day in lurid, awful flames. We are far 
 from the immediate eruption, though its thunders shake 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 55 
 
 our shores. We do not see with our eyes the fierce lava 
 tide that sweeps burning and desolating over the land, 
 but even here, when we read the names of our friends 
 fallen in battle, the fiery cinders fall upon living hearts — 
 alas ! how many hearts do they consume to ashes — while 
 the smoke that goes up from its crater night and day fills 
 all the sky with blackness and shrouds the continent with 
 funereal gloom. On that black war-cloud the world to-day 
 is gazing with trembling and with awe. 
 
 It seems strange that in the economy of Providence 
 wars should have been permitted — stranger yet that they 
 should have been made means of human progress. But 
 He who ordained that physical manhood should be at- 
 tained by hard contact with external things — that strength 
 of character must come by struggling with difficulties, and 
 that moral excellence must be the result of a triumph 
 over vice, also ordained that nations must be baptized in 
 the fires of war before they can wear the crown of natural 
 glory. 
 
 Wars, then, have their hopes and their gains, their debits 
 and their credits. The losses fall heaviest upon the im- 
 mediate generations — the greatest gains belong to genera- 
 tions to come — often their ever-increasing heritage. 
 Instance the American Revolution. Who would desire 
 to strike those bloody, glorious chapters from history 
 now ? How infinitely do the gains preponderate over the 
 losses. See the balance-sheet. Debit eight years of war, 
 cruel, merciless, with suffering and hardships unparalleled ; 
 debit thousands of lives, millions of property ; debit 
 homes destroyed, families severed ; debit the cruelties of 
 the cowboys, the murder of innocents, the massacre of 
 Wyoming, the treachery of Arnold, the baseness of Lee ; 
 debit a land steeped to the lips in poverty. Credit 
 American Independence ; credit the Federal Union : 
 credit the Constitution ; credit a material advancement 
 undreamed of before ; credit the inventions in mechanics. 
 
56 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 the discoveries in science, great names in literature ; 
 credit an impulse to civil liberty throughout the world ; 
 credit the idea that while kings and emperors are divid- 
 ing and partitioning Europe, this continent shall belong 
 to the people and they shall possess it forever ; credit 
 Washington, and if the brow of the Revolution had only 
 served to reveal that name in the brightness of its glory 
 — name among all men, and races, and ages, most loved, 
 most honored, most revered, — its blood would not have 
 been shed in vain. 
 
 It is not my purpose to attempt to make a balance- 
 sheet of the losses and gains to humanity of the war of 
 the Rebellion. Neither side of the account is closed. It 
 may be that the historian will not be born for five hun- 
 dred years who will be able to approximate the result. 
 But bearing in mind the fact that the greatest evils of 
 war are immediate, and its best results distant, I desire 
 to call your attention briefly to a part of the losses, and a 
 part of the gains that are already apparent. Among the 
 debits look for one moment at the loss of property. The 
 Secretary of the Treasury estimated the national debt on 
 the first of July at six hundred million dollars — a sum of 
 startling magnitude at first glance. Let us look at it more 
 closely, and compare it with our resources. The national 
 debt of Great Britain is four thousand million dollars, the 
 greater part of it created during her wars with Napoleon. 
 But notwithstanding this immense debt, England has 
 steadily and rapidly increased in wealth and commercial 
 greatness, and that constant growth was not retarded by 
 the fact that for twenty years the Bank of England did 
 not pay specie, and during part of that time gold was at 
 a greater premium in London than it has been in New 
 York since this war began. We have no reason to antici- 
 pate that our national debt will much exceed one quarter 
 of Great Britain's, and though our present actual capital 
 accumulations are less, looking to the future our resources 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 57 
 
 are incomparably more. By the estimates of the last census 
 the population of this country was thirty million ; the 
 value of its property sixteen thousand million dollars. 
 But the child is now living who will see this country a 
 nation of a hundred million people, with a corresponding 
 increase in the value of property; and the national debt, 
 that is now made a monster to fright us from the line of 
 duty, will be absorbed and paid off with far greater ease 
 than was that part of the debt of the Revolution which 
 was acknowledged and paid. Besides, if the Union 
 should be dissolved, the permanent depreciation in prop- 
 erty and business would be greater than any national 
 debt we can incur, and the increased expenses of carrying 
 on two, three, or half a dozen governments, with the 
 standing armies that policy would require, would be far 
 more than all the interest we will ever be called upon to 
 pay. So that looking at the matter purely as a financial 
 question, and solely in the light of dollars and cents, it is 
 and always has been a wise and prudent economy to fight 
 this war to a successful and triumphant issue. The na- 
 tional debt simply represents the amount which the 
 present borrows of the future. 
 
 There is a loss, however, that falls upon this generation 
 — the loss which is created by diverting the energies and 
 labors of a million of men creating value, producing wealth, 
 into consuming and destroying. The armies of the Gov- 
 ernment and the Rebellion, with their camp followers and 
 transport agents, have for the past year averaged a mil- 
 lion of men. In the State of California, by the regula- 
 tions of armies there are about a hundred thousand men 
 capable of bearing arms. It would thus require every 
 able-bodied man in ten States like this to furnish soldiers 
 for the armies of this war. Imagine, then, that all the 
 men in our State should stop all labor or business for a 
 year, and devote the energies before used in creating 
 value, into destroying it ; add together the amount which 
 
58 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 they should have created and the amount they have de- 
 stroyed ; multiply that sum by ten, and you have the 
 actual loss in property to the nation by the war. And you 
 will have some idea of the inexhaustible resources of this 
 country when you reflect that the loyal States bear their 
 portion of this burden every day, without shrinking or 
 staggering for a moment. 
 
 There is nothing that consumes, wastes, and destroys 
 like an army. Look at the desolate fields of Virginia since 
 that has become the battle-ground. If we could take a 
 telescopic bird's-eye view of the whole country to-day, we 
 would see all the channels of industry and business 
 changed by the presence of the great armies in Virginia. 
 Everything in some degree made tributary to them — the 
 products of labor from all over the country sweeping down 
 in great currents to their support. But the property losses 
 of the war are not felt alone in our country. Millions of 
 operatives in England and Europe feel them. There is 
 no spot of inhabitable land where commerce can pene- 
 trate that does not feel this war in the increased prices of 
 fabrics. War is a great maelstrom that draws into its 
 vortex that which is near, and whose eddies and currents 
 disturb the waters of the farthest sea. 
 
 But there is a deeper, tenderer, sadder loss — a loss that 
 figures cannot represent, or the imagination conceive ; the 
 heart can only bleed over it — the loss of precious, noble 
 lives. Perhaps not less than a hundred and fifty thousand 
 lives have been lost in the war since the first gun was fired 
 upon Sumter — more than the entire male adult popula- 
 tion of this State. And such lives ! The brave, the 
 daring, the manly, the self-sacrificing ! One there was 
 whose noble form was in our midst, it seems, but yester- 
 day, — gifted with power to touch the chords of every 
 heart, endowed with magic to open the fountains of 
 laughter or of tears ; whose words could sooth the malig- 
 nity of foes, and lift the minds of friends to regions of 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 59 
 
 serenest thought ; to whom eloquence was but the out- 
 breathing of his soul, — gone now, swept down in the fierce 
 tide of battle ! That wondrous brain, at one moment 
 the home of strange fancies, the next insensate clay ! No 
 more shall his glorious words kindle the enthusiasm of 
 our hearts — no more his eagle eye flash with the hidden 
 fires of the soul — " He sleeps his last sleep, he has fought 
 his last battle ; no sound can wake him to glory again." 
 Nations mourn the fall of the gifted, and history en- 
 shrines their names in her annals ; but the humble, the 
 lowly, though brave and good, have fallen by tens of 
 thousands, not alone on the field of battle and of glory, 
 where there are shoutings of the captains, the thunder 
 of artillery, and all the pomp and pride of war, but in 
 the sickly camp, in the crowded hospital, in the noisome 
 prison, they have died — and they sleep in indiscrimi- 
 nate trenches and in nameless graves, where not even 
 the tears of love can mark their resting-place. Oh, 
 there is mourning in all the land ! There are fathers 
 and mothers the staff of whose declining years is broken 
 — widows who sit with broken hearts beside desolate 
 firesides — and loved ones who will watch and wait and 
 wait and watch for the echoes of footsteps that will 
 come no more. Is there, oh, is there, in all the armory of 
 Infinite wrath, a bolt red enough with Divine vengeance 
 to blast and punish the crime that has inaugurated 
 scenes like these in a land so peaceful and so fair? Is 
 there — can there be anything that will compensate 
 for this sacrifice of the best and bravest in the land ? 
 Not now — but future generations will rise up and call 
 this one blessed, because it gave its most precious blood 
 to preserve a Union that shall lead the vanguard of the 
 nations, and whose hands will scatter blessings in the 
 pathway of humanity for ever and for evermore. The 
 war of the Revolution was fought for Independence — 
 Union was its incident. This is fought for Union, and 
 
6o NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 must cement it forever. It is a war for the Union, 
 and shall baptize it with a like eternity. It is one of the 
 immediate advantages of the war that it has demonstrated 
 the fact of our financial independence. We were told at 
 the commencement of the struggle that foreign purses 
 would be closed — that we had nothing to expect from the 
 Rothschilds, the Barings, the Hopes, the princely bankers 
 of Europe, and it was thought that would compel us to 
 make terms. But the war has been carried on with home 
 means, home credit — the national debt will be paid at 
 home ; and notwithstanding three hundred million dol- 
 lars of exports in cotton and tobacco have been cut off, 
 we have all the time been transferring American stocks and 
 securities from London to New York, and to-day we owe 
 less of a foreign debt than we did when the rebellion com- 
 menced. The world soon will realize that America is far 
 more necessary to the world's commerce than that com- 
 merce is to her. Another immediate credit to the account 
 of the war, is the certainty of the construction of the 
 Pacific Railroad. Congress had for years been endeavor- 
 ing to settle upon some plan that would appease unreason- 
 able prejudices and harmonize conflicting opinions, and 
 the end seemed each year more and more remote. Sud- 
 denly the war demonstrated that the construction of the 
 road was an absolute military necessity — that it was a 
 measure of great national policy — and the work is begun. 
 The Republic reaches out its great arm that it may clasp 
 the Pacific shores close to its heart. There may they 
 grow forever ! It is strange that this work of peace, of 
 beneficence, of industry and commerce should be inaugu- 
 rated amid the havoc and desolations of war. Such are 
 the paradoxes of human affairs. 
 
 The next national benefit to be placed to the credit of 
 the war, is the destruction of the naval superiority of 
 France and the maritime supremacy of Great Britain. 
 England commenced to build her navy when William the 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 6l 
 
 Conqueror established the Cinque Ports more than eight 
 hundred years ago ; and ever since she has devoted to 
 her navy her wealth, her labor, and her skill. It has been 
 her glory and her pride. It was the right arm of her 
 power. It made her name the terror of the nations, and 
 enthroned her as an arbiter of international law. Five 
 years ago she had nine hundred vessels in commis- 
 sion and building. This was the stupendous monument 
 of her energy. With the first gun of the Monitor^ 
 the fabric fell. That was a memorable engagement at 
 Hampton Roads — to be memorable in all history — when 
 the iron-clad Merrimac came down to attack our fleet — 
 when the Minnesota grounded — when the Congress struck 
 — for " Joe was dead " — when the Cumberland sank — sank 
 firing broadsides as the waves broke over her deck — sank 
 with her flag at the masthead and the wounded tars 
 cheering it as they went down in the dark waters forever. 
 It was a fit ending to the history of Paul Jones, of Bain- 
 bridge and Hull, Decatur, Lawrence, and Perry, of 
 Stewart and Porter, and the thousand gallant tars that 
 have made the exploits of our navy a part of the glory of 
 the Republic. She did not sink alone. The Imperial 
 Navy of France, the Royal Navy of Great Britain, sank 
 with her. When that strange-looking craft, that insig- 
 nificant object, came up, seeming to show nothing above 
 the water but a half-finished smoke-stack, looking " like a 
 cheese box on a plank," — when this diminutive thing that 
 the Merrimac might have swallowed, dared to attack the 
 iron monster, then a new era of naval warfare commenced. 
 No longer wooden walls, but iron sides — no longer hearts 
 of oak, but hearts of steel. Britannia rules the waves no 
 more. Columbia is the Gem of the Ocean. 
 
 It is to be placed to the credit of the war that it has re- 
 buked and humiliated a spirit of aristocracy that has grown 
 up in our country, that arrogated to itself superior rights, 
 privileges, and powers, and whose boldly avowed policy it 
 
62 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 was to rule or ruin the Government. How often, in the 
 last twenty-five years, has this power said to the statesmen 
 of the land, " Fall down and worship me or I '11 grind you 
 to powder," and it ground them to powder when they did ! 
 How continually has it stood up in the councils of the na- 
 tion and said, " Give me this, give me that, give all that I 
 ask, or I '11 scatter your Government to the winds." Why, 
 even when California applied for admission as a State, its 
 Representatives said : " If California comes in, it will sub- 
 vert the institutions of the country ; they are ours, and we 
 will destroy them, and drive a burning plowshare over the 
 Union." When that statesman and sainted patriot, Doug- 
 las, said that the people's doctrine of popular sovereignty 
 should not bow to their behests or pander to their wishes, 
 they resolved to stone him to political death. The spirit 
 that brooked no rivals, acknowledged no equals, will lord 
 it no longer. Let me be clearly understood. I believe 
 that the protection of slavery was as much a false pretext 
 for this rebellion as the doctrine of State rights was a mere 
 pretence for the attempt at nullification in 1832. The real 
 object was to retain political power. They said in their 
 hearts they would not have a man of the people to rule 
 over them. This war was inaugurated for the protection 
 of slavery ! Why, in one year it has impaired and weakened 
 that institution more, infinitely more, than all the agitators 
 who have lived since the foundation of the Government. 
 What will be the status of slavery after the war, depends 
 entirely upon the rebellion itself. If it shall ground its 
 arms when its main army is defeated in a pitched battle, 
 every State may preserve her domestic institutions pre- 
 cisely as she pleases. But if the war is to be protracted 
 into an indefinite struggle, until the heart of the Southern 
 States shall become the battle-ground — if guerrilla raids, 
 partisan depredations, and reprisals are to be features of 
 the conflict — if, instead of being concentrated into one 
 burning focus, where the result will be quick and decisive. 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 63 
 
 it is to be scattered and disseminated through the South, 
 these things will unquestionably so demoralize the slaves 
 themselves, render their position so insecure and the 
 products of their labor so uncertain, that this species of 
 property will become valueless and not worth preserving. 
 A long war of that character, the complexion to which the 
 rebel leaders say it will come at last, would ultimately 
 destroy the institution by the force of circumstances, by 
 the inexorable " logic of events," and Presidents and 
 Cabinets, Congress and commanders, would be powerless 
 to control or prevent it. If the rebellion should succeed 
 in its darhng dream of foreign intervention, the first blow 
 struck would be the doom of slavery. Whether, then, 
 that institution is to be retained in the States that desire 
 it, to be destroyed by a slow, consuming war, or to be 
 annihilated by the concussion of this Government with a 
 foreign foe — by standing between giant gladiators as they 
 cross swords upon the arena of the world, — are events en- 
 tirely in the hands of the rebellion itself, and upon its head 
 be the responsibility of the issue. 
 
 But whatever that issue may be, whatever is to become 
 of the institution itself, the decree has gone forth that 
 destroys, and forever, that claim to be a " master-race " — 
 that assumption of superior blood, of aristocratic privilege 
 and lordly power which was its spurious outgrowth, and 
 which is utterly inconsistent with Democratic institutions 
 and an insult to the dignity of human nature. Not alone, 
 not chiefly was that spirit manifested in the halls of na- 
 tional legislation. If there it attempted to play the politi- 
 cal tyrant, at home it was a social despot, trampling the 
 laboring white man into the mire and the clay beneath its 
 feet. Whoever has been in the land of cotton lords has 
 stood in the presence of an aristocracy as proud, imperious, 
 and exclusive as was ever that of Patrician Rome or the 
 Grandees of Old Spain. There to be a " poor white " is 
 to be of pariah caste, with scarcely a hope ever to rise 
 
64 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 above it. Poor whites will learn now, learn in the terrible 
 lessons of battle-fields, that if they are the bones and 
 muscles, the thews and sinews of society, they are also a 
 part of its life-blood, it head, and its heart. How long has 
 it been since a Senator of South Carolina, bold, eloquent, 
 and outspoken, true to the instinct of his nature and the 
 feeHngs of his class, in the United States Senate denounced 
 Northern society as a delusion and a sham, because it 
 assumed to give social position and political influence to 
 laboring men — " to close-fisted farmers and greasy me- 
 chanics," — whereas, in the true theory of society by that 
 oracle, the laboring class constituted mere mudsills upon 
 which to build. 
 
 I thank Heaven there was in the Senate, and that Cali- 
 fornia sent him there, one man who did not forget that he 
 was a man before he was a Senator — who could, in indig- 
 nant and scathing terms, expose and rebuke the falsehood 
 of that doctrine — who could vindicate the dignity of labor, 
 the manliness of simple manhood, and who had the spirit 
 to say that his own father, in the sweat of his brow, was 
 one of the laborers who cut the columns that supported 
 the marble roof of the Senate chamber, and that he, stand- 
 ing there the peer of the highest, was proud to be the son 
 of a poor stone-cutter. He, too, has left us — peace to his 
 memory — lightly lie the earth upon his breast. Child of 
 the people, he was " a born leader," and every inch a king ! 
 And lastly, I place to the credit of this war an awakening 
 of patriotism — the arousing of this people to a great idea 
 of the claims of the country. We had come to be con- 
 sidered a nation of Mammon worshippers, of traffickers and 
 hucksters, physically degenerate, and morally measured by 
 the Almighty dollar. Perhaps there was something of truth 
 in the estimate. Our material prosperity had been so great 
 that we became absorbed in its pursuit, forgetful of great 
 ideas and noblest impulses. We too " were a nation of 
 shopkeepers." The clarion of danger sounded, and a na- 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 65 
 
 tion of heroes sprang to its feet. The uprising of a great 
 people in a good cause is an event that ennobles humanity. 
 The life-and-death struggle of a free people to preserve 
 their country is an event angels might weep and yet exult 
 to see. Where in all history do you find a heroism sur- 
 passing that of Springfield, of Pea Ridge, of Donelson, of 
 Shiloh, of Fair Oaks, and the six days' fighting before 
 Richmond. That heroism defying wounds and death, 
 pouring out its life-blood freely — freely as I give these 
 words unto the open air, — was the inspiration of country. 
 Tavo ideas there are which, above all others, elevate and 
 dignify a race — the idea of God and of country. How 
 imperishable is the idea of country ! How does it live 
 within and ennoble the heart in spite of persecutions and 
 trials, and difificulties and dangers. After two thousand 
 years of wandering, it makes the Jew a sharer in the glory 
 of the prophets, the lawgivers, the warriors, and poets, 
 who lived in the morning of time. How does it toughen 
 every fibre of an Englishman's frame, and imbue the spirit 
 of the Frenchman with Napoleonic enthusiasm. How 
 does the German carry with him even the " old house 
 furniture " of the Rhine, surround himself with the sweet 
 and tender associations of " Fatherland," and wheresoever 
 he may be, the great names of German history shine like 
 stars in the heaven above him. And the Irishman, though 
 the political existence of his country is merged in a king- 
 dom whose rule he may abhor, yet still do the chords of 
 his heart vibrate responsive to the tones of the harp of 
 Erin, and the lowly shamrock is dearer to his soul than 
 the fame-crowning laurel, the love-breathing myrtle, or 
 storm-daring pine. What is our country? Not alone the 
 land and the sea, the lakes and rivers, and valleys and 
 mountains — not alone the people, their customs and laws 
 — not alone the memories of the past, the hopes of the 
 future ; it is something more than all these combined. It 
 is a divine abstraction. You cannot tell what it is — but let 
 
66 NEWTON- BOOTH. 
 
 its flag rustle above your head, you feel its living presence 
 in your hearts. They tell us that our country must die ; 
 that the sun and the stars will look down upon the great 
 Republic no more ; that already the black eagles of des- 
 potism are gathering in our political sky. That even now, 
 kings and emperors are casting lots for the garments of 
 our national glory. It shall not be. Not yet, not yet 
 shall the nations lay the bleeding corpse of our country in 
 the tomb. If they could, angels could roll the stone from 
 the mouth of the sepulchre. It would burst the casements 
 of the grave and come forth a living presence, " redeemed, 
 regenerated, disenthralled." Not yet, not yet shall the 
 Republic die. The heavens are not darkened, the stones 
 are not rent ! It shall live — it shall live the incarnation 
 of freedom, it shall live the embodiment of the power and 
 majesty of the people. Baptized anew, it shall stand a 
 thousand years to come, the Colossus of the nations — its 
 feet upon the continents, its sceptre over the seas, its 
 forehead among the stars ! 
 
 ORATION 
 
 AT COMMENCEMENT OF THE COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA. 
 DELIVERED AT OAKLAND, CAL. , JUNE I, 1 864. 
 
 We are assembled as fellow-citizens of the republic of 
 letters — of the commonwealth of mind — of that realm of 
 thought where revolutions leave no track of desolation, 
 battles no ensanguined fields, and where the bays that crown 
 the victors are not wet with tears or stained with blood. 
 
 The natural surroundings are beautiful and appropriate. 
 These are the groves of the Academy ; yonder Olympus 
 lifts its summit to the clouds ; here the sea that laves the 
 Hesperian gardens rolls its peaceful waters to our feet. 
 
 The occasion is auspicious. One of the earliest institu- 
 tions of learning in our State, having passed the trials and 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 6/ 
 
 difficulties of organization, having attained a position of 
 permanent and wide-extended usefulness, invites us to 
 join in the celebration of her annual intellectual fete. Let 
 the day be marked with white in our literary calendars. 
 All honor to the College of California. How many thou- 
 sands of incorporations have been formed here to develop 
 the material resources of our coast, to enrich the fortunate 
 holders of their stocks. How have they strewn the shores 
 of our history with wrecked hopes and expectations. But 
 this one, formed to develop the immaterial — the imperish- 
 able wealth of the soul — has kept her eye fixed upon her 
 star, her course true to her mission, her garments free 
 from taint. To-day she sends into the world her first 
 disciples, duly accredited and bearing her commission, to 
 take their places in the warfare of life. Advance-guard of 
 the California division of learning, pioneer-corps of the 
 battalions of hero-scholars that shall follow them from 
 these gates, may they fight a good fight — loyal to country, 
 to freedom, to truth — and every year may each of them 
 bring back from the contest some chaplet of victory, well 
 won and worthily worn, to lay at the feet of his Alma 
 Mater, knowing that she will keep them all green, fresh, 
 fragrant, and fadeless in her love ; and when he is gone, 
 when the work given him on earth has been done, place 
 them, immortelles of fame, upon his grave. May the lives 
 of her children reflect glory upon her, and when they are 
 dead may she still live, the heir of their honors and 
 guardian of their names. 
 
 The scholar finds the circuit of human knowledge and 
 inquiry continually growing wider and wider. Every day 
 adds to the accumulated facts of experience and observa- 
 tion. Every year offers new theories and speculations for 
 investigation and study. Every generation presents new 
 forms of thought, new systems of science, new dreams of 
 philosophy, new implements and applications of art, new 
 phases in the life of humanity. 
 
68 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 In an age not distant in history it was the province of 
 high institutions of learning to indoctrinate their pupils 
 with the teachings of Aristotle, swear them to allegiance 
 to him, and impart to them the fruitless art of scholastic 
 discussion ; now, it is their duty to dedicate them to the 
 truth and lead them to the threshold of endless study, in- 
 vestigation, and research. Less than three hundred years 
 ago Lord Bacon projected a map of learning which should 
 display all the possessions of the human understanding. It 
 was vast and varied. But this great " Chancellor of letters 
 and High Priest of Philosophy," rejecting the theory of 
 Copernicus as absurd, held that the earth was the central 
 figure of the universe. What magnificent provinces have 
 been conquered to the domains of learning since then. 
 The beautiful laws of Kepler, the splendid generalizations 
 of Newton, the telescope of Galileo, have subjected the 
 whole starry firmament to the dominion of the mind. 
 While the telescope has given to our vision an almost in- 
 finite sweep out among innumerable worlds, the microscope 
 has revealed worlds of beauty, mystery, and life in the 
 trembling leaf, the drop of water, and globule of blood. 
 Chemistry has analyzed matter, discovered the elements, 
 and furnished the rules of their combinations. Those 
 subtle, impalpable agents — light, heat, electricity, and 
 magnetism, the nervous fluids of nature — have yielded 
 their laws to investigation. Botany has classified plants, 
 and comparative anatomy animal forms ; physiology has 
 penetrated almost to the sources of life, and geology has 
 sought and read the records of creation in the inscriptions 
 carved on the primeval pillars of the earth. Art has mul- 
 tiplied its implements myriad-fold. Time has given to 
 history great lives, heroic actions, startling revolutions, 
 new and imperial forms of political organization. Bacon's 
 map of learning wells from the outlines of an insular 
 kingdom to the full-orbed dimensions of a world. 
 
 Once a chronology of six thousand years seemed suffi- 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 69 
 
 cient for all the marvels of time and the wonders of 
 creation ; now the astronomer measures the epochs of the 
 past by the oscillations of the stars, the pendulums of 
 eternity that require millions of years to sweep through 
 a single arc. Once the universe was only the earth, sur- 
 mounted by a crystalline dome fretted with golden fires 
 to light man's passage from the cradle to the grave ; now 
 it is the infinite home of Divine Power, 
 
 It would appear that this vast enlargement of the 
 realms of learning would bring this an ever-increasing dif- 
 ficulty to the individual scholar — the whole field being 
 too extended for his comprehension ; if he attempt to 
 compass it all he will become superficial, inexact ; his 
 thoughts will lack precision, his ideas force, his beliefs 
 conviction ; if he confine himself to a single department, 
 his views will become narrow, his information will want 
 that fulness, roundness, and completeness, and his charac- 
 ter that equipoise, which are among the crowning glories 
 of intellect. This difficulty, arising from the limitation 
 of human faculties, must always exist ; but it diminishes 
 instead of increasing with every new discovery of truth 
 and accession of knowledge. We see but indistinctly the 
 field or orchard by starlight, but the whole landscape be- 
 comes clear at noonday. Nature, half-interpreted, speaks 
 a language harsh to the ear and hard to the understand- 
 ing ; but fully known, the keynote struck, her voice 
 becomes easy and musical — full of sweetness and in- 
 struction. 
 
 The progress of science is always from the complex 
 towards the simple — from the vast variety of facts to the 
 simplicity and harmony of law, from the multitude of 
 details to the unity of plan. 
 
 An erroneous theory will constantly invent new hypoth- 
 eses to account for additional facts, but in true science 
 new phenomena range themselves under established 
 principles, and confirm and illustrate their truth. How 
 
70 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 wonderfully ingenious, how difficult of comprehension, 
 was the system of cycles and epicycles devised by Hip- 
 parchusto trace and account for the orbits of the heavenly 
 bodies, assuming the earth to be the centre of motion. 
 For every perturbation a new circle must be drawn 
 until the whole heavens were covered with a tangled net- 
 work of lines. Compared to this how grandly simple are 
 the truths of astonomy as she traces the orbits of the 
 planets with mathematical accuracy, demonstrates the 
 correlation between their distances from the sun and 
 the times of their revolution, and teaches that their places, 
 forms, and motions are all in obedience to that universal 
 law that moulds the dew-drop to a sphere and governs 
 the falling of an apple. And so absolute are her deduc- 
 tions that Le Verrier, watching the perturbations of 
 Uranus, feels a disturbing influence a thousand million 
 miles beyond, levels his telescope at the far depths of 
 space, and from the unknown void a new planet sweeps 
 across the disc of his glass. 
 
 What an intricate, enchanting maze of difficulty and 
 doubt — bewildering and infatuating the soul — was Al- 
 chemy, with its mysterious philters, its spells, its charms, 
 and incantations ; its dealings with the invisible ; its mad- 
 dening search for the philosopher's stone and the elixir of 
 life ; its dreams of boundless wealth and visions of immor- 
 tal youth ! How different Chemistry, that treads no de- 
 vious paths, deals with substances not shadows, attempts 
 not the impossible, yet places the world in its crucible to 
 find the elemental forms, and shows that each of the 
 elements preserves its individual character in every dis- 
 guise — a common multiple every combination. 
 
 How many mysterious processes of nature were ex- 
 plained by the discovery of oxygen. How many beauti- 
 ful phenomena were accounted for by the proper under- 
 standing of the nature of light. Geology instructs us that 
 all the changes of the earth in its history since chaos have 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. J\ 
 
 been accomplished by agencies with whose operation we 
 are hourly familiar. Comparative anatomy reduces the 
 infinite variety of animal forms, living and fossil, to four 
 types. Botany assigns the species of the big trees of 
 Calaveras, and the extinct fern that left its print on a 
 coal field before the creation of man. 
 
 Then, too, the sciences interblend. They are all in- 
 vestigating modifications of the same laws, and they con- 
 firm and illustrate each other. The distance of a planet 
 determines the velocity of light, then light measures the 
 distances of the fixed stars and becomes the astronomer's 
 surveying-chain. The propagation of sounds suggests the 
 existence of an interstellar medium — an all-pervading ether 
 for the transmission of light and heat. Light, heat, elec- 
 tricity, and magnetism are resolved into forces. They are 
 continual agents in astronomical phenomena, in chemical 
 operations, in geological changes, in vegetable growth, and 
 animal life. In all scientific investigations the philosopher 
 is constantly using mathematical formulas and methods, 
 and the highest law to which he can attain is certain to 
 involve a mathematical statement, as if the whole creation 
 were planned on the principles of mathematics. And if 
 light, heat, electricity, and magnetism are the sensitive, 
 nervous fluids of the body of nature, the truths of mathe- 
 matics are the very thoughts of God that animate the 
 universal frame. 
 
 Thus cosmical science grows continually towards unity. 
 We hear now but snatches and airs of Nature's music — 
 its finest passages are lost, and recurring discords jar upon 
 the soul ; but as we penetrate more and more deeply into 
 the regions of mystery and wonder, from every side — 
 above, beneath, around — note after note, bar after bar, 
 part after part, will break upon the ear, until the whole 
 will blend in grand orchestral harmony, and the spirit 
 will add its hymn of devotion to creation's eternal accom- 
 paniment in praise of the Everlasting. 
 
72 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 As the advancement of learning in natural science leads 
 to the recognition of the universality and harmony of 
 law, so every improvement in art is a step towards sim- 
 plicity in the use of means. Mechanical art knows but one 
 principle — force ; to overcome that when it is a resistance ; 
 to accumulate, economize, concentrate, and expend it as 
 power, is the only study of invention. 
 
 In the mutations of human affairs philosophical histo- 
 rians concede that there is, and endeavor to discover it, a 
 law of human progress that determines the pathway the 
 races must follow, establishes the lines of civilization, the 
 boundaries of thought, the form and duration of institu- 
 tions, the periods and consequences of revolutions ; and 
 statisticians inform us there is a law even in accidents — 
 they compute the average duration of human life, predict 
 the total destructiveness of fires in a given time, and fore- 
 tell the number of suicides, the number and character 
 of the crimes that will darken the history of the coming 
 year. 
 
 This constant progress of truth to simplicity of state- 
 ment, and of knowledge to the perception of the univer- 
 sality of law, is not without attending dangers. There is 
 danger of yielding to the passive faith of fatalism — of 
 recognizing the great current of destiny but forgetting 
 our own transcendent individuality. There is danger of 
 rationalism — that the spirit will be enchained when reason 
 is enthroned. There is danger that men will forget there 
 is a God as well as law in nature and history ; once they 
 realized His immediate will in every vicissitude of nature 
 and life. His hand shifted the changing scenes of the 
 seasons. He drew the curtains of the night, brought forth 
 Arcturus with His sons, and Mazaroth in his season. His 
 arm grasped the world's deep pillars in the terrible earth- 
 quake, His wrath burst in fire in the dread volcano ; they 
 saw the flashing of His eye in the lightning's glare, and 
 heard His awful voice in the deep-toned thunder. Then, 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 73 
 
 their conceptions degraded His nature into the material 
 and sensuous ; now, there is a tendency to refine it to the 
 abstract, so that the reaHzing sense of His presence will 
 be lost — the true and burning Shekinah no more revealed. 
 
 These are evils that threaten our spiritual nature, to be 
 averted only by exalting the spirit, keeping the reason 
 subordinate to that within us which most truly reflects 
 the image of Him after whose likeness man was formed. 
 But the intellect itself is not free from perils. There is 
 danger that learning will become formal ; that the living 
 force of truth will be lost in the dead formula of its state- 
 ments ; that the mind will comprehend its terms without 
 assimilating its meaning and appropriating its strength. 
 
 When a principle or theory is the subject of controversy, 
 fighting its way into the established order of things, it is 
 a life-giving power ; but once fully recognized and con- 
 ceded, it is apt to sink " from a truth to a truism " and 
 be laid away as so much dead intellectual capital. 
 Words which ought to be the living incarnation of ideas 
 may become their tomb. There is a grand word — Liberty 
 — whose priceless value was bought for us with the best 
 blood of a generation. Its sound continued musical as 
 ever — even that could thrill the heart with sacred 
 memories ; but it grew to mean servility to a tyrannous 
 power, a sanction for slavery, and it required the fiery 
 touch of War to release its imprisoned, resplendent spirit. 
 
 How apt are we to repeat the noblest litanies, for whose 
 truths martyrs have died, each of whose words came coined 
 and stamped from the furnace heat of ages of conflict, as a 
 mere fashion or ceremony. How easy it is to receive the 
 bare statements of science without climbing its heights to 
 survey the wideness of its fields. Thus patriotism may 
 become cant, rehgion a form, and learning a pedantry of 
 terms. 
 
 Increase of knowledge is not necessarily increase of 
 wisdom. Improved implements may result in a deteriora- 
 
74 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 tion of skill. The barometer foretells the approaching 
 storm for the sailor, but he loses that sensitive observation 
 that takes warning from the weight of air and the color of 
 the water ; his glass enlarges the horizon, but he does not 
 acquire the far-reaching eye of the old navigators ; his 
 compass, chronometer, and quadrant guide his vessel 
 through the sea, but he can no longer track his course by 
 the constellated stars. Can we accomplish more for hu- 
 manity with our steamships than Columbus with his little 
 fleet that would now scarcely be trusted out of sight of 
 the head-lands ? Will our Monitors and Diindcrbergs, our 
 Puritans and Dictators give us abler or more daring com- 
 manders than Paul Jones, than Perry, or Bainbridge, 
 Decatur, Lawrence, or Hull ? We cast columbiads and 
 astonish the world with improved weapons of war, but do 
 we improve on the leadership of Alexander who fought 
 his battles without gunpowder, of Napoleon who trans- 
 ported his armies without railroads, or of Washington 
 who triumphed without means save the resolve of his 
 soldiers and his own indomitable will ? 
 
 Do improved methods in mathematics make greater 
 mathematicians than Euclid ? Do multiplied implements 
 of art give the world greater inventors than Archimedes ? 
 Does the jurisprudence of the ages instruct greater law- 
 givers than Moses? Do printed books and all the aids 
 and advancement of learning educate grander endowments 
 than Plato's or Aristotle's ? 
 
 In a mechanical age man relies too much upon means 
 and instruments, too little upon himself, and he may find 
 that for a time at least, through minute divisions of mental 
 and manual occupation, all the externals of civilization — 
 the appliances of art and even the facilities of learning — can 
 continue to increase while his own powers silently decay. 
 We may press the secrets of nature into our service and 
 they revenge themselves by stealing away our strength. 
 The sun paints our pictures, but where is the Raphael 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 75 
 
 who can illumine the ages with the sun-bright pictures of 
 his soul? Boston plumes herself on the possession of a 
 magnificent organ, but she cannot command the genius of 
 a Mozart to compose its anthems. Anybody can rush 
 into print, but where is the book of to-day that will sur- 
 vive the century ? Our age even grows incredulous of the 
 existence of great men. Homer becomes a myth — Shakes- 
 peare is declared an alias. 
 
 The highest results of genius may become habits that 
 the mind indolently learns to use, and the aid they lend 
 it may relax its vigor. It required thousands of years of 
 experience and the noblest powers of invention ever given 
 to man, to create letters — written language ; now the child 
 learns their use while playing with his toys, and scarcely 
 taxes his memory, but the world has lost the genius that 
 gave it its sublimest art. 
 
 Learning itself may become almost mechanical. Com- 
 mitting to memory " Barbara, Clelarent, Ferioque," the 
 ability to reduce an argument to its appropriate syllogism, 
 does not confer the power to reason like Butler or Spinosa. 
 One may conjugate the Greek verb and know nothing of 
 Greek mind — do Demosthenes into English and not feel 
 the fiery spirit that throbs in his sentences. 
 
 In an age when books were scarce and inaccessible, 
 when the aids to learning were few, when instruction was 
 oral, the student realized that he must make the lesson his 
 own when it fell from the lips of his master. He must 
 more than comprehend its truth ; it must become a part of 
 himself — purge the film from his mental vision, arterialize 
 the blood, and knit the muscles of his intellectual frame. 
 He must find, too, other instructors, nobler than masters 
 and books. Nature was his teacher and his own soul the 
 constant volume of his study. Then " knowledge was 
 power" ; now, it may be a weapon found in an encyclo- 
 pedia to be used on occasion, then left to rust in its 
 armory. 
 
>](> NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 If the American scholar of to-day would discharge the 
 debt he owes to his country and humanity, he must make 
 his learning a living force — permeate it with the fire of 
 his spirit, vitalize it with the blood of his heart. He must 
 slack his burning thirst at the fountains as well as at the 
 cisterns ; must know men as well as books. He will go 
 to the tombs of the past for the lessons of experience, but 
 he must not tarry there until mould of the grave settles 
 upon his thoughts. The present — with its fierce activities, 
 its burning hopes, its strong necessities and awful responsi- 
 bilities — claims him as a living man, an embodied energy, 
 an incarnate power. It were better for him never to have 
 been born than to be educated to that cold-blood, critical, 
 soulless standpoint, where he assumes to be a spectator 
 of life's drama, indifferent to the result, and not a God- 
 appointed actor in its stirring scenes. Truth must be for 
 him, not an abstraction, not a dream, not an image seen 
 in the mind of another, but an internal verity — a guiding 
 star. He must follow it, love it, worship it — worship it to 
 self-forgetfulness. Self-forgetfulness ! That is the true 
 secret of strength, achievement, greatness — the secret even 
 of ease, grace, and polish. How pure and limpid flows the 
 stream of conversation when we forget that its source is 
 within ourselves. How musical are the tones that are not 
 pitched to the key-note of vanity ; how graceful the move- 
 ments that are not clouded by our own shadows. Into what 
 empyrean heights does the soul arise, how does its wing 
 cleave the upper air of thought, when it is not burdened 
 by self-consciousness. Into what heroic forms does the 
 being grow, what martyr-suffering can it endure, of what 
 sublime action is it capable, through forgetfulness of self. 
 
 When the samphire gatherer grows dizzy in gazing at 
 the depths below him, he turns his face upward and looks 
 at the heights above. If the scholar should ever grow 
 giddy with vanity from the plaudits that come up from 
 beneath him, let him look aloft — at the mountain heights 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. yy 
 
 where Newton dwelt, where Shakespeare sang, where Plato 
 taught, and Socrates died — at the heights above the stars, 
 where the serene, all-environing laws encircle nature and 
 life — reverently at the heights above the universe — to the 
 Eternal Throne, from whose awful mystery there came a 
 Messenger to earth, worthy to wear the crown of heaven, 
 the constant teaching of whose life was humility. Not 
 the humility of fear, not servility, but that self-forgetful- 
 ness that dares all things, hopes all things, suffers all things, 
 for THE TRUTH ! 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 AT THE OPENING OF THE SIXTH INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION OF 
 THE MECHANICS INSTITUTE. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO, AUGUST S, 1868. 
 
 Whatever virtues may rightfully be ascribed to this 
 nineteenth century in which we live, humility is not one 
 of them. It is a philanthropic age. Never before were 
 there so many benevolent organizations ; never were the 
 helpless, the blind, the insane, so tenderly cared for. It 
 is a heroic century — its sixty-eight years have been full of 
 that heroism that does not " set life at a pin's fee." It 
 is a democratic age. Never have the people been of so 
 much account, and seldom has genius been so rare. It is 
 pre-eminently an age of mechanical invention. It makes 
 steam bear its burdens, lightning carry its messages, the 
 sun paint its pictures. But it is not a modest age. It 
 does not lack self-confidence or self-praise. It is brim full 
 and running over with egotism. It regards with self-com- 
 placent pity the centuries gone before that did not have 
 steamboats, railroads, and telegraphs, sewing-machines, 
 cooking-stoves, lucifer matches, steel pens, cylinder 
 presses, power looms, cotton-gins, gang-plows, reapers, 
 thrashers, apple-parers, turning-lathes, nitro-glycerine, 
 
78 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 giant powder, columbiads, needle guns, Colt's revolvers, 
 steam paddies, tracklayers, baby-jumpers, chloroform, 
 photographs, and coal oil. It looks with a kind of com- 
 miseration on the ages to come, when the world will 
 have to keep on using old tools, as human ingenuity and 
 nature will be alike exhausted, and there will be no new 
 forms to invent, no new forces to discover. If it experi- 
 ences a momentary chagrin because it has not achieved 
 the perpetual motion, nor successfully an avatar, it is con- 
 soled with the reflection that it has not accomplished the 
 first because it is impossible, and that it will the second 
 because it is possible. In short, whoever has not managed 
 to be born in the nineteenth century has been very un- 
 fortunate, or has made a great mistake. 
 
 Standing in this temple of art, this armory of labor, 
 filled with the implements with which toil carries on its 
 warfare with want, and beautiful with the evidence of its 
 triumphs, we may at least claim with becoming modesty 
 that the world is now fast learning how it can most easily 
 get its daily bread — how labor can be made most produc- 
 tive for the supply of physical wants. Two other ques- 
 tions behind that — how the burdens and rewards of labor 
 shall be equitably distributed, and how the time not 
 needed for the supply of physical wants shall be so em- 
 ployed that the age may be clothed with an intellectual 
 and spiritual glory equal to its material wealth and power, 
 — it has scarcely begun to solve ; questions that may not be 
 rightly solved until a civilization shall arise as superior to 
 ours as ours is to barbarism, in a future as distant from us 
 as we are from the creation of man. 
 
 The problem of daily bread, however, is neither easy 
 nor unimportant. If men depended upon nature alone 
 for food, upon game, fish, and wild fruits, the country 
 would be crowded where population averaged one to five 
 square miles. The trapper was right, if he would remain 
 a trapper, in moving farther west, because the settlement 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 79 
 
 was getting too thick for elbow-room when his neighbor 
 built his cabin only ten miles away. 
 
 Consider what the world consumes every year. Two 
 hundred million pounds of flour and one hundred and 
 thirty million pounds of meat go down the throat of New 
 York City yearly. Multiply by a million, and if you can 
 conceive the result you will have some idea of what it 
 takes to feed the world with bare necessities. California 
 consumes annually three hundred and sixty-five thousand 
 barrels of flour, seven hundred thousand bushels of 
 potatoes, seventy million pounds of meat, a thousand 
 tons of codfish, thirty-eight million pounds of sugar, 
 five million pounds of coffee, one and a half million 
 pounds of tea, five million pounds of butter, twenty 
 million pounds of rice ; wears out fifteen million dollars 
 worth of dry goods and shoe leather, and burns up, beside 
 houses and mountain towns, two hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand tons of coal, four million pounds of powder, four 
 million pounds of candles, one million gallons of coal-oil, 
 and fifty millions of cigars, not to mention the fifteen 
 hundred thousand gallons of whisky that annually assist 
 to consume us. If all this had to be raised, mined, and 
 manufactured, or paid for by the labor of our hands, un- 
 assisted by art, we would have few holidays and no 
 pageants like this. If the world had to be housed, fed, 
 and clothed with only such crude tools as actual necessity 
 would suggest, the many would be slaves to the few, and 
 worn out in their service, or all would be the slaves of 
 toil. There could be no accumulations, nothing laid up 
 against a bad season or a rainy day, and the wolf would 
 be continually at the door. Then, whoever would suc- 
 ceed in pointing a stick with iron to scratch the ground 
 at seedtime, and whoever would teach a dog to guard the 
 sheep while the shepherd slept, would be benefactors of 
 the race. The man who would discover that salt would 
 preserve meat would deserve a patent of nobility ; he 
 
8o NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 who would tame a horse and make him draw a sled and 
 carry his master would be a king ; and he who would 
 make the wind and the water turn a wheel to grind the 
 corn might be worshipped as a god. Then imagine that 
 after a day's toil that brought no hope, and a night's 
 sleep that brought no dreams of rest, men should sud- 
 denly awake as into a world of enchantment, and find 
 themselves supernaturally endowed, so that they could 
 accomplish with their hands or by a wish all that we do 
 with all the tools, machinery, and appliances of modern 
 life, as though each had a hundred arms and were gifted 
 with magic — as though each were winged with swiftness 
 like the wind, had sinews of steel, and strength like the 
 power of steam ; and you will appreciate the miracle of 
 art — realize what a load of toil invention has lifted from 
 the shoulders, what a burden of care it has taken from the 
 heart of humanity. Then, too, you will learn where the 
 leisure comes from after actual wants are supplied, part 
 of which goes into luxuries, ornaments, books, newspapers, 
 paintings, music, homes, schools, churches, cities, culture ; 
 part into idleness, ennui, whisky, tobacco, fast life, folly, 
 vice, crime, and all of which is called — civilization. 
 
 But this miracle of art is not the work of a night or the 
 glory of an age ; it is the work and glory of the whole of 
 man's life on earth. In fable Minerva sprang, armed and 
 panoplied, from the brain of Jove ; but in fact art is the 
 slow growth of time. Take, as an illustration, the art of 
 printing. The idea of printing is older than history or 
 tradition. It is so natural and easy, it would have been 
 strange if the idea of the printed book had not been sug- 
 gested to Adam, if he had known his letters, by his own 
 footprints on the sand. Seals were in use before the 
 book of Job (possibly the oldest book in the world) was 
 written, and seals, used for making impressions, contain 
 the whole principle of printing. Bricks and tiles, covered 
 with characters impressed upon the clay before it was 
 
OR A TIONS AND ADDRESSES. 8 1 
 
 burned, were common not only in Rome and Athens but 
 in Babylon and Nineveh. Wood engraving was brought 
 into Europe from the East long before books were 
 printed. The printing of playing-cards probably first 
 suggested the printing of books, which was at first simply 
 wood engraving, each page being printed upon a block 
 with raised letters ; then the letters were separated into 
 wooden movable types ; then metallic types were cast. 
 Meantime the Arabs — by what processes of thought, by 
 what slow stages of invention, I know not — had pro- 
 gressed from using the bark of plants, the papyrus of the 
 Egyptian, to the manufacture of paper. The method of 
 casting types so that they could be easily multiplied, and 
 the manufacture of paper, were the real difficulties in the 
 invention of printing; when these were overcome Hoe's 
 cylinder press became easy, though it took the improve- 
 ments of four hundred years to attain it. Nay, THE 
 PRESS, snowing newspapers daily all over the land, and 
 sending streams of knowledge through all lands, so that 
 whoever is athirst may come and drink, was as inevitable 
 as the succession of the ages when Job had written : *' It 
 is turned as clay to the seal." 
 
 Two centuries before the Christian era. Hero, of Alex- 
 andria, described a steam toy — a mere plaything. After 
 two thousand years of experiments, suggestions, and im- 
 provements, that plaything became the steam-engine. In 
 the same manner the round-bottomed canoe, made from a 
 log hollowed out with fire, grew into a ship. Fulton com- 
 bined these two growths and made the steamboat. For 
 more than a hundred years before Watt was born, the 
 tramroad had been in use in England for conveying coal 
 from the colliery to the place of shipment. Parallel rails, 
 at first of wood, then of iron, were laid, to which wagons 
 with grooved wheels were fitted, and drawn by horses. 
 Stephenson took the engine of Watt, added the steam 
 blast, mounted it on driving-wheels, and made the loco- 
 
 6 
 
82 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 motive ; put it on the tramroad, and gave the world the 
 railway. 
 
 Hargrave's spinning-jenny, Arkwright's spinning-frame, 
 and Cartright's power loom, which were but the develop- 
 ment of the distaff, the spinning-wheel, and of the hand 
 loom in which Joseph's many-colored coat was woven, 
 were contemporary with the invention of the condensing 
 steam-engine by Watt — about 1780 — and the method of 
 puddling and rolling iron immediately followed. The 
 steam-engine revolutionized industry as gunpowder had 
 war. Furnishing a power stupendous in its strength, 
 marvellous in " the ease, precision, and ductility with 
 which it can be varied and applied, so that it can engrave 
 a seal or crush masses of obdurate metal ; draw out, with- 
 out breaking, a thread fine as a gossamer, and lift a ship 
 of war like a bubble in the air ; embroider muslin and 
 forge anchors ; cut steel into ribbons and impel loaded 
 vessels against the fury of the winds and waves ; " it not only 
 supplemented all mechanical arts, but it so stimulated the 
 inventive faculties that since then men have expressed 
 their best thoughts in wood and iron. Surrounded here 
 by these thoughts embodied in the visible forms of indus- 
 try and art, we are in the presence of a poem, the epic of 
 human progress, in which the voices of all the ages blend, 
 grander in its suggestions, more inspiring in its hopes, and 
 sublimer in its theme than Homer, or Dante, or Milton 
 sang. 
 
 But let us not suppose that the germs of art have 
 reached their full fruition in our age, nor that the future 
 will plagiarize the present or repeat the past. A galvanic 
 toy, the plaything of to-day, may one day supersede the 
 steam-engine. Steam, that is usually cited as the highest 
 instance of the dominion of the mind over matter, is ex- 
 pensive in the machinery and fuel it requires, dangerous 
 and destructive in its explosive properties. Nature's 
 grand forces are silent and safe. The rays of the sun 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 83 
 
 exercise on earthly objects every day a mechanical power 
 " in comparison with which the erection of the Egyptian 
 pyramids dwindles into the labor of mites." The force 
 that binds the earth together, particle to particle, is 
 mightier than the earthquake that comes in visitation of 
 terror. Who can touch the chain by which the sun holds 
 the planets in their orbits ? Hear what Professor Tyn- 
 dall, the highest scientific authority, says, after a mathe- 
 matical calculation of one of the molecular forces that are 
 lavished around us : *' I have seen the wild stone ava- 
 lanches of the Alps, which smoke and thunder down the 
 declivities with a vehemence almost sufficient to stun the 
 observer. I have also seen snow-flakes descending so 
 softly as not to hurt the fragile spangles of which they are 
 composed ; yet, to produce from aqueous vapor a quantity 
 of that tender material which a child could carry, demands 
 an exertion of energy competent to gather up the shat- 
 tered blocks of the largest stone avalanche I have ever 
 seen, and pitch them to twice the height from which they 
 fell." Shall not these forces, in which nature is so prodi- 
 gal, be utilized in the art and service of man ? 
 
 There are dominions of thought in which the mind has 
 reached the limits of its capacity, but not in the sphere 
 of mechanical invention. If we could be permitted to 
 enter an art exhibition at Athens in the days of Pericles, 
 while wandering through the department of machinery, 
 agricultural implements, mechanical tools and power, we 
 might exclaim against the poverty of the Greek mind and 
 the barrenness of Grecian life. But when the statues of 
 Phidias were unveiled — when those marbles "whose head- 
 less, armless trunks, in their severe and awful beauty, are 
 at once the delight, admiration, and despair of modern 
 artists," stood revealed in the full glory of their original 
 perfection, we would admit that there, at least, the world 
 has made no progress, for none was possible. 
 
 Or, if a disciple of the divine Plato could revisit the 
 
84 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 earth, he might hear at the High School in San Francisco, 
 boys and girls reciting, like a household tale, truths in 
 science his master would have died to know ; but when 
 he would mingle with the sages of the earth, he would find 
 that in philosophy the thoughts of his great teacher were 
 the boundaries of human speculation ; that the highest 
 ofifice of philosophy now was but to interpret thoughts 
 uttered twenty-five hundred years ago. He could wander 
 around the world and hear no language spoken superior 
 to the Greek in power, compass, and flexibility ; and he 
 would discover that in poetry, eloquence, and history, the 
 Grecian mind had furnished the models for all succeeding 
 ages. 
 
 In eloquence, poetry, and metaphysical philosophy, in 
 sculpture, painting, and possibly in the forms of architec- 
 ture, in language as a medium for the expression of 
 thought, and possibly in music, the language of the emo- 
 tions, there will be no higher attainment than has already 
 been reached. No race will ever arise superior to the 
 Greek in intellectual and physical organization ; and no 
 men born of women will ever thrust Homer and Shake- 
 speare, Phidias and Raphael, Demosthenes and Mozart, 
 from their thrones of pre-eminence. 
 
 There are also two devices or inventions which are, 
 humanly speaking, perfect. One is that of Arabic nu- 
 merals, and the method of decimation, by which the ten 
 simple figures the school-boy scrawls upon his slate can 
 be made to express everything the mind can conceive in 
 numbers, reaching upward toward the infinite and down- 
 ward toward the infinitesimal. The other is the inven- 
 tion of the alphabet, by which twenty-six characters have 
 become the factors of all human intelligence, bearing from 
 generation to generation the thoughts, and wisdom, and 
 learning of men ; have become the world's memory, per- 
 mitting nothing to perish that is worthy to survive ; an 
 invention so difficult to conceive, so simple in use, so 
 
ORA TIONS AND ADDRESSES. 8$ 
 
 grand and complete, that the world had better lose all 
 other arts combined than to forget its A, B, C's. Some- 
 times I have thought of them as of twenty-six soldiers that 
 set out to conquer the world. That A was an archer, 
 and B was a bugler, and C was a corporal, and D was a 
 drummer, and E was an ensign, and F was a fifer, and G 
 was a gunner, down to Z, who was a zouave ; and these 
 twenty-six drill-sergeants have subdued the kingdoms of 
 the earth and of the air ; taken possession of the realms 
 of thought, and founded a republic of which the wise and 
 noble of all time are citizens and contemporaries ; where 
 there is neither debt nor forgetfulness — the imperial re- 
 public of letters. Again I have thought of them as of a 
 telegraphic cable laid beneath the waters of time, safe 
 from disturbing storm and tempest — so short the child's 
 primer will contain it — so long it connects the remotest 
 ages with the present, and will stretch to the last " syllable 
 of recorded time." We pride ourselves on the successful 
 laying of the Atlantic cable as the crowning achievement 
 of human invention ; but here is a cable that speaks not 
 in broken, doubtful, and sibylline utterance, but charged 
 with the whole spiritual power of all human intelligence, 
 with a circuit reaching through all time, connecting all 
 brains and all hearts in its network, and certain to carry 
 every message worthy to go there to the last man who 
 shall live upon earth. 
 
 Here is an invention so simple that the child learns its 
 use while playing with his blocks ; so grand that all gen- 
 erations cannot exhaust its capabilities ; so perfect no age 
 will be able to add to or take from. In the invention of let- 
 ters man arose nearest to creative power. In other inven- 
 tions he has dealt with material substance, with tangible 
 things ; in letters he created from nothing forms into which 
 he himself could breathe the spirit of life, the immortal 
 soul of power, and eloquence, and beauty. 
 
 In letters the mind has reached the highest heaven of 
 
86 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 invention ; in literature and the fine arts it has touched 
 the boundaries of its power, and knows where the horizon 
 meets the earth ; but in science and the mechanical arts 
 there will be no limit to improvement while nature has 
 one secret unrevealed, one force unappropriated. In 
 those grand domains there " is ample scope and verge 
 enough " for the thought, investigation, and skill of all 
 generations to come, and the work of each generation will 
 be but the scaffolding on which the next shall stand, 
 building ever toward a sky that recedes as it is ap- 
 proached. 
 
 With grateful reverence to the past, whose inheritance 
 we enjoy, proud of the achievements of the present, look- 
 ing hopefully to the future, to whose glories our exertions 
 will contribute, in the name of free and intelligent labor 
 we dedicate this Hall to INDUSTRIAL Art, conscious that 
 year by year succeeding structures will here arise dedicated 
 to the same purpose, in ever-increasing magnificence of 
 display and completeness of design and execution, evi- 
 dencing the progress of our State, our Country, and the 
 whole race of man. 
 
 EXTRACT FROM ADDRESS 
 
 TO THE INDEPENDENT ORDER OF ODD FELLOWS. 
 
 DELIVERED AT SACRAMENTO, CAL., MAY 10, 189I. 
 
 On a beautiful night, not long since, I was standing on 
 the hillside at the intersection of Bush and Stockton 
 streets, in San Francisco, when the city had gone to sleep. 
 Within the narrow limits of my vision nearly two hundred 
 thousand tired bodies and busy brains had taken refuge 
 from the toils, cares, and schemes of the noisy day, in the 
 still world of slumber. The street lamps were not burn- 
 ing; and the blending of soft moonlight and deep shadow 
 gave the scene the weird beauty of enchantment. For a 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 8/ 
 
 few moments I endeavored to transport myself backward 
 in time, and to imagine myself standing on the same spot 
 twenty-five years before, with nothing around me but the 
 bare hills, drifting sands, and lonely waters. I recalled 
 the solitude, which shall there never perhaps again recur, 
 when the two hundred thousand hearts, whose pulsations 
 I could almost feel, had either not commenced their life- 
 long beat, or were scattered wide as the world. I tried to 
 realize the sense of that loneliness which was so long the 
 brooding presence of the place. 
 
 Then the real scene rushed upon me as one of true en- 
 chantment. A magic more potent than that of ring and 
 lamp and wand had called a city from the waste — the 
 magic of Labor and Art. It required the toil of three 
 hundred and sixty thousand men for twenty years to 
 build one of the pyramids of Egypt, one of whose pur- 
 poses was to serve as a mausoleum for a dead king. Now 
 the very name of the king is forgotten, the art by which 
 the stupendous structure was built is lost, and the pyra- 
 mid by the Nile, with thirty centuries looking down from 
 its summit, proclaims to the passing moment only the sad 
 truth that in the birth-place of civihzation the rulers were 
 tyrants and the people slaves. 
 
 The city about me, all built with a tenth of the labor 
 devoted to a receptacle for the dust of royalty, was the 
 home of almost two hundred thousand living souls. The 
 pyramid and the city were both monuments of skill and 
 labor. The moral of the one was that the labor of slaves 
 in the service of a master is vanity ; of the other, that the 
 labor of freemen, guided by individual uses and necessi- 
 ties, is wisdom ; the art of the one is perishable ; of the 
 other, indestructible as the nature of man. Some human 
 use had called into existence every house around me. 
 Each was a realized thought — an answer to some want, 
 necessity, desire, or aspiration of human nature. The 
 houses, built for family shelter, were the visible types of 
 
88 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 the sacredness of family ties and domestic love. The 
 churches were the material expression of the religious 
 sentiment, which, varying in form, is wide as humanity, 
 and deep as the well-springs of our being. The school- 
 houses symbolized the love the old feel for the young, 
 and the hope that the children's future may be better 
 than their fathers' past. The manufactories, shops, stores, 
 and banks, the marts of toil, trade, and money, were the 
 evidences of the ceaseless struggle of life with the primal 
 sentence of labor. Skilful craftsmen had formed men's 
 thoughts into visible things. Not a stone or brick or 
 timber in all these structures had been placed that did 
 not represent some thought executed, some labor accom- 
 plished, some triumph of art, some day of toil. Near me 
 arose the twin spires of the Hebrew synagogue, and from 
 their gleaming tops there seemed reflected the light of a 
 moon that shone o'er Israel three thousand years ago. 
 Abraham had laid the corner-stone of that building ; 
 Solomon had helped to shape its masonry ; the tables 
 Moses brought from Sinai were set within its walls ; there 
 still echoed the voice of David ; the coal " that touched 
 Isaiah's hallowed lips " still lived upon its altar. 
 
 To-day we have met to dedicate a temple, raised by 
 generous hearts and liberal hands, and I am led to ask, 
 what thought does it express, to what use is it devoted, 
 what necessity does it meet, to justify the almost prodigal 
 expenditure of its erection? It stands in fair proportions, 
 the pride and ornament of the city ; but it was no desire 
 of architectural triumph that called it into existence ; if 
 so its bricks might have remained clay, its stones in the 
 quarry, its timbers in the forest, for the Parthenon, built 
 twenty-three hundred years ago, was transcendently more 
 beautiful. Its foundations are solid, its materials enduring, 
 but the pyramids, that were five hundred years old when 
 Solomon was born, will stand a hundred centuries after 
 these walls are dust. Was there any purpose in this 
 
ORA TIONS AND ADDRESSES. 89 
 
 building, any inspiration in its conception, that will re- 
 deem it from decay and preserve its idea spiritually 
 whole, when its outward form has passed away ? So far 
 as any structure built by hands, whether it be frail as 
 canvas or solid as granite, humble as a log school-house, 
 or grand as St. Peter's, represents a living truth, answers 
 to some abiding want of our nature, that far it is conse- 
 crated " above the power of words to add to or take 
 from " — dedicated to human happiness and advancement; 
 and if it should be destroyed by the elements, or when it 
 shall crumble through lapse of years, the same truth will 
 re-embody itself, the same want will call into existence 
 other and fairer forms, upon firmer foundations, while 
 essential truth and man's wants and aspirations remain 
 unchanged. 
 
 EXTRACT FROM ORATION 
 
 DELIVERED AT NEVADA CITY, CAL., JULY 4, 1872. 
 
 This feeling of patriotism is not peculiar to free people 
 and to pleasant lands. The inhabitants of the desert and 
 frozen North, the oppressed and down-trodden, even the 
 enslaved, love and cherish an ideal country, free from 
 oppression, shame, and wrong. The leaders of revolu- 
 tions war against governments in the name of country. 
 Isabella is dethroned in the name of Spain ; Charles the 
 First is beheaded in the name of England ; Louis the 
 Sixteenth in the name of France ; Napoleon the Third 
 flies, the Empire is dissolved, but France lives in the 
 heart of the French, rich in the loss of its bauble crown. 
 The feeling survives even the political existence of its 
 object, and with the wandering Pole memory has all the 
 intensity of grief and ardor of love. It maybe well upon 
 an occasion like this to inquire, not what claims our coun- 
 
90 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 try has upon our love, for that we render instinctively, but 
 what claims has it to honor and regard before the tribunal 
 of public opinion of the world? 
 
 England excels it in stability and wealth ; France in re- 
 finement ; Germany in learning ; Italy in art ; Russia in 
 extent of territory, and China has ten times its popula- 
 tion. It cannot challenge the reverence of mankind for 
 its length of days, or point to a long line of achievements 
 reaching backwards through history. The space it occu- 
 pies in universal history is brief as an hour in the life of a 
 man. A short time since, I was interested in studying a 
 map, or chart, designed to illustrate the historical dura- 
 tion of all the great nations that have ever existed, and 
 the varying extent of their empires. It was a sad lesson 
 of the littleness of human greatness. Nations that for 
 thousands of years, seemed to govern and direct the 
 whole course of events, have disappeared, the memorials 
 of their existence so dim we can scarcely separate fact 
 from fable, their very languages dead and forgotten. I 
 saw on the map the colored spaces which represented 
 Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Greece, flowing in parallel 
 streams for two thousand years. Rome appears seven 
 centuries before Christ as a rivulet ; in seven hundred years 
 it had become an all-engulfing sea, and in fifteen hundred 
 more was lost in the empire of the Turks. Of modern 
 nations, England, France, the German and Italian States, 
 trace their lines of history through a thousand years. The 
 only stream which flows through all time — the contem- 
 porary alike of the oldest and youngest nations — is 
 China, the mysterious and unchanging land. In one cor- 
 ner of this map, occupying so small a space as to escape 
 casual observation (you could cover it with your thumb- 
 nail) is represented the historical existence of the United 
 States of America. Yes, our country was born in day- 
 light, in the later days. There is nothing of darkness or 
 tradition over its early history. Its promises and records 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 9 1 
 
 can be read of men. What has it done in its brief ninety- 
 six years to deserve well of our race ? 
 
 It has given no new religion to the world like the He- 
 brews, the Arabs, and the Hindoos — for I suppose we will 
 hardly claim Mormonism as one of our glories. It has 
 created no new language like the English, the German, 
 the French, the Italian, the Spanish — and English people 
 accuse us of corrupting theirs by slang, and spoiling it 
 by speaking through the nose. It is the parent of no new 
 civilization or form of literature, for civilization and litera- 
 ture in their most modern forms are older than our 
 country. It has not invented letters or discovered conti- 
 nents. Its mechanical inventions, except the electric 
 telegraph, are rather modifications and combinations than 
 original expressions of thought. It has produced no 
 general equal to Caesar or Napoleon ; no poet like Homer, 
 or Shakespeare, or Dante ; no philosopher equal to Plato 
 or Bacon ; no natural philosopher equal to Newton or 
 Kepler; no religious reformer equal to Luther, or Calvin, 
 or Wesley ; no painter like Raphael ; no builder like 
 Angelo; no composer like Mozart or Handel ; no wit equal 
 to Voltaire ; no man of culture like Goethe. Before it 
 was born the principles of civil and religious liberty and 
 political equality, which are its brightest boast, were fully 
 known ; and for thousands of years had been the themes 
 of orators and poets, philosophers and statesmen. 
 
 What, then, has our country accomplished in the first 
 century of its existence to vindicate its right to be and to 
 discharge the debt which every nation owes to universal 
 humanity ? Why, this : It has taken the principles of 
 liberty and equality and organized them into national 
 life. It has taken the truths which were the themes of 
 poetry, eloquence, and philosophy, and made them the 
 daily thoughts of common men. It has brought them 
 from the cloister and made them a living force. It has 
 converted them from speculation and poetry to experi- 
 
92 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 ment and fact. Out of ideas it has made institutions; 
 out of theory, a form of government. 
 
 Perhaps it would be more correct to say that not by 
 the American people, but through them have these 
 things been done. They have not deliberately shaped 
 and fashioned their government ; it is the outward form 
 and semblance of an inward growth ; an incarnation, not 
 a garment. There can be no royalty without the spirit 
 of allegiance ; no religion without faith ; no republic 
 without the pride of personal independence and habit 
 of self-government ; and where the spirit is, the form 
 will follow. 
 
 It is with nations as with individuals — each must live 
 its own life, do its own work, illustrate its own character. 
 The analysis of a drop of water will give you the constitu- 
 ents of the sea. If you knew the average Englishman 
 perfectly, you would understand the English constitution, 
 and might rewrite English history. The average American 
 is America in miniature. He carries the possibility of the 
 thirty-seven States and all the Territories in the " book 
 and volume of his brain." All the lines of our history 
 converge in him as a focal point to make him what he is. 
 Multiply him by forty million, and you will have the 
 living force of the nation. Find the horizon of his 
 imagination, hopes, and aspirations, and you can deter- 
 mine the bounds of the nation's destiny. 
 
 The facts of our colonial history rendered any other 
 form of government in this country than a Federal Re- 
 public a moral impossibility. Whether the colonists came 
 in the fervor of religious enthusiasm, or in the spirit 
 of adventure, or were driven by stress of poverty, they 
 met the same hard conditions of life which demanded 
 and developed a sturdy independence, self-reliance, and 
 individuality of character. Their lives were taken out of 
 the grooves of custom, and forced to make their own 
 channels. They were as far from all civilization as the 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 93 
 
 Central Africa, which hides Livingstone, seems from us. 
 Imagine a colony going from us into the wilds of un- 
 explored Africa, not to seek diamonds, but to build 
 States, and found an empire upon principles as Utopian 
 to us as the American Constitution would have been to 
 Cecil or Walsingham in the days of Elizabeth ; then 
 imagine that all the arts and implements which have 
 been discovered and invented since to make life easy are 
 destroyed and lost ; that there is neither steam-engine 
 nor steel-pointed plow, nor any skill to make them, and 
 you will begin to conjecture what courage, what hardihood 
 of spirit led to the settlement of America, and to appre- 
 ciate its magnificent results. 
 
 Our fathers opened and tilled their farms, and built 
 their houses — their hands their best, almost their only 
 implements. A savage foe did not allow them to sleep 
 on their watch. The pressure of necessity compelled 
 habits of industry. They lived upon land which was al- 
 ways practically, and generally really their own. They 
 were compelled to devise and administer their own local 
 laws and institutions. Locke framed a constitution and 
 laws for South Carolina ; but that embodiment of philo- 
 sophic wisdom was found to be inferior to the enactments 
 of the Provincial Assembly. They realized that the 
 divine right of kings was destroyed when Charles L was 
 beheaded. They read the discussions of the fundamental 
 truths of government and " inalienable rights of man " in 
 the revolutions that made Cromwell a Protector, and 
 expelled James II. from the throne. With little leisure 
 for discursive thought, and little disposition for mere 
 literary culture, their minds were constantly familiarized 
 with the great truths of politics and morals. The con- 
 stant study of the Hebrew Scriptures intensified the idea 
 of national unity, and imbued them with a sense of provi- 
 dential care. 
 
 Such a school could not make anything else than 
 
94 
 
 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 republicans out of such pupils. They were republican- 
 democrats while they were yet unconscious of it. They 
 entered upon the War of the Revolution with professions 
 of allegiance to the Crown which they believed sincere. 
 They did not know their own hearts. Again, it is with 
 nations as with men — neither know their capabilities, 
 their inmost natures, until passion and opportunity meet. 
 It was in the muster of preparation and din of battle the 
 supreme hour of our country came, and it rang out that 
 " passionate manifesto of revolutionary war," the Declara- 
 tion of Independence, that was a proclamation to the 
 world of a political birth, in which history had been in 
 travail for two hundred years. 
 
 The rapid growth of our country in material prosperity 
 is at once a source of pardonable pride and just alarm. 
 Wealth is so formidable in its power, so splendid in its 
 shows, so instant in its enjoyments, and so sensuous in its 
 appeals, that it is not to be wondered that the thirst for 
 riches is apt to become the dominant passion of a peace- 
 ful and prosperous people. " It is an appetite that grows 
 by what it feeds on," until it puts on the royal air of 
 ambition, and invades and corrupts the government. 
 Time was when wealth was only dangerous as a political 
 power through the aristocracy of landed possessions ; but 
 now personal property is so vastly increased, its forms are 
 so multiplied, so protean, often so impalpable, that its 
 approaches are more insidious. 
 
 What protection is there against this danger ? None, if 
 the spirit of corruption taints the character of the people 
 themselves. Once government was esteemed a kind of 
 mystery, whose secrets were known only to the initiated. 
 Now the newspaper has made it open as the day. The 
 public man is on trial every hour for every action. To 
 seek concealment is to deserve censure. Public opinion 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 95 
 
 is in the end the real governing power, and public opinion 
 is only the aggregate of the intelligent private individual 
 opinions of the whole land. In the broad daylight of free 
 inquiry and full information the people are responsible 
 for every public abuse. 
 
 There cannot be a great poem without a great poet ; 
 a great painting without a great painter ; a great building 
 without a great architect ; a great life without a great 
 man. There cannot be a great, pure, free government 
 without a great, pure, liberty-loving people. 
 
 How are these virtues to be maintained ? I know but 
 one school — the school in which our fathers were taught. 
 The school of intelligent industry, personal independence 
 and self-government. The lands should belong to the 
 tillers of the soil. The people should own their homes, 
 and live in the homes they own. They should administer 
 their local affairs, the affairs of their school districts, town, 
 county, and municipal governments, with immediate per- 
 sonal interest and concern. Where the units are right, 
 the aggregate cannot be wrong. The people should live 
 in constant communion with those grand but simple 
 truths of morals which give elevation to character, purity 
 to life. Their beings should be permeated by that love 
 and reverence for country which count any efforts to 
 destroy it by force, to degrade it by error, or contaminate 
 it by corruption, as treason to the best hopes of our race 
 and as a personal wrong. 
 
 When I look to the not distant future, and realize that 
 within a life now begun our country will teem with a 
 population of a hundred million souls, and reflect that 
 this is but the beginning of an ever-increasing volume 
 which is to pour through the channel of our history, I am 
 filled with awe, with reverence, and fear. Here, for good 
 or for evil, is to be the greatest national force ever felt, in 
 time. God guide and direct this broadening, deepening, 
 on-rushing current of life ! 
 
96 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE " STATE GRANGE," AT SAN JOSE, OCTOBER I7, 1873. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen : The organization of the farmers 
 of the United States into one " guild," if permanently 
 carried forward in the spirit of its inception, will lead to 
 consequences of the highest importance. I understand 
 that, while a portion of the work of the " Patrons of 
 Husbandry," like that of the Masons, Odd Fellows, and 
 other similar fraternities, is secret, while it has certain de- 
 grees, orders, honoraiy titles, and decorations, these are 
 mere incidents to its general objects — that it means busi- 
 ness, not show — that its substantial design is to improve 
 the material interests, and mental and moral character and 
 social privileges of the members of the largest and most 
 important industrial interest of our country. How far 
 and in what ways this design shall be accomplished will 
 depend upon the intelligent efforts and patient co-opera- 
 tion of the members themselves. 
 
 There may come a time when all the observances and 
 ceremonies with which societies of this kind hedge them- 
 selves in, and the forms and symbols with which they 
 endeavor to make their proceedings attractive, will be 
 banished by that severe taste which loves to contem- 
 plate truth as a pure abstraction. But that time is very 
 distant, and the millennium will tread close upon its 
 coming. Some of the critics who are wont to sneer at the 
 official titles and degrees conferred by the " Granges," 
 would be giddy with delighted vanity if the meanest and 
 most profligate monarch who ever sat upon a throne would 
 salute them as " Sir Knight." 
 
 While the soldier follows his flag with inspiration of 
 courage, and will lead a forlorn hope for the sake of a rib- 
 bon ; while the parade is bright with the glory of gold 
 lace ; while the church has its stained windows, its organs, 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 97 
 
 and choirs ; ministers their gowns, and bands, and surplice ; 
 while every State occasion or event has its prescribed 
 ceremony ; while colleges and universities annually pepper 
 us with A.M.'s, D.D.'s, and LL.D.'s ; while everybody who 
 is a member of the civil government is '' Hon.", and every- 
 body who is not is " Col." or " Esq." ; why should not in- 
 dustry, too, have its colors, and, holding its patent from 
 Nature, confer its titles and degrees ? Why is not the 
 " Knight of the Plow " as honorable as the " Knight of 
 the Garter"? or why may not the decoration of "The 
 Horse " be worn as proudly as that of the " Elephant " of 
 Denmark, or " Black Eagle " of Prussia ? Since from the 
 constitution of our nature the forms and shows of time are 
 a part of a man's life upon earth, we need not reject those 
 which are images of peace, the coinage of civilization, 
 while clinging to others which are emblems of war or 
 relics of barbarism. 
 
 Whoever has studied the growth of our population 
 must have observed an increasing tendency towards con- 
 centration in towns and cities, and that in the large cities 
 — the centres of capital, commerce, and manufactures — 
 the increase is in greater ratio than in the smaller, which 
 depend upon local trade for support. It is noticeable, 
 too, that cities where population and capital are concen- 
 trated have year by year a greater relative influence in 
 shaping the general policy of government. In them public 
 opinion is massed, and can be thrown immediately upon 
 any given point. They support the great newspapers, at- 
 tract the leading men and surplus capital. The great 
 moneyed interests, and schemes which have in cities their 
 centres, are never without special and plausible advocates. 
 They organize lobbies, and have agents and attorneys 
 before every important legislative and congressional com- 
 mittee. Their influence is thus felt directly and specifi- 
 cally at the time and place where it is wanted. To 
 illustrate : No capital of the same amount in this country, 
 
98 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 perhaps none in the world, has in the same time averaged 
 as large profits upon the investment as that of the national 
 banks. The security for their bills is Government bonds, 
 on which the banks receive interest. The medium with 
 which they redeem is Government notes. The number of 
 banks is limited, so they have a monopoly of the privileges 
 they enjoy. Is it creditable that but for the influence of 
 the banks themselves and the public opinion they have 
 been able to create, the Government handling, as it does 
 annually, from one hundred and fifty to two hundred 
 million dollars in gold, and collecting and disbursing in 
 gold and currency every year an amount equal to more 
 than half the entire circulating medium required by the 
 business of the country, with a credit based upon a conti- 
 nent, and supported by the patriotism and interest of the 
 whole population, would not long since have furnished the 
 currency direct, making the profit on circulation a com- 
 mon benefit, and have made its exchangeable value equal 
 to gold ? The people themselves are entitled to whatever 
 profit there is from the circulation of bills or money, which 
 could have no value but for the credit given by them, 
 and for whose redemption their own bonds are pledged. 
 The problem is not a difficult one, but its practical solution 
 has never been earnestly attempted. If any banking-house 
 enjoyed the credit, commanded the resources, and handled 
 the money the Government does, it would find no difficulty 
 in making its bills of par value with gold. Whenever any 
 financial policy is proposed it is " Wall Street " that is heard. 
 First, because Wall Street, having a special interest, will 
 speak ; second, because we are apt to concede that Wall 
 Street, having made this subject a specialty, has a right to 
 determine. In truth the Wall Street interests should bear 
 about the same relation to the industrial pursuits of the 
 country that the hands on the dial do to the machinery of 
 a watch. If the main-spring and wheels are all right, you 
 can easily adjust the hands to register the movement. 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 99 
 
 Our tariff represents no general principle of policy 
 either of " protection," " incidental protection," or " reve- 
 nue only," but is a patchwork clearly disclosing just 
 how far each special interest seeking protection was able 
 to make itself heard. 
 
 If there is any principle of governmental policy upon 
 which all party platforms and public speakers, candidates, 
 office-holders, and newspapers agree, it is that the public 
 lands should be held for actual settlers. If that sentiment 
 could be put to a viva voce vote, one universal " Ay ! " 
 would go up from sea to sea. 
 
 But we have had land-bounties to soldiers for military 
 services, land-scrip to agricultural colleges for educational 
 purposes, land-scrip for the extinguishment of Indian 
 titles, swamp lands to States for reclamation purposes, 
 land-grants to railroads — and somehow these do pass into 
 the hands of speculators, for the most part, — and the charm 
 of that very musical motto in American politics, " Homes 
 for the homeless," dies away on the ear. 
 
 I instance these illustrations not to find fault, but to 
 show how much and how naturally legislation is influenced 
 and directed by the immediate interest which presses its 
 claims at time, place, and occasion. One positive will ef- 
 fects more than an army of neutrals. One man who knows 
 what he wants, and seeks it, will accomplish more than a 
 hundred who don't want him to get it, but who resolutely 
 stay at home and say nothing about it until it is too late, 
 and then indulge in the luxury of grumbling. 
 
 What we desire and hope for from the Granges upon 
 this subject is that they will give shape, consistency, and 
 definiteness to that diffusive public opinion which now, 
 unorganized, is heard rather in criticism than in direction, 
 and that law-makers and public men shall realize at least 
 that there is a reserve force which, though slow of speech, 
 will speak, and that when private and special interests are 
 clamorous it is safe to wait until those general interests 
 
lOO NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 can be considered, which are often the first to suffer and 
 the last to be heard. 
 
 One subject will doubtless be soon presented for legis- 
 lation of the greatest importance to a large body of the 
 farmers of this State, and on which they ought to be 
 heard — that of irrigation. 
 
 In some districts where irrigation is now regarded as the 
 only assurance of a good crop of grain, deep plowing and 
 summer-fallowing might prove cheaper, more healthful, 
 and about as successful. This can be determined by care- 
 ful experiments and collection of facts. It will certainly be 
 a public calamity if under the operation of State laws the 
 sources of the supply of water necessary for irrigation 
 should pass into the possession of private parties. The 
 mere statement of the possibility of a water monopoly is a 
 stigma upon our law. Whoever has lived in the mines must 
 have observed that the ditch owners could own the mines if 
 they desired to. The unrestricted control of the waters nec- 
 essary for irrigation would confer the same power over lands. 
 
 If a general system of irrigation should be projected, 
 the work to be constructed and managed by the State, it 
 is possible that a great deal of work would be done which 
 would prove unnecessary and unprofitable; some portions 
 of the State would be taxed for improvements in which 
 they had no interest, and the mining districts, to which 
 water is as essential as to the farming, would have a right 
 to demand that the system should be extended to them. 
 
 Is it not possible to divide the State into irrigation dis- 
 tricts, allowing each to determine the question for itself, 
 and giving to each acre a vested right to its pro rata of 
 the water supply, and conferring upon each district the 
 power to condemn the water rights which are necessary 
 for its own irrigation ? 
 
 Another question in connection with this subject will 
 be the practicability of using the same canals for purposes 
 of irrigation and transportation. 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. lOI 
 
 It is of the highest importance that at the outset the 
 State should adopt the best system, and too much care 
 cannot be given to the arrangement of its details. The 
 report of the Commission of Engineers appointed by the 
 General Government to make a reconnoissance of the 
 State will doubtless furnish facts of great value in arriving 
 at a correct conclusion. I trust the farmers, who are most 
 interested, will give the matter their patient, careful, and 
 intelligent attention, so that we shall have the benefit of 
 full discussion and free interchange of opinion. I instance 
 this as a striking case ; but if the Granges shall succeed in 
 giving the affairs of local government that consequence 
 and attention to which they are entitled, they will do an 
 incalculable good. 
 
 We seem as a people to have a quadrennial attack of 
 insanity over a presidential election. How we do "save 
 the country " with speeches and processions, and the 
 burning of tar and turpentine, the blaze of Roman candles 
 and sky-rockets, and the explosion of gunpowder. Distant 
 be the day when the election of a President of the United 
 States shall not be considered a matter of importance. 
 That is the occasion when a sense of the unity of our 
 country is made most vivid and real to us all. But the 
 election of Supervisors, School Directors, and local officers 
 are often of more immediate concern to our individual 
 well-being. Good roads, schools, correct administration 
 of justice in affairs of daily life, taxes imposed only for 
 common benefit and correctly expended, are things which 
 touch us where we live — are real every day. Local ofifi- 
 cers, too, who are amenable to the criticism of their 
 neighbors, should also have the benefit of their intelligent 
 and friendly counsel, so that local administration shall be 
 directed as far as possible by the common neighborhood 
 sentiment of what is right. There is a homely proverb : 
 " Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care 
 of themselves." If the local affairs of our country are 
 
I02 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 wisely administered the general administration will not be 
 far wrong. Indeed, government is a growth from within, 
 and the true character of any government depends upon 
 the local institutions of the country, and these in last re- 
 sort upon the average character of the people themselves. 
 France finds that exterior changes in government are 
 ephemeral, often only changes of name, because local in- 
 stitutions and interior administration remain the same. 
 These are the springs and wheels, and the clock strikes 
 the hours wherever the hands may point. If by constant 
 attention in each neighborhood we can succeed in getting 
 our public shools as nearly perfect as possible, we shall 
 take a bond of fate for the security of free institutions. 
 Emerson says our New England ancestors discovered that 
 the pomps and shows of royalty, with horse-guards and 
 foot-guards, big wigs and little wigs, knights of the bed- 
 chamber, keepers of the hounds, etc., were unnecessary. 
 Perhaps they were too poor to afford them. " Selectmen " 
 would answer the purpose and were cheaper — hence the 
 democratic principle, and representative republican gov- 
 ernment. We must keep the sources pure if we would 
 have the stream clear, and not allow republican shows to 
 destroy republican simplicity. 
 
 I have referred to the comparative over-growth of 
 cities. One of the objects, I observe, of the Granges, is 
 to simplify the machinery of exchange, to dispense with 
 middlemen as far as practicable, and bring producers 
 and consumers more nearly together. In the degree 
 in which they shall proceed in this they will check one of 
 the tendencies towards the concentration of capital and 
 population. This increase of city population, and the 
 aggregation of capital, is not confined to the United 
 States, but is common to the civilized world. London is 
 growing more rapidly than ever before, and the growth 
 of Berlin in the past few years is as great a marvel as that 
 of Chicago. The causes must be sought in principles of 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. I03 
 
 universal operation. At one period of the world's history 
 men gather in cities, walled towns, for mutual protection. 
 At another, cities were great political capitals, law-givers, 
 in fact, making vast provinces and distant countries tribu- 
 taries to their wealth and power by conquest. Now 
 cities attain their importance as the centres and capitals 
 of money, manufactures, and commerce. Think for one 
 moment how vastly their importance as mere money 
 centres has been increased by the introduction of national 
 funded debts. The funded debt of the United States is 
 $1,738,245,500; that of the various States $324,747,959 ; 
 of counties and towns, $429,075,548 ; the last figures are 
 from unofficial statistical tables and are probably largely 
 under. The floating debts of the general government, 
 and of the States, counties, and cities would add more 
 than $800,000,000 to this sum of our public indebtedness. 
 The funded debt of the railroads in the United States 
 is $1,206,615,061. The total debts of the nations of the 
 world, compiled on the basis of Hubner's statistical table, 
 and probably embracing only such as are quotable at 
 the London Exchange, is $18,700,599,758 — more than 
 quadruple the gold and silver coin in the world. Add to 
 that already inconceivable sum the debts of states, 
 counties, and municipalities, and we become lost in a be- 
 wildering maze of figures. The interest upon this vast 
 sum is an annual tribute paid by the world's industry'' to 
 the world's moneyed centres and capitals. What a happy 
 holiday the world would enjoy, what a year of jubilee, if 
 it could get out of debt. Nearly all the vast sums I have 
 recapitulated are the price of wars, and must be paid from 
 the accumulations of peace. There is no escape. No 
 nation can afford to incur the disgrace of repudiation. 
 Capital, when invested in machinery and material im- 
 provements, adds to productive capacity and to the sum 
 of human happiness, but no " national debt is a national 
 blessing," and their vast aggregate is a silent, constant 
 
104 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 drain on the world's productive industry. It is that much 
 of the world's " stock in trade " held by a " dead hand." 
 
 About a hundred years ago Watt invented the con- 
 densing steam-engine, which has revolutionized the arts 
 of peace in as great a degree as the invention of gun- 
 powder did the art of war. So much has it added to 
 productive capacity, that it has been estimated that with 
 it, and the inventions to which it gave rise, the creative 
 power of Great Britain in the arts of civilized life would 
 be as great as that of the world without. One immediate 
 effect of this and almost every other great invention, 
 however, is to strengthen the strong, to make capital 
 a more powerful element in production. Hargrave's 
 spinning-jenny, Arkwright's spinning-frame, Cartwright's 
 power loom, and the methods of puddling and rolling 
 iron, which were nearly contemporary with the steam- 
 engine, with the introduction of cotton as a cheap textile, 
 and the application of steam to transportation by land 
 and water, have completely modified the methods of in- 
 dustry and exchange, and the currents of population. 
 Before that, personal skill was the mechanic's best capital ; 
 now personal mechanical skill is worth comparatively 
 little, without the use of large capital. It cannot com- 
 pete with machinery. Before that, mechanical trades 
 were carried on as independent pursuits, by men who 
 learned them as apprentices, to practise them as masters, 
 with such means as they could severally accumulate. In 
 fact mechanical labor strictly has been largely supplanted 
 by manufacturing labor. When Adam Smith wrote of 
 the division of labor as a cause of increased production, 
 he little dreamed of the minute subdivisions to which 
 the principle would be carried. Before the invention of 
 pins any of our ancestors could gather thorns or make a 
 skewer ; now a pin, I believe, passes through a dozen 
 hands before it is ready for the cushion, but it is cheaper 
 to buy it than to go to the woods for a thorn, or even for 
 
OJ?A TIONS AND ADDRESSES. I05 
 
 a Yankee to whittle a skewer. Outside of agriculture 
 every one who produces is now working to supply the 
 wants of others, and drawing upon the labor of hundreds 
 of others to supply his own. Now, too, it is very seldom 
 that any man produces from raw material an article that 
 any one wants. He only contributes to it in some minute 
 degree — and the whole is the joint production of many 
 hands. This makes exchange more necessary and fre- 
 quent. All articles being for sale seek common centres — 
 places where buyers can purchase everything they want. 
 The volume of commerce is thus wonderfully increased, 
 its machinery exceedingly complex and delicate. These 
 are great centripetal forces which constantly draw popula- 
 tion and capital to those vast human hives, modern cities. 
 They are social forces far more powerful than any legisla- 
 tive enactment. 
 
 If any of you grew up, as I did, near the frontier, you 
 will have observed the operation of these forces in your 
 own experience. Thirty-five years ago, in what was then 
 the " Far West," almost everything consumed on a farm 
 was raised on it. There was some barter. Butter and 
 eggs were exchanged for sugar and coffee. Tea was a 
 luxury, kept for cases of sickness, a few such state occa- 
 sions as the visit of the minister, or of that most august 
 official — in those days — the circuit judge. Wool came 
 from the sheep's back into the house, and never left it 
 until it went out on the backs of the boys and girls. It 
 was carded, spun, and woven by hand. The flax went 
 from the field to the breaker, from breaker to hackle and 
 loom. At the farm I best remember the trough was still 
 in the farmyard, and the remains of the vat were to be 
 seen, where not many years before deer-skins and cow- 
 hides had been tanned, and the lap-stone was still kept, 
 which had been in family use for making shoes from home- 
 tanned leather. The farms where more than one " hired 
 man " was kept were rarer than those that had none. 
 
I06 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Farming implements were of the simplest kind. I 
 remember the first threshing-machine, a horse-power, 
 brought into our neighborhood. It made its appearance 
 about the same time the first piano came into the village. 
 I think both were generally regarded as evidences of 
 extravagant innovations, likely to break their owners. 
 All this has been changed. The introduction of improved 
 agricultural implements, which substantially dates back 
 scarcely twenty-five years, has a tendency to bring about 
 the same kind of changes in farming that labor-saving 
 machinery has effected on the mechanical arts. The gang- 
 plow, the reaper, the header, threshing-machines, enabling 
 one owner to cultivate more acres, increase the size of 
 farms, and make the use of capital a more essential con- 
 dition of success. 
 
 Now almost everything produced on the farm is sold, 
 almost everything consumed in the house is bought. 
 Sometimes the markets are distant, as Liverpool now 
 fixes the price of wheat in Santa Clara. The farmer 
 necessarily becomes interested in the laws of trade, 
 methods of exchange, and price of transportation. It is 
 important he should know what kind of weather they had 
 in England at harvest, how much wheat Russia can spare, 
 how many ships are on their way to his nearest port. It 
 is important that the friction in handling what he has to 
 sell and what he must buy, should be as light as possible, 
 and that he should not be taxed in extra profits to pay 
 losses by bad debts. Now he desires to know about 
 where the money is to come from *' to move the crops." 
 He needs more capital at some times than at others, 
 wants banking accommodations and low interest. As 
 moneyed interests, manufacturing interests, and commer- 
 cial interests, from the nature of their transactions, have 
 their capital and pivotal centres, and as from the nature 
 of their pursuits agricultural interests have not, but are as 
 necessarily diffused as the others are concentrated, it is 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 10/ 
 
 eminently proper they should organize for their own ad- 
 vancement and protection. Farmers living in compara- 
 tive isolation ought to feel that there is a net-work of 
 sympathy connecting each with all. This want the institu- 
 tion of the Patrons of Husbandry, through State and sub- 
 ordinate granges, is intended to supply. The specific 
 objects it proposes will require patient thought and some- 
 times careful experiment, but it can hardly fail to contrib- 
 ute to social enjoyment, to the diffusion of practical in- 
 formation, to a cultivation of a feeling of esprit dii co7'ps, 
 and that sense of honor which results from pride of pur- 
 suit and mutual pledge. During the panic in New York 
 the associated banks for some time received and paid out 
 as money certified checks of each other. The word of a 
 member of a Grange should be sterling in every transac- 
 tion, and pass current as the coin of the realm. Not only 
 his fields, but his life, should be made fruitful by his as- 
 sociation. His presence at home should be an atmos- 
 phere of peace, and his influence among his neighbors as 
 fragrant as an orchard in bloom. 
 
 DECORATION DAY ORATION. 
 
 DELIVERED AT SACRAMENTO, 1877. 
 
 The comrades of the Grand Army of the RepubHc have 
 performed their solemn rites, and the sun has set upon a 
 day sacred to the dead, the memory of whom can never 
 die. The time is aptly chosen, this bridal of the spring 
 and summer for a floral tribute to the men who died for 
 man. It is no idle ceremony. To-day a great people, 
 throughout this broad land, stood uncovered in the silent 
 presence of three hundred thousand dead, whose lives 
 were given as a ransom for Union and liberty. 
 
 From him, the martyr-President, by whose death 
 humanity was bereaved, to the humblest soldier who fills 
 
I08 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 an unknown grave, there is room in the American heart 
 for all. 
 
 No great cause has ever been established without con- 
 flict of battle. Every great country contains the dust 
 of heroes, and is consecrated by it. Humanity claims 
 them all in every clime and land. There are no nation- 
 alities, races, or divisions in the silent kingdom of the 
 dead. 
 
 The ceremonies of this day would be worse than use- 
 less, they would be an impious mockery, if they served to 
 perpetuate the passions and animosities which are neces- 
 sarily engendered by a great civil war. To do this would 
 be to defeat the great object for which the war was 
 fought. 
 
 Free institutions cannot be built upon hatred, or suc- 
 cessfully administered by violence, or in the spirit of con- 
 quest. A union maintained by force must exercise 
 despotic power. The obedience of fear is the sullen sub- 
 mission of subjects, not the willing allegiance of free men. 
 A union preserved by interest would be a commercial 
 partnership, for mutual profit. It could not confront 
 great danger, endure great sacrifice, or rise to the great 
 heights of duty. The life of a great free nation can flow 
 from no such sources. The bands which bind a free peo- 
 ple into that mysterious entity, a nation, can neither be 
 of steel, nor of gold, of despotic power, nor sordid inter- 
 est. They must be purer, more potent, more vital even 
 than authority of law. There must be mutual love, re- 
 ciprocal good-will, a common object and aspiration, a 
 common sentiment of justice and sense of equality and 
 brotherhood. Each citizen must feel that he is part of 
 his country ; his country a part of him ; that he has a 
 share in every portion of it, in all that it has been or is, 
 ©r is to be. Unless we can have this sentiment pervading 
 our common country, and making it the common country 
 of us all, our union, while it exists, will be a mere mechani- 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES, IO9 
 
 cal dovetailing — a political patchwork, not a corporeal 
 whole, animated by an incarnate spirit. 
 
 You may bound your country on the map, describe its 
 geographical divisions, its soil, its climate and productions, 
 its political institutions, social manners and customs, its 
 history — but there is something which escapes description, 
 which can neither be defined nor analyzed nor represented. 
 Our party may not be in power ; the laws may be imper- 
 fect ; their administration unsatisfactory ; office seekers 
 may disgust ; office-holders betray ; the struggle for bread 
 may be hard ; the journey of life may be wearisome ; be- 
 hind all these is the pure presence of our country, a bright, 
 stainless, incorruptible ideal. When that ceases to live in 
 the heart we are without a country. Whoever dims or 
 defaces it is an enemy to his country ; whoever is not ex- 
 alted by it is an enemy to himself. 
 
 This day is taken out of common life and consecrated 
 by solemn religious observance. Let no feeling of hatred 
 profane it. To-day bereaved families gather in broken 
 circles around altar and fireside. To-day skeleton regi- 
 ments muster whose full ranks were thinned by battle. 
 To-day our country mourns and rejoices — mourns over 
 her children fallen, and rejoices that she had heroes for 
 children ; rejoices that she has trodden the wine-press, and 
 exchanged the garments dripping with blood for the white, 
 shining raiment of peace. 
 
 To-day all Europe is an armed camp. From the Irish 
 Sea to the Caspian, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, 
 there is the muster of preparation, and all the land throbs 
 as with a coming earthquake. Let us be thankful that 
 the shadow of the black cloud falls not upon us ; and let 
 us crown the peace that blesses us, with unity and con- 
 cord, that her sweet presence may abide with us forever. 
 
 The experience of our country is novel in human affairs. 
 No nation has ever before survived a conflict like that 
 through which ours has passed, and its ultimate effect 
 
no NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Upon the institutions of this is by no means fully dis- 
 closed. We are in the habit of speaking of the war as 
 civil. It was rather sectional. In the border States, 
 particularly in Missouri, and somewhat in Kentucky, 
 West Virginia, and Maryland, it had many of the features 
 of civil war, where opposing forces in arms are animated 
 by personal hatred, but as a whole it was a war between 
 sections, each equal in extent, population, and resources 
 to an empire. 
 
 The war was inevitable. Institutions to be permanent 
 must be consistent. They cannot unite antagonistic prin- 
 ciples successfully. China, with her fixed type of charac- 
 ter, seems to be unmovable. Wherever intellect is active, 
 there is political movement. Stagnation is death. In 
 every civilized society the movement is towards despotism 
 or liberty. Napoleon comprehended this when he said 
 Europe would become Cossack or Republican. Anarchy 
 is the worst of evils. Either the mass of men require the 
 mastery of force, or individual liberty will evolve the 
 highest social order. 
 
 The Constitution of the United States, founded on the 
 doctrine of equal rights, recognized and protected the 
 existence of slavery. Slavery was an institution old as 
 history, stronger than law, the type and exemplar of the 
 absolute dominance of force. The chariot of the sun 
 could not be drawn by the courser of the night. 
 
 Seward and Lincoln, in their annunciation of the " irre- 
 pressible conflict," and '* house divided against itself," were 
 little in advance of popular presentment. The war cloud 
 which burst in terror had been gathering in darkness from 
 the foundation of the republic. 
 
 The lessons of war are terrible. It can only be justified 
 by an awful necessity, only consecrated by a righteous 
 cause. That war should have been made one of the con- 
 ditions of progress is one of the mysterious dispensations 
 of human life. If war be merely a question of brute force, 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. Ill 
 
 serve only to give vent to the passions of hatred and 
 destructiveness, it is an unmixed, unmitigated, indescriba- 
 ble evil and sin. Behold two armies — facing each other 
 with all the dread enginery of death. Mass hurled against 
 mass, the one object of each to destroy human life — what 
 is this but wholesale murder ? Let each man in the ser- 
 ried hosts believe that he is fighting for the right, that 
 the fate of country, of humanity, is staked upon the issue, 
 the scene is translated to the sublimest heroism. War is 
 not a religious exercise, a Sunday-school lesson, or holi- 
 day pastime. It takes men as it finds them, society as it 
 is, and seeks to organize all passions, thoughts, energies, 
 every capacity of human nature into physical force. 
 
 In no war ever fought in history, did force ever more 
 truly represent sentiment than that through which we 
 have passed. In none has each soldier upon both sides 
 fought from more sincere personal conviction, and per- 
 sonal interest in the result. This redeems it from physical 
 grossness, or intellectual strategy and struggle for advan- 
 tage, and makes it one of the great moral conflicts of all 
 time. 
 
 I am aware that the war as it progressed was an edu- 
 cator of public sentiment, a terrible teacher whose lessons 
 were written in blood and read in the light of battles. Its 
 inevitable result, the secret moving springs in human 
 nature behind it, were at first far better understood at the 
 South than at the North. The South was earlier more 
 terribly in earnest than the North — more logical, consis- 
 tent, and united. 
 
 At the beginning of the war the sentiment which sus- 
 tained slavery as an existing institution, though so univer- 
 sal, was scarcely stronger as a preponderating power in the 
 South than in the North. Many of you can remember 
 when it required more personal courage to question the 
 morality of slavery in this community than it did in many 
 parts of Maryland, Tennessee, or Missouri — almost as 
 
112 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 much as in Charleston or New Orleans at the same time. 
 Some of us can remember when the lives of many of the 
 purest and best men then living were endangered in Bos- 
 ton for proclaiming anti-slavery sentiments, and when 
 there was not a nook or corner in all this broad land 
 where the anti-slavery agitator was safe from violence. 
 
 If Lincoln's first call for seventy-five thousand volun- 
 teers had gone forth with the proclamation that the war, 
 if prosecuted, would last four years, arm two million men, 
 destroy half a million lives, cost five thousand million 
 dollars, enlist white and black men in the same armies, 
 and result in the abolition of slavery and giving the right 
 of suffrage and absolute equality of all civil rights and 
 political privileges to the blacks, how many do you sup- 
 pose would have answered ? Not enough to have officered 
 the regiments. Those who would have been willing to 
 fight for such an object would have considered the con- 
 test as absolutely hopeless. These are incidents and 
 results, and the truth of history justifies the statement 
 that they were not foreseen in the beginning. If they 
 had been, the great mass of those whose lives were sacri- 
 ficed to attain the great end which consecrated the sacri- 
 fice would have started back in blank amazement, blind 
 incredulity, or open revolt. 
 
 Instinct of patriotism answered to the first call. 
 Event succeeded event, danger culminated into peril, 
 until that dire emergency which borders on despair, made 
 emancipation the weapon, not the supreme object of the 
 war. Millions rejoiced in the freedom of the slave in 
 1863, who would have derided it as the dream of a vision- 
 ary, or opposed it as the scheme of a disturber three years 
 before. Let us not, then, as a people. Northern people, 
 exalt our honor, and clothe ourselves in the garments of 
 proscriptive self-righteousness, for we are but lately de- 
 livered from the bondage of this death — our deliverance 
 came in the baptism of fire, and was from the thraldom 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. II3 
 
 of an idea not the bondage of a fact, from the shadow of 
 the substance not the thing itself. It was not our slaves 
 who were emancipated, not our social economy dis- 
 turbed. 
 
 It was fortunate for our country, fortunate for humanity, 
 that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of our councils 
 during this awful struggle. There have lately been at- 
 tempts by unfavorable comparison to decry his ability 
 and disparage the part he played in the great drama ; at- 
 tempts to make it appear that he was a mere figure-head 
 to the Administration over which he presided — little com- 
 prehending the events which swept him onward in resist- 
 less current. His humility and self-abnegation have been 
 ascribed to weakness, his generosity to his great co- 
 workers to a feeling of dependence. His tenderness of 
 human life, his anxious sense of justice, have been mis- 
 taken for irresolution, and his broad sympathies with all 
 humanity for a lack of intense conviction or definite aim. 
 The simplicity of his character deceives those who con- 
 found mystery with greatness. In all his life Lincoln 
 never attempted to appear wiser or better than he was. 
 He never clothed common-place thought in lofty phrase 
 to dazzle by the glitter of words. He indulged in no 
 ominous silence to magnify by concealment. His debate 
 with Douglas introduced him to the American people as 
 the equal of the first political athlete of his time. His 
 homely anecdotes, apt as Franklin's maxims, were the ex- 
 pressed logic of common life, the wisdom of familiar 
 speech. His speech at Gettysburg arose to the loftiest 
 heights of eloquence, and associated his name forever with 
 that of Pericles. His second inaugural, read in the light 
 of subsequent events, has the tone and solemnity of 
 prophecy. In all public action his single aim was to ac- 
 complish the greatest attainable good from the oppor- 
 tunity of every passing hour and event. If he marched 
 abreast of the people, and said "let us go forward," rather 
 
114 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 than " come up here," he had more influence with the 
 people, because he was flesh of their flesh, bone of their 
 bone — he was American — American in fibre and blood, 
 brain and heart. He scorned the idea that common 
 people, "plain people," in his own significant expression, 
 were pottery and that he was porcelain. That any man was 
 porcelain, or better than the clay of common humanity. 
 His simplicity of character, his directness of purpose, his 
 unselfish moral elevation, and severe sense of justice often 
 translated his intellect into the higher regions of inspira- 
 tion and prophecy, but his strength was of the people 
 from whose loins he sprang, whose sufferings, labors, trials, 
 and aspirations had been his life-long experience. His 
 sympathies were broad enough to take in both the slave 
 and his master, and he realized that both were the slaves 
 of fate and circumstance which neither could control. 
 Both were bound by the same chain. With him indig- 
 nation at the wrong never became hatred of the wrong- 
 doer. He was " a man and nothing human was alien to 
 him." We know now, that while he bore upon his 
 shoulders the burden of a continent, his heart bled with 
 a secret sorrow, but no word of refusing escaped him, no 
 act of weakness betrayed him. He suffered in silence 
 until death placed his name in the roll of martyrs. The 
 instincts of humanity are right, its judgments seldom re- 
 versed. To-day no name of mortal is so tenderly loved 
 by so many loving hearts as that of Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 But our grateful reverence and love is not alone for the 
 great who lived in the eye of the world and have been 
 crowned by history. Let us turn for a moment to another, 
 whose name has no place in history, and is only cherished 
 by the hearts that were bereaved by his death. He was 
 an humble private, a representative of many whose names 
 were borne only on the company rolls and in the list of 
 " killed and wounded." No hope of glory called him to 
 the field, nor spirit of adventure led him. He had never 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. II5 
 
 studied the constitution of his country, and knew noth- 
 ing of the nice adjustment of State and national powers. 
 Danger quickened his instinctive patriotism into ardent 
 love and sublime sense of duty. He left the home of his 
 childhood to join the long and wearisome march. He 
 languished in hospital away from mother's and sister's 
 tenderness and care. He stood his lonely sentinel watch 
 in the long night, in the beating of the winter storm, while 
 thoughts of the glowing fireside of home and the sweet 
 voice of love were in his heart. Sense of duty alone sus- 
 tained him, consciousness of duty discharged only requited 
 him. He fell in the impetuous charge. The shout of 
 victory did not reach his ear. His name disappeared from 
 company roll ; he was missed from the camp-fire of his 
 comrades — from the triumphal return. In the heart of 
 love there is an aching void for which earth has no solace, 
 that time cannot fill. This man has his counterpart in 
 heroism, in sincerity, and self-sacrifice in the private who 
 fought in gray for the " lost cause," from convictions 
 which birth and education had made a part of his life. 
 Desolation sits by the Southern fireside, and over all the 
 land " Rachel mourns for her children." 
 
 But there is still another representative man — the rep- 
 resentative of 3,000,000 slaves, who had been waiting in 
 the patience of long suffering and sublime confidence of 
 faith for the hour of deliverance. Deliverance came to 
 him, the dusky volunteer, not by proclamation of presi- 
 dent, or constitutional amendment, but in the field of 
 battle, when his blood, red as that of his white brothers, 
 crimsoned his black skin, and the great emancipation en- 
 franchised him with the common equality of death. If 
 that is most precious which cost most, liberty and union 
 should be the immediate jewels of our soul. To lose 
 either is to sacrifice both. 
 
 Can the awful forces of American society, which the 
 dread necessities of war disclosed, be organized in peace 
 
Il6 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 in the cause of liberty and law and harnassed to the cause 
 of progress ? 
 
 That is the question proposed to us. That is the duty 
 bequeathed to us by the dead, who will have died in vain 
 if we fail to discharge it. In that duty only we can link 
 our names to theirs and share in their heritage of glory. 
 
 I look around me, over this audience, secure in the 
 blessings of peace, and the noise of battle comes to me as 
 from afar. Gettysburg and Richmond blend with the 
 sound of Saratoga and Yorktown, of Thermopylae and 
 Marathon in the triumphal march of humanity. I listen 
 for the footfall of coming generations in the distant, far- 
 off future, when the march of progress shall be under the 
 white banners of peace to the tuneful measure of love. 
 "When nation shall not lift up sword against nation, 
 neither shall they learn war any more." 
 
 EXTRACT FROM ORATION. 
 
 DELIVERED AT SACRAMENTO, JULY 4, 1877. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen : From the high vantage-ground 
 of the century we look back through the vista of a hun- 
 dred years, but the incidents of that day have lost none 
 of their interest. Imagination may idealize them, but can- 
 not exaggerate the importance of the consequences which 
 flow from them and which broaden with the sun. Before 
 us lies the future, with its untried possibilities. The past 
 at least is secure beyond the change of time or chance of 
 fate. What would the history of the century be, with the 
 United States left out ? What would the outlook of hu- 
 manity be, if there were no United States of America? 
 
 The beginning of a new century suggests some reflec- 
 tions. Our nation is no longer a parvenu. We cannot 
 plead the " baby act," or attribute indiscretions to the 
 ebullience of youth. We have attained our majority, and 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 11/ 
 
 are entitled to sit as an equal with the elders at the coun- 
 cil-board of empire. Manhood brings new duties and 
 responsibilities, which demand independence of thought 
 and self-reliance of character. We can no longer afford 
 to deprecate criticism, dress ourselves in the glass of the 
 world's approval, and ape foreign fashions and opinions. 
 We must stand erect, not in the boastfulness of youth, 
 but in the conscious strength of manhood ; dare to think, 
 speak, and do the right ; not beg the issue, but defy criti- 
 cism and challenge fate to the lists. If the American idea 
 is worth anything, it deserves honest utterance ; if Ameri- 
 can life is worth living, it is worthy to be cast in an 
 American mould. Arrogance is bad enough, but it is 
 better than the cringing obsequiousness of the abject imi- 
 tation. There are those who will not read an American 
 book, admire an American work of art, or appreciate an 
 American thought, until it has received the signet of for- 
 eign approval. Nothing home-made is good enough for 
 them. The nativity of such was cast under a wrong star. 
 There are others, butterflies of fashion, who seem to apolo- 
 gize for being Americans — and who ought to apologize 
 for being alive. Their experience of life is confined to 
 eating, sleeping, dressing, and grumbling. A tight boot 
 will throw them into paroxysms of despair over the 
 republic ; an ill-fitting coat is a sign of modern degen- 
 eracy ; a bad digestion shows that free institutions are a 
 delusion and a sham. Afflicted with mental ophthalmia, 
 nothing is fair to them but a full-length image in a French 
 mirror. Suffering an incurable moral dyspepsia, they are 
 nauseated by human nature's daily food. The storm of 
 political excitement may rage round them, wrapped in 
 the garment of their superiority, they thank God they 
 are not as other men, and have no responsibility for the 
 evil days in which we have fallen. 
 
 If battles had to be fought, great deeds done, great 
 sacrifices made, great achievements accomplished by 
 
Il8 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 such men, what a perfect world — of toys, perfumery, and 
 millinery — we should have ! 
 
 I am here to-day to proclaim my faith in the American 
 people, American society, American institutions and form 
 of government, and my belief that, take them for all in 
 all, they are the best we know of on the habitable globe, 
 past or present. I am here to proclaim my conviction 
 that at no time in our past have the ties of our Union 
 been so strong, so little threatened with future danger, at 
 no time has the doctrine of equal rights been so broadly 
 exemplified, as now, on this Fourth day of July, in the 
 year of grace 1877, and of American Independence the 
 I02d. 
 
 We have of late been passing through a stage of intense 
 introspection. There has been a tendency to take the 
 clock to pieces, because it did not keep time with every- 
 body's chronometer — to pull up the beans to see if they 
 were growing. We have been living with finger on the 
 pulse ; we have been studying symptoms, and are like the 
 patient who consults a quack and fancies the pimple is a 
 cancer — every passing ache and trifling pain the beginning 
 of an incurable malady. We have been too much like 
 Addison's hypochondriac who constantly sat in a weighing 
 chair. Every fall in the barometer portends a hurricane 
 of disaster, and three hot days suggest an earthquake ! 
 
 I know we are not perfect. Outside of Utah the sin- 
 ners outnumber the saints. The Centennial did not usher 
 in the millennium. We do not sleep with ascension robes 
 under our pillows for fear Gabriel will take us by surprise. 
 There is perhaps as much human nature to the square 
 mile here as elsewhere. Even in politics, an ounce of 
 active selfishness will effect more than a ton of good in- 
 tentions. If one does not sow he cannot reap, and he 
 must summer-fallow besides ; and sometimes when he has 
 sown the rains do not fall, or the enemy sows tares in the 
 night. There are stony places, thorny places, and barren 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. II9 
 
 places. Neither merit nor industry is always rewarded. 
 Ability often stands at the gate while assurance stalks up 
 the steps and rings the front bell. Modesty is its own 
 reward, and apt to be all it gets. Honesty sometimes 
 walks in rags, while fraud rolls in coach and livery, in 
 purple and fine linen. We have a national debt, State, 
 county, city, and corporation debts. The poor we have 
 always with us. We have suffering, want, vice, crime, 
 and ignorance. But in no other country are there 42,- 
 000,000 people so well fed, clothed, and housed ; so well 
 informed ; of so high a sense of justice, and so instinctive 
 a regard for law as in the United States of America. In 
 no other country could social order be so well preserved 
 without the restraints of law ; could society so well stand 
 alone without the framework of government. Let us rid 
 ourselves of the idea that any form of government is an ob- 
 ject of adoration or has any value except as the expression 
 of the nation's character. It is the protecting shell of 
 society, not society itself. The pomps and shows and 
 pageantry of government are the relics of a barbaric age, 
 the survival of barbaric taste. If there were no vice or 
 crime we should need no government. 
 
 Not the government but the American people is the 
 production of this age and country. 
 
 See the American people — one hundred and two years 
 ago 3,000,000 souls in thirteen colonies, stretched along the 
 Atlantic sea-board ! For a principle in which every human 
 being has an interest, they sever the ties which bind them to 
 the Mother Country, and engage in a war with the strongest 
 power in the world ; they establish their independence 
 and ordain a constitution which is a masterpiece of politi- 
 cal wisdom ; the continent is theirs, and they keep open 
 house for the world ; they flow over the Alleghanies and 
 fill up the valley of the Mississippi ; they clear the wil- 
 derness to make room for States ; they build towns and 
 cities and dot the land with schools, churches, and chari- 
 
120 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 ties ; they borrow mechanical arts and improve them ; 
 they contribute a world of inventions and discoveries to 
 the common treasury of humanity, and pay their debts to 
 civilization with compound interest ; they cross the conti- 
 nent, buttress their empire on the shores of the Pacific, 
 and open its windows to the setting sun ; they are eager 
 in the search for truth, the pursuit of knowledge, glad to 
 assimilate all intelligence, to appropriate all thought, to 
 arm themselves with all the implements of art. They 
 have redeemed a continent from a wilderness to civiliza- 
 tion, and dedicated it from sea to sea to free thought, 
 free speech, free schools, free homes, and free men. 
 
 Humanity could not spare that history. It is one of 
 the epics of progress. 
 
 A few years ago a million of armed men, inured to 
 hardship, accustomed to danger, elated with victory, proud 
 of their leaders, disbanded, melted back into civil life, and 
 patiently resumed the toil which was to pay the debt con- 
 tracted for services themselves had rendered. When and 
 where else could that have occurred ? what other nation 
 could have withstood the strain of a sectional war like 
 that through which we have passed ? In what other 
 country could the vast disturbance of moral, political, 
 social, and industrial forces occasioned by such a war have 
 been so peacefully adjusted "^ 
 
 If our country is steadfast to the great idea of political 
 equality, and individual liberty, it will continue an ever- 
 increasing power in civilization. False to it, the sceptre 
 shall depart to some hand worthy to hold it. If it stands 
 in the way of progress, " Let Rome in Tiber melt, and 
 the wide arch of the ranged empire fall." If it shall lead 
 the vanguard of the nations in the interest of man ; if it 
 continue to give in each succeeding age, fuller and larger 
 expression of the truth upon which its existence was 
 
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES. 
 
 121 
 
 staked, the circling centuries will roll above it in their 
 starry grandeur, adding to its usefulness without impair- 
 ing its strength, and crown it with the honors of age, 
 without robbing it of the grace and beauty of youth. 
 "The sceptre shall not pass from Judah until Shiloh 
 come." 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 Central Pacific Railroad Company — His Early Friendship for it — Political 
 Conflict Created by its Aggressions — His Course as Leader of the 
 People against them — Features of the Long and Bitter Struggle — His 
 Forecast of the Future Sustained by Results Twenty-five Years Later — 
 Sec, I, The Sacra?nento Union — Sec. 2, Course as Governor of Cali- 
 fornia — Sec. 3, Services in the United States Senate — Retirement from 
 Political Life. 
 
 The political battle-ground in California, for the past 
 generation always debatable and hotly contested between 
 the two great parties, has been and is the scene of a con- 
 flict between those of its citizens who chafed in political 
 chains which they believed to be corruptly forged, and 
 who revolted against practical serfdom, upon the one 
 hand, and a corporation which, aided by allies from 
 choice, or through self-interest, or fear, aimed to weld 
 and rivet close their manacles, absorb their substance, 
 crush or control, make and unmake them publicly and 
 privately from the highest to the lowest, upon the other 
 hand. Between collars of branding gold and repressing 
 fetters of iron, there was little attractive choice for ambi- 
 tious manhood crippled by high principles and integrity 
 of character. 
 
 As soon as that corporation exchanged its early swad- 
 dling-bands for gold armor ; sat up, cherished in bland 
 infancy, and took nourishment at the generous breast of 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 23 
 
 the State ; entered by national consent upon the inheri- 
 tance of all the people, the dower of a landed property 
 enormous in extent and value and fertile to sustain 
 enormities social and political ; cloaked itself in eleemosy- 
 nary robes of vested rights, and began to pulsate with the 
 strength of the rich blood of commerce — it struck its con- 
 fiding nurses and beneficial god-fathers myriads of blows 
 full in their faces with iron hands v/hich wore no velvet 
 gloves ! 
 
 In the struggle which then began and which yet endures, 
 Newton Booth was the early champion of the inherent 
 rights of men, their recognized leader in a movement 
 which resulted in a new constitution for the State in 1879, 
 their undaunted, tireless advocate. 
 
 He had been among the foremost of the friends of the 
 railroad project, a plan which was of vital interest to the 
 State, and which as a war measure was also of essential 
 importance to the general government. To aid the enter- 
 prise he had made a free, liberal gift of money. At the 
 ceremony of breaking ground at Sacramento, January 8, 
 1863, he was the brilliant orator, saying in closing: 
 
 " You, sir, to-day have inaugurated a most glorious work — a work whose 
 beneficent influences shall last when the names of Egyptian kings and 
 dynasties shall be forgotten. Hail, then, all hail, this auspicious hour ! 
 Hail this bond of brotherhood and union ! Hail this marriage tie between 
 the Atlantic and Pacific ! Hail, all hail, this bow of promise which amid 
 all the clouds of war is seen spanning the continent — the symbol, the 
 harbinger, the pledge of a higher civilization and an ultimate and world- 
 wide peace ! " 
 
 In the State Senate that winter he was guardian of the 
 interests of the corporation, watchful, prompt, effective. 
 When it was attempted to require the directors to adver- 
 tise all their proposed work, and let contracts to the 
 lowest bidders, his able antagonism defeated the bill, and 
 made the Contract and Finance Company possible. 
 When authorization of a million-dollar gift from San 
 
124 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Francisco was sought to be qualified with a proviso, 
 he killed the offered amendment. He lived to regret 
 such service. Within two years he was the quiet an- 
 tagonist — in four the open one — of the aggressive corpo- 
 ration, the management of which had already whispered 
 to itself : 
 
 " He thinks too much, — such men are dangerous ! " 
 
 In 1865, replying to a covert threat that patronage 
 would be withdrawn from him if he persisted in running 
 for the State Senate, he said : 
 
 " My goods have always been for sale — my principles never ! " 
 
 and he was defeated by a few votes ; in 1867, cause and 
 result repeated themselves. In both instances nomina- 
 tion was unsought, was tendered to him, hundreds of 
 miles away, by telegraph from the convention floor. 
 
 The citizens of Sacramento had not then been taught 
 some cruel lessons they afterwards learned. 
 
 Two years later it became evident that he would prob- 
 ably receive the Republican nomination for Governor in 
 1871. 
 
 The occasion was before him now for the waging of 
 war against the palpable and common danger from exist- 
 ing public corruption, private timidity, threatened com- 
 plete enslavement of all classes of men, control by 
 centralized wealth of government, general and local, — the 
 occasion was at hand ; the cause of his action had matured 
 in his mind and become his fixed conviction, his inflexible 
 principle. During the campaign he fought with such de- 
 clared purpose. 
 
 Long before, in one of his finished lectures, he had said : 
 
 " The regulation (in the English Parliament) of that great commercial 
 monopoly and political corporation, the East India Company . . . brought 
 on a contest, one of the first between the chartered powers and vested privi- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 12$ 
 
 leges of a corporation upon the one hand, and the natural rights of man and 
 supremacy of law upon the other." ' 
 
 In another lecture, prepared at a time when the trans- 
 continental railroad companies had barely begun their 
 work of despoiling the Republic of millions of money 
 and dictating to all classes of voters, he expressed this 
 belief : 
 
 " Concentrated capital becomes kingly power making war for monopolies, 
 seeking new fields of wealth as a conqueror invades kingdoms regardless of 
 the rights of men, and esteeming government a name to impose on the 
 patriotism of the simple, while it is made subservient to and a part of 
 schemes of private advantage." "^ 
 
 On another occasion, this : 
 
 " There is no danger that we will lose the forms of a republic. There is 
 a danger that we may ultimately retain only the forms. Caleb Cushing's 
 famous ' man on horseback ' is as distant and mythical as ever. The danger 
 comes from another direction. The eagles on the coin, not in the standard, 
 are its badge. It is gold, not steel, which threatens. It shapes itself in the 
 endeavor to make government and law subservient to private rather than 
 public good — to special rather than general interests. The contest will be 
 between associated capital and popular rights. Let the field be cleared for 
 that action, and let the dead past bury its dead ! " ^ 
 
 The prolific brood of our present-day multiple-million- 
 aires lay then in their cradles. 
 
 There is a voluminous railroad literature 7iow — there 
 was none then worth perusal — touching public peril in the 
 United States from the intrenched, expanding, myriad- 
 faced powers of incorporated monopolies. Exposure of 
 the Credit Mobilier was not made until late in 1872 ; the 
 method and results of the Contract and Finance Company 
 lay coiled away out of sight until its work was done — the 
 records then destroyed. When fierce light flashed upon 
 each, he publicly scored them both as 
 
 " A twin-birth of incesttiotis shame /" ■* 
 
 * Lecture on " Fox." ' 
 
 ''■ Lecture on " Morals and Politics." 
 
 3 Speech on " National Issues," at Piatt's Hall, San Francisco. 
 
 * " Railroad Problem in American Politics." 
 
126 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 The selections given in this volume from his contribu- 
 tions to the literature named will long be worth study. 
 Perhaps " he builded better than he knew " ; Emerson did 
 not immortalize that idea until after many men had 
 done so. 
 
 He feared the concentration of power in a few hands, — 
 possibly one hand ; a self-constituted oligarchy, perhaps 
 an Augustus Caesar preferring substance to semblance in 
 imperial sway ; the decay of individual enterprise in its 
 over-shadowing presence ; a throttle-valve controlling all 
 personal aspiration ; the loss of freedom of thought and 
 action ; the arrogance of riches arrayed against a sense of 
 dependence — the servility of want ; the insidious influence 
 of those who were " sycophants from the choice of their 
 own slavish and subservient souls " ; an iron finger upon 
 every pulse of industry, counting its beats " ; the fulfil- 
 ment of the communistic prophecy made by Daniel 
 Webster at Plymouth Rock, December 22, 1820 ; the cor- 
 ruption of legislators in their halls, judges in chambers 
 and on the bench, Congressmen and Cabinets, minor 
 ofificials in droves ; the terrorizing of merchants into re- 
 pressed utterance and open subjection ; a sword of 
 Damocles, engraved with ALL THE TRAFFIC WILL BEAR, 
 suspended over the head of every farmer and pro- 
 ducer ; the submission of the army of labor in making 
 choice between that and the hunger of their families ; the 
 allurements of proffered wealth and power to the brightest 
 legal minds of highest culture'; the prostration of the 
 
 ' The Hon. Creed Haymond stated the issue at Sacramento, Sept. 4, 
 1872, as follows : " There is but one single contest, and that contest is be- 
 tween the people on the one side and the Central Pacific Railroad Company 
 on the other. 
 
 " It has been said that we ought not to aim our shafts or direct our jave- 
 lins against that company. I ask, has it not, in the language of the resolu- 
 tions, dictated policies to the people of this State ? Has it not made and 
 unmade our laws ? Has it not controlled conventions and dictated nomina- 
 tions ? Has it not corrupted Legislatures ? Has it not assailed the late as 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 12/ 
 
 body politic, local and general, before a shrine erected and 
 maintained by an iron will ; the greed and weakness of 
 the ambitious, noted by Shakespeare : 
 
 " O that estates, degrees, and offices were not derived corruptly ! and that 
 
 clear honor 
 Were purchased by the merit of the wearer ! " 
 
 All this he had foreseen and dreaded, and against it bat- 
 tled as a leader. 
 
 How much of it has come to pass? 
 
 Let those who ask themselves that question now, ob- 
 serve, read, — and reflect ! 
 
 He lived to see what is now apparent to all — the power 
 of the law paralyzed too often in courts of all grades ; 
 Congressmen and legislators labelled as merchandise ; 
 taxes unpaid in California to the amount of $3,000,000, — 
 a million of it owing to the school fund ; a debt to the 
 United States, of the California corporation alone, that at 
 maturity a few years hence will amount to $77,043,630.66 
 — for the payment of which an extension of time for one 
 hundred and fifty years is asked. 
 
 In his self-imposed work Newton Booth was courageous 
 and great. He led the attack in the United States upon 
 the insolence and the terrible powers of corporations 
 " without souls." 
 
 The men who were fortified by laws which drained the 
 resources of the commonwealth and turned flowing 
 streams of gold into their capacious coffers, he never 
 named personally in his open warfare — waged upon prin- 
 ciple ; but he would not admit any merit or justice in 
 their declaration that self-defence compelled corporations 
 to control all political parties. To that plea he replied : 
 
 well as the present Chief Magistrate of the State because both were true to 
 the great interests of the people ? When the answer comes, as come it must, 
 * All this and more has it done,' I can but feel that we would be recreant to 
 our trusts and false to the people, were we to turn aside our arms at the 
 mention of its name." 
 
128 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " I do not think railroads need be political machines any more than 
 grist-mills, tin-shops, and farms."' 
 
 The most incisive speech he ever made contains this : 
 
 " Do not understand me to say now that the owners or managers of rail- 
 roads are different from other men, or that they have met together in a 
 conspiracy to do a particular thing, and are methodically proceeding upon a 
 fixed plan. Great social or political changes are seldom or never wrought 
 that way." * 
 
 Concerning individuals he cared little, and as a rule he 
 refrained from personal attacks. Of great principles, 
 public danger from irresponsible power, the rights of the 
 trembling many menaced by the powerful few, he was the 
 volunteer guardian. 
 
 His moral courage was greater than the measure of it 
 has been in the mind of Californians : the glitter of con- 
 centrated gold occasionally blinded their eyes against the 
 flashes of his keen intellect — the weight of it at times sunk 
 their perceptions to the level of careless ingratitude. 
 There was a thoughtful and large minority which recog- 
 nized his great qualities ; but, contrasted with the ap- 
 preciation openly given them by his fellow-citizens, his 
 services were as Niagara to a mill-pond — Yosemite to a 
 soap-bubble. 
 
 One who had known him well, and whose own character 
 and public services were in harmony with his, ^ wrote 
 upon the occasion of his death a thoughtful tribute to his 
 memory. The first stanza, however, must be challenged. 
 Newton Booth did not fail of effort and purpose as long 
 as such were possible factors in the broad strife. What 
 could he have added to that which he had already said ? 
 He knew that an Achilles, sulking in his tent, was apt to 
 
 ' " Railroad Problem in American Politics." 
 
 ^ The gifted, brilliant, and able lawyer and honorable man. Creed Ray- 
 mond, succeeding Sanderson, became chief attorney for the company a few 
 years later, and remained so until his death. 
 
 ^ Joseph T. Goodman, of Nevada. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 29 
 
 be derided ; but knew also that he had left nothing that 
 he could do, undone. In one of his addresses he had said : 
 " In this age, whatever stands still, recedes — whatever 
 ceases to grow, dies." * 
 
 The following- is the tribute referred to : 
 
 " We give his ashes back to earth to-day, 
 But in the true sense he died long ago ; 
 When effort fails and purpose fades away 
 The rest of life is but an afterglow. 
 
 " We watched him mount with his audacious sweep 
 Of pinion till his forehead touched the sun, 
 But while the all-hail swelled, lo ! in the deep 
 Our Icarus lay, his flight forever done. 
 
 " No wax wings his, through which the fervid heat 
 Of trial melted — fire they had withstood — 
 But he grew weary of their constant beat 
 Against the pricks, and folded them for good. 
 
 " His nature was too fine, his soul too pure 
 To jocky in the time's ignoble race. 
 Bribe, bargain, cringe, or even to endure 
 
 The shame that common purchase stamps on place. 
 
 " Woe to the State where precedence and place 
 Are in the open market bought and sold. 
 Where modest worth is forced to bow its face 
 Before the coarse effrontery of gold ! 
 
 " You stabbed his heart, you turned from your true friend 
 To worship at a bogus Csesar's feet — 
 In frenzy bade Hyperion descend. 
 And raised a bloated satyr to his seat. 
 
 " Ah, ye are penitent ! Let every toll 
 Of his funeral bell record a vow 
 To be unshackled men, and his great soul 
 Shall bear the palm of triumph even now." 
 
 ' Address to Odd Fellows, at Red Bluff, April 26, i860. 
 
130 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Sec. I. The history of a great journal, singularly pure, 
 firm, and splendid in character and attributes, and its final 
 crucifixion, are incidentally so interwoven with his biogra- 
 phy as to require brief mention. 
 
 The Sacramento Union was without a peer west of the 
 Rocky Mountains. It had earned, it cherished, and it 
 exercised the right to create public opinion by unswerv- 
 ing guardianship of public interests. The incessant stream 
 of its editorial work bore upon the surface coruscations 
 of literary elegance, reflected in every ripple steadfast 
 courage and allegiance to the truth ; and in its clear and 
 evenly flowing depths displayed boundless resources of 
 scholarly statesmanship, never tempered to the exigencies 
 of the moment, but devoted always to the common safety 
 and welfare. Necessarily it wielded great influence. It 
 was fearless — incorruptible. The Central Pacific Railway 
 — failing to bribe, powerless to intimidate — crushed it to 
 death after a struggle which lasted from 1867 to 1875. 
 
 All classes of men in the commonwealth upon which it 
 depended for that circulating life-blood which assures 
 prosperity, were driven in self-defence to ostracism ; they 
 dared not to support it longer for fear that if they did they 
 would be deprived of support themselves. After the 
 Unioji became a losing property, its brave proprietors con- 
 tinued to publish it until each of them had lost $150,000. 
 Even then they peremptorily refused private offers from 
 agents of the railroad company, and announced to the 
 public that the sale of the paper would be by public 
 auction. 
 
 One of the editors of the Union, sorrowfully walking 
 away after the auction on the sidewalk : 
 
 " Woe worth the chase, woe worth the day 
 That cost thy life, my gallant gray ! 
 I little thought, when first thy rein 
 I slacked upon the banks of Seine, 
 That the foul raven e'er would feed 
 On thy fleet limbs — my matchless steed ! " 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I3I 
 
 Newton Booth felt that murder keenly — deeply. A 
 general had lost that which was precious as an army — a 
 leader the sustaining arm of a power greater than his 
 own ! In an address to the citizens of Sacramento, he 
 said with caustic force ' : 
 
 " A decree had been registered by the railroad company that the Sacra- 
 mento Union should be destroyed. It was the ablest newspaper ever 
 published in a community of this size. Its service in the cause of right and 
 truth had been of inestimable value. It had never bowed to power or truckled 
 to position or soiled its integrity. Being dead, it yet lives, and its spirit 
 walks abroad. But it had refused to share with the railroad in a legislative 
 scheme of plunder, and had stood boldly up in defence of the people and 
 their rights, against all schemes, open or insidious. It was destroyed, at 
 their bidding, in the house of its friends. There has been no other such 
 exhibition of the brute power of money to crush free speech, in American 
 history. You have exchanged the Sacratnento Union for the promise of a 
 ' rolling-mill ! ' — a promise that will be renewed as often as you are asked 
 to sacrifice your manhood to the will of those who aspire to be your august 
 masters, and fulfilled when it suits their sovereign pleasure, convenience, 
 and interest ; and if it should ever be fulfilled, its smoke will only serve to 
 remind you of your shame ! " ^ 
 
 Sec. 2. As Governor of California, Mr, Booth's ardu- 
 ous and effective labors, unswerving firmness of purpose, 
 thoughtful and suggestive State papers, prudent financial 
 policy, and admitted excellence of administration are 
 matters of local rather than general interest. 
 
 The Executive power he wielded was directed against 
 the monopolists, only in legitimate and dignified channels 
 flooded by the light of open debate. Petty revenges were 
 beneath the level of his nature, foreign to his broad pur- 
 pose. Every just and wholesome demand made by cor- 
 porations and acceded to by the Legislature, he approved 
 into laws. 
 
 An extra session of the Legislature was vehemently 
 urged by capitalists, sustained by a powerful press, to 
 cure defects in a single law ; he refused to call it. 
 
 ^ Speech at Sacramento, July 22, 1875. 
 
 * This tribute is due to the memory of James Anthony and Paul Morrill. 
 
132 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 The veto prerogative he used freely, yet approved 13 16 
 laws.' The pardoning power he exercised with rare con- 
 scientiousness, yet, on the average, pardoned one convict 
 weekly. On the average, too, once in every six weeks a 
 man was condemned to death in California, and the law 
 required the Chief Executive to read all the testimony in 
 each case. He did so — and commuted but five sentences. 
 One of those commutations illustrates his sense of justice. 
 William Williams was sentenced to death in 1871, for 
 murder in Siskiyou County. The reason for Executive 
 interference was written by the Governor : 
 
 " Decision. — Whereas, the case having been finally decided on appeal 
 by the Supreme Court of this State, so that no hope of a reversal of sentence 
 or delay of execution was left ; and whereas, the said Williams being thus 
 under sentence of death, made his escape from jail without personal vio- 
 lence ; and whereas, the officers who were responsible for his safekeeping, 
 after exhausting other means for his capture, caused information to be con- 
 veyed to him that his sentence had been commuted to imprisonment for life, 
 and the said Williams, believing such information to be true, surrendered 
 himself. Now, believing that the State ought not in any manner to be a 
 party to a violation of faith, even to the guilty, and, least of all, in a matter 
 involving life and death, — therefore let his sentence be commuted to im- 
 prisonment in the State prison for the term of his natural life." ■' 
 
 His biennial message to the Legislature contained an 
 exhaustive essay on the pardoning power ; the conclud- 
 ing words of that on capital punishment were : 
 
 "Executions are required to be private, but in this age of newspapers 
 they are faithfully reported to every fireside, and whatever of evil influence 
 there was in public executions before the newspaper age, is necessarily in- 
 creased in tenfold degree. I am of opinion that the death penalty should be 
 abolished, and some kind of imprisonment, different from that provided for 
 crimes of lower grade than murder, should be devised instead ; and that in 
 such cases the power of pardon should be so circumscribed as to require 
 proof of innocence before it could be exercised." 
 
 * Legislative bills to the number of 2658 were introduced during his term 
 of office. 
 
 ^ The officers forged a commutation, including the great seal of the State 
 and the Governor's signature. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 33 
 
 Although such was his opinion, he withstood at times 
 pressure almost incredible brought to bear upon him by 
 friends of murderers. Sworn to maintain the laws, he did 
 so, often at the cost of intense mental suffering — not on 
 account of the criminal so much as on that of relatives. 
 He was too humane and sympathetic by nature to look 
 with composure upon lacerated hearts. On one occasion, 
 while telling a pleading woman that her son must die the 
 day following, he became faint from emotion, and did not 
 recover for hours ; on another he handed his secretary a 
 letter, saying : " Write to this lady and tell her — as best 
 you may, no language can temper the blow — / cannot save 
 her brother ; the task is too painful for me." 
 
 A brutal assassin condemned to death feigned insanity 
 so artistically that the Governor was in doubt. He in- 
 duced the superintendent of the State Insane Asylum to 
 spend a week — disguised as a prisoner — in jail with the 
 murderer. The result was convincing proof of sanity — 
 and execution followed. 
 
 In brief, he was of the judicial habit of thought, in- 
 clined always to mercy — but sternly unwavering when 
 facing established facts. These incidents are given 
 simply to illustrate his character. 
 
 Doubtless all governors receive many threats of assas- 
 sination. He did — and merely smiled as he placed them 
 on the " anonymous " file of his secretary. 
 
 During his gubernatorial term he entertained in a man- 
 ner and upon a scale commensurate with his dignity and 
 circumstances. Occasionally, also, small gatherings at his 
 home, of from forty to sixty guests, were made the more 
 delightful by being chiefly literary ; the contributions in- 
 cluding essays, poems, satires, ballads, and musical com- 
 positions, — all original with the guests, and many of suf- 
 ficient merit to find wider audiences afterwards through 
 the magazines. 
 
 The years of Mr. Booth's administration, although not 
 
134 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 marked by extraordinary incident, were full of interest 
 and importance to Californians. He suggested many 
 new laws, and amendments to those existing, nearly all of 
 which have since been adopted. The spirit of the Execu- 
 tive pervaded all State institutions. His business ex- 
 perience and habits were valuable there. He left these 
 institutions in much better condition than that in which 
 he found them. 
 
 Suspecting the most important Board of Commissioners 
 in the State of being corrupt, he acted instantly, exam- 
 ined affairs personally, went from investigation to imme- 
 diate prosecution. One of them resigned with clean 
 hands ; another died pending trial under indictment ; the 
 chief offender, a man of great wealth, went to State prison 
 for six years. 
 
 California never has been afiflicted with a corrupt gov- 
 ernor, or one mentally weak, and never has had one of 
 higher character than Newton Booth. 
 
 Sec. 3. Of his work in the United States Senate, some 
 of his speeches and his exquisite tributes to the dead are 
 given in this volume ; the remainder are omitted. All of 
 the addresses may of course be found in the records. He 
 was faithful in practice to his theory of the ideal legislator 
 by being constant and energetic in quiet work. In a 
 lecture he had said : 
 
 "The immensely increased pressure of public business demands from 
 public men a constant and laborious attention to details, and makes de- 
 spatch more valuable than speech — the committee-man more useful than the 
 orator. . . . 
 
 " Now, legislative action is governed by public opinion, and the journal- 
 ist has acquired the influence which the orator has lost." ' 
 
 Such was his teaching — such his action. The Senate 
 contained a no more valuable working member. 
 
 ' Lecture on " Fox." 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 35 
 
 He served on the Committees on Public Lands, Civil 
 Service and Retrenchment, Mines and Mining, and as 
 Chairman of those on Patents and Manufactures. 
 
 Content to work quietly and faithfully for the interests 
 of all people, he deliberately subordinated his personality 
 to public service. 
 
 Those of his constituents who had expected him to 
 pursue a course marked by a splendor of mental equip- 
 ment in oratorical display — and they were many — were 
 bitterly disappointed. 
 
 Yet, while he did not choose to seek national fame for 
 eloquence and power in debate, he spoke at length and 
 with polished force, as well as thorough knowledge of his 
 subject, upon every question involving especially the in- 
 terests of California. Let that, at least, be known in the 
 State of his adoption. 
 
 Nine days after he took his seat, March 9, 1875, the 
 Hawaiian treaty was debated in executive session. He 
 opposed it in a compact and powerful argument. Con- 
 sidering later events, it is interesting to quote his 
 prophecy ' : 
 
 " But, Mr. President, it will not be seriously contended that this treaty 
 with a nation which the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Morrill) aptly styled the 
 kingdom of Lilliput, has been negotiated upon our part for any commercial 
 purpose. The object is political. It is assumed that by bringing ourselves 
 into special relations with the Hawaiian Islands we shall acquire a protec- 
 torate over them and eventually their sovereignty." 
 
 Again : 
 
 " No sir, — This colonial idea means an innovation upon our general plan 
 of government. It will be a government at Washington of islands 2000 miles 
 distant from our nearest port. It means that we are to become a great 
 naval power, with distant possessions which it is a point of honor to defend, 
 with all the additional expense and strengthening of the central government 
 which that implies. It means that we, a Continental republic, shall enter 
 upon a colonial system like that of the insular kingdom of Great Britain, 
 and which many of the wisest British statesmen to-day regard as the great 
 
 ' The speech is not given in this book. 
 
136 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 mistake in the policy of their government. It is only a beginning, but a be- 
 ginning which in my judgment we should avoid." 
 
 And in conclusion : 
 
 " I differ, Mr. President, with great diffidence upon this question from 
 the other Senators of the Pacific Coast States, but I can come to no other 
 conclusion. I can see in the avowed commercial purposes of this treaty 
 nothing but loss, in its real political object nothing but danger. 
 
 " The problems of our government are difficult enough without further 
 complications, and there is room on this continent for our highest ambi- 
 tion." 
 
 His attitude towards the Pacific railroads remained 
 firm and unflinching. As fearlessly and as frankly as he 
 had spoken in California he addressed the Senate when- 
 ever occasion gave opportunity for argument to be really 
 listened to : 
 
 " I am unwilling by implication, by giving a silent vote, to be placed in 
 the category of those who follow the hue and cry, who pander to prejudice 
 for the sake of popularity, or who exact from the weak what they would not 
 demand from the strong. 
 
 " These companies are not weak. If any one supposes they are, let him 
 attack them in the citadels of their strength. They have but one rule of 
 policy — first, employ all means to convince ; failing in that, all means to 
 crush ! Since I have had the honor to have a seat upon this floor, when 
 any question touching a conflict between them and the people has been 
 under consideration, their agents, attorneys, and lobbyists have swarmed in 
 our corridors ; they have blocked the way to our committee-rooms, and 
 have set spies upon our actions. To-day they would occupy these vacant 
 chairs but for the timely order of the President of the Senate to double- 
 guard our doors." ' 
 
 " The bill is an attempt to make us particeps criminis in the fraud that 
 the men who hang around our doors would perpetrate. Pass this bill, but 
 change its enacting clause and let it read : Be it enacted by the Central 
 Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad Companies, and then do not send it for 
 approval to the President of the United States ; for he represents the 
 sovereignty of this people ; send it for approval to the presidents of the 
 companies. Yet that is scarcely necessary. It is the coin and mintage of 
 their brain. It was approved in advance." 
 
 ' Speech on " Pacific Railroad Acts," Feb. 14, 1877. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 137 
 
 A year later 
 
 " The bill of the Railroad Committee has been called a settlement. To 
 my mind it is a surrender. The whole amount of money involved in this 
 subject is of trifling importance compared with the principle which it pro- 
 poses to surrender. Sir, the question is before us ; let us not barter, let us 
 not dicker ; let us legislate. If we are as powerless as is contended on behalf 
 of the Railroad Committee, let us learn that from the highest judicial 
 authority, for if that be so there will be no more charters granted, nor aids 
 bestowed while the world stands or Congress remains sane. 
 
 " The Senator from Georgia in his eloquent peroration said that these 
 railroad companies are not the kind of corporations which he dreads. What 
 he dreads is the great and growing power of the corporation of the Federal 
 Government. I accept the term from his standpoint. From that point of 
 view these corporations swell into the imperial proportions of sovereignty, 
 or in their overshadowing presence this government dwarfs into the dimen- 
 sions of a corporation. I accept the term. The stockholders in this 
 corporation of the Federal Government are forty-five million people entitled 
 to share and share alike in all its benefits. Its charter is the Constitution 
 of the United States. It holds in its hands the title-deeds to liberty for 
 countless millions yet to be. I trust it will ever be, as I believe it has ever 
 been, full of grace, mercy, and loving kindness to its friends ; dreadful only 
 to its enemies. Look upon this picture and then upon that. The recora 01 
 the corporation he does not dread can be read in the transactions of the 
 Credit Mobilier and the Contract Finance Companies. His election is not 
 mine, but I thank the Senator for the boldness of his speech. He has 
 cloven this subject to the centre ; he has cleft its heart in twain. It is a 
 question as to where our allegiance is due. We cannot serve two masters, 
 which shall we serve?" ' 
 
 The Pacific railroads and the friends of their magnates 
 were not alone in their fixed enmity to the Senator who 
 dared to assail them so fearlessly, who ventured to invoke 
 the spirit of justice in the august Senate, and who 
 demanded the enforcement of the laws in defence of the 
 public interests. 
 
 Other powerful corporations gave him a full measure of 
 hostility. 
 
 The bold and repeated utterance of the idea that the 
 people not only possess sovereign power, but should 
 
 ' Speech on " Pacific Railroads," April 3, 1878. (Only this extract is 
 given.) 
 
138 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 actually insist through their representatives upon the 
 exercise of such power, was full of real danger to mo- 
 nopolists everywhere. 
 
 It was of importance to suppress such eloquence. To 
 do so, to a great extent, was not difficult. The telegraph 
 wires could be spared the burden of it by those who con- 
 trolled them. Owners and managers of journals could 
 fill their columns with topics less menacing to their purses. 
 The fees of political attorneys, in Congress and out of it, 
 and many other places than Washington, were threatened 
 with the shrinkage resulting from curbed power. Corpo- 
 ration hosts were strong enough in their widely various 
 citadels, in both the great political fields, to dictate the 
 tenor of despatches sent throughout the land ; thrifty 
 camp-followers were numerous, obedient, and vigilant. 
 The arrogance of certain corporate organizations had been 
 rebuked too openly ; and the bitterest antagonism was 
 aroused. 
 
 The individuality in the man, the work he had already 
 done, the courage and power he had displayed, were to 
 his enemies as offensive as his consistent attitude as Sen- 
 ator was alarming. The desire for revenge was strong, 
 the need of political precaution great. 
 
 Thus it occurred that of his really brilliant services in 
 the Senate little record -was made throughout the coun- 
 try, and in California hardly any reports were published. 
 In these days of electricity the delay of a week 
 or two in proclaiming the work of a statesman robs that 
 work of its immediate value ; the suppression of the bet- 
 ter part of it is almost as fatal to his political reputation 
 as the silence of the grave. 
 
 In the brilliant array of giants in debate on " The Silver 
 Question," he justly took high rank. He compressed into 
 a speech of less than two hours suggestive facts ; acute 
 reasoning ; knowledge of the inner meaning and outward 
 results of financial methods in the United States for more 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 39 
 
 than a century ; analysis of the relations, one to another, 
 of gold, silver, currency, and credit throughout the world ; 
 philosophy of national and individual honor involved in 
 the question debated ; and illustrated it all with keen 
 expression of logical thought, flashes of wit, and " sabre 
 cuts of Saxon speech." ' 
 
 On the subject of " Currency and Banking " he had 
 shortly before written public letters which attracted wide 
 attention."^ 
 
 Both the speech and the letters are of permanent value, 
 and are given in this volume. 
 
 So, also, is given his characteristic remarks on " Chinese 
 Immigration," and an address to the Senate of peculiar 
 elegance and power. 
 
 Having been elected as an independent Senator, he had 
 little patronage at his disposal to reward political friends ; 
 and his personal friends grew regretful to the verge of 
 indignation at what they thought his neglect of oppor- 
 tunity, or lack of energy, to assert himself. Distant 
 thousands of miles, they did not learn how faithfully he 
 toiled at the working-oar. Account of that was eliminated 
 from the news despatches, by his enemies, with gold pens. 
 He could not stoop to beseech constituents to scan the 
 records — there was nothing of the moral mendicant in his 
 nature. 
 
 Through perceptions too keen and accurate to avoid 
 knowing this, sensibilities too quick to escape suffering, 
 possibly there came to him regret modified by just pride 
 of conscious worth, endured with quiet philosophy, tem- 
 pered by silent contemplation of the past, — and came also 
 Hstlessness of purpose to succeed himself in the Senate. 
 
 The war against monopolies he had initiated in local 
 California had become a national one and there was a host 
 of giant gladiators in the political field. 
 
 ' In Senate, June 8, 1876. 
 
 * See the Springfield Republican, December, 1875 and January, 1S76. 
 
I40 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Original, faithful, and effective during long public ser- 
 vice, he welcomed retirement from it. 
 
 Nineteen years before his death, during the delivery of 
 a masterly political speech,' he said : 
 
 " The political blows I have taken have all been in front. It is not often 
 I intrude the ' personal pronoun, first person, singular number,' but I claim 
 the privilege to do so, very briefly. 
 
 " The people of this State have honored me above my deserts. I shall 
 die in their debt. They owe me nothing, except, when the time shall come, 
 an honorable discharge, and I think I have earned that. The path I have 
 trodden has not always been easy, and the burden I have carried has not 
 always been light. 
 
 ' ' I dare say this of myself in my public career : there has never been a 
 time when I would not have stood uncovered before the smith at his stithy, 
 the hod-carrier at the ladder, or the prisoner in his cell, to apologize for any 
 wrong done by mistake or inadvertence ; and if there has ever been a time 
 when I would have touched my hat, or abated a hair's breadth of my man- 
 hood, in the presence of wealth or power, for the sake of patronage or 
 place, I trust its memory may be blotted out, — and I am too old to change." 
 
 EXTRACT FROM SPEECH OF HON. HENRY EDGERTON, NOMINAT- 
 ING MR. BOOTH FOR GOVERNOR, AT SACRAMENTO, 
 JUNE 28, 1871. 
 
 " I rise to discharge one of the most pleasant duties of my life, by pre- 
 senting to this convention for its nomination to the office of chief magistrate 
 a distinguished citizen — the Hon, Newton Booth, of Sacramento. Having 
 in view either those personal attributes and qualifications which dignify and 
 adorn a public station, or the important considerations involved in a success- 
 ful political canvass, it would be difficult, sir, to say anything of Newton 
 Booth that would transcend the bounds of just and decorous eulogy. . . . 
 
 " A merchant of the highest character and standing, now and for a long 
 time at the head of one of the first commercial houses of the countrj' ; a 
 competent lawyer ; a legislator of extended experience, the author o£.much, 
 and honorably identified with more, of the wisest and most beneficent legis- 
 lation upon our statute-books ; familiar with politics, but a politician only 
 in the highest and noblest sense of that much-abused term ; one who, in 
 the front ranks of your scholars, has already done much to disseminate 
 classic literature in the State ; a first-rate orator, whose pure advocacy of 
 the principles of the Republican party has done much in the past, and will 
 yet do more in the future for the dissemination and triumph of those princi- 
 ples — he stands to-day, sir, in my humble judgment, in point of fitness for 
 
 ' San Francisco, 1879. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I4I 
 
 the candidacy to which he is proposed, without a peer within the pale of 
 the Republican party of California. But, sir, he possesses elements of 
 availability of a more striking character. It is not necessary for Newton 
 Booth, or anybody in behalf of Newton Booth, to define his position. Dur- 
 ing our long and bloody civil war, through good report and evil report, 
 whether success attended or calamity befell our armies, he was always in 
 the front rank of the patriots of this State. And, sir, his opinions were 
 fixed and expressed in more than a score of original and imperishable 
 orations." 
 
 SPEECH OF ACCEPTANCE. 
 
 The President : Gentlemen of the convention, I have 
 the extreme pleasure of presenting to you the Hon. New- 
 ton Booth, of Sacramento. 
 
 Mr. Booth ascended the rostrum and said : After this 
 generous reception and the marks of devoted friendship I 
 have received, I should be more or less than the man I am 
 if I were not moved almost beyond the power of self- 
 command. If my sense of gratitude were boundless as 
 the sea, I should be bankrupt in expression as I stand be- 
 fore you to-day. "* Beggar that I am, I am even poor in 
 thanks, ''' I accept, gentlemen, the nomination for Gov- 
 ernor upon the platform you have put forth. I accept 
 the platform, not as an idle formality, not as a stepping- 
 stone to office, but from conviction. I accept it as the 
 latest expression of living faith of the party to which I 
 am proud to belong. 
 
 If political parties are anything other than combina- 
 tions to seek office, they are public opinion organized ; 
 they are forces whose general direction is fixed. They 
 can be judged far better by their traditions, instincts, and 
 governing ideas than by any formal declaration of princi- 
 ples. Tried by this test, which party to-day best deserves 
 the confidence and regard of the American people, 
 which has championed the great measures of human free- 
 dom and good government, which has endeavored to 
 direct the current of events in the grand channel of right, 
 which has stood as a bar and obstruction until it has been 
 
142 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 swept forward by the sweeping tide ? Both parties con- 
 tinue to-day the same organization that they did during 
 the war. Each stands upon the history it has made. Can 
 the Republican party ground arms in the presence of its 
 old antagonist ? We have heard much of the " new de- 
 parture " of the Democracy. Perhaps it was time for the 
 Democratic party to depart. Sir, when a political party 
 abandons its old ideas, its instincts, and its traditions, it 
 departs this life. For the first time in history we have 
 the remarkable case of a suicide that insists upon holding 
 an inquest upon its own body. Sir, the Republican party 
 needs no " new departure." It stands upon its history. 
 It has written no chapters that it desires to tear out. 
 Every page is emblazoned with glory. Let the record 
 stand ; the party will stand by the record. Ay, they tell 
 us they will accept the policy of reconstruction as a hard 
 necessity. We adopt it as a living truth. They regard it 
 as an obstruction which must be over-climbed in the road 
 to office ; we as a sacred principle baptized in the best 
 blood of the land. The late Democratic candidate for 
 Governor in Massachusetts was right when he said the 
 American people would never abandon the attitude of 
 hostile vigilance, which is the true interpretation of the 
 policy of this administration, while one of their war 
 trophies was threatened. And what are these war tro- 
 phies ? They are not captured citadels and cities, not 
 guns and flags ; they are moral trophies — a republic saved 
 from destruction, freedom made the law of the land. By 
 these trophies the Republican party proposes to stand 
 guard while the stars shine. 
 
 We do not propose now, nor at any time, to rekindle 
 the passions of the war ; but we cannot forget its memo- 
 ries, and we would be false to ourselves, false to the dead, 
 if we did not claim all the moral force bequeathed to us 
 by the past, to accomplish every attainable good in the 
 present and in the future. But grand as is the heritage 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I43 
 
 of glory that has come down to us by the past, we cannot 
 live upon that ; we must meet living questions as living 
 men, looking forward to the grand future. The party 
 has saved the government from an open foe ; it must also 
 protect it from an insidious enemy. The rebellion struck 
 with bared arm in broad day, and with naked sword. 
 There is a danger more alarming because more subtle, 
 that comes as the stealthy poisoner, creeping in the dark : 
 the corrupting power of money in shaping legislation and 
 controlling political action. For us this question of sub- 
 sidy and anti-subsidy has a far broader significance than 
 any partial application would assign to it. It means 
 purity of legislation ; it means integrity of courts ; it 
 means the sacredness of private rights ; it means that 
 whatever a man has, whether it be broad acres or a nar- 
 row home, whatever he has acquired by his industry and 
 enterprise, is his ; his though he stands in a minority of 
 one ; his against the power of the world ; no majority, no 
 legislation, however potent, can make a private wrong a 
 public right. It means this : Shall this government be 
 and remain a mighty agency of civilization, the protector 
 of all, or shall it be run as a close corporation to enrich 
 the few ? 
 
 Our party recognizing pubhc sentiment upon the ques- 
 tion, proposes to organize that sentiment into a living 
 force so that the sacredness of individual right shall be 
 protected by all the muniments of constitutional law. 
 The instincts of our party are unchanged. In the recent 
 European war we instinctively felt that the principle of 
 the " solidarity of peoples" would be vindicated ; that the 
 old artificial system of balance of power, fruitful in wars 
 and kingcraft, would be destroyed ; that nations would 
 rest not upon a central pivot, but upon broad, natural 
 foundations ; and if anywhere on earth there is a move- 
 ment of liberal thought, the Republican party is in sym- 
 pathy with that movement. If there is an aspiration for 
 
144 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 human freedom, the RepubHcan party is in sympathy with 
 that aspiration. The country, the world, cannot afford 
 that so generous an impulse in human forces should die ; 
 and it will not die. Let it be kept in accord with the 
 great moral laws ordained for the government of the 
 world. Its defeats will be for a day, and its triumphs for 
 all time. 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 DELIVERED AT PLATT'S HALL, SAN FRANCISCO, AUGUST 27, 1872. 
 
 The presidential election in the United States is an his- 
 torical event. Other elections are local ; this is national. 
 In its significance it is more than national. It is the only 
 occasion upon which the voice of the whole people is 
 heard. It is the popular verdict upon the conduct of pub- 
 lic affairs — an open declaration of future policy — and it 
 challenges the attention of the world. We are apt at all 
 times to lose, in some degree, the sense of individual re- 
 sponsibility when we act in masses, but if there be any 
 political duty in the discharge of which the citizen should 
 exercise his deliberate judgment and highest patriot- 
 ism, it is in casting his vote for President, — not so 
 much on account of the transcendent dignity of the 
 office as of the importance which, by reason of our 
 national traditions, the nature of our institutions, and the 
 spirit of the people, is necessarily attached to the event 
 of the election. The success of this man or that man, the 
 appointment of one set of men or another to office, is of 
 little moment save to the individuals themselves (and of 
 less to them than they are apt to imagine), but the deci- 
 sion of the American people, the expression of their will, 
 is of the highest consequence. If we were an older peo- 
 ple, if the lines of our policy had been worn by imme- 
 morial custom into grooves, and our habits of thought 
 had become traditional ; if we were a stationary people, 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I45 
 
 without constant influx of new life within, and a broaden- 
 ing horizon of career without ; if the tenor of our history- 
 had been even, unbroken by sudden changes and great 
 upheavals, the national election might be one of the forms 
 and pageants of government. But now, in the flush and 
 rapid growth of youth, our institutions still experiments, 
 close behind us the revolution which threatened to en- 
 gulph, now just entering upon a policy of universal free- 
 dom, now having cut loose from the moorings of preju- 
 dice and set sail upon the open sea beneath the divinely 
 guiding stars, it is scarcely possible to exaggerate' its 
 importance. 
 
 We enter upon this election under circumstances so pe- 
 culiar they are without a parallel in our history — possibly 
 in any history. 
 
 Now, as for the past sixteen years, the country is 
 divided into two great parties — two politically hostile 
 camps — the Republicans, the party of ideas ; the Demo- 
 cratic, the party of discipline. The latter in the time of 
 its power had fully identified itself with the interests of 
 the institution of slavery. The logical conclusion of its 
 doctrines was reached in the South in secession. In the 
 North it staked its existence upon the pledge that the 
 Union could not be restored and slavery destroyed. It 
 stood in deadly hostility to every measure which in the 
 past twelve years has become a part of the fundamental 
 policy of the government. It survived the institution 
 with which it was identified, the principles upon which it 
 was based, by the very force of its discipline. To-day, 
 after an ostensible abandonment of its political tenets, 
 with its local. State, and national organization complete 
 as ever, in perfect working order, it adopts for its leader 
 the man who of all others had most hated and reviled it, 
 and hopes to triumph by a piece of political strategy. 
 " There is something in this more than natural, if philoso- 
 phy could find it out ! " 
 
146 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 No progressive party can remain long in power and give 
 entire satisfaction to all its members. With some prog- 
 ress will be too slow ; with others too fast. There will 
 be idealists, and there will be adventurers. The right 
 measure will not be passed at the right time. The right 
 man will not always get the right place. The offices will 
 not go round. Real merit will be sometimes overlooked, 
 and there will be soldiers of fortune disappointed in the 
 hope of position. Among leaders there will be personal 
 jealousies, and among the people some degree of impa- 
 tience, because the work of years is not accomplished in 
 days. No political party is perfect ; none is likely to be 
 while there is as much human nature in the world as now. 
 Where there is free thought there will be differences of 
 opinion, and the Republican party is pre-eminently a 
 party of free-thought and self-criticism. There are always 
 men, too, who attach an exaggerated importance to minor 
 differences of opinion — just as we forget the general 
 health of the whole body in thinking of a sore finger or 
 an aching tooth. 
 
 The various elements of dissatisfaction in the Repub- 
 lican party were represented in the Cincinnati Convention. 
 As a movement against the party it was not so formidable 
 as that attempted under President Johnson. After twelve 
 years' lease of power the only wonder is it was not more 
 formidable. The nucleus around which it was gathered 
 seemed to be personal opposition to the man who was so 
 largely the choice of the party that his nomination for 
 President was a foregone conclusion. The President was 
 arraigned for the execution of laws by men who had as- 
 sisted to pass them — by men who would have moved his 
 impeachment if he had refused to execute them. 
 
 It is not for us to pass judgment on that convention 
 and say whether it was controlled by its better or worse 
 elements, by interested or disinterested men — within or 
 without. It put forth an " Address to the American 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I47 
 
 People," and a platform of resolutions. With severe im- 
 partiality it gave the former to the Democrats, the latter 
 to the Republicans with an " if." It is not too much to 
 say that its nomination took the country by surprise. 
 
 Of Horace Greeley I have no reproachful word to utter. 
 His past is secure from all but himself. Few men are bet- 
 ter known to the American people in his strength and his 
 weakness, his greatness and his foibles. Two master pas- 
 sions seemed to have struggled for supremacy in his past 
 life — love of freedom and hatred of Democrats. If the 
 first was ideal, the latter was personal and vindictive. His 
 warmest friends find in him much to extenuate, and his 
 bitterest enemies something to admire. If he was be- 
 wildered in the civil revolution he had so often invoked ; 
 if his face blanched at the battle he had so often pre- 
 dicted ; if he had not strength to seize the golden oppor- 
 tunity he had so longed for from afar, we will never forget 
 his early services to the cause of freedom. Whatever may 
 be the result of this contest, he will go into history as the 
 journalist, the editor, and his monument will be the New 
 York Tribune. His life-work was finished when he 
 accepted a Democratic nomination for President. Ambi- 
 tion is said to be " the disease of noble minds " ; it is 
 also the disease of youth, and like other diseases that 
 belong to early life, when it attacks the aged, is apt to 
 be fatal. 
 
 It is not too much to say that the " Liberal " movement 
 alone, without the Baltimore endorsement, would not 
 have had strength enough to carry one election precinct 
 in the United States. As a popular movement, originat- 
 ing with the people, as an effort to form a third party, 
 it was a failure. It would have had no inception but for 
 the hope that it would be coddled into life by the De- 
 mocracy. Whatever strength, whatever life, whatever hope 
 of success it has, come from Baltimore and not Cincinnati ; 
 and Baltimore as promptly approved, ratified, and con- 
 
148 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 firmed as though the whole were one scheme. Perhaps 
 it was, and Tammany its author. 
 
 I congratulate you, my fellow-citizens ; I congratulate 
 the Democracy ; I congratulate humanity ; I hail it as an 
 auspicious day, when, under any circumstances, for any 
 purpose, the representatives of the Democratic party, in 
 convention assembled, can subscribe to sentiments like 
 these, which are a part of the Cincinnati resolutions : 
 
 " We recognize the equality of all men before the law, and hold that it is 
 the duty of Government, in its dealings with the people, to mete out equal 
 and exact justice to all, of whatever race, color, or persuasion, religious or 
 political." 
 
 " We pledge ourselves to maintain the union of these States, emancipation 
 and enfranchisement, and to oppose any reopening of the questions settled 
 by the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution." 
 
 "The public credit must be maintained, and we denounce repudiation in 
 every form and guise." 
 
 " We remember with gratitude the heroism and sacrifices of the soldiers 
 and sailors of the republic, and no act of ours shall ever detract from their 
 justly earned fame or the full reward of their patriotism." 
 
 The world moves ! If this new political shibboleth 
 should sometimes stick in " an old-liner's " throat, like 
 Macbeth's " amen," still the effort to pronounce it will 
 do him good. Perhaps the convention could have done 
 but one thing better — to have Whereased every principle 
 the party had contended for in twelve years past that has 
 been overwhelmed in the rising tide of events, and Resolved 
 that the party is disbanded and its members released from 
 allegiance. 
 
 The earnest, sincere acceptance by the Democracy of 
 the Cincinnati platform as a whole would have been a 
 moral triumph for the Republican party equal to its 
 highest achievements in the field. But there is a differ- 
 ence between lip-service and heart-service ; between creed 
 and faith ; between the letter which killeth and the spirit 
 that maketh alive. There is a difference between accept- 
 ing a situation as a hard necessity and embracing it as a 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I49 
 
 joyful opportunity. There is a difference between the 
 spirit which says, " The Hnes are hard, but it is so 
 written," and that which says, " Before ever the world 
 was it was true ; though the foundations of the world 
 should pass away it will remain true ; therefore, it is so 
 written ! " 
 
 These principles are the trophies of the Republican 
 party. It achieved them in tribulation and trial. It 
 clung to them when it was treading the wine-press. It 
 bore them in the fires of battle — in the darkness of de- 
 feat it would not part with them ; and washed white in 
 the blood of the faithful, it flung them to the glad light 
 in the triumphant glory of victory ! Come weal or come 
 woe, come joy or sorrow, they are a part of its history 
 forever. 
 
 The practical question before the American people is, 
 shall the Democratic party succeed, with a platform and 
 candidate it has accepted for the sake of success, or the 
 Republican, with principles which are its traditions, and a 
 candidate who is its spontaneous choice ? It is not the 
 ofifice of President which is the great stake, it is the 
 prestige of victory — the control of the Government, its 
 legislative as well as executive departments, its state and 
 local as well as general administration. It is the moral 
 effect upon our peace and tranquillity at home, and on the 
 progress of free institutions abroad. Bear in mind there 
 has been no pentecostal fire to convert the masses of the 
 Democracy to new light. They receive the new doctrines 
 as a party, not as men ; as the Roman people were sup- 
 posed to change their religion when it suited the pleasure 
 of the Emperor to change his. They have been turned 
 over in gross, as a colonel in the army is reported to have 
 detailed a company to be baptized. They have been 
 converted, not by a change of heart, but by a political 
 edict, by a resolution in convention ; and a resolution can 
 undue what a resolution has done. 
 
150 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Now, under which general administration will there be 
 greater national stability, individual security, and personal 
 freedom ? The one is assured — the other experimental. 
 Why, my Liberal Republican friend, looking for impossi- 
 ble perfection in a very impossible quarter, do you believe 
 that Horace Greeley can control the Democratic party, 
 once in power ? That the mountain will come to Ma- 
 homet? That Jonah will swallow the whale? Under 
 such an administration the old questions will arise, and 
 will not down at the bidding of any man. We have not 
 yet reached the millennial era when the Government can 
 be administered without party organization. Tyler and 
 Johnson both assayed it, and both were compelled to 
 throw themselves into the arms of the opposition, and the 
 latter learned, as Greeley will learn if he should attempt 
 the same role with the Democracy that Johnson did with 
 the Republicans, how powerless an executive is against a 
 dominant party controlling Congress. How easy it will 
 be for the party " to palter with a double sense, and keep 
 the word of promise to the ear but break it to the hope." 
 How easy to leave the constitutional amendments undis- 
 turbed, but refuse the legislation necessary to their execu- 
 tion — to pay pensions to the Union soldiers and also to 
 the rebel. We all profess to believe in local and State 
 self-government. With the Republican this means that 
 all government should be as near to the people as practi- 
 cable ; that San Francisco should govern itself in all muni- 
 cipal concerns ; that California should govern itself in all 
 matters of State policy ; but that there is a reserved power 
 in the General Government strong enough to protect it 
 from all assaults within and without, and that it is its duty 
 to guarantee to all its citizens liberty and equality before 
 the law, and to throw over the humblest and weakest its 
 broad, protecting shield whenever his rights as a citizen 
 are assaulted. With the Democrat it means that the State 
 has the right to judge of the constitutional limitations of 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 15I 
 
 the General Government, and to absolve itself from alle- 
 giance whenever it believes they are transcended. What- 
 ever may be done or left undone in regard to these 
 questions, the fact that they become open questions is the 
 greatest calamity. 
 
 There is no peace, no absolute safety, from the questions 
 that brought on and grew out of the war while the Demo- 
 cratic party continues as a distinctive political organiza- 
 tion, and the real issue now is, shall that party be restored 
 to power, by a political coup d'etat, or shall it be destroyed. 
 I know of no destruction so complete and certain as its 
 support of Horace Greeley, followed by defeat. I am 
 anxious — more than anxious — for that event, because I 
 desire that whatever there is of intelligence, ability, and 
 patriotism (and I do not disparage or underestimate them) 
 there is in the members of the party should be released 
 from the thraldom of its iron discipline, taken up into 
 new and living forms, utilized in the service of progress, 
 and not be dedicated to the illusions of the past — to the 
 worship of an idol which has been dethroned and should 
 be ground into powder. 
 
 For myself I go further, and do not consider it desirable 
 or possible that any political party, cemented together in 
 civil war, should be continued after the entire moral results 
 of that war have been secured. After the rebel armies 
 surrendered the Union armies disbanded. They could not 
 before. No promise, no truce would have justified it. The 
 Republican party cannot afford to disband in the presence 
 of its old antagonist, but the dissolution of the Democratic 
 party, in the logic of events, will be followed by that of 
 the Republican. New organizations will form themselves 
 around living issues. There will be questions enough in 
 the future to differ about, and difificulties great enough to 
 challenge the highest patriotism and abilities of all. 
 
 There are those who affect to believe there is danger that 
 the military will subvert the civil power of the country. 
 
152 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 The common-sense of the people rejects this as a night- 
 mare dream. There never was a time, from Washington 
 to Grant, when any miHtary leader could usurp the civil 
 functions of government, and no man, however high his 
 position, or venerated his name, deserves any credit — 
 except for common-sense — for not attempting it. There 
 is no danger that we will lose the forms of a republic. 
 There is a danger that we may ultimately retain only the 
 forms. Caleb Cushing's famous "man on horseback" is 
 as distant and mythical as ever. The danger comes from 
 another direction. The eagles on the coin, not in the 
 standard, are its badge. It is gold, not steel, which 
 threatens. It shapes itself in the endeavor to make gov- 
 ernment and law subservient to private rather than public 
 good — to special rather than general interests. The con- 
 test will be between associated capital and popular rights. 
 Let the field be cleared for that action, and let the dead 
 past bury its dead ! 
 
 But now, the immediate question of the hour, the one 
 vital question involved in the present election is — Shall 
 we secure what we have gained in the name of Liberty 
 and Union, and take a bond of Fate that it shall never be 
 forfeited ? 
 
 "The destruction of Carthage is the safety of Rome." 
 During our civil war there were a great many theories 
 as to how it should be conducted. There was a great 
 deal of studying maps and planning campaigns. Almost 
 every officer and every war-correspondent had a theory. 
 There was the famous " anaconda theory " of General 
 Scott, the starvation theory, the " on-to-Richmond 
 theory," the theory of cutting the Confederacy in two, of 
 capturing its strategic points, of taking its capital ; over- 
 running its territory, of sealing up its ports. And there 
 were men who were willing "to undertake the job by 
 contract." Men who " never set a squadron in the field 
 nor knew the division of a battle more than a spinster," 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I 53 
 
 had their theories, and put them forth in most excellent 
 English. One officer, the Colonel of an Illinois regiment, 
 and scarcely known beyond it, had his theory. It was a 
 homespun affair, and involved only good sense and hard 
 fighting ; it was that the strength of the Confederacy was 
 in its armies, and that they should be sought and fought, 
 until they surrendered or disbanded. What he said or 
 thought was or seemed a matter of little consequence, for 
 the eyes of the country were not fixed upon him and his 
 name was not even in the newspapers. He afterwards 
 had " a wonderful run of luck." From an obscure 
 Colonel he became General and Commander-in-Chief. 
 Perhaps not a military genius, he had the safer qualities 
 that belong to eminent good sense and a lucky faculty 
 of doing the right thing at the right time. No one has 
 accused him of being an eloquent man, but somehow 
 sharp, pithy sentences seem struck from him, as sparks 
 from the flint, which never die out of the memory. It 
 was he who said : " I purpose to move on your works 
 immediately." " My terms are unconditional surrender." 
 " I intend to fight it out on this line if it takes all sum- 
 mer." It was he who gave that very unmilitary order to 
 Sheridan, " Push things." It was he who said to the 
 vanquished rebel army (and what grander thing has been 
 said on this continent, or any other?): "Go home and 
 obey the laws and you shall not be molested." It was he 
 who said : " Let us have peace." 
 
 There was another man, who, at the commencement of 
 the war, as a journalist, had the ear of the country. Few 
 men in the North had done more in moulding public 
 opinion ; few had been more steadfast as the champion of 
 equal rights. If the Northern heart was fired, few had 
 done more to fire it, for his challenge to slavery was one 
 of scorn and defiance. When the war was inevitable, he 
 thought of peace ; and when it raged in mid-battle, and 
 to return was more tedious than to go on, he sought the 
 
154 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 magnificent scenery of Niagara — to negotiate a peace on 
 private account. 
 
 We blame him not — believe he was honest in all. He 
 is not the first man, in fact or fable, who has stood amazed, 
 terrified, and appalled at the spirit he has invoked. He 
 is not the first great teacher who has proved weak and 
 vacillating in action. 
 
 Again we are to choose between two policies — victory 
 and compromise. Defeated now, the Democratic party will 
 disintegrate, and both the war parties will soon disappear 
 from our politics. Then we shall have peace. There 
 will be no hands clasped over a bloody chasm ; the chasm 
 will be closed and hidden from sight by grass as green 
 and sweet as ever sprang from a patriot's grave ! 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED AT PLATT'S HALL, SAN FRANCISCO, AUGUST 12, 1874. 
 
 THE RAILROAD PROBLEM IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 
 
 Fellow-Citizens : The issues involved in the political 
 canvass of this year are peculiar, and the conditions under 
 which they are to be decided anomalous in American his- 
 tory. We shall err, however, if we suppose these issues 
 and conditions are confined to California ; they are com- 
 mon to the people of the United States. Everywhere 
 there is a deep pervading feeling that old things are pass- 
 ing away ; that the nation confronts new questions and 
 difificulties — that again the Sphinx's riddle is propounded 
 to us, which we must read or be destroyed. And yet 
 when we come to consider these questions closely we find 
 them new indeed in our history and new in form, but in 
 substance and universal history they are as old as history 
 itself ; it is a new phase of the old, old contest between 
 prerogative and personal freedom — between the power of 
 the strong to take, and the right of each man to his own. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I55 
 
 In the presence of new dangers party ties are relaxed. 
 Where they bind together it is rather from social affilia- 
 tion than the power of political allegiance. From force of 
 habit and personal association, we look to our old politi- 
 cal leaders and comrades for guidance and counsel ; but 
 pass along the street, take the men as you meet them, lis- 
 ten to their frank avowals, and you will find that the old 
 party discipline, which was wont to marshal its hosts, like 
 contending armies, is destroyed. Gather together a repre- 
 sentative, intelligent assemblage like this, composed of 
 Republicans and Democrats, poll it, and you will find that 
 on the living questions of the hour, where there are differ- 
 ences of opinion, men no longer differ as Democrats and 
 Republicans, but as men of independent convictions ; and 
 those who prefer to remain with old organizations simply 
 feel that for the present there is nowhere else to go, and 
 hope to accomplish new purposes with old forms. This 
 is not a local, but a general truth, and there is a general 
 feeling that a warfare should cease whose motive and 
 meaning have gone. 
 
 It is natural under circumstances like these that men 
 who believe that political parties are simply incorporations 
 for the purpose of paying salaries to directors and divid- 
 ing offices among stockholders, should begin to inquire, 
 " What man hath done this? " and to look about for some 
 victim for their impotent wrath. Sir, no man hath done 
 it ! They might as well seek for the hunter who built his 
 camp-fire on the upper Mississippi to account for the ice- 
 gorge that comes crashing and grinding down in a Spring 
 flood after an April thaw. There are moral forces in so- 
 ciety which can no more be controlled by conventions and 
 resolutions than the tempest can be stayed by a proclama- 
 tion of peace. While parties sincerely represent differ- 
 ences of opinion upon great and living political questions ; 
 while they continue the outward embodiments of princi- 
 ples, the representatives of ideas ; while they are forces 
 
156 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 moving openly to the accomplishment of a given result, 
 they may err, may be wrong, but they will live. No de- 
 sertion of leaders, no betrayal of principles can destroy 
 them or perceptibly abate their strength. When they 
 cease to be these things, and become " a pipe for fortune's 
 finger to sound what stop she please " on, no man, though 
 he combined in one the leadership of Clay, the eloquence 
 of Webster, the iron will of Jackson, the philosophical 
 prescience of Jefferson, and the moral weight of Washing- 
 ton, can hold them together. An agreement of purpose 
 — genuine — sincere — is as necessary to their cohesion as 
 is the law of gravitation to hold the world in shape, or the 
 hidden force of life to keep corruption from the corporal 
 frame. 
 
 Nor can political parties be manufactured to order by 
 joining and dove-tailing materials upon a given plan. If 
 they have any value at all they are living growths, not 
 mechanical forms. In political as in ecclesiastical affairs, 
 the preaching of doctrine precedes organization, and with 
 the acceptance of doctrine the organization arises, we can 
 scarcely see how or when. Yesterdaj^ it was not, to-day 
 it is. Yesterday it was a spirit diffusive as the air and as 
 impalpable ; to-day it is strength incarnate — embodied 
 power. You need have no fear, my friends, if your con- 
 victions are deep, sincere, and truthful, that they will not 
 find form, expression, and triumph. Where two or three 
 are gathered together for a good cause, the all-compelling 
 spirit that organizes, directs, and conquers, is also in their 
 midst. 
 
 There is no lesson enforced by history with more em- 
 phasis than that one of the effects of a great war, and 
 especially a civil war, upon a republican government, is 
 to create a strong tendency to a centralization of power, 
 to raise up a ruling class or governing man. There are 
 many philosophical reasons for this. One is, that success 
 in war depends largely upon secrecy in council and unity 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 57 
 
 in action ; and the thoughts of the people become habitu- 
 ated to these conditions, until that is tolerated as custom 
 which was at first accepted as a necessary sacrifice. 
 Another, that great wars generally bring to the surface 
 great leaders. Another, and in our days a still more 
 potent reason, is that war creates great social inequalities, 
 by affording opportunities for the accumulation of gigantic 
 and overshadowing fortunes ; and in our days money is 
 power. I do not refer now to the fortunes that are made 
 immediately out of the operations of war, and the vast 
 disbursements of armies ; these, indeed, are great, but 
 they are only feeders to the riches realized by money- 
 kings out of the general disturbance of financial laws and 
 accepted values. When gold, as measured by a standard 
 fixed by the government, for five years fluctuates between 
 par and two hundred and eighty, and all commercial prices 
 are afloat, unsettled, so that no day, no hour, is a criterion 
 for another, the men of money, sense, and instinct, the men 
 of coolness, boldness, sagacity, and training, find golden 
 opportunities, and they who are eminent in these qualities 
 make for themselves thrones of gold. We sometimes see 
 in shop windows cartoons of " Before and After the War." 
 If we could see correctly represented the social condition 
 of the whole country " before and after the war," we 
 should realize what a vast increase there has been in the 
 inequalities of fortune, to which custom deadens our sense. 
 What was a handsome independence is now scarcely a 
 ticket into the upper gallery, the third tier of social life. 
 Private fortunes mount up into millions — in two cases 
 approximate a hundred millions — and corporations con- 
 trol revenues which, a few years ago, would have sufficed 
 for a first-class kingdom. This of itself would present a 
 great but insidious danger to the Republic, for every 
 student of history knows that government is but the out- 
 ward form of what society is the inward spirit. To pre- 
 serve a republic, there must be a general sense of manly 
 
158 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 independence, of equality of right, and freedom of 
 personal thought and action. Great accumulations of 
 riches tend to destroy this by creating upon the one hand 
 the feeling of dominance, the arrogance of power, and 
 upon the other a sense of dependence — the servility of 
 want ; and there is still another class — would it were 
 smaller ! — hybrids in human nature, who are sycophants 
 from the choice of their own slavish and subservient souls. 
 
 To this insidious disease, which time might develop or 
 cure, there is added an open danger, the bold attempt, 
 stripped now of all disguise, of great aggregations of 
 capital to control the Government in their own interest 
 for purposes that are selfish and corrupt. The forms of 
 the republic are to be retained, but its spirit destroyed. 
 Like Augustus Csesar, they prefer the power to the title 
 of king, and are willing we should toy with the semblance 
 while the substance is theirs. This is the danger foreseen 
 with prophetic power by Jackson. What was then a 
 possibility, is now a fact ; what was then a pigmy, is now 
 a giant. 
 
 If there were no a priori rtdiSons to teach that the tend- 
 ency to concentrate power was a natural outgrowth of 
 war, the experience of history would demonstrate the 
 fact. In the times and countries where military power is 
 the highest controlling force, the gravitation is towards 
 successful leaders and chieftains, and the military class ; 
 where money is the most active principle it is towards 
 aggregated capital — or, rather, to speak with exactness, 
 toward those men who from disposition and opportunity 
 desire and are able to make the operations of Government 
 tributary to them, so that they shall have the control of all 
 property, whether they claim the right of ownership or not. 
 
 The management of the railroad system of the United 
 States, the great method of intercommunication affecting 
 all property and every value, affords an opportunity for 
 this of which history furnishes no parallel. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 59 
 
 Do not understand me to say now that the owners or 
 managers of railroads are different from other men, or 
 that they have met together in a conspiracy to do a par- 
 ticular thing, and are methodically proceeding upon a 
 fixed plan. Great social or political changes are seldom 
 or never wrought in that way. Forewarned is forearmed. 
 Even the great Napoleon confessed that his life was not 
 governed by a fixed idea, but that occasion furnished op- 
 portunity until he believed that his steps were controlled 
 by fate, and that his footprints marked the path of 
 destiny. Wherever the opportunity of irresponsible 
 power is presented, the man or men, or principle will not 
 be wanting. That is the one gap in human affairs which 
 is filled as soon as opened. We may want heroes and 
 poets, statesmen, orators, and inventors, but in the race 
 of self-seekers the strongest always survive. 
 
 CHANGES IN METHODS AND PRINCIPLES OF TRANS- 
 PORTATION CAUSED BY RAILROADS. 
 
 Before the introduction of railroads, all public highways 
 by land and water were free to all upon the same condi- 
 tions. The facilities for travel and transportation were 
 insufificient, the methods often crude and imperfect, but 
 the means were free. Exchanges were difficult, but they 
 were not controlled. With the introduction of railroads 
 all this has been changed. The facilities and methods 
 have been improved — exchanges have been made easy, 
 but the freedom is gone. The means are in the hands of 
 a power that claims to be, and seems to be, independent 
 of law and public opinion — a power which is often able to 
 make law in defiance of public opinion. It is as easy as 
 it is brutal to say, if you do not like " our " railroads you 
 can go back to ox-carts and pack-mules. The old order 
 of things has been destroyed by the new. The railroad 
 was built over our highways, through public domain, 
 
l6o NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 through private possessions, by right of the highest pre- 
 rogative of government — the right to take private property 
 for pubhc use ; it was built for public use, for a just, 
 equitable, and necessary public use ; and with a full con- 
 sciousness that it was to destroy the old order of things 
 these grants and concessions were made to it, and it was 
 armed with these prerogatives. It is as easy as it is 
 insulting to say^ if you do not like the management of 
 " our " railroads, build others yourselves. The answer is : 
 The men who use railroads are not able to build them ; 
 most of them are poor, and those who are not have their 
 means in other pursuits ; besides, the probabilities are, 
 you did not build with your money the road you control 
 — the road may have made you rich, your riches did not 
 make the road. 
 
 For many years it has not been the American fashion 
 for the owners of railroads to put their own money into 
 their construction. If it had been it would have insured 
 a more conservative and business-like use of that species 
 of property. The favorite plan has been to get grants of 
 land and loans of credit from the General Government ; 
 guarantees of interest from the State Government ; sub- 
 scriptions and donations from counties, cities, and indi- 
 viduals ; and upon the credit of all this issue all the bonds 
 that can be put upon the market ; make a close estimate 
 as to how much less the road can be built for than the 
 sum of these assets ; form a ring ; call it — say the Credit 
 Mobilier or Contract and Finance Company — for the 
 purpose of constructing the road, dividing the bonds that 
 are left ; owning the lands, owning and operating the 
 road until the first mortgage becomes due, and graciously 
 allowing the Government to pay principal and interest 
 upon the loan of her credit, while " every tie in the road 
 is the grave of a small stockholder." Under this plan 
 the only men in the community who are absolutely 
 certain not to contribute any money to the construction 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. l6l 
 
 of the road are those who own and control it when it is 
 finished. This method requires a certain kind of genius, 
 poHtical influence, and power of manipulation, and 
 furnishes one clew to the reason why railroads " interfere 
 in politics." The personal profit upon this enterprise is 
 not a profit upon capital invested, but the result of brain- 
 work — administrative talent, they call it, in a particular 
 direction. When the road is built capital will seek it, 
 but until the whole principle of subsidies is abolished 
 it will not seek to build it. It is easier, more delightful, 
 and more profitable to build with other peoples' money 
 than our own. 
 
 Again, I do not wish to say that railroad men are more 
 selfish than other men, but that opportunities are offered 
 — of which only the strong can avail themselves — that 
 might make Caesars of the best, and that no men are 
 moderate enough to be trusted with arbitrary power. 
 When Lord Clive was before a Committee of the House 
 of Commons on a charge of having enriched himself by 
 the plunder of India, according to Macaulay, he justified 
 his acts, " described in vivid language the situation in 
 which his victory had placed him — a great prince de- 
 pendent on his pleasure ; an opulent city afraid of being 
 given up to plunder ; wealthy bankers bidding against 
 each other for his smiles ; vaults piled with gold and 
 jewels thrown open to him alone — and exclaimed in con- 
 clusion, ' By , Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand 
 
 astonished at my own moderation.' " 
 
 To form some idea of the magnificence of the whole 
 prize at stake, let us suppose that the entire railroad 
 system of the United States is under the control of one 
 company. Nor is this a violent presumption. When we 
 consider the colossal strides of the New York Central and 
 Pennsylvania Central towards this result — the latter now 
 owning or operating more than four thousand miles, 
 making thousand-year leases and guaranteeing dividends 
 
l62 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 for thirty generations — and reflect that the owners of the 
 trunk Hnes control their feeders as absolutely as though 
 they owned them, it will not seem improbable that the 
 whole system may pass under one general management. 
 Imagine this accomplished, and that the principle that 
 the law cannot fix rates and compel uniformity is estab- 
 lished — one company would then have a monopoly of all 
 inland transportation. A, B, C, and D own the coal 
 mines which supply the city of New York. The mines of 
 A are most valuable and nearest to market. He finds to 
 his astonishment that his rivals can undersell him, and 
 the value of his property is destroyed. He learns upon 
 inquiry that while he pays freight according to the 
 published tariff, B, C, and D, have special rates. He 
 complains, and is told that he can haul his coal on carts 
 or pack it on mules. He remonstrates, and is informed 
 that he can build his own railroad. Finally, as a choice 
 between that and bankruptcy, he sells or gives a control- 
 ling interest in his mine to the Directors of the " Mam- 
 moth Railroad Company." 
 
 The same process goes on successively with B, C, and 
 D, and reaches the same result. Then the great "An- 
 thracite Company " is formed, composed of the Directors 
 of the " Mammoth Railroad Company " ; a stock of coal 
 is accumulated in the city ; winter has come ; the Director 
 of the Mammoth looks in the mirror and says to the image 
 he sees there : " Anthracite, we have got to advance your 
 rates ! " and the image reflects a smile and a bow ; coal 
 advances in the city, but there is no panic. Then some 
 new regulation is established at the mine which provokes 
 a strike. The rumor goes abroad : " No more coal." 
 Then there are panic and famine prices in the city — murder 
 at the mine — and the poor shiver and freeze over the white 
 ashes in their grates, that Anthracite may swell Mammoth's 
 profits. Some one ventures to say this is wrong — this is 
 monopoly — and the whole brood of parasites that bask 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 63 
 
 in the social sunshine of Mammoth's favor and eat the 
 crumbs that fall from his table, join in the cry : " He is 
 a Communist ! a demagogue ! and does n't believe in the 
 rights of property ! We are comfortable — Mammoth gives 
 us gold for our flattery. ' After us the deluge ' ! " The 
 sentiment has been heard before — it was on the lips of the 
 courtiers on the eve of the French revolution — and then 
 a whisper brought down the avalanche. 
 
 The illustration I have instanced might be multiplied 
 until every coal field in the United States would be under 
 the absolute control of transportation — and coal is the 
 great source of manufacturing power, as it is also the 
 comfort and life of almost every home. You can scarcely 
 imagine a single industry that would not be affected, might 
 not be controlled, by a monopoly of the transportation of 
 coal. 
 
 Does the result I have sketched seem an exaggeration? 
 It is neither impracticable nor unprecedented. Do you 
 believe, if you owned a coal mine on the line of the Cen- 
 tral Pacific and the railroad company owned another, that 
 you could compete with them on fair terms in this city ? 
 Under such circumstances, would not their arguments to 
 you about election time have an eloquent persuasiveness 
 of more than mortal utterance ? 
 
 Then suppose the Mammoth turns its attention to wheat. 
 It builds warehouses and elevators. The wheat passing 
 through these can have " special rates," and get into cars 
 with red stars or blue stars, while the refractory farmer 
 finds his in a car without any star, and it never reaches the 
 market in time. If there happen to be an election about 
 that time, and a ticket comes around with a red star or a 
 blue star on it, don't you think the " star-back " would 
 commend itself to the farmer with a magnetism which 
 would require manhood to resist ? Then opposition ware- 
 houses and elevators become tenantless ; other buyers 
 find their " occupation gone," and every pound of wheat 
 
164 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 pays its toll before it gets to mill. This may seem an un- 
 necessary addition of machinery, as the road could put the 
 additional tariff on the wheat direct, and so it would be 
 in California, where the Directors are the road. It becomes 
 important, however, say in Illinois, when the Directors of 
 the road own the warehouses and elevators, the blue stars 
 and red stars, and a larger body of stockholders own the 
 road, and is one of the ingenious appliances by which the 
 "inside ring " gradually possess themselves of the whole 
 stock. For it often happens that those who most loudly 
 invoke the principle of the sanctity of property act as 
 though they believed that sanctity was a quality which 
 belonged to their property but not to that of other people 
 — on the principle, I suppose, that to the saintly all things 
 are sanctified, and that sinners who do not belong to the 
 ring are altogether ungodly — whose inheritance should be 
 taken away and given to the saints. 
 
 Then suppose an instance, which, of course, is purely 
 fictitious. Suppose a salt plain should be discovered in 
 Nevada, from which salt could be laid down at the Com- 
 stock Mills cheaper than from the coast. But, salt is very 
 cheap at the seaside ; a " special rate " would place it in 
 Virginia City at a price that would " defy competition." 
 The owner of the salt plain could be given his choice be- 
 tween " published rates " and pack-mules. Do you think 
 after he had succumbed the price of salt would be any 
 lower, because another " middle-man " had been squeezed 
 out ? What could be done with one salt manufactory or 
 deposit could be done with others, and we have added 
 salt to the coal and wheat which have passed under the 
 control of a monopoly of transportation that is not amen- 
 able to law. 
 
 A man owns a mine near the road ; if he can transport 
 his ore or base metal to the smelting works at reasonable 
 rates, his mine is valuable. He does not succeed in get- 
 ting rates which he can afford to pay. He holds on with 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 165 
 
 the sickness of deferred hope at his heart. His creditors 
 become clamorous — perhaps his children are clamorous for 
 bread. If at the next election the railroad has a ticket, 
 do you think the owner of the mine could refuse to vote 
 it? And, if he did, who would own the mine after the 
 sheriff's sale? Oh, but our railroads don't put up tickets, 
 and don't want mines for themselves or their friends. 
 Perhaps not. Their successors may. It is not mercy — it 
 is justice we want. But, why multiply instances ? Go 
 through the whole catalogue of the necessaries, the luxu- 
 ries, the superfluities of life, there is not an article which 
 would be exempt from this power to control. The long 
 list would include everything which is worth controlling. 
 In one of the parliaments of Elizabeth a member had fin- 
 ished reading a list of the articles upon which monopolies 
 had been granted, when another started up and asked, 
 "Is not bread there?" In the new list to be prepared 
 for us bread would be there — everything would be there 
 necessary to the comfort or sustenance of life, except the 
 air of heaven. 
 
 But the magnitude of this result still suggests its im- 
 practicability ! Why, four fifths of the preparatory work 
 has been silently done, apparently without design ! Take 
 the seventy thousand miles of railroad in the United States 
 — the great mass of this property is owned, or controlled 
 as absolutely as though it were owned, by certainly less 
 than ten companies, and the directory of these companies 
 may not include a hundred men. If the present rate of 
 absorption continue, how long before it will reach one 
 head ? It could be accomplished now in one day. Sup- 
 pose the transportation companies — the white stars, red 
 stars, and blue stars, who have contracts to run their cars 
 over various roads — should conclude to combine, and, 
 making their capital stock one, or two, or three thousand 
 million dollars — determine to " place it where it would do 
 the most good," and further determine that it could not 
 
1 66 NEWTON BOOTH, 
 
 possibly do so much good anywhere else as in the hands 
 of the men who are railroad directors. Then these men, 
 as railroad directors, lease to themselves as transportation 
 directors the various roads under their control — and the 
 thing is done. But such a contract, you urge, would be 
 bad in morals and void in law. I don't know wherein it 
 differs in principle from a contract made by the directors 
 of a railroad company with themselves to construct a road. 
 But, you suggest, the stockholders would not stand it. I 
 do not know why they would not, if their dividends are 
 secured by the leases. But the people, you say, would 
 not stand it. There would be an uprising, a revolution ! 
 Now you are the Communist, the, agitator. We do not 
 propose to invoke the bloody power of revolution, but the 
 majesty of a pronounced public opinion under the benig- 
 nant forms of law. Grant that this danger of unification 
 is, as perhaps many of you think it, the chimera of an 
 over-heated brain — that the tendency toward concentra- 
 tion has reached its limit. What, after all, is the practical 
 difference ? What Vanderbilt might do if sole owner, is 
 doing in various sections by various corporations acting 
 for a common purpose with a common interest and com- 
 mon instinct. It is only the difference between the king 
 and the satraps. 
 
 Let me state the danger as exactly as I can. There is 
 a natural tendency in every civilized society towards the 
 concentration of capital. That tendency has been greatly 
 intensified in this country by the convulsions of our civil 
 war. The property in the hands of the people, the men 
 of moderate means, is still a hundred-fold greater than the 
 great fortunes, but it is employed for ten thousand dif- 
 ferent purposes. Concentrated capital recognizes by the 
 instinct of money sense that the control of the railroads of 
 the country will give it the control of all the property 
 of the country ; that to accomplish this, political power, 
 political supremacy is necessary, and this it is enabled to 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 6/ 
 
 seek with such an immense pressure upon the rights and 
 material interests of every man and every community, 
 that there is imminent danger that we will become en- 
 slaved in spirit, lose that sense of manly independence 
 which is the essence of freedom, while we are enjoying 
 the forms of liberty, and barter the bright hopes of the 
 Republic for a fictitious material growth. The power that 
 threatens this danger has not yet reached unity, but the 
 work is certainly being done by different companies 
 acting in the same interest as though it had ; while the 
 tendency towards concentration under one head to one 
 iron hand is so manifest that not to see it is to be wilfully 
 bhnd. 
 
 That this statement is not exaggerated or emotional, I 
 appeal to the experience of every business man in this 
 community who takes part or feels an interest in public 
 affairs. Get together a committee for the purpose of con- 
 sidering a question of public importance, the moment it 
 trenches upon railroad ground, how many will feel that it is 
 dangerous ground full of pit-falls for their personal safety? 
 Attempt an organization to resist a railroad demand, no 
 matter how bold and unscrupulous, how many will tell 
 you, " I should like to join you, but it will injure me in 
 my business ; the railroad can take away special rates or 
 give them to my neighbor ; they can issue orders all along 
 the line that none of their employees shall deal with me ; 
 they can ruin merchants who will not regard their orders. 
 It may be a question of ruin, of bankruptcy, of bread to 
 my family." The struggle of his manhood is earnest and 
 painful, but the yoke is upon his neck, the iron in his soul. 
 Others will join you, act with you in all sincerity, perhaps. 
 There comes a time when the tempting offer is held out, 
 a new road or bridge is to be located where it will inure 
 to a great public use and private advantage, improvements 
 are to be made that will advance particular property, then 
 — there are vacant places on the committee, sudden conver- 
 
1 68 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 sions, and ingenious compromises where one party takes 
 the oyster and the other the shell. 
 
 A ballot-box is stuffed or returns altered to carry one 
 subsidy ; another demand follows. Men will say : " I know 
 it is wrong — it is an outrage ; but my property is all in 
 the city. They could not affect its ultimate value, but it 
 is mortgaged ; they can unsettle prices by their threats, 
 and I should have the sheriff at my door. I yield. I 
 am not of the stuff of which martyrs are made. If a 
 robber had his pistol at my head, I should give him my 
 purse." 
 
 What interest is there here which cannot be made to 
 feel this iron pressure ? But, as if it were too tedious to 
 capture these several interests in detail, they go to Con- 
 gress and demand the possession of Goat Island — still de- 
 mand it — boast that they will get it — and will get it if they 
 carry this election. Reserved for military purposes, they 
 scarcely intend to change its purpose ; they only intend 
 to bombard the city, instead of its enemies, when it refuses 
 their demands ! 
 
 God in heaven ! You are two hundred thousand — they 
 are three ! Have they got a hook in the jaws of this 
 leviathan, to draw it as they please ? 
 
 I have known good men who gave up the fight, for re- 
 sistance seemed hopeless. I have known others (often 
 the hard-handed sons of toil, sometimes in the employ- 
 ment of the railroad), who, in a spirit of manly independ- 
 ence, preferred to eat black bread which was their own 
 rather than pound-cake from another's table ; and yet 
 others who, from professional and clerical abilities of a 
 high order, could have maintained a social position of their 
 own, who, for the daily dole of a fixed salary, and for the 
 gracious privilege of using the imperial '' our " when they 
 looked at a locomotive, were willing to run errands, repeat 
 stale slanders, and mouth the hatreds of their employers 
 with a gratuitous, cringing, and obsequious meanness that 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 169 
 
 must disgust the manhood of their masters, if they have 
 any manhood left. 
 
 These influences, though more apparent in cities and 
 commercial and manufacturing communities, are by 
 no means confined to them. Even in the country, farmers 
 will tell you that their rates may be changed, their depots 
 moved, their accommodations restricted, or that they owe 
 upon railroad sections with unperfected titles ; and they, 
 too, are in the toils. To one community hopes are held 
 out ; threats are made to another. Go through the State. 
 Upon every pulse of industry there is an iron finger count- 
 ing its beats ; upon every throat there is an iron hand 
 that tightens or relaxes its grasp at the interest or caprice 
 of an iron will. 
 
 Add to this direct power that which it naturally draws 
 to it. It is a power in hand which can be used for any 
 purpose. Is there a project to monopolize the waters of 
 a great valley, so as to own the lands as efTectually as by 
 title, the railroad has a new aid and ally, with promise 
 of reciprocal advantage. It " makes itself friends of the 
 Mammon of Unrighteousness," and all schemes gather 
 around it as a convenient centre. It will defeat them if 
 they do not aid it, and the bargain is made. It has its 
 own lobby and newspapers. It enjoys a veto power su- 
 perior to that of the executive, exercising its prerogative 
 upon bills before they pass. Perhaps we ought to thank 
 it for its moderation ! Now we begin to understand not 
 only the motives for seeking political power, but the means 
 and appliance by which it is sought. Now we can com- 
 prehend how a central office in San Francisco, with wires 
 laid to every county, sends its political rescripts to every 
 convention of every party. We are to be allowed to vote, 
 but not always to count the votes, if a superserviceable 
 Board of Supervisors will appoint Election Boards to or- 
 der. Sometimes we are allowed to vote for good men — 
 men whom we could ourselves choose — but who will be, if 
 
170 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 elected, in a minority so hopeless and be so enmeshed in 
 the web of circumstances that they cannot stir hand or foot. 
 We are to be allowed to go through all the forms ; the 
 Declaration of Independence and Proclamation of Eman- 
 cipation will still be read on the Fourth of July, and the 
 " flag of the free heart's hope and home " be carried in pro- 
 cession ; the eagle will " moult no feather," on the coin of 
 the realm, and the " Battle-cry of Freedom " will be musi- 
 cal as ever. 
 
 So fair, so calm, so softly sealed, 
 
 The first, last look by death revealed ! 
 
 Such is the aspect of this shore ; 
 
 'T is Greece— but living Greece no more ! 
 
 I have referred but incidentally to that twin birth of in- 
 cestuous shame, the Credit Mobilier and the Contract and 
 Finance Company. I have said nothing of the two hun- 
 dred and twenty-four millions of acres of public lands — 
 three times the area of Great Britain — given to railroad 
 companies, and at the last session of Congress bills were 
 introduced giving one hundred and eighty-nine millions 
 more — nor to the millions — hundreds of millions of 
 which the Southern States have been robbed, and under 
 the false pretence that the railroads were to be built by 
 the paper companies. I have made no reference to the 
 $30,000,000 this State and its counties have been asked 
 for railroad companies through legislative action and 
 popular votes, nor to the fact that while the General 
 Government is paying $2,000,000 per annum on the bonds 
 of the Central Pacific, and the State, $105,000, the com- 
 pany can successfully defy the State to collect its taxes, 
 and with an effrontery that is sublime, makes the gifts 
 and largess it has received one of the grounds of its re- 
 fusal to pay ; nor the fact that to-day there is not a piece 
 or species of public property, from China Basin and Goat 
 Island to all the broad acres of our national domain, from 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. iy\ 
 
 the remotest spring in the mountains to the rolHng waters 
 of the rivers of the plains, upon which some incipient or 
 full-grown monopoly has not fixed its covetous eye, and 
 does not hope to obtain through some kind of political 
 corruption or bargain and sale. 
 
 And if I mention them now it is to say that I regard 
 them only as symptoms of a disease, the surface sores of 
 a corruption that is inward, which threatens to destroy 
 all freedom by destroying that manly independence 
 which is its only sure foundation, and making dominant 
 the principle that government is a thing for personal 
 aggrandizement, to get rich out of it, and not ordained to 
 give equal protection to all. 
 
 For the expression upon other occasions of sentiments 
 like these, I have been freely called an agitator, a dema- 
 gogue, an alarmist, and a Communist. As communism 
 seems to be the " raw head and bloody bones " of this 
 generation, and is made the symptoms of everything that 
 is bad, I desire to say just how much of it I have. 
 
 I believe that the man who owns one dollar holds it by 
 a right as sacred as the man who holds a million ; and that 
 the man who does own a million does not acquire by that 
 ownership any greater right to take the dollar, than the 
 owner of the dollar has to take the million. I do not 
 subscribe to that doctrine of political ethics, " To him 
 that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not it 
 shall be taken away, even that which he hath." I do not 
 concur in the new Scriptural reading, " Sell all thou hast 
 and give it to a railroad company." The man who has 
 earned his dollar by the honest sweat of his brow, or his 
 brain ; the man who has received by inheritance, or who 
 has accumulated by industry, energy, thrift, frugality, fore- 
 sight, or good luck, I would protect in his fortune, small or 
 great, by every sanction or muniment of law. Housed 
 in his possessions — cabin or castle — he should be protected 
 from the touch of the Government and the fury of the mob. 
 
1^2 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 But if he had despoiled the nation's inheritance, in his 
 greed of gain and power ; if he had bought legislators, 
 judges, and executives ; if he had organized corruption 
 into a system, made bribery a trade until he had de- 
 bauched the moral sense of the people by the grandeur 
 of his robbery, and all titles became insecure in his grasp- 
 ing presence — I should say — I think I should say — that he 
 had enough, and that the fact that he had taken so much 
 did not give him in reason, and should not in law, a 
 vested, absolute, and indefeasible right to take all there is 
 left. And, whether it be a man or a corporation, or a 
 system of corporations bound together by the common 
 hopes of public plunder, I do not think I should modify 
 the sentiment. To this degree has my communism come ; 
 is yours a shade less or more ? 
 
 There are those who believe that a certain amount 
 of political corruption is necessary for the maintenance of 
 any government. I confess I respect those who vow the 
 sentiment more than I do those who act upon it without 
 avowing it. There are those who believe that the system 
 now in vogue is the only one under which railroads can 
 be built. I do not think so. I do not believe that 40,- 
 000,000 of American people, with $30,000,000,000 of prop- 
 erty, must barter their birthright to secure transportation. 
 I do not think railroads need be political machines any 
 more than gristmills, tinshops, and farms. In thirty years 
 the population of the United States will approximate 
 100,000,000 souls, its property values $100,000,000,000. 
 Do you think the wheat is going to rot in the field, the 
 fruit on the trees, the vessel at the dock, and that all 
 commercial and industrial life is to stagnate if the admin- 
 istration of the Government is not given up to railroad 
 companies and their allies? I do not believe the future 
 of California, with all its illimitable possibilities, should be 
 mortgaged now to any set of persons with power to ap- 
 point guardians and receivers for all generations to come. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. IJl 
 
 To this complexion it will come, unless we burst the 
 bands wherewith we are bound, before our locks are 
 shorn. 
 
 For the whole of this great question no adequate solu- 
 tion has yet been proposed. The evil has struck its roots 
 deeply and their ramifications are wide ; to eradicate it 
 is a work of courage and wisdom, of patience and time. 
 But the work must have a beginning ; the time to begin 
 is now. 
 
 One solution proposed is, that the Government take 
 possession of all the roads. That this would involve a 
 concentration of power in the General Government, and 
 must be preceded by a civil-service reform of a nature of 
 which as yet we have had no experience, none will deny. 
 It has lately been urged in newspapers of wide circulation 
 in this State that we must vote for legislative candidates 
 who would go into caucus in order to get appropriations 
 for our State. The logical conclusion of this argument — 
 if it have any — is that we must vote a particular ticket, 
 designated in a particular way and in a well-known office, 
 or our forts may be dismantled and our mails be stopped. 
 Charles the First, in his boldest moments, would not have 
 dared to use such words to the Commons of Great Britain, 
 and if Louis XIV., when he said " I am the State," had 
 acted upon such a policy, he would have lost his head. I 
 do not believe any administration ever elected by the 
 American people ever deserved such a reproach — if so we 
 are already slaves. But the very use of such an argument 
 by an intelligent man, in a public newspaper, must " give 
 us pause " upon the question of conferring additional 
 power until we have additional guarantees. We have at 
 least reached the point, however, where we can say : 
 
 And where the Government has loaned its credit and 
 given its lands to build a road and been defrauded of its 
 securities, it has the right and should exercise the power 
 to take possession of the road. 
 
174 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 If no man has yet been able to devise a solution for the 
 whole question, every man knows the first step which 
 must be taken before any solution can be reached. The 
 political power and dictation of these corporations, 
 whether they comprise three men or three thousand, must 
 be broken. That tyranny which is so potent when exer- 
 cised upon individuals and interests in detail must be 
 destroyed by a general uprising of all individuals and 
 interests, heralded by a new declaration of independence. 
 
 The American people are a just people, a law-abiding 
 people, a debt-paying people ; and it is not necessary for 
 any corporation to own the Government in order to pro- 
 tect its rights — that only becomes necessary in order to 
 perpetuate wrongs. The time has come when the people 
 should assert their right through forms of law to exercise 
 that control over railroads which will secure uniformity, 
 fairness, and accountability. The issue is fairly made up 
 between the people upon the one side, and railroads and 
 allied corporations upon the other. Which shall govern ? 
 
 I have done. Standing in this presence — loving order 
 as I love life, sworn to maintain it and ready to redeem 
 the oath with my life — conscious of my responsibilities, 
 and weighing my words — looking the future earnestly in 
 the face, I solemnly believe that the choice of the Ameri- 
 can people is between reform now and revolution here- 
 after ! And I adjure these corporations for their own 
 sakes as well as ours not to involve us all in the common 
 ruin which their madness threatens. Justice is the only 
 sure foundation upon which our feet can stand. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1/5 
 
 AN OPEN LETTER TO JOHN B. FELTON.' 
 
 [Note : — John B. Felton was conceded to be a learned lawyer, a man also 
 highly educated and accomplished outside of his profession, an orator of 
 great prominence. It has already been said herein : " The allurements of 
 proffered wealth and power to the brightest legal minds of highest culture " 
 were great ; and that such as he, even, were swept into the maelstrom of 
 corporation service. So clearly and so fully does this "Open Letter" give 
 the gist of Mr. Felton's speech, that it is not thought proper or necessary to 
 reprint it.] 
 
 Dear Sir : I find in the Alta California of 22d inst. a 
 report from your own notes of a speech delivered by you 
 in Piatt's Hall on the previous evening, and I learn from 
 the head-lines that it was intended as a critical analysis 
 of " Governor Booth's dose of political strychnine." A 
 severe cold prevents me from answering your address on 
 the rostrum where it was delivered, and I trust you will 
 excuse this method of reply. I cannot stoop to notice 
 the hired assassins of character, who find in your speech 
 an armory of poisoned stilettos ; I cannot afford not to 
 notice you. Perhaps I should feel flattered that a man of 
 your distinguished ability, profound scholarship, and great 
 reputation should devote so much time to the considera- 
 tion of any effort of mine — and I do. The feeling would 
 have been somewhat different, I admit — something of 
 gratitude would have been mingled with it — if your state- 
 ment of my positions had been generous, candid, fair, or 
 truthful. I have vanity enough to believe that I speak 
 English with tolerable accuracy, and no one doubts your 
 ability to understand it. You are credited, also, with that 
 fine faculty of argument which enables you to state your 
 opponent's propositions with more force and clearness 
 than he does himself — when you desire to. I make due 
 allowance for the mental obliquity which some natures 
 necessarily acquire from the habit of looking at only one 
 side of questions with interested eyes, and the determina- 
 
 * Published August 27, 1873. 
 
1^6 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 tion of making that appear the right side at every hazard, 
 from interested motives. I have known some persons who 
 successfully counteracted this tendency in themselves by 
 devoting a portion of their leisure to the careful study of 
 the abstract and physical sciences, where truth, not vic- 
 tory, is the object sought. The study of Monte Cristo, 
 though doubtless a delightful relaxation from severe men- 
 tal toil, I do not think would have this corrective effect, 
 even if supplemented by the teachings of " Rabelais laugh- 
 ing in his easy chair," and the mocking satire of the illus- 
 trious Dean Swift. Making, however, due allowance for 
 any natural or acquired habit of thought, I am still com- 
 pelled to the opinion that your own misrepresentation 
 upon this occasion was conscious, designed, deliberate, 
 and studied. I will tell you why : Soon after my nomi- 
 nation for Governor on the 2ist of July, 1871, I delivered 
 the opening address of that canvass in Piatt's Hall. It 
 was published in most of the daily papers in San Fran- 
 cisco, and by the leading Republican papers throughout 
 the State. It was circulated as a campaign document by 
 the Republican State Central Committee in every county 
 of the State. Fully one third of the speech was devoted 
 to a consideration of railroad and other incorporated 
 monopolies, the danger to Republican institutions of great 
 social inequalities growing out of vast concentration of 
 capital, and to the imminent danger that associated capi- 
 tal might control in its own interest the whole machinery 
 of our Government. The positions then were the very 
 same as those maintained in the address to which yours 
 purports to be an answer. In proof of this I republish 
 at the close of this letter that portion of the speech of 
 1871, which refers to this subject, and shall be glad to 
 know wherein my position then differs from what it is now. 
 In every one of the thirty odd times I addressed the peo- 
 ple of this State in the canvass of that year, I went over 
 the same ground. Whatever other topic may have es- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 77 
 
 caped attention, that was always fully discussed. When 
 I addressed the people of Oakland you were one of the 
 most distinguished of my auditors. From your acciden- 
 tal position in the audience you were the most prominent 
 to me. I was flattered by your marked attention while 
 delivering the speech, delighted with your warm encomi- 
 ums when through. The doctrines wherein you now find 
 " enough political strychnine to throw all society into con- 
 vulsions " then seemed a very harmless anodyne. I 
 cannot believe that even your public devotion and distin- 
 guished fealty to your party — since the close of the war — 
 would induce you to support a man for Governor who, 
 had he the power, would " Uproar the universal peace, 
 confound all unity on earth." 
 
 Upon these questions I maintain the same sentiments 
 now as I did then. I was nominated for Governor be- 
 cause my sentiments were known. I was simple enough 
 to believe that the platform on which I was nominated 
 meant what it said. If I had not made an open profes- 
 sion of my faith I should not have received a majority in 
 any county of the State. May not the difificulty with 
 those who would quarrel with me be, not that I have 
 changed, but that I have not. My sentiments when I was 
 elected were in accord with nine tenths of the Republican 
 party. They are still. In the counties where the one 
 tenth control the organization to stifle the full expression 
 of opinion I appeal to the people and await the result 
 without a thought or a care as to how it may affect my 
 personal interest. You fall into a very harmless error 
 when you mistake your own " convulsions " for those of 
 society. 
 
 A stranger reading your speech, who had not read mine, 
 would suppose that I desired to inaugurate a war upon the 
 rights of property ; when my greatest desire is to make 
 each man secure in the possession of his own. I maintain, 
 if you own a farm and desire to give a portion of its annual 
 
178 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 income to a railroad or other incorporation, no one should 
 prevent you. If you do not desire to — no one — not even 
 a majority of voters, should compel you. You maintain 
 that a majority of your fellow-citizens can tax you for 
 such a contribution, even though you believe you will be 
 injured, not benefited. I desire to secure every man in 
 the fruits of his labor, skill, sagacity, and prudence from 
 all robbery, whether under forms of law or not, and you 
 accuse me of paralyzing industry. I say that railroads 
 should not be political machines, and you accuse me of 
 inciting a spirit which would tear up their tracks. Is that 
 a concession that your clients are so committed to their 
 present policy that they must continue it or abandon their 
 road ? I would cut out a cancer ; you accuse me of medi- 
 tating murder. I would stop that political corruption by 
 which every man's possessions are endangered ; you accuse 
 me of attacking the rights of possession. One might al- 
 most suppose from your insinuations that I was prepared 
 to throw a drag-net over a city, large enough to encompass 
 in its meshes alike the widow's homestead, the cottage of 
 the poor, and the mansion of the rich — or was an evil 
 genius, whose very presence casts a shadow upon the 
 honestly acquired title of my neighbor's property. 
 
 I protest against a favored few making Government a 
 machine through which to acquire property at the ex- 
 pense of the many ; you represent me as attacking the 
 right of property. 
 
 You say the accumulations of the rich are the reservoirs 
 from which the poor are supplied. God help the poor if 
 some rich men in my mind's eye measure the supply. 
 God help them if any man can obtain the power to 
 measure it. The truth is, the capitalist, large or small, 
 employs laborers for the sake of the profits upon labor, 
 and the laborer accepts employment for the wages paid. 
 " The reservoirs of wealth " are fed by labor — that is the 
 original, constant, and only source of supply. Cut that 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 79 
 
 off and there would be neither poverty nor riches, but all 
 would meet on the common level of common ruin, 
 
 I give voice to a common sentiment that the city is 
 menaced by the greed and political machinations of a 
 corporation, and ask that it be put under bonds, and find 
 myself arraigned as a disturber of the public peace. Stating 
 that vast concentrations of capital are dangerous to re- 
 publican institutions, I am accused of desiring to check 
 the general accumulation and fair distribution which 
 result from industry, energy, foresight, and thrift. 
 
 A fair distribution is as great an object of political 
 economy as a rapid creation of wealth. Suppose the two 
 million acres of the San Joaquin Valley should come into 
 the possession of a great irrigation company, with a paid- 
 up stock of a hundred million dollars, who would employ 
 50,000 Chinamen. The amount of wealth, the amount of 
 production, would be as great as though the valley were 
 settled and owned by 25,000 American families. The net 
 profits would be greater, as the consumption would be less. 
 Will any one seriously contend that the first condition of 
 society is as desirable as the second, or that a man who 
 resisted the enactment of laws to create the first condition 
 was a Communist or Socialist, and engaged in a war against 
 property ? Yet this is the meaning of your argument, if 
 it have any. 
 
 You are pleased to draw an illustration from mining 
 enterprise, and instance a case where success has been 
 honestly earned, and honorably used. I beg to call your 
 attention to an illustration of our respective positions, 
 drawn also from mining. The Green Briar Mine is an in- 
 corporated mining company, with a capital of a million 
 dollars, whose shares are owned by a thousand stock- 
 holders. The work has reached a point where it is self- 
 supporting. The superintendent discovers a large and 
 rich body of ore, and concealing the fact from others, 
 communicates it to the directors, who immediately levy 
 
l80 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 an assessment, depreciate the stock, and buy it in. After 
 a series of rich dividends the ledge pinches, a double divi- 
 dend is paid from earnings reserved for this purpose, the 
 stock goes up and the public take it. If I depreciate this 
 peculiar kind of "industry" in aid of the concentration 
 of capital, and ask laws for its punishment, am I to be 
 arraigned as the enemy of that industry which produces 
 and accumulates and dispenses ? Do you really recognize 
 no distinction between the industrious man and the cheva- 
 lier d'mdtistrie? " 
 
 Or again, a company of gentlemen incorporate them- 
 selves as the " Turbine Company." They manage, at 
 election time, to control a majority of the stock in the 
 several companies of the Mocstock ledge, and put in their 
 own Boards of Directors. Then all of the ore from the 
 various claims is sent to the mills of the Turbine Com- 
 pany, the members of which grow rich at the expense of 
 their fellow-stockholders in the mining companies. Ob- 
 jecting to this method of accumulations, and arguing if it 
 does not come within the prohibition of law it ought to, 
 am I to be stigmatized as worse than the men who 
 saturate houses v. ith camphene and give them to the 
 flames ? 
 
 A railroad company is endowed as no other corporation 
 has ever been before. Its Directors make contracts with 
 themselves for the building of the road, for the purpose 
 of exhausting the endowment and swelling their private 
 fortunes. A few of the individual stockholders, who are 
 not Directors, believing that their rights have not been 
 respected, resolve to bring suit. They find no lawyer in 
 the State whose reputation and ability commend him, in 
 greater degree, to them, than John B. Felton. He pre- 
 pares his complaint so skilfully and marshals his facts in 
 such a solid column behind it, that the Directors will not 
 even go into court, but compromise with the parties to 
 the action by paying five dollars and seventeen cents for 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. l8l 
 
 every dollar invested, and add a magnificent fee for the 
 lawyer. If I say that the nation who gave its lands and 
 lent its credit to build the road is a sufferer by the fraud 
 to the extent of its impaired security, do I thus become 
 an enemy to railroads ? Your doctrines drive you to the 
 inevitable conclusion that fraud is a necessary element to 
 the success of associated capital, and that in destroying 
 that we shall destroy its life. If that is the moral atmos- 
 phere of your daily life, it is well you should occasion- 
 ally come " up into the upper air." 
 
 Your Monte Cristo illustration does not deceive any 
 one — not even yourself. It is not the policy of monopo- 
 lies to destroy themselves by locking up supplies, but 
 to tax supplies at their pleasure on their way to the 
 consumer. 
 
 I instance a corporation that, in its determination to 
 direct and debauch legislation, manipulates the machinery 
 of both parties ; which, controlling all the great lines of 
 intercommunication, endeavors to override and crush out 
 every man and every interest it cannot use ; that makes 
 bribery a trade, corruption a system ; defies the State to 
 collect its taxes ; openly acts upon the principle that it 
 will make the avenues to justice so expensive that no 
 private litigant can afford to seek legal redress against its 
 wrongs ; openly maligns or secretly whispers away the 
 good name of every public man who will not do its bidding. 
 I instance the fact that 224,000,000 acres of public lands 
 have been given to the railroad companies, and that they 
 ask for 189,000,000 more ; that the Southern States have 
 been robbed to the verge of bankruptcy under the false 
 pretence of building railroads ; that, all through the West, 
 towns and counties are groaning under taxes to pay in- 
 terest on bonds issued ostensibly for railroads, but really 
 for the benefit of contract and Finance companies. I 
 point to the fact that this is not only a constantly grow- 
 ing power, but is rapidly centralizing, becoming more 
 
1 82 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 and more a political element to the detriment and danger 
 of a republican government. And I am told what ? — that 
 I am the teacher of a pernicious doctrine ! Stanton died 
 poor ; Chase did not steal, and Boutwell was a retail 
 grocer ; that when the sky falls we will catch larks, and 
 am treated to a lot of puns and bon mots, which if care- 
 fully common-placed and judiciously expended, would 
 make a reputation for a first-class jester at a dinner-table. 
 
 You desire to know if, when I speak of revolution, I 
 mean it as a prediction or a threat. 
 
 During the height of our civil war, on the 31st of May, 
 1864, you delivered an oration before the "Associated 
 Alumni." I beg to refresh your memory with one or two 
 of its eloquent passages : 
 
 " Am I asked what will be the consequence if California is treated with 
 injustice, if ignorance and folly make unwise laws to oppress her ? Well I 
 know from the time of Homer down it is the prophet of evil who is blamed, 
 not the cause. But will you find an instance in history where unwise laws 
 have not weakened and finally sundered the ties of loyalty and love that bind 
 the subject to the ruler. Where will you see a growing nation submitting 
 long to the restraints that fetter her in her onward march. Is there an ex- 
 ample recorded in the tvorld's annals of a great political abuse that did not 
 at length shatter the system in which it had its root. . . . With this 
 dread lesson in my heart how can I hesitate to tell you that in any great politi- 
 cal abuse there is the seed of anarchy, revolution, atid disunion. — John B. 
 Felton. 
 
 The " great political abuse " in which you then found 
 " the seed of anarchy, revolution, and disunion," was in 
 the failure of the General Government to have surveys of 
 the public lands with sufficient rapidity, and in its then 
 policy of not giving titles, but only possessory rights to 
 mines ! The time you improve to make your prediction 
 or threat of anarchy, revolution, and disunion was when 
 Sherman was before Atlanta, and Grant fighting his bloody 
 way through the Wilderness. 
 
 In conclusion, if I am to be read out of the party and 
 denounced a traitor, in the eternal fitness of things you 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 83 
 
 are the man of all others to pronounce the excommunica- 
 tion. Having come into the party late it is most meet 
 that you should atone for your early supineness by your 
 present proscriptive zeal. During the war I thought at 
 one time or another I was brought in contact with every 
 prominent Republican in this portion of the State. It 
 never was my good fortune to meet you. Your social and 
 professional position were as high then as now. Your in- 
 tellectual eminence always, your pre-eminence not unfre- 
 quently, conceded, then 
 
 " One blast upon your bugle horn 
 Was worth a thousand men." 
 
 After the war was over, after the glad acclaim of victory 
 — when our hearts were full of the sweet, silent thankful- 
 ness for peace — I, in common with 50,000 other Republi- 
 can voters, learned three facts at the same time : 
 First — That you were a Republican. 
 Second — That you were a candidate for the United 
 States Senate. 
 
 Third — That it was to be a " moneyed fight." 
 I have the honor to be 
 
 Your obt. servant, 
 
 Newton Booth. 
 
 The following is that portion of the speech referred to 
 in the above letter. It was delivered by Newton Booth, 
 as the Republican candidate for Governor, in Piatt's Hall, 
 July 21, 1871 : 
 
 OUR RAILROADS— A PROBLEM. 
 
 In the rapid growth and development of this country 
 new questions and new appHcations of old principles are 
 constantly arising. That which seemed a trifle yesterday, 
 may be of grave importance to-day and become a threat- 
 ening danger to-morrow. The introduction and vast ex- 
 
1 84 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 tension of the railroad system in the United States, 
 placing our interior trade and communications largely 
 under the control of great corporations, present some 
 difficulties to practical statesmanship. The world has 
 seldom witnessed so great and rapid a material change as 
 that wrought by railroads. There may be those who can 
 remember their invention. Forty years ago they were a 
 curiosity in the United States. Now we have more than 
 50,000 miles in operation at a cost of $2,600,000,000. They 
 are a part of the movement we call civilization. They 
 are the arteries of trade. They are a necessity of the 
 time. 
 
 More than any other branch of business, however, they 
 represent capital massed. In our day there is a strong and 
 increasing tendency toward the centralization of wealth. 
 The great business absorbs the small, the powerful com- 
 pany the weak. In this country the control of internal 
 commerce, through methods of transportation, is the prize 
 for which concentrated capital and executive ability are 
 struggling. It is a struggle between giants — a struggle in 
 which popular rights, the rights of individuals, the rights 
 of the weak, are liable to be disregarded. There is one 
 company now in the United States that own and operate 
 railroads which cost more than the assessed value of all 
 the property in this State. If this principle of centraliza- 
 tion should continue, and increase as rapidly in the next 
 twenty-five years as it has in the past, it is not impossible 
 that the whole vast system of railroads may pass under the 
 control of one company, or a combination of companies 
 with one head, with power and patronage enough to make 
 the Government in all its departments subservient to its 
 will. Does this seem chimerical ? It is neither chimerical 
 nor remotely improbable. It seems quite certain that 
 three or four companies will soon control, if they do not 
 already, nearly all the great lines of communication in the 
 United States — the struggle for supremacy to-day being 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 8$ 
 
 between Tom A. Scott, representing the Pennsylvania 
 Central ; Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, representing the Erie; 
 and Vanderbilt, representing the New York Central, with 
 their various connections and dependencies. If one of 
 these companies should absorb the others, or if they should 
 combine, that company or combination in ten years might 
 control every mile of railroad in the United States. 
 
 The problem to be solved is, how to increase and pro- 
 tect the necessary facilities of communication, and avoid 
 the danger to republican institutions from immense ac- 
 cumulations of capital in few hands, or it may be under 
 the direction of a single will ; and the special danger 
 which arises from the fact that any power which controls 
 our internal commerce, touches every interest, and to 
 that extent influences the well-being and destiny of the 
 nation. I know not what solution will ultimately be 
 reached, but the first step is to say, " Hands off ! " to de- 
 termine that Government shall not be used in any of its 
 departments for purposes of speculation — that capital is 
 able to take care of itself — and that concentrated capital 
 is becoming so vast a power, it is necessary to detach it 
 from all control of the Government to prevent its obtain- 
 ing the entire control. 
 
 Having stated the question as I understand it, in its 
 broad significance, it may seem trivial to discuss it in de- 
 tail ; but the particular phase of the question known here 
 as " anti-subsidy," involves the whole principle, and we 
 must consider it as it presents itself in its immediate as 
 well as its remote effects. It is said, also, as both parties 
 substantially agree in their platforms, the question is 
 settled and its discussion idle. It is not to be denied, 
 however, that there is a kind of undercurrent to public 
 opinion, or belief, I know not how general, that popu- 
 lar feeling upon this question is mere sound and fury, 
 which must be humored while it lasts, but whose force will 
 soon spend itself. I do not think so. I believe the 
 
1 86 NEW TON BOOTH. 
 
 popular instinct is right ; that it will abide, and I desire 
 to justify it. 
 
 The argument against State and county subsidies is : 
 First — Upon grounds of economy. It is the most ex- 
 pensive method of building railroads that can be devised. 
 A large percentage of every subsidy granted is lost before 
 it reaches actual payment for work done. If $500,000 is 
 deemed essential to construct a road through a county, 
 the company asking the subsidy will add to that amount 
 the sum necessary to carry the bill through the Legisla- 
 ture, and an additional sum to carry the election before 
 the people. Thus the people will not only pay for the 
 road, but furnish the money to corrupt their own agents, 
 and forestall the just expression of their own will. Is it 
 not better to establish the principle that if the people of 
 a county want a road and are willing to build it, they 
 should own it ; and if a company wants to own a road, 
 they should build it ? The narrow-gauge road will soon 
 extend facilities for transportation at greatly reduced ex- 
 pense ; and since mechanical genius has grappled with the 
 subject, it will not be long before the steam wagon is 
 trundling over our roads, bearing its burdens to our doors. 
 Next — County subsidies are unnecessary. There is abun- 
 dance of capital seeking investment. Where there is suffi- 
 cient business a road will certainly be built. If the building 
 of a road this year will create a supporting business, wait 
 a year and the business will bring the road without a pub- 
 lic tax. Forcing it through may do some good, but also 
 some evil. Its first effect is to enhance the price of unset- 
 tled lands and place them beyond the reach of the poor ; but 
 if the lands are first settled the advantage accrues to the 
 many and not the few — to the producer, not the speculator. 
 Third — It is unjust. Public wealth is simply the aggregate 
 of private property, and if private enterprise cannot afTord 
 to build a road, and the public consents to make a donation 
 for its construction, it is certain that some interest will be 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 87 
 
 taxed which will not be benefited, and very often, as in the 
 case of towns lying near but not on the line of the road, 
 property will be taxed whose value will be impaired, it may 
 be destroyed. It is asked with insidious sophistry, " If a 
 majority have not a right to do this ? " No ! This is 
 confiscation. Waiving the consideration that a majority 
 vote obtained for such a purpose is liable to be a result of 
 corruption, the rights of minorities, the rights of individ- 
 uals, are sacred. Government is ordained to protect, not 
 to destroy them. Taxes should be levied only for the 
 necessary purposes of government, in which all have a 
 common interest. Lastly — The system is demoralizing. 
 It opens the door to corruption ; it gives the strong the 
 advantage of the weak ; it tends to build up the few at 
 the expense of the many ; it is in the aid of the concen- 
 tration of wealth and power, not of their diffusion. 
 
 It is not a local question or partial one. It touches all 
 departments of government ; it concerns the very theory, 
 purposes, and spirit of all government ; it is no exhibition 
 of unfriendliness to any man or set of men ; it is no spirit 
 of envy or detraction, no disposition to depreciate the 
 sagacity and energy that achieves success, or takes from 
 them invested rights or just reward. It is the recognition 
 of the danger that if the power to tax can be levied at 
 all in aid of individual interests, then the colossal fortunes 
 in the hands of individuals and corporations may control 
 the exercise of that power to the very limit of revolu- 
 tionary resistance. It is the recognition of the sacredness 
 of private property — that whatever a man has as the 
 result of his industry, economy, and enterprise, is his own, 
 and shall not be taken from him to be given to another ; 
 and that no law, no majority vote, can make a private in- 
 jury a public right. It is part of an attempt to shut out 
 from legislation all schemes, of whatever nature, of money- 
 making and corruption. It is a protest against that spirit 
 of speculation which is absorbing our public lands, and 
 
1 88 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 converting what should be held as homes for the toil- 
 ing millions, into imperial donations. It is the perception 
 of the overshadowing danger of the hour, that this Gov- 
 ernment may be run in the interest of money and not of 
 manhood — that gold may become king and labor its vas- 
 sal. When General Jackson vetoed the United States 
 bank bill in 1832, he used the following language : 
 
 " Distinctions in society will always exist under every just Government. 
 Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by hu- 
 man institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of heaven and the 
 fruits of superior industry every man is equally entitled to protection by law. 
 But when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages 
 artificial distinctions ; to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges ; to 
 make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members 
 of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the 
 time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to 
 complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary 
 evils in Government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine 
 itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors 
 alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unquali- 
 fied blessing." 
 
 When this bill was vetoed on the ground that the bank 
 was a moneyed monopoly, dangerous to liberty, the capi- 
 tal stock of the bank was $28,000,000. We are now 
 threatened with a combination of capital of more than 
 a thousand millions. 
 
 The ideal republic would be a community where wealth 
 would be so equally distributed that the possessions of 
 each would represent actual services rendered. There 
 would be no Vanderbilts, Stuarts, and Astors, and no 
 men who would toil through a lifetime to reach a pauper's 
 grave. This ideal has never been realized on a large 
 scale, and there is no historical probability that it ever 
 will be. If direct legislation can do little to prevent ine- 
 quality, it should do nothing to foster it. And legislation 
 should prevent as far as possible those immense combina- 
 tions of capital, which draw to themselves more than 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 89 
 
 imperial power. The law should do this in the interests 
 of the rights of property itself ; for if the tendency to 
 centralization continues to increase, the time may come 
 when social order and the tenure of all property will be 
 shaken by the volcanic outbreaks of revolutionary forces. 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 DELIVERED AT STOCKTON, AUGUST 3O, 1873. 
 
 Fellow-Citizens : In consequence of a violent cold I may 
 not be able to address you at any considerable length ; 
 and I fear I shall not speak with more pleasure to you 
 than comfort to myself. 
 
 I find in the resolutions adopted by the Taxpayers' 
 Convention of this county a specific demand that the 
 duties upon quicksilver and coal should be taken off, and 
 that they should be admitted free. I have long believed 
 that the duties upon these articles, and upon many others 
 in the same category, were imposed at the instance and 
 for the benefit of private interests, and not for the public 
 good. Perhaps a stronger illustration of men being legis- 
 lated into riches at the expense of others could hardly 
 be cited than the provision which imposes a duty upon 
 quicksilver. The Government does not derive a dollar of 
 revenue from it. Its only effect has been to increase the 
 revenues of the owners of large quicksilver mines. It 
 says, in effect, to the consumers : A royalty is imposed 
 upon you, not for the benefit of Government, in whose 
 blessings you are equal participants, but for the benefit of 
 certain of your fellow-citizens who own mines which could 
 be worked profitably without it ; you shall be taxed for 
 the private advantage of some one whom you do not 
 know, and for whom you do not care. The absurdity of 
 this becomes still more glaring when it is known that for 
 years, when the New Almaden mine produced more than 
 the coast consumed, the surplus was sent to China, Mex- 
 
IQO NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 ico, and other foreign countries, and profitably sold there 
 at lower rates than it could be bought at the door 
 of the furnace ; that it was shipped to New York and 
 sold there cheaper than the San Francisco price, under 
 stipulation that it should not be returned. Further than 
 this : for years quicksilver has been a monopoly which, 
 transcending the boundaries of geography, has had the 
 whole world for the field of its operations.- A combina- 
 tion was formed some years ago, and I believe still exists, 
 among the great quicksilver companies with the Roths- 
 childs at the head, by which the production of each was 
 limited to a fixed amount, and the particular division of 
 the globe which each might supply was duly assigned. 
 These potentates divided the earth into commercial king- 
 doms, and enthroned themselves as kings ; and now, let 
 any man endeavor to develop a quicksilver mine in this 
 State, he will find himself harassed — perhaps ruined — by 
 causeless litigation instigated by the monopoly. Looking 
 at the duty imposed in this light, even though the mo- 
 nopoly has now become strong enough to make the price 
 purely arbitrary, the principle involved makes the ship- 
 money which Hampden refused to pay equitable and 
 right, and the monopolies granted by Elizabeth public 
 blessings. 
 
 This statement of facts, which is its own argument, will 
 of course be treated as others of a like nature have been 
 before, as an appeal to popular passion and an insidious 
 attack upon vested rights. The power to oppress seems 
 to be the one vested right which it is never safe to attack. 
 Since the days of Hebrew story the oppressed have been 
 the disturbers ; since the time of ^sop it is the lamb who 
 muddles the stream. 
 
 In regard to coal, although the Government does derive 
 revenue from the impost, it is safe to say that not a hun- 
 dredth part of the tax paid is for the benefit of the Gov- 
 ernment. The proportion of imported coal consumed to 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I9I 
 
 the domestic is scarcely appreciable. Within a year, on 
 account of a sudden advance in the English price, Ameri- 
 can " coal has been sent to Newcastle." Coal being a 
 constant element in manufacturing power, whatever en- 
 hances its price enhances the cost of every article of man- 
 ufacture ; an addition paid by the consumer for which he 
 receives no benefit. 
 
 The article of salt furnishes another instance of the 
 injustice of this kind of discrimination. It is of universal 
 consumption, and every one who uses it pays a direct tax 
 levied by the Government in favor of the manufacturer. 
 The largest salt-manufacturing company in the United 
 States will to-day send salt to Canada and successfully 
 compete with that from Liverpool. Standing on the 
 border, you can buy American salt in British territory less 
 than in our own — certainly by as much less as the amount 
 of the duty levied by Government in favor of the pro- 
 ducer. By reason of natural advantages and aided by this 
 kind of legislation, the company referred to increased its 
 capital stock a thousand per cent, without levying an 
 assessment and pays dividends on the whole. Where do 
 these dividends come from ? Who pay them, and for 
 whose benefit? How is it that such abuses arise and are 
 tolerated ? 
 
 They all come from one source : that while we all 
 acknowledge and believe that governments are instituted 
 for the equal benefit of all the people, yet, in practice, 
 special and private interests are able to secure the enact- 
 ment of laws in their own favor. It is so much easier to 
 be legislated into money than to make it by plodding in- 
 dustry and economy that the field is as tempting as the 
 rewards are great. You will find to-day if any great en- 
 terprise is projected, the first thing suggested is, how can 
 the company secure some special privilege, avail them- 
 selves of some law already in existence, or procure the 
 enactment of one that will suit their purpose? For in- 
 
192 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 stance : your magnificent valley of the San Joaquin needs 
 only the irrigation of the waters, whose sources are in the 
 mountains, to make it blossom as the rose. How is it to 
 be accomplished ? Do men meet together and say, Na- 
 ture has kindly stored this water for the benefit of the 
 arid lands, and now it shall be equitably used for that 
 purpose ; and in its distribution we will endeavor to imi- 
 tate the impartiality of heaven in sending the dews and 
 the rains ? No ! The first step would probably be for 
 some one, or some company, to get or claim a monopoly 
 of the waters ; and that such a thing is or should be 
 thought to be possible is a disgrace to the civilization of 
 the age and country ! Next, get a monopoly of as much 
 of the lands as possible ; then get donations of lands 
 from the General Government to construct the necessary 
 works ; then, such contracts and donations from farmers 
 as will enable the company to complete the whole at the 
 least possible cost to themselves. When completed there 
 will be princely revenues upon the one hand — and quit- 
 rent tributes upon the other forever ! 
 
 I am not now arraigning the men who do this, or would 
 do it. Possibly you and I might if we could ; the temp- 
 tation would be very great. But I do arraign the system 
 that makes such a thing possible — which places such 
 temptations before weak and erring humanity. 
 
 Now I presume it will be charged that I am opposed to 
 irrigation, or fear some one will make something, so com- 
 mon is the idea that injustice is a necessary ingredient in 
 every material improvement. If we should go through 
 the revenue laws of the General Government we should 
 find, if we could ascertain all the facts, that the impost 
 upon nearly every article in the long, long list of dutiable 
 goods had been adjusted by the private interests which 
 are to be benefited. There are many reasons for this. 
 One is that members of Congress and public men, finding 
 a constant stream of money pouring into the Treasury, un- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 1 93 
 
 consciously fall into the idea that the Government is a 
 self-supporting machine. They gradually lose sight of 
 the fact that the Government, as such, does not own a 
 dollar, and of the homely truth that, having nothing of 
 its own, it cannot give anything, directly or indirectly, to 
 any one without taking it from somebody else. Another 
 reason is that private interests are constant and earnest in 
 their own advocacy, and are able, often very plausibly, to 
 direct attention to a special good while the general evil 
 is spread over the whole country and is lost sight of. If 
 every inhabitant of the United States should on a particu- 
 lar day give one cent to a particular man, he would find 
 himself in the possession of a fine fortune and no one would 
 be much poorer. It would almost seem to be like getting 
 something from nothing. But if everybody should keep 
 on day by day giving a cent to every one else, we should 
 soon get back where we started, minus the loss from col- 
 lecting and distributing. That might be a harmless 
 pastime, and enable each of us to play rich for a day ; but 
 when it is the many who give and the few who re- 
 ceive, the pleasure and profit are not equally divided. 
 The system becomes as burdensome to the multitude of 
 contributors as it is agreeable and delightful to the class 
 of receivers. Still another reason is that a member of 
 Congress, finding the productions of other States pro- 
 tected, is driven in self-defence to seek protection for 
 those of his own, and goes into combinations with other 
 members on the agreement that you shall have this if you 
 will give me that. The result is that we have a revenue 
 system so artificial and complicated that no one fully 
 understands it ; and one of the most honorable mercantile 
 houses in the United States has been compelled to pay 
 $275,000 as a forfeit for a mistake that was unintentional, 
 which did not amount to $3,000 ; and although, taking all 
 their invoices together, the house had actually paid more 
 duties than the Government was entitled to collect. Of 
 
194 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 course the Government must have a revenue, and a large 
 one ; but the only equitable manner in which it can be 
 collected from imposts is by fixing the duties so that all 
 that is paid shall be for the Government. The funda- 
 mental error behind all this is in the idea that the Govern- 
 ment can direct the private business of the people better 
 than they can themselves. Congress is an able body, 
 composed for most part of distinguished men ; but if it 
 was composed of the ablest statesmen and men of affairs 
 who have ever lived, from Moses to Gladstone, and from 
 Joshua to Grant, and they were all as pure as the saints, 
 they could not direct the industries of this whole country 
 as successfully or as equitably as can the people them- 
 selves, by each " minding his own business." Is this Re- 
 publican ? Yes ! It is the logical deduction from the 
 central living principle of the Republican party — personal 
 freedom — that man shall be free to do anything which 
 does not harm some one else. Is it Democratic ? Yes ! 
 It is the direct application of the principle of the party 
 in its earlier and better days — " That Government is best 
 which governs least." In truth, in the expression of this 
 principle, both parties have been right, and neither has 
 been willing to follow it to its logical results. Governor 
 Palmer of Illinois recently said that the only way to pre- 
 vent Credit Mobilier transactions and exposures was, not 
 to elect Credit Mobilier men to office. The only way to 
 keep them out of ofifice is to have it understood, settled 
 for all time, that it is a fundamental and unchangeable 
 rule of action that the Government has no special favors 
 to grant to any one ! Until this principle is adopted, the 
 rich and the powerful, and particularly the corporations 
 which represent massed wealth, will be able in a greater 
 or less degree to shape legislation in their own behalf by 
 the constant pressure they can bring to bear upon public 
 men. As it is, we have lived to see the day when one of 
 the most distinguished and able of the United States 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I95 
 
 Senators can defend the Credit Mobilier, *' that house 
 built to receive stolen goods," and to assert that mem- 
 bers of Congress had as good a right to take its stock as 
 to take stock in a manufacturing company. We have 
 lived to see the day when men who have grown gray in 
 the pubHc service, and whose good names we prized as a 
 portion of our country's honor, have confessed that they 
 were bribed so skilfully that they could scarcely tell how 
 or when. They remind one of the swordsman who cut 
 off his antagonist's head so deftly the poor fellow did not 
 know it was off until he sneezed ; so some of our states- 
 men did not know they were decapitated until a little 
 snuff of investigation was thrown in their faces, and they 
 immediately sneezed their political heads into the basket. 
 The mania for incorporating seems to be so general it will 
 scarcely be a matter of surprise if the time should come 
 when every individual man will incorporate himself for the 
 purpose of pursuing his avocation, from bootblack up. 
 There seems to be an opinion that there is some kind 
 of divinity that hedges in a corporation, and that it has 
 only to ask to receive. What the great corporations do 
 receive — what they take, even, with strong hand — is among 
 the lesser evils of their management. If the Government 
 levies a tax for the benefit of a corporation, we at least 
 know how much we have to pay, and pay alike ; but when 
 a great railroad corporation acquires the power to levy its 
 own taxes, they have not even the virtue of uniformity, 
 and may be fixed arbitrarily to punish its enemies or 
 reward its friends. It is a public misfortune that the 
 public lands, in place of becoming homes for millions, 
 should pass into the hands of railroad Seigneurs — and not 
 always be used for the purpose of building railroads. I 
 instance here a case which must be familiar to you all: 
 That division of the Central Pacific Railroad which passes 
 through your country was known as the Western Pa- 
 cific. For the building of that road Congress made 
 
196 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 vast grants of lands, over 1,500,000 acres to the Western 
 Pacific Company. We do not know that one acre of that 
 land ever went towards the construction of the road. Cer- 
 tainly no considerable portion of it ever did ; for when the 
 Western Pacific Company turned over the franchise with 
 the Government's loan to the Central, they simply kept 
 the lands as the price of the franchise ; and the lands thus 
 became an out-and-out gift from the Government to the 
 members of the former company. The instance is by no 
 means a solitary one. And, indeed, when land grants are 
 made they are simply used as a basis of credit upon which 
 to build the roads ; then, when the bonds mature, if the 
 roads are worth what they cost, of course the lands are 
 clear gain. You know something of the management of 
 railroad subsidies in San Joaquin, and how the big com- 
 panies absorb the little ones. Less than four years ago 
 you voted a subsidy to the Stockton and Visalia road. 
 What have you got, except an endless litigation to make 
 you pay for something you did not get ? But the gifts, 
 grants, loans, and subsidies are not so bad in themselves 
 as the corrupt means by which they are sought, and the 
 great demoralization which results from the introduction 
 of systematic corruption into public affairs. Why should 
 the Central Pacific Railroad endeavor to control the whole 
 politics of our State, and secure Representatives and 
 Senators in its own interest, except that it expects to use 
 the State and General Government for its own benefit ? 
 To what a pass has it come, when this creature of State 
 laws, fed upon the people's bounty, is able to wield the 
 whole power and patronage of the Federal Government, 
 so that every federal office-holder, from tide-waiter to the 
 collector of customs, from watchman to superintendent of 
 the mint, holds his position at their pleasure and subject 
 to their surveillance ; and, speaking in their behalf, a 
 United States Senator can openly and unblushingly say 
 that he will teach the people of the State the power one 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I97 
 
 United States Senator can exercise in the election of a 
 Senator ? How is it that a system of espionage has been 
 established by which every man who disagrees with this 
 company is threatened, and injured in his private busi- 
 ness and public and private character? Was there ever 
 before, in any community, a despotism so petty in its 
 spites ; so far-reaching in its power and disposition ! It 
 not only assumes to punish individuals for the expression 
 of opinion, but whole communities — friends and foes alike ! 
 It threatens to remove shops, offices, depots, from one 
 community to another for political effect ; and puts up 
 public accommodation at auction to the highest bidder. 
 It makes the gifts it has received a power of extortion ! 
 Upon this coast it is the representative of the evil which 
 I have endeavored to depict — the central figure around 
 which all other schemes gather ! Having made itself a 
 political power, it must be fought as a political power. 
 Against its tyranny I rebel — you rebel — the people rebel ! 
 Since no man or interest singly can resist it, there is a gen- 
 eral resistance of the whole in favor of each. We do this 
 in no spirit of wrath or vengeance, but in the spirit of 
 justice. Tyrants may do wrong — the people cannot 
 afford to. 
 
 In the name of Justice we demand that the people shall 
 be allowed to do their own voting, unintimidated by 
 menace ; and that their votes shall be fairly counted. We 
 demand that the laws shall be made and executed for the 
 general benefit of all, and not for special interests. We 
 demand the just and equitable payment of taxes. We de- 
 mand free access to the courts, and that that brutal rule of 
 action which wantonly ruins any private suitor who seeks 
 legal redress against the company's wrongs shall be abro- 
 gated. We demand that fares and freights shall be regu- 
 lated by law, so that they shall be uniform and just ; and 
 that the company shall not discriminate against persons 
 or places by charging higher rates between some points 
 
198 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 than between others of the same distance and similar 
 grades. We demand a full investigation of the transac- 
 tions between the Government and the company; a strict 
 accountability for all the assets placed by the Government 
 in the company's hands ; and that there should be repara- 
 tion and punishment for any frauds that may have been 
 committed. 
 
 This is California's part of the great contest which is 
 everywhere to be made in favor of a " government of the 
 people, by the people, for the people." You have a ticket 
 here that represents the people's side of the question. 
 The Springfield Republican, the leading newspaper in New 
 England, justly styles the political contest in California 
 this year " A State's fight with a railroad." But the fight 
 has more than a State significance. It is the beginning of 
 a contest against all schemes that have for their object 
 private advantage at public expense. It is the beginning 
 of a contest which will make such schemes impossible by 
 restricting government to its legitimate functions. It has 
 been complained that I have not heretofore suggested a 
 complete and adequate remedy for all the evils I have de- 
 picted. I do not pretend to know what final solution for 
 the whole will be reached. We can only take one step at 
 a time, and the first steps are plain. If the question 
 should ultimately come between the Government owning 
 the railroads and the railroads owning the Government, 
 I shall certainly favor the Government ownership. But, 
 first of all, it is essential that the people should own the 
 Government, so that when the negotiations for sale take 
 place, the railroads shall not make both sides of the bar- 
 gain. In making this contest, they say we have gone 
 outside of the parties. Wherever it has been found neces- 
 sary to, so much the worse for the parties ! Surely it can 
 be no great harm for any one to say what everybody 
 thinks, for any one to do what every one knows is right ; 
 and. if he have to go outside of a party or a church to do 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. I99 
 
 it, still, God's sky is above him, the free air around him, 
 manhood's strong heart within him — and sooner or 
 later, in the right and appointed time, he will surely 
 succeed ! 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 DELIVERED AT UNION HALL, SAN FRANCISCO, JULY 20, 1875. 
 
 Mr. President and Fellow-Citizens : A bolder man than 
 I am might well stand awe-struck in the presence of this 
 vast audience and conscious of so much expectation. It 
 seems to me that I can feel to-night the signal of the 
 popular approval to the cause which has convened us. 
 
 The representatives of the People's Independent Party 
 have met in convention, and their work is presented to 
 the people for approval or rejection. 
 
 Whatever else may be said of it, it cannot be said that 
 its declaration of principles is not clear and explicit, and 
 its candidates are not widely known. Its platform sur- 
 prised no one — is not a trap to catch votes, but is the 
 sincere expression of the body of doctrine on which the 
 party is founded. 
 
 At the head of its ticket is the name of John Bidwell, a 
 man who came to California thirty-four years ago, and 
 has lived here ever since. In that time he has committed 
 two very grave offences. In 1867 he was the most accept- 
 able candidate of his party for the ofifice of Governor ; 
 he refused to abate one jot or tittle of his manly integ- 
 rity, to trade, traflfic, and barter his way to nomination, 
 and of course in the eyes of village, cross-roads, and ward 
 politicians he was a political incompetent. In 1875 he 
 is a candidate for Governor, in obedience to a very general 
 but popular sentiment, without the seal of approval of 
 the men who claim the right to make and unmake Gov- 
 ernors as their personal prerogative. These are offences 
 
200 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 which the people may condone — the village, the ward, 
 and cross-roads politician and the California Warwicks, 
 never. He must be judged and punished. Unroof his 
 house, let in the light of meridian sun upon his private 
 life, track him like a sleuth hound for the thirty-four 
 years in which he has seen California develop from a 
 waste into what it is ; see if you cannot discover some 
 idiosyncrasy of manner, some fault or error. It may be 
 that he is not absolutely perfect, as his traducers are. If 
 you wish perfection, you will not find it among the people, 
 but must seek it among those who make politics a trade. 
 But tried by any human standard, I dare avouch that 
 John Bidwell will be found a man true to his convictions, 
 honest in his purposes, open in his dealings, and charitable 
 in his judgments. He has not sought popularity by art, 
 he enjoys it only as a tribute to his character. 
 
 But I am not here to eulogize any man, or to vindicate 
 him against aspersions, however unjust. If this move- 
 ment is not far above any personal considerations, it has 
 no value or significance worth your attendance here to- 
 night. I believe this people are tired and disgusted with 
 that kind of party warfare, offensive indeed, because it is 
 offensive to common decency and intelligence — tired of 
 that servitude to party leadership, which is animated only 
 by selfishness, and which regards the possession of the 
 machinery of government of more importance than the 
 object it was devised to accomplish. 
 
 In view of this, its leading idea, I ask your attention to 
 some of the reasons why the People's Independent Party 
 should commend itself to your favor and support. 
 
 First. It is a protest against the tyranny of party dis- 
 cipline, and a proclamation of the sacredness of individual 
 liberty. It is the first political party to announce that 
 none of its members owe it allegiance, except as it does 
 right, and of this the judgment and conscience of each must 
 decide. It carries no party lash, or political thumb-screw. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 20I 
 
 It affirms that it is the right of every man to participate 
 in good faith and honest intention in its councils, but 
 that no jugglery, no coup-d'e'tat, shall control his action 
 to the support or sanction of a wrong. It abjures the 
 old test on canonization, " I never scratched a name, 
 crossed a /, or dotted an i, in a party ticket." It is an 
 association where honorable men may honorably act 
 together for a common object, without a slavish abandon- 
 ment of the right of private judgment. For years it has 
 been the fixed habit of both political parties to appeal to 
 the people, while constantly asserting that all the people 
 belong to one party or the other — which it was treason 
 to desert. Thus each was arraigning the other before a 
 tribunal which both maintained did not exist. That 
 tribunal, however, which really does exist in free thought 
 and independent opinion, the People's Independent Party 
 desires to convert into a political power which shall regard 
 the rights and interests of the people, not as the football 
 of contending factions, but as the real object of govern- 
 ment. It invites the co-operation of all who concur in its 
 general purpose, who are tired of the thraldom of party 
 discipline and would like to throw ofT the yoke, without 
 renouncing any of the rights or duties of an American 
 citizen. 
 
 In thus publicly proclaiming that individual liberty and 
 the right of private judgment are superior to its organiza- 
 tion, or to any party organization, in leaving the con- 
 sciences of its members absolutely free to pursue the 
 right, as they severally see the right, we believe it presents 
 a valid claim to the support of all who place a higher 
 value upon liberty and conscience than upon party fealty 
 and success. It may be asked why this cannot be attained 
 simply by independent voting, without concert of action 
 at all. The answer is, that the man who stands abso- 
 lutely aloof from all organization whatever can exercise 
 only a silent influence at best. The time has come when 
 
202 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 the active political influence of all good citizens is de- 
 manded in the interest of good government. 
 
 Second. It is one of the leading objects of the People's 
 Independent Party to make the theory of local self-gov- 
 ernment a substantial fact. 
 
 Whoever has intelligently watched the current of events 
 for the past few years can hardly have failed to observe a 
 strong and increasing tendency towards a centralization 
 of political power and influence, which, if not checked, 
 will become as fatal to local good government and indi- 
 vidual freedom, as the theory of the right of secession 
 would be to national unity. The open form of this ten- 
 dency is not its most dangerous form. If an ofificer of the 
 army should decide who were and who were not members 
 of our Legislature ; if a United States marshal should 
 decide who were entitled to vote, and how certain persons 
 would have voted if they had voted, these would be open 
 acts which would excite popular indignation, and find 
 their own correctives. But if through the use of Federal 
 patronage and distribution of appointments, conventions 
 can be controlled, then the machinery of State and local 
 government may be as effectually managed at Washing- 
 ton, as though it were accomplished by open force. The 
 vastly increased Federal patronage makes its use for any 
 but the strictest purposes of government, dangerous not 
 only to local self-government, but to all good government. 
 And, if the possession of the Federal Government, with its 
 powers and patronage, is to be made the great object of 
 every political contest — local or national — and the people 
 are imbued with the spirit of this idea, we have practical 
 centralization, all the more dangerous because it has the 
 popular assent. The Democratic party, always an advo- 
 cate, in theory, for State rights and local government, has 
 been even more at fault in this than the Republican, as 
 its discipline has been more strict. How can we have 
 intelligent local government, if every local election is to 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 203 
 
 be regarded simply as a part of a great national campaign ? 
 if we are to obey instructions, always stand in line or fol- 
 low a party leader ; and because a Presidential election is 
 coming off after a while — it is never more than four years 
 distant — any one who breaks ranks must be shot ? It was 
 natural that this idea should obtain during the civil war, 
 when national questions were all-absorbing, and the fate 
 of the nation the subject nearest to every heart. But in 
 time of peace I submit that it is subversive of the true 
 principles of local government, which are the real founda- 
 tions of national greatness. We cannot carry the princi- 
 ples and policy of peace into war, and we ought not to 
 bring the spirit and policy of war into peace. The election 
 of a Board of Supervisors or a city Assessor may be — 
 probably will be — in the next four years a matter of more 
 practical importance to you in the daily walks and busi- 
 ness of life, than that of President. Separate them, 
 and you can decide both intelligently ; unite them and 
 sink your private judgment in blind partisanship, and it 
 is all a matter of chance and accident. 
 
 The People's Independent Party hold and believe that 
 the American people constitute one nation, whose unity, 
 baptized in blood, is sealed to all the future ; and that its 
 glory is not in any splendor of equipment or concentra- 
 tion of power ; that its General Government can best be 
 buttressed and strengthened by the proper administration 
 of local affairs by local communities ; that the true sources 
 of its greatness are in the intelligence, industry, and mo- 
 rality of its citizens — its best safeguard in their willing 
 affections. 
 
 Third. The party addresses itself to the consideration 
 of living questions of pressing and immediate importance. 
 It recognizes the truth, and makes it the guiding principle 
 of its political action, that the people do own this Govern- 
 ment, and should control all its departments — national, 
 State, and local — for their common benefit, and not in the 
 
204 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 interest of rings, schemes, aggregated capital, or great 
 corporations, that this shall be truly a Government '' of 
 the people, by the people, for the people." We have 
 passed the great danger which threatened our national 
 unity, to confront another which threatens to canker our 
 social and political well-being. The question of the effect 
 upon our political system of vast accumulations of wealth, 
 the increasing disparity — the widening gulf — between the 
 rich and the poor, and of great corporations, with per- 
 petual succession, is comparatively a new one in our his- 
 tory. Jefferson and Jackson foresaw it, but it confronts 
 us now with startling reality. I know that whoever dis- 
 cusses or refers to this question is accused of agrarianism, 
 socialism, communism, demagogism, and all the other 
 isms which are considered bad. But it is a question that 
 cannot be sneered out of existence. It will not down at 
 any man's bidding. " The rich do grow richer, and the 
 poor poorer ; cunning idleness does eat the bread of hon- 
 est industry ! " the powerful can avail themselves of facili- 
 ties of law to become more powerful. Somebody once 
 said that there was but one security against Vanderbilt's 
 owning everything — the certainty that he would die, and 
 suggested that as one of the compensations of mortality ; 
 but a corporation may be a Vanderbilt endowed with im- 
 mortality. And if it is to be hereafter held to be the law 
 that conditions imposed upon corporations may be re- 
 moved, but that privileges granted are in the nature of a 
 contract, and not repealable, we had much better have 
 Vanderbilt — unless, indeed, he could incorporate himself. 
 There is a rapidity in the growth and expansion of cor- 
 porations which is quite startling, if you will stop to 
 think about it. A few years ago a corporation was 
 formed to use the waters of a spring for supplying the 
 city. The object was a good one, the beginning small. 
 Now that corporation owns, or claims to own, pretty 
 much all the water available for the supply of the city ; 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 20$ 
 
 its charges are limited only by the ability of the consumer 
 to pay, and it estimates its property, rights, and privileges, 
 for the purposes of a sale to the city, at from $15,000,000 
 to $20,000,000, and hopes to be in a position to dictate 
 terms of sale. I am not criticising the men who originated 
 this corporation, nor those who have put their money in 
 its stock at the market price as a legitimate investment, 
 but that scheme of law or policy which makes a monopoly 
 of water possible, and that kind of politics which may 
 give a corporation the control of a municipal government. 
 A gas company gets the right to lay its pipes in your 
 streets. In a very short time, by the accumulations of its 
 profits, it is able to prevent all competition ; it can fix its 
 own rates, and, while paying dividends on $8,000,000, it 
 will pay taxes on one-sixteenth of that sum, with a cheer- 
 fulness that is refreshing. You can see, from these in- 
 stances, what an immediate and direct interest local cor- 
 porations have in controlling local governments, and how 
 easily they may obtain this control, if you elect local 
 ofificers simply with a view to the Presidential election 
 and the distribution of Federal patronage. 
 
 Less than fifteen years ago two corporations were 
 formed for the purpose of building a railroad from the 
 Mississippi to the Pacific. The project had been dis- 
 cussed for years. Its accomplishment was regarded as a 
 national triumph. There was a charm about the magni- 
 tude of the undertaking. It was a road that was to cross 
 wilderness, desert, and mountains, weld the continent and 
 wed the seas. The Government was in the midst of a 
 war, and its operations and expenditures were upon a 
 gigantic scale. There was little time or disposition to 
 criticise a bill in details which promised magnificent re- 
 sults ; loans of credit and grants of lands were made with 
 a munificence which seems imperial in the prosy times of 
 peace. The corporations represented very little capital of 
 their own, but very great executive ability and an immense 
 
206 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 capacity to receive. In less than twelve years from the 
 time the first shovel of earth is turned, these corporations 
 own the transcontinental railway, tracts of land which 
 would make an empire, the steamship communication be- 
 tween New York and San Francisco, and between San 
 Francisco and China, and all the principal lines of trans- 
 portation by rail and water in California. Without local 
 competition, at any time powerful enough to crush com- 
 petition, now they can fix their own rates, discriminate 
 between places, between individuals, build up or destroy, 
 reward or punish. By getting control of the Pacific Mail 
 Steamship Company, they remove through competition, 
 and their increased profits from the advance on the through 
 freight, which is paid by the people of the State, would 
 support the common schools of the State — a tax levied at 
 the sovereign will of the companies themselves. Their 
 net income for the single year 1873 from the transconti- 
 nental road alone, and before the increased tariff, was 
 $12,886,793.28. This must be increased to at least $20- 
 000,000. Yet, under a technical construction of law, they 
 can successfully refuse to pay interest on the Government 
 loan, until now the arrearage amounts to $19,294,122.40. 
 They refuse to pay the one-twentieth of their net earnings 
 to the United States, as a sinking fund for the redemption 
 of the bonds issued for their benefit — bonds which will 
 amount, principal and interest, to more than one hundred 
 millions of dollars, to be paid by the people. Enjoying all 
 this, they resist the payment of their taxes by every means 
 which legal ingenuity can devise. 
 
 Think for a moment of the vast interests and power 
 concentrated in so few hands — the railroads across the 
 continent ; the lines of interior communication by land 
 and water in California ; the steamship line between New 
 York and San Francisco ; that between San Francisco and 
 China. All this obtained within twelve years ! When and 
 where else would it have been possible? And Jiow ob- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 20/ 
 
 tained ? The Credit Mobilier, the Contract and Finance 
 Company, the Pacific Mail bribery, are only incidents of 
 its history. Regarded only in a social aspect, are the 
 facts not startling ? When you reflect that Government 
 is but the effect and representative of the forces of society, 
 is there not an alarming political significance in all this ? 
 "Out of politics!" When did power neglect oppor- 
 tunity ? They mean in their hearts that they are above 
 the law. They mean in policy to run the political rail- 
 road underground. They mean, in fact, " when the lion's 
 skin is too short, to eke it out with the fox's." Is not the 
 relation of corporations to the Government, and their in- 
 fluence upon it in all departments, a living question before 
 the American people ? Is the revenue under considera- 
 tion ? The manufacturing corporation asks Congress to 
 legislate a profit into Its business by a protective duty. 
 Is finance the subject of discussion ? The National Banks 
 insist upon supplying the people with currency. Great 
 railroads absorb the small, combine, dictate terms, and 
 rival the Government itself in power and patronage. 
 
 But the remedy. There may be none immediate, 
 effective, radical. In politics as in medicine, we are apt 
 to trust too much to specifics, too little to general treat- 
 ment. The general treatment should begin. The evil 
 should be stopped. I know of no better means than the 
 organization of a party which shall represent the people, 
 and stand at all times against the demands of special in- 
 terests, which shall recognize that " when rights are pro- 
 tected, interests can take care of themselves." I know of 
 no better means than by bringing the people together 
 who think this, that the moral weight of their numbers 
 may be felt as a political power. Take party platforms. 
 How nearly they read alike. But for some references to 
 the past, and the use of party names, you would have to 
 look at the head lines to see which is which. The Min- 
 nesota Republicans and Wisconsin Democrats might ex- 
 
208 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 change platforms in the dark, and not be conscious of the 
 metamorphosis. The Ohio Democrat is for soft money, 
 and the New England Republican is for hard money. 
 The Pennsylvania Democrat is a protectionist, and the 
 California Republican is (I guess he is — he ought to be) a 
 free-trader. Under this confusion of terms, selfishness 
 alone is consistent, and moves to the accomplishment of 
 its purpose. As everybody is for the people, how will it 
 answer for the people this year to be for themselves ? The 
 experiment is worth trying, for its novelty at least. Let 
 all who do wish substantially the same thing stop calling 
 each other names and quarrelling about terms, and face the 
 common enemy. 
 
 The great value of an election is in its moral significance 
 — the idea it expresses. The platforms of the three parties 
 may be substantially alike. It may be only a question of 
 sincerity. One may be the letter which kills, another the 
 spirit which makes alive. Let the Democratic or Repub- 
 lican ticket succeed at the next election, and it will be a 
 mere party triumph, in which every corporation that de- 
 sires to aggrandize itself at the expense of the people will 
 have its share of rejoicing. The success of the People's 
 Independent Party will be a triumph of principle ; it will 
 be hailed by the people everywhere as their victory, and j 
 
 its moral weight and influence will be worth infinitely ^ 
 
 more than any specific measures that can be devised. 
 
 Carlyle, in his FrencJi Revolution, gives an amusing 
 description of a cartoon of that period. A farmer had 
 called the chickens of the farm-yard around him and ad- 
 dressed them in the most paternal and friendly manner: 
 " My dear, good chickens, I have called you together to 
 ask you in what kind of sauce you would like to be 
 cooked." 
 
 " But," exclaimed an old rooster, the patriarch of the 
 barn-yard, "master, we don't want to be cooked at all." 
 
 "You wander from the subject, my dear chickens," re- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 209 
 
 plied the farmer, " the question is simply Jiow will you be 
 cooked." 
 
 For some years the railroad and its allies in the various 
 schemes and rings have been in the habit of convening 
 about them the people of this State in different counties, 
 and asking them how they will be cooked — whether with 
 Republican or Democratic sauce. It is rather a hard 
 conundrum. I think this is a good year for a successful 
 barnyard rebellion, and an active determination not to be 
 cooked at all. 
 
 Of course, old party leaders, and all who hope to obtain 
 ofifice through old organizations, object to a general union 
 of the people, and an obliteration of old party lines. The 
 Republican candidate for Governor objects, because he 
 says the financial management of the State Government 
 has been extravagant, and he alone is capable of reforming 
 it. I am not here to apologize for, or defend, any extrava- 
 gance or mistakes. Something is due to the truth of 
 history. Under our system of Government, the Governor 
 is not, as Mr. Phelps seems to imply, a kind of viceroy 
 who determines just how much money shall be expended, 
 and what for. That rightly belongs to the representatives 
 of the people assembled in the Legislature. The Governor 
 cannot, as he can in New York and some other States, 
 veto items in an appropriation bill. The general appro- 
 priation bill comes to him on the last night of the session, 
 and he must sign it or stop the wheels of the Government. 
 Mr. Phelps will not have an opportunity to learn these 
 facts by experience, and I volunteer the information. 
 The Independents have never had control of any Legisla- 
 ture, or any representation distinctively in any until the 
 last; and all the appropriations up to July i, 1874, were 
 made before that time, I shall have something to say 
 hereafter as to how they exercised the power they had. 
 It is due, however, to all who have had any connection 
 with the finances of the State in a legislative or any other 
 
210 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 capacity, to say that the expenses have been large, not 
 from any misapplication of money under any administra- 
 tion, but from a desire, in which the people have also 
 shared, which is in fact only a reflection of their disposi- 
 tion, to do in a few years what it has taken others a great 
 many to accomplish. We have almost extemporized a 
 system, which elsewhere has been of slow growth, and we 
 have not gone in debt. Our State Capitol, buildings for 
 the Insane, for the University and the Normal School are 
 among the best in the United States. Whether this be a 
 subject of pride or criticism, they were all planned before 
 the Independent party had an organization in the State. 
 Our insane and criminal population are exceptionally 
 large, and for many years the State has contributed to the 
 support of the orphans. No State in the Union, in pro- 
 portion to wealth and population, contributes so much, by 
 a State tax, to the support of common schools as ours. 
 Connecticut, which has one of the best school systems in 
 the Union, and about the same population as California, 
 appropriates from Treasury about $200,000 for common 
 schools; California, over $1,100,000, more than five times 
 as much. But Connecticut, being a densely populated 
 State, each district can support its own schools, while in 
 the sparsely settled districts of California they cannot be 
 maintained without liberal aid from the State. But this 
 is all lumped in, in a general charge of mismanagement. 
 
 Our expenses are too large ; they can be reduced by 
 intelligent criticism, not by mere fault-finding. The ma- 
 chinery of our government should be simplified ; we do 
 too much law-making — build on too extravagant a scale. 
 The reform of all this rests with the representatives of the 
 people. By careful attention to details, they may be able 
 to give generously, as they now do, to the support of 
 common schools — the nurture of freemen ; to shelter the 
 insane ; to give such poor sight and hearing as art can 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 211 
 
 bestow to the blind and deaf ; and find it more humane 
 <ind eventually cheaper, to assist in caring for the orphans 
 than to abandon them to the chances of private charity 
 and a street education. These unfortunates suffer for no 
 fault of their own — no one will be willing to " drown them 
 to save their board." 
 
 Finally, the Independent party commends itself to 
 popular favor, because it affords a common ground upon 
 which all can meet who desire to forget the animosities 
 and heart-burnings engendered by the civil war. It can- 
 not expect the support of any Democrat who believes 
 that the adherents of the lost cause will ever again rally 
 under the stars and bars, or of any Republican who fears 
 " the next gale which sweeps from the South will bring to 
 our ears the clash of resounding arms." But it does 
 commend itself to all who accept the fact of history as 
 conclusive, who believe with Vice-President Wilson : that 
 the rebellion was the inevitable result of conflicting insti- 
 tutions and forces ; that it is over, and that peace should 
 be as sunbright in its glory as the war was terrible in its 
 darkness ; that the reconciliation should be cordial as the 
 conflict was awful. 
 
 To accomplish this is the work, not of politicians and 
 statesmen, not of President and Congress, but of the 
 American people. The wound heals slowly that is often 
 chafed. That would be a divine moment in our history 
 which should strike down every party tie and party name 
 which perpetuates a war memory, and brings the people 
 together who are willing to forget, in a solid and impene- 
 trable phalanx, " The American people was the real 
 hero of the war," and must also be the apostle of peace 
 and reunion. Why should they not come together? 
 Sumner would remove the names of battles from flags, 
 because they were remembrances of civil war — why can 
 we not take the names from our political banners, which 
 
212 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 are also reminders ? The Vice-President journeys through 
 the South everywhere, received by all classes with respect 
 and kindness due to his age, character, and position. 
 Fitzhugh Lee goes to Boston, and is met with the fervor 
 of hospitality, by the men he met in arms. It may be 
 well to sneer at this as sentimental gush. I prefer to be- 
 lieve it the spontaneous outpouring of reconciled friend- 
 ship — of that spirit which is as sincere in the fellowship 
 of peace as in the struggle of war. It is the spirit which 
 animates this people, and manifests itself on every occa- 
 sion. The Centennial Commissioners appoint Adams of 
 Massachusetts and Lamar of Mississippi orators ; Sher- 
 man, who marched to the sea, and Johnston, his great 
 antagonist, as Grand Marshal and Master of Ceremonies — 
 and all the people approve. The blue and the gray com- 
 mingle at the graves of their dead comrades. There 
 comes a time when the instinct of sentiment is a truer 
 guide than cold philosophy or calculating prudence. Is 
 this a time to hunt up every act of lawlessness and outrage 
 that has occurred for years in States whose civil, social, 
 and political institutions have been broken down, and 
 frame them into an indictment against the people ? Is 
 this an hour when we should forget fraternal peace in the 
 memory of fratricidal strife ? 
 
 But they tell us a great many rebel generals have been 
 elected to the next Congress. Why should they not be? 
 When the Government amnestied them, did it mean to 
 say, " We restore your rights, but you shall never enjoy 
 them ? " When they take their seats in Congress, it will 
 be with an oath to support the Constitution of the United 
 States. I do not believe that the men who are willing to 
 die for their convictions will be most ready to perjure 
 themselves for place. Parties are but necessary evils. 
 There are great moments in a nation's life when the times 
 should rise above them. Why may not the true spirit of 
 the people have way ? This is the Centennial year. Let 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 21 3 
 
 it be a "year of jubilee." Before us is a grand outlook 
 of history. Who shall estimate the power and population 
 of this country at the close of the century now dawning, 
 if we the people are equal to the divine opportunity ? 
 Who knows what trials may await us, what temptations 
 may beset? Let us challenge destiny as one people. 
 Let us have the only union which can be permanent — a 
 union of hearts. Let the true feeling of the hour find 
 genuine expression unrestrained ; and reconstruction will 
 come — not by legal enactment, not by force bills or writs 
 of law, but in the hearts of the people, like the dawning 
 of day, like the breath of the morning, like the Spirit of 
 the Lord. 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 DELIVERED AT SACRAMENTO, AUGUST 25, 1877. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen, and Fellow Citizens: If any 
 one has come here to-night expecting to hear from me any 
 attempt at oratorical display, he will be disappointed. 
 The candidates for the various offices in your gift, between 
 now and the election, will, no doubt, discuss in your 
 presence questions of State and county policy, and define 
 their respective positions. All I desire to do is to have a 
 plain neighborly talk with you about the general situation, 
 and to express some of the reasons why 1 believe that 
 every good citizen, who believes that the policy of Presi- 
 dent Hayes should receive that generous support which 
 its success demands, and which its purity and patriotism 
 deserve should unite with the Republican party as the 
 only political organization that can and will stand behind 
 him in his hours of difficulty and trial. 
 
 As I see you before me to-night, with this beautiful sky 
 above us, and recognize that you are all Americans bound 
 together, as I believe, by the common ties of patriotism. 
 
214 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 I recall the fact that the broad lines of demarcation;, 
 which a few years ago separated us into hostile camps, 
 have passed away forever. And I am glad of it. By no 
 act or word of mine would I recall any of the animosities 
 of the past. 
 
 New questions are crowding to the front ; great ques- 
 tions, which demand our serious consideration ; questions 
 upon which public opinion is undergoing the slow process 
 of formation, and which has not yet crystallized into party 
 organization. Why, my friends, if you should take the 
 var'ous resolutions passed in this State this year by 
 the Democratic county conventions and the Republican 
 county conventions, and put them into a hat — and if 
 they were all as long and as numerous as the resolutions 
 of the Sacramento Democratic County Convention, it 
 would take a big hat to hold them — and then draw them 
 out by chance, one at a time, nine times out of ten it 
 would puzzle you to tell which was Democratic and which 
 was Republican. If the two parties would hold a State 
 convention in this State this year and each put forth a 
 platform, you would have to get a magnifying glass and 
 read between the lines in order to tell one from the other^ 
 or who the things belonged to. And you could take 
 either and change a few words and " presto ! change," 
 you could hardly tell one from the other. All this would 
 have been very different a few years ago. Which party 
 has changed, or has there been only a change upon the 
 surface ? Or is it true that we have drifted away so far 
 from our old anchorage that it is impossible to calculate 
 our departure by the same stars? It seems to me that 
 upon the old questions, the vital issues that separated us 
 a few years ago, the Democratic party, like an army in 
 retreat, has surrendered every position it occupied ; sur- 
 rendered each after a hard fight, and now it is admitting 
 that all the distinctive principles for which it contended 
 were wrong. It has accepted the results of the\var; it 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 21$ 
 
 has accepted emancipation ; it has accepted universal 
 suffrage ; it has accepted the thirteenth, fourteenth, and 
 fifteenth amendments to the Constitution of the United 
 States — all the acts of reconstruction ; it has ac- 
 cepted the greenback ; it has accepted Hayes' admini- 
 stration. In the name of reason, what is there left 
 for it to do but to disband ? Nothing in its life 
 would become it like the leaving of it. What reason is 
 there why any good Democrat, patriotic in his impulses, 
 who does believe that the present administration is 
 patriotic, that it is generous in offering the olive branch 
 of peace, and that it is sincere in endeavoring to reform 
 our civil service, and which ought to be a success — what 
 reason can there be alleged why he should not come over 
 and stand with us — with the only organization upon 
 which he can rely to make it a success ? Although we do 
 seem to agree in opinions, there is a question of sincerity ; 
 there is a question as to which organization you can act 
 with in order to make your action most efficient. Beneath 
 opinion there is principle ; beneath principle there is 
 sentiment. I know that neither party is absolutely per- 
 fect. We do not find perfection in this world, even in 
 political parties. It is a question of choice in whose 
 hands do you believe the destinies of the nation are most 
 secure? Which best represents the American idea? The 
 American idea in politics I take it to mean just this, and 
 nothing more : Individual liberty, personal security, equal 
 rights, and national unity. That is its centre and circum- 
 ference. Which party, by its history, by its traditions, 
 by its sentiments, best represents the American idea? 
 
 In considering public questions your judgment may be 
 warped by your own personal interests. You may shut 
 out the sun with your hand, but only Omnipotence can 
 destroy the sun. But leaving aside all questions of per- 
 sonal interest or personal prejudice, there is not one of 
 you before me to-night who is so strict a partisan that he 
 
2l6 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 would not be willing that any public question should be 
 tried by that test — does it promote individual liberty, 
 personal security, and national unity ? Let me ask the 
 question, which of the two parties that divide the Ameri- 
 can people to-day — and there are but two — which by its 
 traditions, by its history, by its sacrifices, by its defeats, 
 and by its triumphs, has best represented those grand 
 guiding principles, liberty, security, and national unity ? 
 There will be differences of opinion about the various 
 questions which arise, but if that is the test by which they 
 are to be tried, where will you find them ? 
 
 Looking forward, beyond the horizon of to-day ; look- 
 ing forward to the future of your children ; looking for- 
 ward to the destinies of this great, free country ; if either 
 of these parties is to be destroyed, defeated, and blotted 
 out, which should it be ? I have no concealments to 
 make ; if I had, it would be folly to attempt to make 
 them in the presence of my friends and neighbors, who 
 have known me for twenty-seven years. I have desired, 
 I do desire, that all the animosities that have character- 
 ized us in the past, that the deep impressions that were 
 burned into us by the civil war, should be cast for- 
 ever into oblivion. I do earnestly desire that even the 
 memory of them should be buried beneath a common 
 sod, that covers alike the Union and the Rebel dead. I 
 do desire that the American people should have one 
 common object — that the dead past should bury its dead, 
 that we should look forward alike to one bright, happy, 
 and glorious future ; and I do most sincerely believe 
 that the only obstacle to this consummation, the only 
 cloud upon this prospect, is that the Democratic party 
 continues a powerful organization in this country, bound 
 together, as I believe, not by a cohesive power of living 
 ideas, but by the traditions and prejudices of the past. 
 Therefore I think the Democratic party ought to be 
 destroyed and defeated. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 21/ 
 
 It was my fortune to be present at most of the turbu- 
 lent scenes which transpired in the House of Representa- 
 tives in the American Congress during the counting of the 
 Electoral vote. I watched the clock as the hand measured 
 the hours, believing that if the time should strike when 
 that Congress should dissolve and the result of the election 
 not declared, this country would be plunged into anarchy 
 and possibly into civil war — bloodier and more terrible 
 than that through which we have passed. I shall never 
 cease to remember with gratitude, with respect, many of 
 the Southern leaders who stood up in that Congress, man- 
 fully contending that the contract made should be ob- 
 served, standing with patriotism and good faith upon the 
 law ; and I cannot forget that there was a large element 
 of the Democratic party there loud in voice, violent in 
 manner, fierce in vituperation, resisting every step of the 
 count ; resisting it by filibustering motions, and marking 
 it a scene of violence and disorder that has no parallel 
 in legislative history outside the National Assembly of 
 France during the bloody days of the Revolution. Voting 
 with that element of obstruction every time were two 
 of the Democratic Representatives from California — Mr. 
 Wigginton and Mr. Luttrell. These men talk to Repub- 
 licans here to-day — honey would scarcely melt in their 
 mouths — they would make you believe that they were 
 extremely judicial, characterized by a lofty patriotism. 
 Then, aloes were not more bitter. Now, inside the Demo- 
 cratic party to-day, there is a contest for leadership be- 
 tween this violent, disorderly, turbulent element and the 
 conservative element that was willing to abide by the law, 
 and the resolutions this morning received of the Pennsyl- 
 vania Democratic Convention, and the violent speeches of 
 Mr. Pendleton and of Mr. Ewing, show but too plainly 
 that the violent and the extreme element of that party 
 will attain the leadership ; and I appeal again to all patri- 
 otic Democrats who believe that with the honest, just, and 
 
2l8 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 fearless administration before us, we can have peace, se- 
 curity, good-will, harmony, and political prosperity, to 
 come over and unite with us, and make that administra- 
 tion the success that it deserves to be. 
 
 Now these are general political considerations. You can 
 weigh them ; you can decide them ; you can determine if 
 there be anything in them, and I appeal to your sober 
 judgment and to your sincere patriotism 
 
 A Citizen : I want to know if that purity, as you say, exists in the Re- 
 publican party, what is the matter with Senator Sargent and Page and 
 others ? 
 
 Mr. Booth : I suppose that Senator Sargent and Mr. Page and others can 
 fight their own battles. I have not contended that the Republican party is 
 absolutely perfect — perhaps it is not so perfect as you are. But, my friend, 
 you must remember that, outside of yourself and myself, and your friends 
 and my friends, and of your wife and the woman I hope to marry [merriment], 
 there is not absolute, entire, and immaculate perfection in more than 8,000 
 or 10,000 people even in this very virtuous town. 
 
 I had been speaking of general political considerations. 
 Now, there are some questions that are crowding them- 
 selves to the front that we cannot ignore ; that, in my 
 judgment, are deeper than mere questions of government. 
 They are questions that belong to society, to our common 
 civilization ; and it becomes us to give them candid and 
 careful consideration. 
 
 Recent startling events throughout this country have 
 disclosed what seems to be a contest between capital and 
 labor. There will be many who will come before you and 
 who will try to make political capital out of the distur- 
 bances which, unfortunately, have so recently pervaded 
 our country. Now, right here, before I go any further 
 upon the question, I desire to say that I believe I am as 
 true, as sincere, as hearty a friend of the laboring man as 
 any one can be who has not more ability than I have. I 
 am too good a friend to him to flatter him. I respect his 
 judgment too highly for that, and I respect it too highly 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 219 
 
 to promise impossibilities for the sake of his passing favor. 
 Some remedies that have been proposed for these social 
 disturbances — for this is what it seems to be to my mind, 
 — have reminded me of what John Bright said of Disraeli, 
 that he would try to stop an earthquake with a dose of 
 quinine. Some of them have reminded me of the model 
 constitution that some wag proposed for France during 
 the days of the Revolution. It read something like this : 
 "Section i. Everything belongs to everybody. Section 
 2. Nobody is charged with the execution of this decree." 
 Some of them have reminded me of the man who said that if 
 he was elected to Congress he would introduce a bill to bring 
 in the millennium. If anybody could discover a method 
 by which the man who has to labor for his daily bread 
 could fix the compensation for his own labor, and then fix 
 a price at which he could buy the commodities produced 
 by other people's labor, he would have accomplished a 
 miracle compared to which the finding of the philosopher's 
 stone would be an incident of every-day life. If any of 
 you know any means by which this thing can be done, you 
 are the greatest man who has lived on earth since Julius 
 Caesar, and I hope you won't keep it a secret. Carlyle 
 has said, and it is not more true than it is sad, that the 
 saddest sight on earth is that of a man who is willing to 
 work for bread and who cannot get the opportunity. And 
 it is a terrible commentary on the Christian civilization of 
 the nineteenth century that in the growth of society this 
 very sad thing does sometimes occur. An)' one who has 
 been looking at the course of human affairs and industrial 
 pursuits, even for the last few years, cannot fail to see 
 that there has been a gradual change in the relations of 
 employers and employed. A good deal has been said, and 
 a good deal foolishly, I believe, about the antagonistic or 
 unfriendly relations of capital and labor. Now, capital, 
 as capital, does not think. Labor, as labor, does not think. 
 Some capitalists are wise, and some are foolish. Some are 
 
220 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 liberal, and some are mean. Some invest their capital in 
 bonds, and some in industrial enterprises. Some laborers 
 are skilful, others are unskilful ; some are provident, others 
 are improvident ; some are industrious, others are lazy. 
 But when a man has labor to sell, he goes to some one who 
 wants to buy labor, and then they are in the position of 
 making a bargain, and the laborer wants to get the most 
 he can for his labor, and the man who employs him, as a 
 general proposition, wants to buy his labor at the lowest 
 price. But it is just so with the laborer when he goes to 
 buy anything. Perhaps he does not buy labor directly, 
 but he buys the commodities that are produced by labor 
 — everything that he wears, everything that he eats, the 
 house that he sleeps under, are all the product of labor, — 
 and in buying them he buys labor only one degree re- 
 moved, and he buys it just as cheap as he can, so that 
 really labor patronizes labor, just as much, and a little 
 more, than capital does, because there are more laboring 
 men than capitalists. And that rule runs through all 
 the transactions of life — that the seller tries to get the 
 best price he can, and the buyer to pay the least that 
 he can. 
 
 A few years ago, not a great many years ago, a large 
 proportion comparatively of the labor was performed by 
 the hands with a few simple tools — it was handicraft. It 
 is only a hundred years since the steam-engine was in- 
 vented, and what a powerful revolution that has worked 
 in every industrial pursuit. Some of you can remember — 
 I can — when mechanical work was done with compara- 
 tively few tools. For instance, the shoemaker had his 
 kit, and it did not take much to buy all the tools that he 
 wanted in the manufacture of shoes ; the carpenter had 
 his chest, he had his jack plane and his saws and his 
 chisels, and then he would take the lumber that came 
 from the sawmill and do all the wood work in a house. 
 Now, the wood work is all prepared for him by costly 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 221 
 
 machinery. I recently passed through the railroad shops 
 in this city, and it was a marvel to me to see the wonder- 
 ful combinations of machinery working with automatic 
 precision, with almost intelligent ingenuity, and accom- 
 plishing in a day what a few years ago could not have 
 been done in months. 
 
 Then another change has been going on. It used to be 
 that the mechanic would take a piece of work and he 
 could do the whole of it himself. Now you know it is 
 divided up. One mechanic does one part and another 
 another, and a third the third, and the fourth puts it to- 
 gether. Even in the manufacture of so simple a thing as 
 a pin it goes through some twenty-five or thirty hands, I 
 am told, before it is absolutely finished. Now it is a 
 necessity of labor to avail itself of machinery, of expen- 
 sive machinery ; and the fact that the mechanical laborer 
 only does a small part of a single job, that it is divided 
 up among so many hands, has necessitated and brought 
 this about — that there is capital invested in machinery, 
 and that that employs an army of laborers. And this is 
 bringing about gradually a comparatively new relation 
 between the employers and the employed. Why, it has 
 reached even further. I can remember, and I am not a 
 very old man, when the farm was regarded more as a 
 home, a place to bring up the family, than as something 
 to make money out of. And the father and the sons 
 worked and farmed themselves with such few agricultural 
 implements as were then known. But now farming has 
 got to be a great business. To carry it on successfully 
 much capital is invested — invested in lands, in agricul- 
 tural implements. That business is assuming the shape 
 that the mechanical and manufacturing pursuits have. 
 
 Now, in this country the business in which there is the 
 most capital invested, except in farming — the business 
 that touches every other business most nearly, because it 
 controls the great arteries of commerce and trade, and the 
 
222 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 business which directly and indirectly employs the greatest 
 body of men, is the railroad business. 
 
 Let us look for one moment at the incidents of this 
 strike and see if we can draw any deduction from it. The 
 first step was that most of the great railroad companies 
 combined to make a reduction of the wages of labor. 
 That was the first combination. When capital organizes 
 you can be sure that labor will organize in opposition. 
 And it was a part of the agreement among railroad em- 
 ployes in many instances that they would not work and 
 that they would not allow any other persons to take their 
 places. Then transportation upon most of the great rail- 
 road lines was stopped. The business of the country re- 
 ceived a shock, and then, as always happens in violent and 
 turbulent times, the worst elements of society, the thieves 
 and incendiaries, came to the surface and made the dis- 
 order an opportunity for plunder and riot and destruction. 
 This violence was repressed, partly by the military, but I 
 am glad to say — I am proud, as an American, of the fact 
 — in a far greater degree by the awakened moral sense of 
 the people ; and I am glad to say that, as a friend of the 
 laboring man, law and order and the preservation of 
 society had no stronger advocate, no firmer friend, than 
 the laboring man himself. And some of the inferences I 
 draw from this are these : Anarchy and destruction are 
 remedies for no evil, and the honest laborer of this coun- 
 try scorns any association whatever with thieves and in- 
 cendiaries. Second — That we need no great standing 
 army in this country. I am not of those to be frightened 
 from my propriety by the passing disorders, into adopting 
 and equipping a great standing army, which in all coun- 
 tries and in all ages has been a ready-made instrument of 
 despotism. When the time comes, if it shall come, when 
 the American people need a standing army to police the 
 land, to repress and keep in subjection public sentiment, 
 they will have forfeited their right to be a Republic. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 
 
 — 
 
 Third — When capital organizes, labor, too, will organize, 
 and I am glad of it. I am hopeful for the future for it. It is 
 well that these two principles, whether they be friends or 
 antagonists, should stand face to face in an open field and 
 upon equal terms. If capital has the advantage of an in- 
 trenched position, labor has the advantage of numbers. 
 Tell me not that gold is king, or that commerce is king, 
 or that cotton is king. Labor is the king of this earth, 
 with its brawny arms and giant face bronzed and marked 
 with toil and care. I trust that the hour will come 
 when he will be crowned in triumph, and I am hope- 
 ful that through this organization of labor the time will 
 come — not in your day, perhaps, not in mine, but in the 
 future not distant — when organized, intelligent labor shall 
 be able to own and control all the tools and machinery 
 necessary for production, and shall have a full and un- 
 divided share in all the blessings it creates. 
 
 And I want to say this right here, that while I do not 
 desire, while no one desires, to apologize for the violence, 
 I know this to be a fact — that whenever any great mass 
 of men is driven from any cause backward and backward 
 towards the sharp pricks of starvation, the reaction will 
 come. When Jefferson was in France before the Revo- 
 lution, whose volcanic eruption shook the very founda- 
 tions of civilized society throughout the world, he went 
 among the peasants. He saw how they lived, saw the 
 beds they slept upon, the fare they ate, and he said that 
 from his knowledge of human nature a revolution was in- 
 evitable. The prophesy may not be one that we desire 
 to lay to ourselves, but if ever the conditions of American 
 society become such that the great mass of the laboring 
 men cannot have not only their bread, but cannot gratify 
 those wants which civilization has made a part of our 
 second nature, there will come a revolution. I know that 
 often the lot of the man who toils for his daily bread 
 seems hard. I know it is hard to have to sell Monday's 
 
224 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 labor to get Tuesday's bread for wife and children. But, 
 my friends, the lines of this country have fallen to us in 
 comparatively pleasant places. There is no other country 
 in the world where daily labor can be so secure of a 
 bountiful supply of bread as in the United States of 
 America. There is no other country where the oppor- 
 tunities for education of his children are so free and so 
 open ; and there is no other country where he can stand 
 erect in the conscious dignity of his manhood. 
 
 It is not true that the seeds of this discord were sown 
 by the system under which railroads in this country have 
 been constructed for the last twenty years. Under this 
 system fraud has been organized. Railroads have too 
 often been built, not so much for the legitimate profits of 
 their operation as for the profit that could be made out of 
 their construction, and the losses to the actual capital of 
 the country through this have been ten-fold greater than 
 by the destruction from strikes and riots. They were 
 built, not as cheaply as possible, but at the greatest possi- 
 ble cost, that the companies, the inside rings, that con- 
 structed them, might realize inordinate profits, and that 
 the small stockholders and the tax-payers should pay 
 them. And while we are wiping the outside of this cup, 
 it becomes us to consider at least something on the inside. 
 While we are whitewashing this sepulchre let us not forget 
 that within it are corruption and dead men's bones. Open 
 violence is an enemy that can be met upon the threshold ; 
 but fraud is an insidious disease which preys upon the 
 vitals. 
 
 Now, my friends, I wish to ask you again, do you know 
 of any ready-made, instantaneous remedy for this relation 
 that exists between the employers and the employed ? Do 
 you know any means by which any man who is willing to 
 sell labor can secure the amount for his services which he 
 believes he is justly entitled to ? There are persons who 
 believe that if the silver dollar is remonetized it would 
 
POLITICAL LIFE, 22$ 
 
 be a kind of panacea for all the evils that flesh is heir to. 
 But suppose you should try it ? Do you think it would 
 be any easier to get a silver dollar that contains 412 8-10 
 grains of standard silver than it is to get now two half 
 dollars that contain 383 grains ? There are those who be- 
 lieve that an unlimited issue of greenbacks would bring 
 about a kind of financial millennium. Do you know any 
 means by which this Government could enrich all its 
 people, when, in fact, the Government is to be carried on 
 every day, every hour, by taxes paid by the people ? You 
 will not find any instantaneous relief by any heroic treat- 
 ment. This world will not be made a paradise except 
 through the slow, patient centuries, thousands of years 
 of labor by its inhabitants. Many measures will be pro- 
 posed. I suggest that they all be tried by the test of the 
 Republican doctrine of American ideas — personal security, 
 individual liberty, national unity. 
 
 I am told that my friend Judge Curtis proposes that we 
 should get some kind of relief by paying the public debt 
 of this country in greenbacks. Let us examine the propo- 
 sition for a moment and see whether it is right and politic. 
 I confess I do not know exactly how he intends to get the 
 greenbacks to pay the public debt — whether he means — 
 and Pendleton of Ohio I believe has the same idea — I do 
 not know whether they mean that we should set the pub- 
 lic printing-presses to work and print off greenbacks and 
 tell the men who hold our bonds to bring them in and get 
 greenbacks for them or get nothing, or whether they mean 
 that the volume of greenbacks remaining as it is, all the 
 revenues of the Government shall be collected in green- 
 backs, and these revenues applied to the payment of the 
 public debt after the payment of current expenses. Would 
 either be honest ? Would it be right to say to the men 
 who hold the securities of our Government that are draw- 
 ing interest, " Here, you must come and take our promise 
 to pay that does not bear any interest or you shall have 
 
226 
 
 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 nothing ? " Now I know that is often a popular outcry 
 made against bondholders. They are supposed to be a 
 class of people living off of other men, and whose interests 
 are entirely distinct and antagonistic to the others. To 
 me it does not matter whether a bond is held by a poor 
 man or a rich man, so far as the obligation of the country 
 to pay it is concerned. In truth, most of the bonds in 
 this country are held by banks — savings banks — invested 
 in estates for the benefit of widows and orphans. Many 
 are held abroad, and when they are held abroad they are 
 held often, very generally, I think, by comparatively poor 
 persons. But whether they are held by the poor or the 
 rich does not make one particle of difference in the obli- 
 gation to pay. Does it ? The honor of the country is 
 pledged and that cannot be forfeited. By maintaining 
 the credit of the country in good faith, we have been able 
 to reduce the interest on our public debt, until we can 
 now place four-per-cent. bonds at par. Seven years ago 
 we were paying six per cent, interest upon all the funded 
 indebtedness of the country. We then owed something 
 more than two thousand millions of dollars, and by ful- 
 filling the contract to the letter we were able to place a 
 loan, first at five per cent, and then at four per cent., and 
 now simply by maintaining our credit we should be able 
 to fund the whole at four per cent, certainly and I believe 
 for less, and every one per cent, that we take off reduces 
 the interest that you pay per annum eighteen millions of 
 dollars. Now, is not honesty the best policy ? Does n't 
 it pay ? If you commence tampering with your credit, if 
 you commence trying to pay it as my friends suggest, in 
 silver, is not it probable that you will lose more than you 
 will gain ? The four-per-cent. bonds we are now selling 
 are forty years. A three-per-cent. bond at sixty, or at the 
 outside a hundred years, could be placed upon the market 
 as readily as they can. And I do candidly think that this 
 generation is paying off the public debt of this country 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 22/ 
 
 rather more rapidly than they ought. That we might very 
 well if we placed it so that it is absolutely secure, the faith 
 of the country pledged for its redemption, we might just 
 as well spread it out over a few more generations, and 
 not burden ourselves with the payment of it so rapidly 
 as we do. 
 
 A good deal has been said, and it is one of the questions 
 that interest us, on the subject of currency. Now, on this 
 subject, I do not understand that either the Democratic 
 party or the Republican party has a fixed policy. That 
 is to say, Democrats differ with each other in regard to 
 what the currency ought to be, and Republicans differ 
 among themselves in regard to our financial policy. Gov- 
 ernor Hendricks, before he was a candidate for Vice- 
 President, said that if he should leave his home in Indiana 
 to travel to the Atlantic sea-board, if he wanted to be a 
 Democrat all the time, he would have to change his opin- 
 ions on the currency question every time he crossed a 
 State line ; and that sometimes in the various counties he 
 would get bewildered and mixed up so that he would not 
 know what his opinions were, or whether he had any. 
 Fernando Wood, when he was asked (I mean in private 
 conversation, jocularly) what his opinion on currency was, 
 said that one of the members from New York had gone 
 crazy trying to solve the question, and he did not propose 
 to follow him ; that he was going to keep out of that 
 matter. 
 
 Now money is a good thing to have. It is convenient 
 to have in the house ; but it is rather a dry subject in the 
 abstract to talk about. I have my opinions in regard to 
 currency, and, although I have thought about it a great 
 deal, I hope to keep out of the Insane Asylum. 
 
 I believe, first, that we should have a currency of uni- 
 form value. In this community we constantly experience 
 a good many of the inconveniences and a good many of 
 the losses of having a currency of mixed values — that is, 
 
228 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 your silver coin is worth less in the transactions of life 
 than your gold coin. Experience establishes the fact that 
 credit in some form will circulate as money. Even here, 
 although we have a gold and silver currency, the mass of 
 transactions are made with bank checks, which represent 
 simply credit. We shall have for a circulating medium 
 for the whole country either bank credit or national credit. 
 I prefer national credit. I believe that the note of this 
 Government is as good as the note of any bank. I be- 
 lieve that its volume can be regulated by and through 
 the Government as well as by and through the officers of 
 a bank. 
 
 One thing I forgot, and I want to refer to it before I go 
 on, that is the wonderful change that has come over the 
 Democrats, who now insist upon paying the bonds of the 
 Government in greenbacks, during the past seven or eight 
 or nine years. When the greenbacks were issued they told 
 us that they Avere unconstitutional. There was scarcely a 
 Democratic judge in the land who did not decide that the 
 legal-tender feature of the greenback was unconstitutional. 
 And when Judge Chase left the Treasury and went on the 
 Supreme Bench and decided that the greenback which he 
 himself had made was unconstitutional, the Democratic 
 party at once took him into its embrace for that decision. 
 
 Do you know how the bank note under the present 
 system of National Banks gets into circulation ? If you 
 wanted to organize a national bank — we have none of 
 them in this State except the National Gold Banks — five 
 of you might have $100,000 of national bonds, and you 
 take them to the Treasury of the United States and you 
 deposit them there, and the. United States Government 
 would give you $90,000 in greenbacks that you could take 
 to your bank and loan them for all the interest that you 
 could get, while at the same time the Government was 
 paying you the interest on the bonds that you left in 
 pledge for them. This seems to be an entirely unneces- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 229 
 
 sary machinery. I do not know why the United States 
 Government should not issue its credit to circulate as 
 money just as well directly as through a bank. What is 
 the use ? I do not know why if you have a bond and go to 
 the Treasury of the United States and say : " Here, I want 
 something that will circulate as money for this ; you keep 
 it for me until I bring the money back," that it should 
 not just as well give it to you as to the bank, and then 
 keep the bond and not pay anybody any interest on it 
 until you or somebody else who held the note for it should 
 take it back and get the bond you left in pledge. 
 
 I know this whole idea has been ridiculed, for most 
 part by bankers — by men who have studied the science 
 of finance as it has been written by them. I have read 
 almost everything that has been submitted to me on 
 either side of the question — the bank side — and I have 
 never seen anything that seemed to me to be anything 
 like an argument. I am in favor of some such scheme as 
 that — the Government supplying all the notes that circu- 
 late as money directly — because it is fair and right ; be- 
 cause it saves to the people the whole of the interest on 
 all the notes that circulate as money ; because I believe it 
 to be the just prerogative of the Government and one 
 not to be peddled out ; because I believe it can be made 
 the best currency that any people ever had ; and because 
 I fear the influence upon a General Government of so 
 powerful an interest as the National Banks have become. 
 I have said that this is not a party question, but I think 
 my ideas are a fair deduction from the general principle 
 which underlies the organization of the Republican party ; 
 the scheme is a legitimate deduction from personal secur- 
 ity, equal rights, and national unity. 
 
 My friends, I have touched on a dry subject and have 
 detained you too long. It is hard sometimes to revert to 
 general principles, but I will ask you to try all the meas- 
 ures — all the measures of daily policy — by the test of 
 
230 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Republican principles. I invoke that you sustain the 
 national administration. There are those who predict 
 that the principles of President Hayes cannot be carried 
 out, because it places the politics of this nation upon too 
 high a plane. It is said that it is right but impracticable. 
 I do not believe that the political administration of this 
 country can be placed upon too high a plane to suit the 
 people, I believe the more patriotic you make it, the 
 more free from corruption and selfishness, the higher and 
 the more assured its success will be. Do you not believe 
 that with the policy of this administration carried out in 
 all the departments of the Government that we can enter 
 upon an era of prosperity and of purity of national glory 
 such as we have never before known ? Do you not be- 
 lieve that it means peace, that it means honesty, that it is 
 patriotic, that while we stand together upon this platform 
 we may face the evils of to-morrow, whatever they may 
 be ? I know that we are passing through diflficult times. 
 I know that there is discontent, but I have faith in the 
 American people ; I have faith in the American ideas, and 
 I have faith that the administration now in power will 
 exemplify them in all its actions. 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 DELIVERED AT SAN FRANCISCO, 1879. 
 
 I believe that the best interests of the State and nation, 
 the good order of society, the general welfare, the protec- 
 tion of each in the enjoyment of his own, the security of 
 equal rights before the law, will be subserved by the suc- 
 cess of the Republican party at the September election. 
 
 That is my text. 
 
 I have personally known George C. Perkins, the Repub- 
 lican candidate for Governor, for about ten years. His 
 private character is above reproach. His successful busi- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 23 1 
 
 ness career is evidence of administrative ability of high 
 order, and the fact that he enjoys the esteem and confi- 
 dence of all with whom he has been brought in business 
 relations is proof that his conduct of business has been as 
 honorable as successful. 
 
 He has served two terms in the State Senate with 
 entire satisfaction to his constituents. The first was 
 during the administration of Governor Haight. It is 
 well known that Governor Haight had for him not only 
 the highest respect, but a warm feeling of personal grati- 
 tude, for his support in the great contest over the question 
 of subsidies to railroads. 
 
 On the subject of subsidies let me say that the growth 
 of the anti-subsidy sentiment has been slower and more 
 difficult than we now realize in the hour of its triumph. 
 
 There was a time when it was the general feeling that 
 all we wanted to usher in the millennial dawn in this State 
 was railroad communication with the Atlantic, and that 
 no sacrifice was too great to secure it. There was a time 
 when counties and communities were bidding against 
 each other for branches and connections. It was only 
 as the evils of the system of building railroads by grants 
 and subsidies developed themselves, its corruptions, waste- 
 fulness, and extravagance made manifest, that the peo- 
 ple slowly awoke to the conviction that it was wrong; 
 and not at once but by degrees came to the conclusion 
 that if any one wants to own a railroad he ought to build 
 it — and any community that furnishes the money to build 
 a road ought to own it — and that no man has the right 
 to vote away the property of another for the benefit of 
 a third. 
 
 I appeal to every man who believes this principle to 
 search his own experience and say if this is not a fair 
 statement of the origin, the growth, the struggle, and 
 triumph of that idea. 
 
 There are men to-day who but yesterday were willing 
 
232 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 to vote away anybody else's farm, who persuade them- 
 selves, in the ardor of conversion, that they were original, 
 " dyed in the wool," anti-subsidy men — that they have 
 always been engaged in resisting the influence and curtail- 
 ing the powers of great corporations, and " were stoned 
 with the prophets," just as Ben Butler may have imagined 
 that his Abolitionism antedated Lloyd Garrison's. 
 
 This contest first distinctly formulated itself in this State 
 in 1869. It divided parties into wings ; it alienated friends. 
 The part which Governor Haight took is too well known 
 to need more than a reference. It was distinguished and 
 honorable. In the heat of a political contest, he singled 
 out of his political opponents George C. Perkins, as de- 
 serving his grateful remembrance for his support on this 
 question. 
 
 In 1 87 1 I received the Republican nomination for 
 Governor. The only reason for my nomination was my 
 identification with the anti-monopoly wing of the party. 
 I had the original, earnest, and steadfast support of Mr. 
 Perkins. In 1873 I was elected to the United States 
 Senate, after a contest made directly before the people on 
 questions of railroad pohcy. Mr. Perkins supported me 
 and voted for me, under circumstances and against per- 
 suasions which would have moved a man whose convictions 
 were not steadfast. They did not disturb him. 
 
 Of course I am not here to give Mr. Perkins a certiiicate 
 of character. He does not need it. 
 
 The charge has been made that, if elected, he will be 
 subservient to the Central Pacific Railroad Company. I 
 point to his record as a refutation. The man who could 
 maintain the position he did, has independence enough to 
 fairly meet any questions which may arise on the subject 
 of corporations. He is not made of the kind of stuff which 
 is subservient to any one. 
 
 With George C. Perkins for Governor, and A. L. Rhodes 
 for Chief Justice, the people of the State will have perfect 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 233 
 
 assurance that the Executive and Judicial Departments 
 will be presided over by men of unsullied purity, and of 
 ability equal to their high positions. 
 
 California is phenomenal. The world talks about us, 
 and our proverbial modesty alone prevents us from talk- 
 ing about ourselves. We have big trees, high water-falls, 
 and an occasional earthquake. Nature works here on a 
 grand scale, and in some degree the people emulate her 
 extravagance. Our history is a series of surprises and 
 paradoxes. Perhaps the excitement which led to the 
 settlement of the country and filled the golden age of '49 
 and '50 with adventure and romance, has left an impression 
 on the character of the people which it will take genera- 
 tions to remove. I am afraid we do not sufificiently practice 
 that rule of homely wisdom — to do common things in a 
 common way. We are something like the people Charles 
 Lamb speaks of, who, having discovered roast pig by the 
 accidental burning of a house, went on burning up their 
 houses whenever they wanted roast pig. We go from one 
 extreme to another, until excitement seems to be our nor- 
 mal condition. It is feast or famine, flood or drought, 
 bonanza or porphyry — all going to be rich, or the bottom 
 dropped out. We are nothing, if not unique. 
 
 This year we have a greater variety of politics and more 
 of it to the square acre than any community on the con- 
 tinent. The abbreviations of party designations are be- 
 ginning to try the capacity of the alphabet, and to bewilder 
 the average memory. It would seem as if in this great 
 variety every one might be suited, and yet there never 
 were so many political orphans. 
 
 A stranger studying our institutions and character, who 
 should make up his mind to believe that what we said of 
 each other was true, would inevitably come to the con- 
 clusion that we are a very hard lot ; that we are all either 
 agrarians, and Communists, and robbers, and plunderers, 
 railroad monopolists, water monopolists, or land monopo- 
 
234 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 lists ; that each of us had sold out to somebody, and that 
 the buyer would certainly be cheated in the purchase. 
 
 Perhaps it is not all true. Some allowance must be 
 made for the necessities of declamatory eloquence and 
 sensational writing. If it were true, society would be on 
 the verge of disintegration or revolution ; for it is true now, 
 as in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, that some degree 
 of righteousness is necessary to save the State. There 
 must be the cohesion of honesty and virtue to hold the 
 parts together. 
 
 Amid this perturbation and excitement, this multiplicity 
 of organization, these charges and counter-charges, now, 
 when the fundamental principles of constitutional govern- 
 ment are to be tried in the crucible of experience, abating 
 no jot or tittle of former opinions ; holding, as I ever have, 
 that the prosperity and progress of any community depend 
 upon the condition of those who toil, and that whoever 
 aspires to the leadership or statesmanship should study 
 the wants and necessities of labor; believing that the first 
 rule of political econony, " in the sweat of thy face shalt 
 thou eat thy bread," is worth all the books, treatises, and 
 systems of philosophy on that subject since the Book of 
 Genesis was written ; believing that the primary danger 
 to our Government — to any popular government — is 
 greater from the greed of the few than from the passions 
 of the many ; recognizing that in the present state of in- 
 dustrial development incorporations are necessary for the 
 prosecution of great enterprises, but maintaining unalter- 
 ably that these, being creatures of the law, are at all times 
 and under all circumstances amenable to the law, and sub- 
 ject to its regulation and control, and that the franchises, 
 powers, and privileges they enjoy are rather in the nature 
 of a public trust than private property ; clinging fast to 
 the principle that flesh and blood are of infinitely more 
 consequence than adventitious circumstances of fortune, 
 and that the central fact — the vital force of any popular 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 235 
 
 Government, from which flow its stability, prosperity, and 
 greatness— is the freedom and independence of the indi- 
 vidual citizen, and the security with which each holds and 
 enjoys the rights which belong to him as a m&n ; acknowl- 
 edging no fealty to party which is not subordinate to pri- 
 vate conscience and public duty ; holding country higher 
 than party, and justice superior to both, I am here to-day 
 to declare my earnest conviction that the honor and welfare 
 of the State and Nation, and the object of all government, 
 the security of each in the enjoyment of his rights as an 
 individual, will be best subserved by the success of the 
 Republican party at the approaching election. 
 
 I disparage no candidates, attack no character, impugn 
 no motives ; I concede to others the sincerity which I 
 claim for myself. I concede, too, that Republicans are 
 not all saints ; that the party is a human instrumentality, 
 that it contains a great deal of human nature, that ambi- 
 tious men may seek to rise through it, selfish men to 
 secure private aims through it, hypocrites may wear 
 its livery ; and of what institution, civil or ecclesias- 
 tical, in the world's history may not this be said ? But 
 I do affirm that it is a party of great ideas, splendid 
 achievements, lofty aims, patriotic impulses, and principles 
 broad as humanity itself. I do afifirm that the honor of 
 the nation, the welfare of the State, the good order of 
 society, and that liberty of the individual protected by 
 law, which is the best achievement of civilization, are 
 safer in its hands than in those of any other, whether it 
 be of yesterday, last year, or fifty years ago. 
 
 For the purpose of making a diversion and raising a 
 false issue the charge is made, reiterated, and scattered 
 broadcast, that the success of the Republican party in this 
 State this year, means the dominance of the Central Pa- 
 cific Railroad Company over the State Government. I 
 deny it. I make the denial bold, broad, and absolute. 
 
 The Central Pacific and other railroad companies have 
 
236 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 a direct and immediate interest in the selection of rail- 
 road commissioners. They have the same kind of interest 
 which other holders of property have in the choice of a 
 State Board of Equalization. 
 
 If the charge were sincere, if it were not made for 
 effect, attention would be directed to these ofifices, in 
 place of the unjust attack on the head of the Republican 
 ticket, who, when elected Governor, will have less to do 
 with the interest of the railroad, than the Assessor of any 
 county through which it passes. 
 
 If, however, Mr. Perkins were a candidate for Railroad 
 Commissioner, I could proclaim my belief that he is a 
 just man, and that the people could trust him to do right. 
 I have known him winters and summers, and I cannot be 
 shaken in this behef by false clamor for partisan effect. 
 
 Under the new Constitution other corporations may 
 have interests to be effected by legislation, and by the 
 political departments of the State Government, but those 
 of the railroad companies have been segregated and 
 given into the hands of a distinct Commission. It is a 
 bold experiment worthy of a fair trial, but it is not to 
 give it a fair trial to divert attention from the fact. Bear 
 in mind constantly that other corporations, other forms of 
 aggregated wealth, have all the interest in controlling the 
 Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Departments of the 
 Government they have ever had, and more, and that of 
 the railroads has been reduced to a minimum — a vanish- 
 ing point — and answer me if this attack on the head of 
 the Republican ticket is sincere ? 
 
 I shall feel justified in saying a few words about the 
 " railroad fight." I have been there — I know what it is — 
 and the blows I have taken in it have all been in front. 
 It is not often I intrude the " personal pronoun, first 
 person, singular number," but I claim the privilege to do 
 so, very briefly. 
 
 The people of this State have honored me above my 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 237 
 
 deserts. I shall die in their debt. They owe me nothing, 
 except, when the time shall come, an honorable discharge, 
 and I think I have earned that. The path I have trodden 
 has not always been easy, and the burden I have carried 
 has not always been light. 
 
 The Central Pacific Railroad Company owe me nothing 
 as a favor — nor I them — and so the account will stand to 
 the end of the chapter. If we ever meet it will be on the 
 severe ground of justice — and it is possible that neither 
 are equal to that. 
 
 I dare to say this of myself in my public career : there 
 has never been a time when I would not have stood un- 
 covered before the smith at his stithy, the hod-carrier at 
 the ladder, or the prisoner in his cell, to apologize for any 
 wrong done by mistake or inadvertence ; and if there has 
 ever been a time when I would have touched my hat, or 
 abated a hair's-breadth of my manhood, in the presence 
 of wealth or power, for the sake of patronage or place, I 
 trust its memory may be blotted out — and I am too old 
 to change. 
 
 The first phase of the railroad question in this State 
 was in regard to subsidies. It had been discussed inci- 
 dentally in particular cases before, but it was first formu- 
 lated into a general principle over which the great public 
 took sides in 1869 — about the time the Central Pacific 
 Railroad made its Eastern connection. Its discussion 
 was earnest, exhaustive, sometimes violent and angry. It 
 is now settled. So well settled, it is scarcely referred to. 
 To-day it is obsolete — as historical as the Declaration of 
 Independence. The experience was not peculiar to this 
 State. All through the Western and Southwestern States 
 bankrupt towns and tax-ridden communities bear witness 
 to the fact that the habit of voting subsidies was once as 
 popular as it is now odious. It has been a good deal like 
 the business of dealing in stocks. When the market is 
 going up, nothing is so lovely or of such good report ; 
 
238 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 when it turns, it becomes of doubtful propriety ; as it 
 goes down, its morality becomes more and more ques- 
 tionable ; when it is flat — when the tide is out and the 
 mud shoals of bankruptcy are laid bare — it is positively 
 wicked — total depravity. 
 
 Questions in relation to corporations, the nature of their 
 franchises, the relations they sustain to the public when 
 their general business is for a public use, and how far such 
 business can be regulated by law, are not recent. Under 
 the system formerly in vogue in this country, of granting 
 special charters, incorporated companies often obtained 
 special privileges and exemptions which, in the growth 
 and changes of society, became onerous and oppressive. 
 The phrase '' chartered rights," which was invoked for 
 their protection, became almost as odious as the "divine 
 rights of kings." The courts, following the decision in the 
 Dartmouth case, held that charters, or acts of incorpora- 
 tion, were in the nature of a contract, and could not be 
 changed by law. In order to avoid this doctrine — or 
 rather to remedy the evils which grew out of it, — nearly 
 all the States have amended their Constitutions, so that 
 incorporations other than municipal can only be organized 
 under general laws, which can be altered, amended, or 
 repealed like other acts of legislation. This change, which 
 seems to us so benign and necessary, was not accom- 
 plished without long and ardent discussion. Companies 
 whose charters were about to expire had a strong interest 
 in resisting it — and there were many who sincerely believed 
 that in every community there were some interests that 
 needed peculiar protection, and certain men should be a 
 special providence over them, whose rights should be 
 guarded by unusual sanctions, hedged in by unchange- 
 able law. 
 
 Even after these changes were made, it was strongly 
 contended that the right to alter, amend, or repeal was 
 modified and restricted. In this State it was ably insisted 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 239 
 
 that under this power the State Legislature had no right 
 to change the maximum of tolls on railroads which had 
 been fixed when the companies were organized. I have 
 heard a distinguished Senator of the United States argue 
 that the franchise of a corporation could not be changed, 
 though the act conferring reserved the right to alter, 
 amend, or repeal. 
 
 This point has been settled. Corporations are not 
 superior to the law which creates them, and reserves the 
 right to change. They are not Frankensteins, to enslave 
 their inventor and creator. 
 
 In relation to railroads, the Supreme Court of the United 
 States announced the final and conclusive doctrine less 
 than three years ago : 
 
 "Railroad companies are carriers for hire. They are incorporated as 
 such, and given extraordinary powers in order that they may the better 
 serve the public in that capacity. They are, therefore, engaged in a public 
 employment, and subject to legislative control as to their rates of fare and 
 freight, unless protected by their charters." 
 
 Contemporaneously with that was the decision in what 
 is known as the " Elevator case," where an individual, not 
 a corporation, was the party in interest, and in which the 
 general principle was more broadly stated : 
 
 " Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a 
 manner to make it of public consequence, affect the community at large. 
 When, therefore, one devotes his property to a use in which the public has 
 an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and 
 must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good to the 
 extent of the interest he has thus created." 
 
 That is, railroads are just as subject to legislative con- 
 trol as to their rates of charges as hackney coaches, turn- 
 pikes, ferries, and bridges. So are water- and gas-companies ; 
 so is the business of any man, in so far as he devotes his 
 property to a use in which the public has an interest. The 
 
240 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 principle is the same. It is only more important in its 
 application to railroads because their business is larger 
 and affects a greater variety of interests. 
 
 These questions were authoritatively settled less than 
 three years ago. Before that they were subjects of dis- 
 pute — there was scope for argument, cause for agitation, 
 and room for independent organization. Now they are 
 not only settled, but acquiesced in. It only remains to 
 exercise the acknowledged power. The new Constitution, 
 leaving other corporations and other individuals who de- 
 vote their property to a use in which the public has an 
 interest to legislative control, has created a Commission 
 to regulate freights and fares on railroads. 
 
 The people of the State have a right to expect and 
 demand that the rates of freights and fares shall be just 
 and reasonable. They desire nothing in anger or by way 
 of punishment. 
 
 They will not tolerate discriminations in favor or against 
 persons or places. They want rights, not favors — equal 
 rights under the law. The power to discriminate is too 
 great and dangerous to be confided to the arbitrary exer- 
 cise of any one. They recognize that classifications of 
 freight are necessary, but they deny that these should be 
 changed arbitrarily with a view to increase the railroads' 
 profit. They deny the right of a railroad company to 
 advance the freight of any article when its market price 
 advances, and thus make themselves partners with pro- 
 ducers and manufacturers. 
 
 These things, as I have said, are to be accomplished not 
 in anger, or passion, or revenge, but in a spirit of fairness 
 and justice, and under the majesty of the law. They are 
 no longer topics for agitation and partisan appeal, but for 
 judicial consideration and decision. To ask more than 
 this is to deserve less. 
 
 In all the phases of the railroad question in this State 
 — and it has had many — Mr. Perkins has been fairly 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 24 1 
 
 abreast with the best pubHc opinion, and far, far in ad- 
 vance of many who now denounce him. It has ever been 
 the part of new converts to attempt to atone for loss of 
 time by a display of zeal, and to substitute violence for 
 faith. 
 
 In the choice of a friend, a business agent, or a pub- 
 lic officer, which do you prefer, character or cast-iron 
 pledges ? 
 
 Perhaps I ought to apologize for devoting so much 
 time to this subject. If so, the place it holds in public 
 attention must be my apology. I regard the issue as fac- 
 titious. It is unfortunate, as it serves to divert the public 
 from the consideration of other subjects of vital impor- 
 tance. Perhaps this is the purpose of its introduction. In 
 this city your water-rates are more burdensome than rail- 
 road tariffs, and you are in more danger from the schemes 
 of water-companies than of railroad corporations. 
 
 The effect of large landholdings in this State demands 
 patient, thoughtful, and dispassionate consideration. The 
 evil is admitted, and some remedy should be earnestly 
 sought, which, without doing violence to rights acquired 
 under existing laws, should prevent it from increasing and 
 entailing itself upon the future. The good order and 
 orderly progress of society, the perpetuity of republican 
 institutions in spirit, as well as form, depend more on an 
 equitable division of lands than upon anything else. If 
 every man in this country could live in his own house, 
 cultivate his own lands, we should have a bond of fate for 
 security and progress, wise laws, and good government. 
 
 I have been in the habit of saying to our friends in the 
 East that the question of vital and paramount interest to 
 us to-day was that of Chinese immigration ; that its pres- 
 ent importance was only exceeded by the magnitude of 
 its possible results ; and that in the not distant future the 
 practical issue would have to be met as to whether the 
 civilization of this coast, its society, morals, and industries 
 
242 NEWTON' BOOTH. 
 
 should be of the American or Asiatic type. Am I now to 
 be forced to admit that this question has been dwarfed, 
 and is as little considered as though it were " relegated to 
 the limbo of forgotten things " ? 
 
 Whatever may be the result of this contest, the great 
 contest remains between the Republican and Democratic 
 parties. The Democrats see fit to run a headless ticket 
 this year, trusting to Republican votes to put a head on 
 it. I trust they will — but not just in that way. 
 
 These parties are national and historical. They are 
 parties of ideas — forces in human affairs. Whatever local 
 divisions and dissensions there may be, these two will re- 
 main in the struggle for control and direction. That the 
 contest next year for the election of a President and the 
 control of Congress will be doubtful, it would be useless 
 to deny. That every State election this year, whether in 
 Maine, Ohio, New York, or California, is a part of that 
 contest, it is idle to conceal. 
 
 The Republicans of California stand in line with their 
 brethren of the Eastern States, and purpose to stand or 
 fall with them. 
 
 Since the fourth of last March, for the first time in 
 seventeen years, the Democratic party has had a majority 
 in both houses of Congress. It has been bold and aggres- 
 sive. It is announced that the verdict of history is to be 
 reversed, that the principle of State sovereignty, for which 
 the Rebellion fought, is to be vindicated, and that its only 
 crime was its failure. The measures of the Republican 
 party during the war, and during the still more difficult 
 period of reconstruction, are impeached, their authors 
 maligned, and the intention announced of repealing them 
 all. The Democrats of the South claim that if there were 
 any virtue in putting down the Rebellion and saving the 
 Union, it belongs to the Democratic party of the North, 
 and the Democrats of the North concede, that hereafter 
 the principles on which the Rebellion justified itself are to 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 243 
 
 be recognized as the true interpretation of the Govern- 
 ment. A distinguished Democratic Senator from a New 
 England State argued in the Senate, with emphasis and 
 power, that the war had settled nothing. Then nullifica- 
 tion and secession are as open questions as when Calhoun 
 argued for them or the Confederacy fought for them ! 
 Examine the debates on the Democratic side at the extra 
 session of Congress. You will find one principle under- 
 lying them all : that the Government of the United States 
 has only jurisdiction in any State by the State's consent. 
 It was contended by all the Democratic speakers that 
 Congress had no power to pass laws to secure a fair elec- 
 tion of members of Congress. 
 
 It was contended, without dispute on the Democratic 
 side, that the President of the United States had no right 
 to use the army to enforce Federal laws in any State, ex- 
 cept on the demand of the Governor or Legislature of such 
 State. That goes a bow-shot farther than Buchanan's 
 celebrated sentence in regard to the coercion of States 
 — admit it and you make secession as easy as a town 
 muster. 
 
 I think these things ought to be a bugle call to summon 
 every Republican into line. Not only the future policy of 
 the Government is at issue, but the memories of a past, 
 made sacred by sacrifice, are at stake. In the tremendous 
 conflict that divided the Nation, heroism may have been 
 equal, sincerity may have been equal, but there was a right 
 and a wrong — and they were too widely divided for the 
 wrong to be reinstated in power, before the generation 
 which was scarred by the battle has passed away. 
 
 The achievements of the Republican party make a great 
 chapter in history — one of the grandest in the book of 
 time. Was ever a party confronted with so many dif^- 
 culties which made so few mistakes ? It is to-day a moral 
 power and patriotic force, which humanity cannot spare. 
 
 It has been charged — and that was the animus of most 
 
244 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 of the Democratic speeches at the late session of Congress 
 — that the Republican party was in favor of military con- 
 trol of elections, and the interference of the army in civil 
 affairs. The charge is as ridiculous as false — an army of 
 less than twenty-five thousand, two thirds of it guarding 
 an Indian frontier, to influence or control forty-five mil- 
 lions of people ! There was a time when the Republican 
 party administering this Government controlled an armed 
 power. When the Rebellion was crushed, there were more 
 than a million of Union soldiers in arms, inured to danger 
 and hardship, accustomed to discipline, proud of their 
 leaders, flushed with victory. There was a time when 
 power could have been perpetuated by force. At a breath 
 of law this armed host, invincible to any power on earth, 
 melted into civil life, and became indistinguishable in the 
 peaceful pursuits of industry. History will point to that 
 as the supreme triumph of the time. It is an abnegation 
 of power which has no parallel in human affairs. 
 
 It has been charged (the charge is as old as the party 
 itself) that the Republican party was hostile to State 
 rights and local government. At the close of the war, 
 eleven States were at its feet. It could have wiped 
 out their boundaries, changed their names, made them 
 military dependencies. Its chief care was to rehabitate 
 them, and restore them to proper relations to the Federal 
 Union. 
 
 It would be amusing, if it were not serious, to watch the 
 average close construction Democrat of to-day, who be- 
 lieves the war has settled nothing, and that nothing has 
 been settled since the Resolutions of '98, parsing through 
 the Federal Constitution to show by copulatives and dis- 
 junctives just where the boundary line is between State 
 and National sovereignty, and precisely how the General 
 Government exists by sufferance of the States. 
 
 It is the satire of the time, and of all time, to see men 
 claiming the especial care of the letter of the Constitution 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 245 
 
 to-day, who but yesterday were striving to rend the 
 instrument to pieces and scatter it to the winds. 
 
 Next year there will be a tremendous conflict between 
 these two great forces, moral and political, the Republican 
 and Democratic parties. This year there is a marshalling 
 of the forces. Can California afford to be absent from 
 the Republican line ? 
 
 If I have not convinced you, I at least am convinced 
 that the best interests of the State and Nation, the good 
 order of society, and its orderly advancement, the protec- 
 tion of each in the enjoyment of his own, and the security 
 of equal rights under the law, will be subserved by the 
 success of the Republican party at the September election, 
 
 SPEECH ON NATIONAL ISSUES. 
 
 DELIVERED AT SAN FRANCISCO, SEPTEMBER II, 1880. 
 
 The nomination of General Hancock for President, by 
 the Democratic party, means one of two things — conver- 
 sion or hypocrisy — a change of heart, or an attempt to 
 deceive. If it be the first — if this be the evidence of a 
 sincere abandonment of old positions, what reason can 
 that party give for its further existence ? Is it necessary 
 to call the Democratic party into power to administer the 
 government on Republican principles ? The effrontery of 
 a claim like this would be sublime if it were not ridicu- 
 lous. 
 
 I have heard an illustration which seems to me apt : It 
 is as if the prodigal son, when he had returned to his 
 father's house, and eaten the fatted calf, should turn the 
 old gentleman out of doors, demand a deed to the farm, 
 insist that nothing less would reconcile him and make him 
 forget the past unpleasantness ! 
 
 I have been trying to find an historical parallel. I have 
 failed. History is often absurd — but never, I think, so 
 
246 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 absurd as that. I can imagine one : During the war of 
 the American Revolution there was a large number of 
 men in this country who were sincerely opposed to the 
 independence of the United States. In some sections 
 they were in a majority. They were called Tories, from 
 their sympathy with the then governing party in Great 
 Britain. They held themselves to be subjects of George 
 III., just as much as the great body of the people in the 
 Southern States from '61 to '65 held themselves citizens 
 of the Confederacy. They resisted drafts, impeded the 
 execution of the laws, fought with the red-coats, and 
 made the Revolution a civil war —a war that divided neigh- 
 bors and families. Suppose the Tories had maintained a 
 distinct political organization after the war closed, and 
 had met in convention, resolved that they stood by their 
 principles, were proud of their traditions, and that they 
 were of right entitled to the possession and control of the 
 Government of the United States. Suppose they had 
 nominated for President, General Gates, a soldier by pro- 
 fession, distinguished for his services in the patriot army, 
 and had said, " accept this as an olive branch — we admit 
 the United States are independent — give us the control 
 of the government to soothe our feelings ; do it, or we 
 shall be mad so long as we live, and the longer we live the 
 madder we '11 get — and you shall be responsible for the 
 animosities which have grown out of the war." 
 
 Would that proposition be more absurd, preposterous, 
 than that of the Democratic party to-day ? 
 
 If it had not been for the Republican party there would 
 to-day have been no Government of the United States to 
 administer. I am not speaking of men, but of political 
 organizations. If there be any way in which to adminis- 
 ter a free government except through political parties, it 
 has not yet been discovered. For the past twenty years 
 the Republican and Democratic parties have stood in 
 bold, defiant, aggressive opposition. However members 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 247 
 
 of these parties may agree or disagree upon measures of 
 temporary policy, the difference between the parties as 
 political organizations, in their scope, tendency, spirit, is 
 essential, radical, fundamental. I repeat, and enlarge the 
 statement, that we have a Government of the United 
 States of America ; that we have a great republic — the 
 first great republic in history where no man calls another 
 master — is due, under Providence, to that organization 
 which will be known and honored in history forever as the 
 Republican party. 
 
 I have heard the statement made, and its truth con- 
 ceded by men with whom I politically affiliate, and for 
 whom I have the highest respect, that no party was enti- 
 tled to the credit of putting down the Rebellion ; that it 
 was the work of the American people. If this means that 
 it was the work of the American people irrespective of 
 party organization, I deny it. If there had been no 
 Democratic party, the Rebellion would not have lasted 
 a season, if it had ever arisen. If no Republican party 
 had stood behind Lincoln, the rebels would have dictated 
 terms at Washington, without a Bull Run. 
 
 Mere physical courage is an attribute which we share 
 with the animals. If the war had been a mere exhibition 
 of brute force, a trial of strength, a field for the display 
 of military skill, it would have been the stupendous 
 crime of history. It was only as a part of the conflict of 
 ideas necessary to the salvation of the Republic, that it is 
 redeemed from murder, to sacrifice, and takes its place in 
 heroic annals. From the humblest soldier who fell in 
 battle to the martyred Lincoln, it was the awful issues at 
 stake ; the tremendous interests imperilled ; the great 
 ideas involved, that sanctified it all. These ideas, in- 
 terests, issues, were formulated, championed, and de- 
 fended by the Republican party. 
 
 Political parties are not mere voluntary associations. 
 They cannot be made to order. If they have any vitality 
 
248 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 they organize themselves, and become great forces in 
 human affairs. To ascertain the governing ideas of a 
 political party we should not go to a particular declara- 
 tion made at a particular time, for a particular purpose. 
 That might be a passing qualm of conscience, or, per- 
 chance, a bid for office. We must examine its history. 
 Especially if there be such, should we see how it has met 
 great emergencies, that try the inmost heart and test the 
 utmost strength. Has it arisen to or fallen short of the 
 height of great occasions, when great interests were at 
 stake, and the rights which underlie all forms of govern- 
 ment imperilled ? 
 
 There may come a time to parties — as there often does 
 to men — a time of trial, when the very soul stands re- 
 vealed, naked in the burning light of day. After that 
 professions and hypocrisy are useless to conceal. Nothing 
 but the grave can cover infirmity. 
 
 The Democratic party has passed such an ordeal, and 
 the highest boon it can rightfully ask is the charity of 
 oblivion. The only mercy it ought to expect is forget- 
 fulness. 
 
 I choose in this address to discuss historical facts, 
 essential differences, central principles. There are dif- 
 ferences of opinion among Republicans as there are 
 among Democrats, on questions of revenue and currency, 
 of tariff, greenbacks, gold and silver. Many of these will 
 be gradually settled by experience. That these are 
 questions of comparatively trivial importance is due to the 
 wise, patriotic, and successful administration of the Re- 
 publican party. 
 
 We are a Nation 50,000,000 strong. That we shall 
 remain a Nation, one undivided, indivisible, there can be 
 no doubt. No Englishman doubts there will always be 
 an England for the English ; no German doubts there will 
 always be a Germany for the Germans ; there will always 
 be a France for the French. That there will always be 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 249 
 
 an America for Americans — that this fact has been ac- 
 comphshed, established — is due to the RepubHcan party. 
 What the government of the country shall be — how it 
 shall be administered — is a question of only less impor- 
 tance than its continued existence. 
 
 The problems of law, administration, and policy which 
 are constantly arising in a government like ours, are com- 
 plicated and difificult. Neither you nor I, nor any one 
 else, can understand them all in detail. What we are re- 
 quired to understand is the spirit in which they are to be 
 met and solved. 
 
 No disinterested man, if there be such, will seriously con- 
 tend that the Government would be better administered 
 under Democratic than under Republican control ; that 
 its dealings with foreign nations would be more just and 
 enlightened ; that its credit would be better maintained ; 
 that its debt would be more rapidly paid ; that it would 
 be better protected from the vague, vast, portentous 
 mass of Southern war claims which hang over it like a 
 cloud. Surely no one will claim, whether disinterested 
 or not, that the spirit of the Democratic party is more in 
 harmony with social order, and that orderly progress of 
 society which comes of evolution, not revolution, than the 
 Republican. No one, however prejudiced, will claim that 
 those personal rights which all government is ordained to 
 protect — free speech, equality before the law, the security 
 of each in the enjoyment of his own — are safer under 
 Democratic than RepubHcan control. No one, whatever 
 his condition may be, will dare to assert that the American 
 idea of government, personal liberty, and national union, 
 centre and circumference, is safer under Democratic than 
 Republican control. 
 
 The splendid achievements of the RepubHcan party 
 since the close of the war will be only less famous in 
 history than the suppression of the Rebellion. 
 
 Pause for a moment ! Go back in your memories to the 
 
250 NEWTON BOOTH, 
 
 sad, bitter day when the joy of victory was turned to 
 tears, and the sweet dawn of peace was clouded by the 
 death of Lincoln. 
 
 Did ever a nation confront graver problems, more com- 
 plicated difficulties, more serious dangers, than ours did 
 then? 
 
 The questions our fathers met in the establishment of a 
 government, after the achievement of independence, were 
 far less difficult. The war of the Revolution, itself, welded 
 the people into one ; the war of the Rebellion dissevered 
 them. The governments of eleven States had been 
 destroyed, and the people of these States were animated 
 with a hatred for the Union, which was intensified by de- 
 feat. The actual poverty of the South was scarcely less 
 to be deplored than the fictitious, inflated, speculative 
 prosperity of the North was to be feared in its ultimate 
 effect. 
 
 Four million slaves, who had inherited slavery with its 
 submissions and weakness from immemorial generations, 
 had just been emancipated, and were to live side by side 
 with their late masters, who regarded their emancipation 
 as an act of despotic power. A million of men under 
 arms, flushed with victory, proud of their leaders, were to 
 be disbanded and absorbed in pursuits of civil life. A cur- 
 rency fluctuating from day to day, demoralized business 
 into speculation or degraded into gambling. A debt so 
 vast it could scarcely be estimated, and behind it a mass 
 of claims too vague and vast for definition. A credit 
 prostrated until it was a byword and a reproach. 
 
 Confronting these questions, between order and anarchy, 
 civil government and military rule, payment and repudia- 
 tion, with nameless and countless complications of settle- 
 ment, in the moment of supreme civil peril, our chosen 
 leader, whose character exalted to the highest plain of 
 humanity, made him worthy to wear the crown of martyr- 
 dom, whose wisdom and purity, and the great love the 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 25 I 
 
 people bore him, were pledges of the Nation's safety, was 
 stricken down, and the hearts of the people were stirred 
 by wild thoughts of vengeance. The sea of trouble was 
 tempest-tost by passion. 
 
 In war, all questions are subordinated to success — all 
 measures look to one end — all appeals are to one senti- 
 ment. War over, the intensity of excitement relaxed, the 
 stimulus of heroic achievements and tangible resistance 
 withdrawn, difificulties of administration begin. These had 
 never been more manifold and complicated than with us. 
 For never had civil war been waged over so wide a coun- 
 try, involved greater loss of life and property, enlisted 
 deeper passions, or been fraught with graver interests. 
 
 Go back again to the bitter day when the lightning 
 flashed over the civilized world the saddest tidings the 
 wires have ever borne — that Lincoln was dead, — what a 
 weary waste of difificulty lay before the Republic ! What 
 a dark cloud of danger overhung it ! An army in hand 
 which in any other country an ambitious leader might use 
 to subvert civil authority ; a united Government to be 
 established over a discordant people on the basis of justice 
 to each ; freedom to be secured to 4,000,000 emancipated 
 slaves in a hostile community. This to be done with a 
 credit prostrated by unexampled expenditures, and under 
 a load of incalculable debt. 
 
 Contrast then with now ; that with this ; not sixteen 
 years have gone ; not half a generation ; our credit is the 
 highest in the world ; our debt liquidated until it is easily 
 in hand, and substantially all held at home ; the nation 
 stands in the foremost rank of time, and an indissoluble 
 union has been sealed with universal freedom. 
 
 To assert that the party has made no mistakes, would 
 be to claim that it is more than human. Measures are 
 often experimental — sometimes a choice of evils. A party 
 must be judged by the result of its policy. To say that 
 the Democratic party would have improved on this mag- 
 
252 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 nificent result, the grandest in civil history, is to insult 
 common-sense, and libel common honesty. It has stood 
 as a party of obstruction. It has stood as a prophet of 
 evil, intent on making its prejudices good. It has pro- 
 posed no great measure ; it has championed no great 
 idea ; it has uttered no broad catholic truth, Whatevei 
 has been achieved for human progress, national stability, 
 personal freedom, has been accomplished in its despite. 
 It is even driven to the necessity of making a merit of 
 acquiescing in what it was powerless to prevent, and is 
 impotent to reverse. Twelve years ago it denounced the 
 Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of 
 the Constitution as revolutionary and void. To-day it 
 concedes they are a part of the organic law. It has taken 
 the party twelve years to discover what all the world 
 knew. General Hancock, in his letter of acceptance, says 
 these amendments must be maintained. I read that part 
 of his letter with delight, and half expected to find the 
 logical sequence — that he would advise everybody to 
 support Garfield, who had assisted in their adoption. 
 
 The earnest, sincere acceptance by the Democratic party 
 of these amendments, crystallized results of the war, would 
 be a triumph for the Republican party, scarcely less than 
 its highest achievement. But there is a difference betwen 
 lip-service and heart-service ; between creed and faith ; 
 between the letter which killeth and the spirit which 
 maketh alive. There is a difference between accepting a 
 situation as a hard necessity, and embracing it as a joyful 
 opportunity. There is a difference in the spirit which 
 says, " The lines are hard, but it is so written. I acquiesce 
 in the inevitable," and that which acclaims, " Before ever 
 the world was it was true ; though the foundations of the 
 world should pass away, it will remain true ; therefore, it 
 is so written." 
 
 These represent principles which are the trophies of the 
 Republican party. It achieved them in tribulation and 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 2$$ 
 
 trial. It clung to them when it was treading the wine- 
 press ; it bore them amid the fires of battle ; in the dark- 
 ness of defeat it would not part with them ; washed in the 
 blood of the faithful it flung them to the broad light in 
 the triumphant glory of victory. Come weal or come 
 woe, come joy or sorrow, they are a part of its history 
 forever. 
 
 I desire to adhere to my text. It may be late to state 
 it in the middle of the discourse, but you will pardon the 
 omission ; it is, that a free government can only be ad- 
 ministered through party organization ; that political 
 parties are forces which must be judged by their ten- 
 dency, direction, results. And that the triumph of ideas, 
 the moral triumph in the war of the rebellion, which 
 redeem the war from butchery and emblazon it among 
 the constellations of history : that the unity, credit, and 
 general prosperity Avhich in the face of unexampled diffi- 
 culties the country has attained, are due, not to any 
 unorganized, vague sentiment diffused at large, but to the 
 powerful organization of that sentiment in the Republican 
 party. That all these achievements have been in oppo- 
 sition to the Democratic party — that the antagonism be- 
 tween the parties still exists, by reason of the antagonism 
 of spirit, purpose, and tradition, and will exist so long as 
 both shall live. That they represent the ideas of diverse 
 civilizations — the one the relic of the social aristocracy 
 and African slavery of the South, the other the product 
 of the universal freedom and local democratic institutions 
 of the North, — and if either is right the other is so fatally 
 wrong it has forfeited its right to a place in history. 
 
 If I must refer to facts which are but too familiar, it is 
 because of the difficulty of demonstrating a proposition 
 which ought to be evident from its statement. 
 
 Again I ask you to revert to one of the great crises of 
 our history. Lincoln was inaugurated on the 4th of 
 March, 1861. The Confederate Government was already 
 
254 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 organized ; its Constitution had been agreed upon ; its 
 President selected. It had appointed diplomatic agents 
 to treat with the Government of the United States. 
 General Twiggs, commanding the Department of Texas, 
 had turned over his entire army, with posts, fortifications, 
 arms, and munitions, depriving the Government of the 
 United States of half its military force, and of the control 
 of Texas, with the Mexican frontier. Forts, arsenals, 
 and public property had been seized, not only within the 
 limits of the seven States which had passed ordinances of 
 secession, but within several which had not. It was evi- 
 dent to the dullest understanding that one of two calami- 
 ties was imminent — either a dissolution, which would be 
 a national humiliation and disgrace, or war. Both could 
 only be averted in one way. If the Democratic party of 
 the North had made one authoritative declaration, that 
 the laws of the United States must be enforced through- 
 out all the land, that the flag should never recede an inch 
 on American soil, the Union might have been restored 
 with peace. 
 
 The Senate of the United States was in session for 
 twenty-five days while the fate of the nation hung in 
 balance. Horace Greeley says : " No Democrat in the 
 Senate, and no organ of Democratic opinion out of the 
 Senate proffered an assurance or an exhortation to the 
 President, tending to encourage and support him in up- 
 holding the integrity and supporting the laws of the 
 Union." 
 
 The opportunity went by. The word was not spoken, 
 " and the war came." 
 
 In the course of an elaborate speech in the Senate, on 
 the loth of May, 1879, Senator Hill, of Georgia, said: 
 " No, my good Northern Democratic brethren, you saved 
 the country at last ; you saved the Union in the hour of 
 its peril — not the Republican party." 
 
 The audacity of this declaration is unequalled in the 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 255 
 
 oratory of ancient or modern times. If Danton's defini- 
 tion of oratory and leadership be correct, " Laiidace, 
 Vaudacc, ct toujour s raudace," the Senator from Georgia, 
 in one sentence, made Cicero a babbler and Demosthenes 
 a clown ; made Caesar a camp-follower and Napoleon a 
 sutler. 
 
 Let us make every concession that is consistent with 
 truth ; let us state the case at its best for the Democratic 
 party of the North ; let us admit that war was inevitable 
 — that it was a conflict of moral forces, old as time, strong 
 as death, for which statesmanship had no solution, peace 
 no arbitrament. If when war could no longer be post- 
 poned, was not a thing to be dreaded but to be met, if, 
 then the Democratic party of the North had made one 
 authoritative declaration for the maintenance of the Union, 
 the war would have been short and decisive. Virginia, 
 North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas might have 
 been saved from the Confederacy. It would not have 
 been necessary to hold Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri 
 by force of arms. The war would have filled but a few 
 pages of history. At that crisis, when every instinct of 
 patriotism called aloud for action, the Democratic party 
 of the North, as a party at best, stood with folded arms 
 and dumb lips. Silence then, is an accuser now. For 
 the long continuance of the war ; for chapters, volumes 
 of desolation ; for hecatombs of heroic lives, history will 
 hold that party responsible. The stain of blood is on its 
 hands so deep, not the ocean of time can wash it out. 
 It would " the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making 
 the green ones red." 
 
 On the 4th of July, 1861, Congress was convened in 
 extraordinary session. It was in the midst of war. The 
 proclamation of the President calling on the militia of the 
 States for seventy-five thousand troops had been an- 
 swered by the Democratic Governors of Maryland, Vir- 
 ginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri with denial, 
 
256 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 contumely, and insult. Massachusetts troops had been 
 murdered in the streets of Baltimore while marching to 
 the National Capitol for its protection. 
 
 Many seats in both Houses of Congress were vacant. 
 Three weeks after Congress convened the battle of Bull 
 Run was fought and lost, and the sombre days were upon 
 us. Members and Senators were leaving their places, 
 preparing to cast their lots with their States or to urge 
 their States to cast their lots with them in the ranks of 
 rebellion. Some no doubt left in sorrow, some in anger, 
 but all with defiance. Baker, in the fervor of oratory, 
 denounced a speech of Breckenridge as " polished trea- 
 son," and asked " what would have been done with a 
 Roman Senator who had made a speech in the Roman 
 Senate so full of encouragement to the enemy, when 
 Hannibal was encamped before the walls of the city, as 
 the rebels were about Washington ? " Fessenden, from 
 his seat, murmured through clenched lips, " He would 
 have been hurled from the Tarpeian rock." Breckenridge 
 left the Senate to drag Kentucky into rebellion. Baker to 
 meet death at Ball Bluff. 
 
 Oh, voice of Genius ! Oh, lips touched with the live 
 coal from the altar of freedom, too early hushed — too 
 early closed in death ! Oh, martyr of liberty and Union, 
 would thou couldst have lived to witness the fruition of 
 thy teachings, the garnered results of thy inspiration and 
 heroism ! 
 
 In this stormy session Broderick was not in the Senate. 
 The term for which he was chosen had not expired, but 
 the seat to which he had been chosen was filled by another. 
 Would he had been there ! I can fancy him rising from 
 his seat and saying : " Some of the seats in this Chamber 
 are vacant, and others will be vacant soon. Some Sena- 
 tors remain because they can serve the Rebellion here 
 better than elsewhere. Gentlemen, stand not upon the 
 order of your going, but go at once. An open enemy is 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 257 
 
 better than a deceitful friend. You took part in an elec- 
 tion and will not abide the result. That is infamous ! I 
 have no need to parse the Constitution to tell me I have 
 a country. I need not go to State trials for a definition 
 of treason. Go, gentlemen ! Your conspiracy may suc- 
 ceed — for I know not what vial of wrath Heaven may 
 have in store for mankind — but if you do succeed in over- 
 throwing the Republic, you shall perish in its ruins." 
 
 No, he was not there. He is not here, but I can almost 
 see his stalwart form, clad in the cerements of the grave, 
 stalking before me, pointing with slow, unmoving finger 
 at the Democratic electoral ticket of California ; and I am 
 filled with wonder that any friend or follower of his can 
 dare to vote that ticket, in the solemn presence of the 
 past. Against tJiat ticket, contrived as though to insult 
 his memory and " justify the deep damnation of his taking 
 off," "his form and cause conjoined, preaching to stones 
 would make them capable." 
 
 The war went on for weary months and years. Its 
 murky clouds were seldom illumined for us save when 
 victory flashed from the sword of Grant. 
 
 The Democratic party had utterly failed to meet the 
 question of union or disunion. There came another time 
 of trial. It had another great opportunity to redeem its 
 past. There came a time when the exigencies of war de- 
 manded the emancipation of the slaves. The choice was 
 beween emancipation and victory, slavery and defeat. 
 The word was spoken, the bonded were made free. 
 
 As a mere war measure the proclamation of emancipa- 
 tion was more than the sword of Gideon, more than the 
 sword of Michael ; it was the sword of Truth from the 
 armory of the God of Justice, But it was far more than 
 a war measure. It concerned universal humanity and all 
 time to come. It was one of the great events of history. 
 As we recede from it in the perspective of the ages, it will 
 rise above the pyramids, above the Himalayas, above the 
 
258 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 stars. Then the clock of time struck twelve. Then, if 
 ever, " the morning stars sang together and the sons of 
 God shouted for joy." 
 
 In this jubilee of humanity there was one note of dis- 
 cord ; one voice of lamentation. To the Democratic party 
 the light was darkness. No wonder that in its councils 
 the war was a failure. What to it was the Union with- 
 out slavery ? 
 
 In this great chapter of events which makes our age 
 heroic, I ask what patriotic act or utterance can rightly be 
 ascribed to the Democratic party ? There were Demo- 
 crats who were patriots, but their patriotism found voice 
 and action ouside the party. The more they were patriots 
 the less they were Democrats. 
 
 Why go back ? How can the spirit, tendency of a 
 party, its moral force, direction, and purpose be judged 
 but by its history ? These are not changed in an hour, 
 by resolution, or by setting up a figure-head for office. I 
 charge that the Democratic party has been false to the 
 Union, false to freedom, false to humanity. Its claim to 
 administer the Government, which it was willing to aban- 
 don or eager to destroy, is monstrous — a satire on patriot- 
 ism, reason, and sense. Nothing in its life would become 
 it like the leaving of it. 
 
 Why go back ? The Democratic party itself gives the 
 challenge. It pleads no baby act — invites no statute of 
 limitations. It comes into this canvass flaunting its tradi- 
 tions, proud of its identity. It appeals to its followers 
 as " The gel-orious old Democratic party ! " The distin- 
 guished gentleman who presided at its late National Con- 
 vention congratulated that body because it contained so 
 many men who were in the Convention of '56, which 
 nominated James Buchanan, and took hope that the party 
 would again succeed, and restore the administration of the 
 Government to Democratic principles. Think of that ! 
 The administration of the Government of the United 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 259 
 
 States brought back to the point where James Buchanan 
 left it ! A local orator recently asserted in San Francisco, 
 that the present political canvass was a Democratic upris- 
 ing to reconquer the ground which had been lost in the 
 past twenty years. Think of that ! The ground which 
 the Republican party has conquered in twenty years for 
 stability of government — the supremacy of law — for human 
 liberty and progress, is to be retaken in one charge by the 
 massed Democracy. 
 
 There is no occasion to go back to the past. The 
 Democratic party to-day bases its hope of success on the 
 assurance that it will receive the support of every State 
 that joined the Confederacy — a support secured and made 
 certain by the same means which carried their secession. 
 If it ought to succeed, if it deserves success, the preser- 
 vation of the Union was a blunder, emancipation a crime, 
 the war for the Union gigantic murder, and the Republi- 
 can party a monster of iniquity. It will not succeed ; the 
 stars in their courses fight against it ; the time has not 
 come when the American people will concede that on 
 those great questions of government, humanity, liberty, 
 which in our generation were championed on the one 
 hand by Abraham Lincoln, and on the other by Jefferson 
 Davis, the right is in doubt. They are not questions of 
 a day or an age, but of all time. They are a part of a 
 conflict which in some form is old as history. It has 
 come down by the pyramids of the Nile, by the fountains 
 of Judea, by the temples of Greece, by the amphitheatres 
 of Rome, by the schools of the Middle Ages, by the 
 palaces and cities of modern art ; and it will continue in 
 some form until the right shall be overthrown or estab- 
 Hshed, until anarchy shall come down like night, or liberty 
 and order shall become the peaceful heritage of all the 
 nations of the whole earth. 
 
26o NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 DELIVERED AT SACRAMENTO, OCTOBER 20, 1886. 
 
 Mr. President, Ladies and Fellow-citizens : I once heard 
 Starr King, of blessed memory, say in a lecture on Web- 
 ster, that the climate of New Hampshire, where Webster 
 was born, had three seasons — setting in of winter — winter 
 — breaking up of winter. 
 
 In this country we seem to have three political seasons 
 — preparing for an election — holding an election — getting 
 over an election. 
 
 It did seem for some time that the Democratic party in 
 this country had concluded not to hold an election this 
 year. The Republican local ticket is so unexceptionable 
 we may properly make its election unanimous. There 
 never was less excuse for Sacramento Republicans to 
 scratch a ticket or to revise it. Whoever expects to vote 
 for a better will not obtain it from any " mutual admir- 
 ation " society, and will die of old age before he has an 
 opportunity. 
 
 I am not one of those who believe that this frequency 
 of elections is an unmixed evil. Of course it involves 
 trouble and expense, but it identifies the people with the 
 Government, it creates a sense of direct responsibility in 
 the men who administer public office, and is an essential 
 part of our republican institutions — our representative 
 democracy. 
 
 The approaching election is important. It involves the 
 choice of the Governor and all the State officers for four 
 years, of the entire Legislature, of three Justices of the 
 Supreme Court, of six members of Congress, of all county 
 ofificers, and of a United States Senator. 
 
 The two great parties which so nearly equally divide 
 the voters of the whole country have named their respec- 
 tive tickets, and it is to be assumed that they are com- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 261 
 
 posed of fairly representative men. In so far as the 
 canvass is conducted as a discussion of ideas, principles, 
 and measures, and a fair inquiry into the fitness of the 
 candidates for the of^ces they aspire, it can only be 
 productive of good. In so far as it degenerates into 
 misrepresentation, personal abuse, aspersion of private 
 character, it is evil in turning attention aside from the 
 true issues, and in pandering to and cultivating a depraved 
 appetite for slander and vituperation. 
 
 As for that hyper-criticism that takes exception to the 
 cut of a man's coat, to the tie of his cravat, that calls a 
 man cold if he does not gush, selfish if he does not pro- 
 claim his own charities, I could wish that those who 
 indulge it could be placed in the fierce fight that beats 
 upon a candidate, that they might exhibit to the world a 
 spectacle of absolute perfection. 
 
 Of the candidates for Governor, Mr. Swift and Mr. 
 Bartlett, I can speak from personal acquaintance. The 
 personal character of each is above reproach. If I knew I 
 were to die to-night, I should be willing that either should 
 administer my estate without bonds. I do not believe 
 there is any one who knows them both intimately, who 
 has not the same confidence in their integrity and good 
 faith. 
 
 I first met Mr. Swift in the Legislature of 1862-63, 
 of which we were both members, and have been intimate 
 with him ever since. He is in the best sense of that often 
 much abused phrase, " a self-made man." Without early 
 advantages, born to the lot of labor, from early youth de- 
 pendent on his own exertions, he has neglected no oppor- 
 tunity of self-improvement, until his ability is known and 
 recognized throughout the entire State. He is at once 
 profound in thought and practical in application. He is 
 a successful man — but his success is the measure of his 
 industry and talent. In versatility I do not know his 
 superior. His long experience in public affairs, his mature 
 
262 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 judgment, his close observation in extensive travel, well 
 fit him for the complicated questions which are constantly- 
 arising in our State policy. 
 
 Neither Mr. Bartlett nor Mr. Swift have been "thick 
 and thin partisans." Neither can indulge the old Demo- 
 cratic boast that he has never dotted an " i " or crossed a 
 " t " of a party ticket. Mr. Bartlett has sometimes acted 
 as an independent Democrat ; Mr. Swift as an independ- 
 ent Republican. For the past twenty-five years Mr. 
 Bartlett has been sincerely in sympathy with the policy 
 and purposes of the Democratic party, and desirous of its 
 success, and Mr. Swift has been devoted to the principles 
 and purposes of the Republican party, and it is as the 
 leaders and representatives of their respective parties they 
 are presented to us as candidates. 
 
 If the issues between the parties are not sharply defined, 
 if you have to read between the lines of platforms of con- 
 ventions to discover there is a difference, it is not because 
 the Republican party has changed its principles. 
 
 I presume the Southern Democrat will admit that this 
 is a Nation — one and indivisible — but he believes it be- 
 came such, not by virtue of the Constitution, but as a 
 result of the defeat of the Rebellion. He accepts the 
 doctrine, not as a fundamental truth, but as a hard 
 necessity. 
 
 He will admit that slavery has been destroyed, can 
 never be restored, and, perhaps, that it should never be, 
 but he will contend that the proclamation of emancipa- 
 tion, the amendments of the Constitution and measures 
 of reconstruction were acts of arbitrary tyranny. 
 
 There is a problem in mathematics that two lines can 
 forever approach, but never meet. However the Demo- 
 cratic party may seek to ignore the past, may be willing 
 to accept results, it can never reach the lofty plain of 
 patriotism on which the Republican party has stood 
 from the time of its organization. The difference is funda- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 263 
 
 mental, historical ; it is in spirit, scope, tendency, purpose, 
 idea. You must not look so much between the lines of 
 platforms to find it as beneath the lines. 
 
 I am not here to assert that the Republican party is 
 perfect. No human agency is. But I do proclaim my 
 belief that it has accomplished more for humanity than 
 any other political organization in all time. It does not 
 propose to abandon any of its trophies, at a senseless cry 
 of "bloody shirt." It does not propose to close the book 
 of its achievements, and refuse to read the great chapters 
 it has written in history, while its old antagonist stands 
 as a living reminder of the past. It is not composed 
 entirely of political saints. It does not claim a monopoly 
 of the virtues. We must agree with the Republican orator 
 who said : " He knew men of whom the only good thing 
 that could be said was, that they were Republicans, and 
 others of whom the only bad thing that could be said was, 
 that they were Democrats." 
 
 I think these last are Republicans in disguise — perhaps 
 I should say unconscious Republicans. They will become 
 Republicans when they die. A good old Methodist 
 preacher once said to me in my youth : " My young 
 friend, John Wesley was a Christian a long time before 
 he knew it," 
 
 In my boyhood days, there was a religious sect called 
 " Perfectionists." If there were an association to-day, and 
 perfection were the test of admission, you might get in, I 
 could not ; if I did, I should be lonesome. 
 
 Not all the boys in blue in the armies of the Potomac, 
 of the Cumberland, and the Tennessee knew the West- 
 minster catechism, or could repeat the Thirty-nine Articles. 
 Not all the ofificers who wore shoulder-straps and sashes 
 were devoid of self-seeking and personal ambition. Self- 
 ishness, personal ambition, always have been, always will 
 be, ingredients of every political movement. Even re- 
 ligious and philanthropic associations are not altogether 
 
264 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 free from them. " There is a great deal of human nature 
 in man." Even in this nineteenth century, in this " home 
 of the brave and land of the free," the old Adam has not 
 entirely been cast out. I have often observed in human 
 affairs that an ounce of active selfishness will accomplish 
 more than a ton of good intentions. That political 
 organization is best and will accomplish most that regards 
 society as it is, with its tremendous forces for good or for 
 evil, seeks to combine these elements for the best attain- 
 able good, to marshal them the way they ought to go, to 
 harness even ambition and selfishness to the chariot of 
 progress. That, we claim, the Republican party is and 
 does, and that the Democratic party is not and does not. 
 The one subordinates success to truth, the other truth to 
 success. 
 
 Let me illustrate the charge that the Democratic party 
 subordinates truth to success — that it is disingenuous, not 
 bold, open, and frank. 
 
 The Democratic State Central Committee have plagia- 
 rized the Republican motto, and at the head of all their 
 advertisements they place the sentiment : " Protection 
 for free labor and home industries." In the language of 
 Dogberry, this " is flat burglary as ever was committed." 
 We have all heard of " stealing the livery of heaven to 
 serve the devil in" — this is stealing the livery of the 
 Republican party to serve the Democratic party. 
 
 The Democratic platform of this State declares that the 
 duty on wool should be restored to what it was in the 
 tariff of 1867. This is simply a bid for the votes of the 
 wool-growers. Every intelligent Democrat knows that if 
 the duty on wool is to be restored to what it was, or main- 
 tained at what it is, it will be by Republican votes in 
 Congress, not by Democratic. At the last session of 
 Congress, the Democratic leader on the floor introduced 
 a bill placing wool on the free list. Out of 185 Demo- 
 cratic Representatives, less than forty voted against its 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 265 
 
 consideration ; out of 140 Republicans, only seven voted 
 in its favor. 
 
 In the Forty-eighth Congress, the contest in the caucus 
 for Speaker of the House was between Carlisle, of Ken- 
 tucky, and Randall, of Pennsylvania. Next to the Presi- 
 dent, the Speaker of the House is the most important 
 political of^cer in the Government. He appoints the 
 committees, can recognize whomsoever he chooses on the 
 floor, and, in shaping legislation, has more power than 
 the President. Carlisle is an honest man, and has the 
 courage of conviction. He is the ablest advocate of 
 free-trade doctrine in either house of Congress. Randall 
 is a man of perhaps equal ability and integrity, of larger 
 public experience, a Democrat, no doubt, from conviction, 
 and a Protectionist from the accident of his birth and resi- 
 dence in Pennsylvania, where in some districts they still 
 think they are voting for " Polk and Dallas, and the tariff 
 of '42." 
 
 Of course, Carlisle was nominated and elected. In the 
 Forty-ninth Congress, he was nominated in the Democratic 
 caucus without opposition. Promptly on his first election, 
 he appointed Colonel Morrison, of Illinois, Chairman of 
 the Committee of Ways and Means, which has charge of 
 all revenue bills, and shares with the Committee on Appro- 
 priations the leadership of the House. Morrison is bold, 
 honest, and patriotic. He sincerely believes that protective 
 duties are robbery. He has constantly, earnestly endeav- 
 ored to modify the tariff in the line of his convictions, 
 willing to take what he could get, if he could not get all 
 that he wanted. The consideration of his bill for a hori- 
 zontal reduction of the tariff was defeated by the almost 
 unanimous vote of the Republican members, aided by 
 about forty Democrats — recalcitrant Democrats, the lead- 
 ing Democratic papers call them. The Louisville Courier- 
 Journal, one of the ablest, if not the ablest. Democratic 
 paper in the United States, promptly read these " recalci- 
 
266 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 trants " out of the party, asserts that none of them from 
 the southwest can be returned to Congress, and advises 
 Sam Randall to leave the Democratic party, to join the 
 Republican, where he properly belongs, on account of his 
 views in regard to protective duties. 
 
 Mr. Manning, the Secretary of the Treasury, is un- 
 doubtedly the ablest member of the Cabinet, and has the 
 closest and most confidential relations with the President. 
 If it had not been for Daniel Manning, it is not probable 
 that Grover Cleveland would ever have been Governor of 
 New York or President of the United States. When, a 
 few months ago, he tendered his resignation on account 
 of his illness, his letter contained two suggestions in the 
 nature of a testamentary legacy. They were to the effect 
 that if the coinage of silver were stopped we should have 
 the best currency in the world ; and that if our tariff were 
 revised and duties imposed only on a few leading articles^ 
 we should have the best revenue system possible. He 
 undoubtedly voiced the sentiment of the Administration, 
 and the leading sentiment of his party. Now this is just 
 the kind of tariff that England has, and it approaches 
 more nearly to absolute free trade than that of any other 
 nation in the civilized world. The principle of protection 
 is entirely eliminated. 
 
 The people of the Southern States are imbued with the 
 doctrine of free trade, and have been since Calhoun in- 
 voked " nullification " to prevent the collection of duties 
 at Charleston. The Southern Confederacy held out the 
 boon of free trade to England and France as an induce- 
 ment to recognition. New York City, the commercial 
 capital of the country, and so largely engaged in foreign 
 commerce, is for free trade, and the Democratic party 
 depends upon the Southern States and the city of New 
 York for any national success. I am not here to discuss 
 the comparative merits of protection and free trade. It 
 is a broad question, about which many honestly differ. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 267 
 
 What I object to in the position of the Democratic party 
 is that it is not honest. The direction of the party, its 
 best and intelHgent sentiment, is for free trade — for such 
 a tariff as Secretary Manning recommends. Every Na- 
 tional Democratic Convention will adopt a resolution in 
 favor of a " tariff for revenue only," and every Democratic 
 State Convention will resolve in favor of protective duties 
 on every local production. 
 
 Judge Baldwin once wittily said of a famous decision 
 of our Supreme Court that " it gave the law to the North 
 and the negro to the South." The Democratic party 
 discounts that. It offers free trade or protection to any 
 one who wants either, or it will serve them both together 
 in just the proportions any individual voter fancies. 
 
 As a National Democrat the Californian is in favor of 
 a tariff for revenue only — as a State Democrat he is in 
 favor of protective duties on wool, on wine, on fruits, on 
 quicksilver — and certainly one very distinguished Demo- 
 crat would be sorry to see the duty on borax reduced. 
 The Louisiana Democrat is in favor of free trade — and 
 protection for sugar. Even the South Carolinian, though 
 he may have sat at the feet of Calhoun, if he happens to 
 live in a rice district, is for free trade — and protection for 
 rice. The Michigan Democrat, nationally, is for a tariff 
 for revenue only — as a Michigander, he is for protection 
 to lumber and salt. The New Jersey Democrat is for 
 free trade and protection for silk. The New England 
 Democrat is for free trade, and especially for free wool, 
 and for protection for woollen fabrics, and whatever else 
 is manufactured in New England. The Pennsylvania 
 Democrat will endorse the national platform " for revenue 
 only " — as a member of Congress he will trade everything 
 with everybody for protection of coal, iron, and Pennsyl- 
 vania manufactures. 
 
 In national convention, in the supreme council, the 
 party is for tariff for revenue only, discarding the prin- 
 
268 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 ciple of protection. In the various State conventions its 
 opinions make a political crazy-quilt, and justify the 
 famous expression of General Hancock that " the tariff is 
 a local question." 
 
 The position of the Democratic party on that subject 
 was well illustrated by a wag, who said " it reminded him 
 of the boy whose trousers were made the same way be- 
 fore and behind, so that the boy never knew whether he 
 was going to school or coming home." 
 
 In contradistinction to this, the Republican party is 
 in favor of " Protection of American labor and industries." 
 It supports it as a principle — as a broad national policy. 
 It proclaims it everywhere — in districts where it is un- 
 popular as well as where it is popular. It does not hedge 
 or double deal. It is consistent. Its position may be 
 assaulted, its sincerity cannot be doubted. 
 
 The resolution of the Democratic Convention of this 
 State on the Chinese question is open to a charge graver 
 than disingenuous. An old acquaintance of mine coined 
 a word not to be found in any dictionary — "duplicious " 
 — which I have added to my vocabulary, and often find 
 convenient. I desire to keep within the bounds of pro- 
 priety, and will simply say that this resolution is " du- 
 plicious." It calls for the abrogation of the Burlingame- 
 Swift treaty. The men who wrote the resolution knew 
 there was no such treaty — the intelligent men who voted 
 for it knew there was none. Every man in the State who 
 is conversant with current history knows that the Bur- 
 lingame treaty never had a more severe critic than Mr. 
 Swift. Mr. Swift was one of the commissioners who 
 negotiated the treaty with China, changing the Bur- 
 lingame treaty and enabling our Government to restrict 
 Chinese immigration. He had a most difificult task. He 
 was one of three commissioners. It is but just to say 
 that he had first to bring his own coadjutors to his own 
 views, and to secure such concessions from the represen- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 269 
 
 tatives of the Chinese Government as were possible. 
 From the first he was handicapped by his associates. He 
 did secure more than his most sanguine friends thought 
 possible. It was for him a diplomatic triumph. That 
 Chinese exclusion is not more rigid is not the defect of 
 the treaty, but of the laws and their administration. The 
 memorial which he prepared to Congress on the Chinese 
 question is the ablest presentation of California opinion 
 ever made. No one man on this coast has done so much 
 towards educating public opinion in the Eastern States 
 on this subject. 
 
 Yet the Democratic convention, ignoring facts, which 
 are as open as the day, by an innuendo as cowardly as it 
 is false, endeavors to identify him with the Burlingame 
 Treaty. I have observed with surprise and regret that 
 Mr. Bartlett justifies this attempt, and in doing so resorts 
 to a verbal quibble unworthy of him or any other honor- 
 able gentleman. That is, because Mr. Swift has done 
 everything in the power of man in changing the Burlin- 
 game Treaty, he is responsible for its adoption. 
 
 I want to be polite — or at least not impolite — I will 
 simply say that this phrase, " Burlingame-Swift Treaty," 
 is a gratuitous ter-giv-er-sa-tion. Any one who could be 
 deceived by it would vote the Democratic ticket anyhow. 
 
 I charge the Democratic party with dissimulation in 
 dealing with what are popularly known as the *' labor 
 questions." It has always claimed to be the champion of 
 labor, the laborer's friend and protector. That has long 
 been a large part of its political stock in trade. It was 
 even when it justified slavery and the bringing of free 
 labor in competition with slave. A Democratic national 
 administration has been in power nearly two years. Sel- 
 dom, if ever, in our history has discontent been so rife, 
 have labor strikes been so frequent, and the orderly con- 
 dition of society been so disturbed. I do not charge that 
 these things are the direct result of a Democratic admin- 
 
270 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 istration. Far from it. They might have occurred under 
 a Republican. What I do charge and maintain is, that 
 the Democratic party constantly holds out delusive hopes, 
 and that their inevitable disappointment embitters the lot 
 of men who are compelled to labor for daily bread. It 
 inculcates and insinuates that the inequalities of wealth 
 and condition are created by law ; that the men who pay 
 wages are the natural enemies of the men who receive 
 wages, and that in this country there are arbitrary class 
 distinctions ; that the rich are necessarily oppressive, that 
 the poor are inevitably oppressed. Its appeals are con- 
 stantly to what it terms the " laboring classes," as if there 
 were any class of people in this land of equal laws, that 
 had an interest distinct from and antagonistic to the well- 
 being of the whole. 
 
 Now the difificulties and hardships arising out of the 
 inequalities of human condition are as old as history. 
 Their solution has been sought by priest and philosopher, 
 by toiler and statesmen. I do not know that their solu- 
 tion is possible. 
 
 Anarchism will not solve them ; that form of Socialism 
 which seeks to abolish private property will not solve 
 them ; demagogic appeals to prejudice, declamation, how- 
 ever brilliant, will throw no light upon them. If they can 
 be ameliorated, or placed in process of ultimate solution, 
 it will be by the orderly progress of society, not by social 
 convulsion and revolution. It will be by holding fast to 
 that which is good while seeking whatever is better. It 
 will be by recognizing the truth that one man's liberty 
 ends when it infringes upon another's rights ; that there 
 can be no liberty, security, order, or progress except 
 under enlightened law ; and that no power is so great as 
 to be above the control of the law, no individual so weak 
 as to be beneath its protection. 
 
 These principles, these aims and purposes the Repub- 
 lican party embodies and champions in a higher degree 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 27 1 
 
 than any other great poHtical organization on the habit- 
 able globe. 
 
 The millennium will never be inaugurated by Act of 
 Congress or of the Legislature. If there has been one 
 since " our first parents fell," history fails to record it. 
 The progress of humanity has been slow and toilsome, 
 over steep and stony places, and its footprints have been 
 marked with blood, even as the Saviour's were when he 
 bore the cross to the crucifixion. 
 
 It is too early to pass judgment on the administration 
 of President Cleveland. If we may infer the future from 
 the past, it will not be distinguished either by its domes- 
 tic or foreign policy. Even a Pan-Electric light would 
 reveal nothing brilliant so far. Its attainments in phi- 
 lology seem to be higher than in statesmanship or diplo- 
 macy. It is likely to go into history as the author of two 
 phrases, " offensive partisanship " and " innocuous desue- 
 tude." 
 
 I know what an " offensive partisan " is — it is a Repub- 
 lican in office. A Democrat in office is a subhmely disin- 
 terested patriot. As for the exact meaning of " innocuous 
 desuetude," you will have to seek for it in the depths of 
 the profound obscure. 
 
 It is somewhat famous for two other incidents. Cleve- 
 land sent a pre-natal message to Congress advising the 
 demonetization of silver before he was inaugurated, and 
 the national flag was half-masted for the death of Jake 
 Thompson. 
 
 The highest praise that can be accorded to it is negative 
 — it has not been so harmful as was feared. There is a 
 reason for this. The Republican party has so deeply en- 
 graven its ideas, principles, and purposes on the national 
 policy that they cannot be erased. The party may be 
 defeated, but its moral triumph is secure beyond the 
 chance of time or change of circumstances. You can no 
 more obscure that than you can reverse the verdict of 
 
2/2 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 history, or turn back the iron leaves in the book of 
 fate. 
 
 The most ardent friend of the present administration 
 will hardly claim that its diplomacy has redounded to the 
 national honor. During the twenty-four years that the 
 Republican party has administered the government, in its 
 intercourse with foreign powers it maintained the just 
 rights of the nation, under circumstances the most diffi- 
 cult and trying, with dignity, firmness, and self-respect. 
 It did not have one voice for the strong and another for 
 the weak. It did not truckle to the one or hector the 
 other. Let me recall a few notable illustrations. 
 
 When in the hour of the nation's supreme peril — when 
 the governments of England and France were seeking for 
 a pretext to recognize the " Confederacy " — the English 
 Secretary for Foreign Affairs said to the American Min- 
 ister that the cruisers that were fitting out in British 
 ports to destroy American commerce could not be re- 
 strained from sailing, as there was no municipal law to 
 prevent, the American Minister replied, '' My Lord, this 
 means war," and no other cruisers sailed. For injuries 
 inflicted under those which had sailed, England was com- 
 pelled to settle under the provisions of the treaty upon 
 the Alabama claims — another triumph for American 
 diplomacy. 
 
 When Commodore Wilkes, in an exuberance of patriot- 
 ism, seized Mason and Slidell, rebel emissaries, on the 
 Trent, he violated the American doctrine that a neutral 
 flag protects a neutral ship. Against temporary public 
 sentiment in the North, a Republican administration 
 stood firmly and calmly for the right. It snatched the 
 flower of safety from the nettle of danger. It obtained 
 from Great Britain the acknowledgment that there was 
 no right of search on the high seas ; that a neutral flag 
 protects a neutral ship. That was the question about 
 which England and the United States had fought in the 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 2/3 
 
 War of 1812, and which had not been settled by the treaty 
 of Ghent. For the first time England conceded that the 
 American doctrine was right. 
 
 The principle for which Lawrence exclaimed with his 
 dying breath, " Don't give up the ship," for which Perry 
 triumphed on Lake Erie and Jackson at New Orleans, 
 was vindicated as a part of international law. 
 
 At the close of the war, when the sound of the cannon 
 had scarcely ceased to reverberate, the American govern- 
 ment politely but firmly said to Emperor Louis Napoleon 
 that the French troops in Mexico had no business there, 
 and had better go home. They went. 
 
 In the times of extremest peril, when the war clouds 
 hung blackest and were charged with the lightnings of 
 destruction, when the sky was tempest-tost, the Re- 
 publican party abated no jot or tittle of the just rights of 
 the nation — it maintained its honor abroad, while it pre- 
 served its existence at home. 
 
 Let me revert. I do not claim that the Republican 
 party is perfect, or composed of perfect material. This 
 government. State and national, will be administered by 
 one of the two great parties which contend for supremacy, 
 and have contended for twenty-six years. It is not a 
 question of perfection, but of choice. Which will best 
 maintain the honor of the country abroad, and develop 
 its resources at home ? Which will best promote social 
 order and orderly progress ? Which is more in sympathy 
 with those individual rights which are the foundation of 
 free government ? Try them not by profession and plat- 
 form, but by their traditions and history, their general 
 direction and animating spirit, and there can be but one 
 answer. 
 
 In the political campaign which resulted in the election 
 of Cleveland, the Democratic party appealed to the 
 people for a change of administration " that the books 
 might be examined." They have been examined with 
 
274 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 unfriendly eyes. No forced balance, no suspicious entry 
 has been found. The money in the Treasury has been 
 counted, and found to agree with " the books " to the 
 fraction of a cent. 
 
 There are other records which the party might examine 
 with profit. They would find to the credit of the Re- 
 publican party, a nation redeemed from civil war, the 
 greatest rebellion of history vanquished, a dissevered 
 Union re-established, made indissoluble, and sealed with 
 universal freedom. It would find a prostrate credit re- 
 stored and made the highest in the world. It would find 
 the amendments to the Constitution charters of political 
 equality and civil liberty. It would find the Proclamation 
 of Emancipation. It would find the greatest chapters of 
 political history ever written in the book of time, illumin- 
 ated with an effulgence as from above the skies, radiated 
 with the light of the loftiest patriotism, and of a heroism 
 that conquered death streaming from the illustrious 
 names of Lincoln and Grant. 
 
 Fellow-Republicans : Can any Republican afTord to fall 
 out of the ranks in the presence of the consolidated De- 
 mocracy ? While the rebel army was in the field the 
 Union army could not disband ; no Union soldier could 
 desert. At the coronation of Napoleon the Emperor 
 asked Marshal Augereau " if anything were wanting to 
 the splendor of the scene?" "Nothing," replied the 
 Marshal, " but the presence of those who have died to 
 prevent all this." 
 
 Shall the control of the destiny of this nation be given 
 to the Democratic party? If so, let the roll be called of 
 those who have died that the nation might live. Let 
 polling-places be opened at every battlefield, from Bull 
 Run to Appomattox, and the silent protest of the dead 
 be placed on that page of history. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 2/5 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, JUNE 8, 1879. 
 
 LEGAL TENDER OF SILVER COIN. 
 
 The Senate, as in Committee of the Whole, resumed the consideration of 
 the bill (S. 263) to amend the laws relating to legal tender of silver coin, the 
 pending question being on the amendment of Mr. Bogy to the amendment 
 reported by the Committee on Finance. 
 
 Mr. Booth said : 
 
 Mr. President : The provisions of the bill under con- 
 sideration, known as the " silver bill," are important ; its 
 theory is more important. I ask the hearing of the Sen- 
 ate to some considerations touching both its form and 
 substance. 
 
 First, let us examine the bill in its details with a view 
 to its probable practical operation. The first section pro- 
 vides for the coinage of a silver dollar of 412.8 grains of 
 standard silver, and that said dollar shall be a legal tender 
 for any amount not exceeding $20 in any one payment, 
 and shall be receivable in payment of all dues to the 
 United States except duties on imports ; and that the 
 trade-dollar of 420 grains standard silver shall no longer 
 be a legal tender. 
 
 The circulating medium of the United States consists 
 of greenbacks and bank-notes convertible into greenbacks, 
 of gold coin, fractional currency now being retired, and 
 subsidiary silver coin, really a token coinage by a limita- 
 tion upon the amount to be issued, made equal to green- 
 backs in value ; gold coin being used only in business 
 transactions on the Pacific coast, where it circulates to the 
 amount of about $25,000,000, and by the Government in 
 the collection of customs and payment of principal and 
 interest of funded debt, and worth at this time 12 to 13 
 per cent, more than the national and bank notes which 
 constitute the great body of the circulation. 
 
 Now, certainly one great object to be attained, the 
 
276 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 greatest, I think, in any legislation upon the currency, is 
 to bring the different currencies in use to one standard of 
 value, and, if possible, to that standard recognized by the 
 commercial world. The new factor which it is proposed 
 to introduce not only does not reconcile those now in use, 
 but is an additional element of variation. 
 
 When this bill was introduced about a month ago, the 
 bullion of the silver dollar it proposes to coin was worth 
 II per cent, less than gold and 2 per cent, more than 
 greenbacks. It is now worth 13 per cent, less than gold 
 and \^o \ per cent, less than greenbacks. If this bill can 
 be operative at all, the value of silver will be somewhat 
 enhanced by the new use created for it, but just how much 
 no one can predict. If, in the fluctuation of the bullion 
 market or the value of legal tenders, the silver dollar 
 should again become worth more than the greenback, 
 who would pay an obligation in silver which could be dis- 
 charged in United States notes? You compel the use of 
 gold for certain purposes but give an option to silver, and 
 whenever it is worth more than United States notes it 
 will drop from the Mint into the melting-pot, but never 
 go into circulation. 
 
 In that condition, you could only compel its use by 
 withdrawing from circulation all national and bank notes 
 of less denomination than $20, and then you would have 
 the anomaly of requiring small transactions to be con- 
 ducted and small payments to be made in a medium of 
 greater value than large ones, in place of the absurdity of 
 supposing it will be done without compulsion. 
 
 Suppose there shall be continued decline in silver in the 
 markets of the world, and it would take more silver dollars 
 than greenbacks to purchase a hundred dollars in gold or 
 a hundred bushels of wheat, then, as fast as they could be 
 manufactured, silver dollars would crowd national notes 
 out of circulation, supplanting paper money, not by a 
 superior, but by an inferior currency. That is the natural 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 277 
 
 law, if there be anything natural about money. I admit 
 that it would be counteracted for a time by the practical 
 limitation of silver coinage to the capacity of our mints. 
 
 This is purely mechanical, and does not concern the 
 theory of the bill. The tendency of silver to fall below 
 greenbacks would be mitigated, not destroyed, by the 
 inability of the mint to manufacture silver dollars fast 
 enough to supply the demand ; this indeed would be a 
 new variable quantity introduced into a question, which 
 can only be solved by an equation — an equation we shall 
 endeavor in vain to formulate where all the quantities are 
 unknown variables. No man can predict the relative value 
 of silver and greenbacks six months from now, or on the 
 day this bill may become a law. Yet the practical opera- 
 tion of the bill depends upon the remote contingency that 
 this silver coinage, with its legal tender limited to $20, shall 
 settle to and fluctuate with national notes legal tenders 
 for any amount. 
 
 Rhetorical criticism distinguishes between an improba- 
 ble possibility and an impossible probability. I am at a 
 loss to know to which of these categories this contingency 
 belongs. 
 
 Though I admit that silver, being below greenbacks, 
 the bill may be operative for a period — not, however, ex 
 propria vigore, — but simply from the mechanical disability 
 of the mint to comply with the theory of the bill. 
 
 We have had experience enough to teach us that values 
 cannot be fixed by legislation. The only possible way in 
 which an identity of value can be maintained between 
 two instruments created by law, is to make them inter- 
 convertible ; and that brings me to consider the second 
 section of the bill which provides : 
 
 First. That the Secretary of the Treasury is authorized 
 to exchange silver dollars for an equal amount of United 
 States notes which shall be retired and cancelled, and not 
 again be replaced by other notes, etc. 
 
278 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Now, how is the Secretary of the Treasury to get silver 
 dollars with which to redeem greenbacks? By collections 
 of internal revenue? 
 
 If silver should be worth less than greenbacks, it will be 
 paid into the Treasury to the extent of its manufacture; 
 but who would want to exchange greenbacks for it, giving 
 more for less ? In that event, it must either lie in the 
 Treasury as dead capital, or be paid out to reluctant 
 creditors of the Government under the twenty-dollar legal- 
 tender clause ; the smallest claims upon the Government 
 losing the largest percentage of the discount, and claims 
 of $20, or under, losing it all. Suppose the silver to be 
 worth more than greenbacks, who will pay it into the 
 Treasury when he can pay greenbacks — that is, pay more 
 when he can pay less ? 
 
 To cover every contingency, suppose that, being in 
 commercial value less than or equal to greenbacks, it 
 does get into the Treasury, and that in the fluctuations 
 of both or either it is enhanced — then first come first 
 served. The most active holders of greenbacks would 
 drain the Treasury's till, and the Government would be 
 compelled to suspend specie payments after resumption. 
 As soon as that contingency did occur, no more silver 
 would flow into the Treasury, and silver-specie redemption 
 would have the fluctuations of the tides without their 
 regularity. 
 
 Again, we have a law requiring the redemption of na- 
 tional notes in coin on and after January i, 1879. The 
 present bill is not inconsistent with it, and if it be enacted 
 and the resumption law not repealed, we shall have this 
 condition of things on that day ; the bills of the denomi- 
 nation of $20 or under can be redeemed in silver, of larger 
 denomination must be redeemed in gold. 
 
 Of course the largest holders of money could avail 
 themselves of this profit to the greatest extent. The 
 banks would accumulate the greenbacks of denominations 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 2/9 
 
 larger than $20, in order to make the premium on gold. 
 They would call in their own large notes, substitute the 
 smaller, and be able to redeem their own circulation in 
 silver while receiving the interest on their bonds and 
 collecting their reserves from the Government in gold. 
 Under the law a bank having any large bills in circulation 
 could easily avail itself of the opportunity for the whole 
 of this profit, and retiring its whole circulation by making 
 the deposit required in the Treasury and then issuing a 
 new one. 
 
 The remaining provision of this section requires that the 
 United States notes which shall be redeemed in silver be 
 cancelled and not be replaced by other notes. Upon this 
 I have only two suggestions : 
 
 First. In the past few years silver has been just as 
 mercurial, just as variable in value as United States notes ; 
 for the one quality we desire in money, stability, it is not 
 superior. While this condition continues, it is a question- 
 able gain to substitute an interest-bearing for a non- 
 interest-bearing debt. 
 
 Second. No one, I imagine, supposes that silver itself, 
 except for purposes of change, will circulate very exten- 
 sively as money. 
 
 The freight on silver, when sent by express, by railroad, 
 or steamship, may not be greater than on gold ; but no 
 one wants to carry even $20 in silver in his pocket, or to 
 get an express-wagon, a hand-cart, or a dray to make a de- 
 posit in, or collect a draft from, a bank. 
 
 What would really circulate would be promises to pay 
 silver, and we should end by using the credit of a bank 
 instead of the credit of the Government as money. 
 
 There are those who think this an improvement, and 
 that it is " specie payment." I do not ; and I think the 
 history of American banking sustains the conclusion that 
 bank credit is not any more stable than the credit of the 
 Government. 
 
280 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 The fact that under every system of banking we have 
 ever had prior to the one we now have, which is based 
 upon the credit of the Government, the loss to the people 
 through bank bills has equalled their average circulation 
 every thirty years may justify the doubt that that model 
 of human perfection, the bank director, is absolutely and 
 immaculately infallible, or that the difference between him 
 and that summiun malum, the politician, is so great that it 
 cannot be calculated by logarithms or measured by astro- 
 nomical instruments. 
 
 I pass to section 3, and have to confess that its meaning 
 is to my mind so obscure, that I fear I shall not comment 
 intelligently upon the meaning it is intended to express. 
 Its first provision reads : 
 
 " That any owner of silver bullion may deposit the same at the mints, to 
 be taken at its market value, as ascertained and publicly announced from 
 time to time by the Director of the Mint, with the approval of the Secre- 
 tary of the Treasury, and to be paid for either in silver dollars, or with gold 
 coin, or United States notes." 
 
 The privilege to deposit is as wide as language can make 
 it. Under any ordinary rule of interpretation payment 
 must be made on the day of deposit at the market value 
 of that day. Our mints have a capacity to coin, in addi- 
 tion to other necessary business, not to exceed fifteen 
 million silver dollars a year. Under this provision of the 
 bill, in the present condition of the silver-bullion market, 
 enough bullion might be deposited in one day to run the 
 mints for years ; the Secretary of the Treasury would be 
 at the mercy of the bullion dealers, and would be com- 
 pelled to receive and pay for bullion in large quantities 
 when it was high and unable to buy it when it became 
 cheap. So far from being able to take advantage of 
 fluctuations of the market, the fluctuations would take 
 advantage of him. 
 
 What is the meaning of " market value " in this clause? 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 28 1 
 
 Of course the market value of silver must be quoted in 
 something other than silver. To quote it in itself would 
 be as absurd as saying the price of a bushel of wheat is a 
 bushel of wheat, or to refine the mathematical axiom, 
 " Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other," 
 into " The same thing as equal to itself." 
 
 It is true that silver coin is manufactured silver, and 
 bullion raw material ; but in this instance the cost of 
 manufacture is so uniform and so slight that it need not 
 be taken into account. Silver dollars, where there is no 
 legal restriction upon the amount which can be coined, 
 will fluctuate in value exactly with silver bullion. As a 
 matter of fact, we know that silver is quoted in gold. The 
 Senator from Indiana [Mr. Morton] interpreted the clause 
 under consideration as authorizing the Secretary of the 
 Treasury to pay for silver bullion the gold price in silver 
 coin or greenbacks. This is the obvious meaning of the 
 language, but the conclusion is so obviously absurd that 
 I suppose we shall be driven to seek some other construc- 
 tion. 
 
 The meaning intended probably is that the bullion shall 
 be paid for either in gold coin, or in silver coin, or green- 
 backs reduced to gold value. I only pause to note the 
 fact that we are compelled to go back to gold as the 
 world's standard of value even in providing the material 
 for silver coin, and to point the moral that laws of trade 
 cannot be overruled by acts of Congress, and that benefi- 
 cent legislation on the subject of trade must be in har- 
 mony with these silent laws which we can neither enact 
 nor repeal. 
 
 In this connection I may refer to the amendment offered 
 by the Senator from Missouri [Mr. Bogy], that the "rela- 
 tion between gold and silver is hereby fixed at \^\ to i." 
 As the weight of the silver dollar has already been fixed 
 at 412.8 grains and of the gold dollar at 25.8 grains, the 
 amendment does not change either of these weights, but 
 
282 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 only a rule of arithmetic, and makes the following a legal 
 proportion: 412.8: 25.8:: 15^^: i. 
 
 The concluding clause of the section gives the Secretary 
 of the Treasury the option to buy silver bullion out of the 
 " bullion fund," but as the sellers have an unlimited option 
 to sell under the prior provision the Secretary will not have 
 an opportunity to exercise his until the rules which govern 
 buyers and sellers are reversed. 
 
 The theory of the bill is to give circulation to silver, 
 but its provision seems to me inadequate to accomplish 
 the result. The logical conclusion of the able and learned 
 speech of the Senator from Nevada is that we should 
 make silver the standard of value and medium of ex- 
 change. 
 
 I do not underestimate the force of his reasoning in 
 favor of what is called the " double standard," but no one 
 knows better than he that only one standard will be in 
 use at one time except so far as a specific use is given by 
 law to the other, as is the case in regard to gold with us 
 in payment of customs and interest. 
 
 The superior convenience of " paper money " will pre- 
 vent the extensive circulation of silver coin. So long as 
 the representative of value will answer the same purpose 
 as value itself the coin will not circulate, but only its rep- 
 resentative. Why not issue the representative upon the 
 bullion without the expense and delay of coinage ? The 
 Government might receive silver bullion in bars or ingots 
 and issue notes thereon in multiples of $5, redeemable at 
 the option of the Government in silver coin, or upon 
 presentation of a stipulated amount, in standard silver 
 bullion. 
 
 As we shall ultimately reach the point where paper 
 promises to pay silver will circulate as silver, why not start 
 there and avoid the payment to the owners of silver bul- 
 lion a profit which will accrue from the inability of the 
 Mint to supply the demand for silver coin ? Why not 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 283 
 
 look the whole question in the face, and adopt a bill which 
 will give the theory of this bill fair play, if the theory be 
 correct ? 
 
 The question now arises, and it is a pivotal question, 
 what should be the value of the silver dollar? How much 
 should it express ? Shall it be of the same weight as when 
 we parted company with it, twenty-three years ago ? Shall 
 we assume that it retains the same relation to gold, the ac- 
 cepted international standard, that it did then, though we 
 know it does not? Shall we recognize by law the relation 
 which we know exists to-day and make the bullion in the 
 silver dollar to be coined equal to that of the gold dollar 
 which is coined ? Shall we endeavor to ascertain what 
 the value of silver will be when the bill is passed which 
 shall make it possible to use silver as the basis of circula- 
 tion, and establish upon that the legal relation between 
 silver and gold ? If the latter, who can determine or even 
 approximate that relation to-day ? 
 
 The Senator from Nevada argued very ably in favor of 
 the double standard, but it was a double standard that 
 started from the same point, the two lines running to- 
 gether, and where the variations of each were supposed 
 to be corrected and equalized by the average of relation 
 of each to the other. That is, gold and silver starting 
 from a common point, both variable of changing relations 
 to each other, both would touch a straight line drawn 
 from that point oftener than either. This would un- 
 doubtedly be true so long as the variations of both were 
 about that line, each being sometimes above and some- 
 times below it. I am aware of the dif^culty of drawing 
 that straight line of value. I anticipate the answer that 
 it can only be fixed by first knowing the average of differ- 
 ences between gold and silver. But here a new factor 
 comes in, the comparatively modern factor, the use of 
 credit as money, and the impossibility of a correct solu- 
 tion drives me back to consider the necessity of the single 
 
284 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 standard by which all values shall be measured, to which 
 all quantities shall be reduced. 
 
 The assimilation in value between national notes and 
 silver to-day is an accident — an accident which cannot be 
 properly taken into account in fixing the relation between 
 silver and gold in the adoption of silver as the currency 
 of the country. The Senator from Nevada in effect ad- 
 mitted this when he expressed the opinion that the 
 adoption of silver for that purpose would approximate its 
 value to our present gold coinage ; that is, bring back the 
 relation between gold and silver to the proportion of i 
 to i6. The general theory of his speech failed, I think, 
 to give due weight to the use of credit as money, for 
 he assumed that by universal experience only gold and 
 silver furnished the materials out of which money could 
 properly be made. Granting this for the purpose of the 
 argument, though by modern usage and with vast labor- 
 saving credit is used as money for ninety-nine one-hun- 
 dredths of business, let us consider what is the philosophy 
 of the double standard. It is this : that gold and silver, 
 both starting from the same point, a common unit of value, 
 their average differences after leaving that point will 
 establish the line about which values ought to be deter- 
 mined, and that practically for the time being values 
 always will be determined by the factor which happens 
 to be below that line. This is a very different question 
 from starting from two points, one ten degrees below the 
 other, in the hope that the lines drawn from each will 
 eventually meet and then vary about a mean line. Since 
 the time we ceased to use the silver dollar it has diverged 
 from gold ten degrees ; shall we get down to the level of 
 the one or up to the level of the other ? 
 
 If we intend to get down to the level of the silver dol- 
 lar as estabhshed by this bill, what shall we gain by the 
 exchange ? It will cost us an annual interest of at least 
 $ r 4,000,000 to make the exchange of greenbacks for silver. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE, 28$ 
 
 If credit will answer precisely the same purpose as silver, 
 but we must revert to silver because it costs more, by a 
 parity of reasoning we ought to abolish all labor-saving 
 machinery, for in making exchanges the use of credit is 
 only an improvement on that labor-saving machinery of 
 which money is the original invention. If, on the other 
 hand, it is supposed that, by the use of promises to pay in 
 silver, silver itself will be brought back to the relation in 
 value it sustained to gold twenty-three years ago, I shall 
 endeavor to show that with less difficulty and expense 
 we can bring greenbacks and gold to a common value, 
 utilize all without losing the special advantage of either. 
 
 I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do not expect 
 to inaugurate the millennium by legislative enactment ; 
 I do not expect to reverse the law, " In the sweat of thy 
 face shalt thou earn thy bread " ; I do not expect the 
 world to move except as the glacier moves, imperceptibly. 
 To-day will not be greatly better than yesterday or to- 
 morrow than to-day. 
 
 Whoever looks to great immediate improvement from 
 inflation or from instant return to specie payments may 
 prognosticate and give loose rein to imagination in safety, 
 for both are impossible ; the first absolutely, and the last 
 because no living man has the courage to face its conse- 
 quences. 
 
 I have heard here and elsewhere that it is a point of 
 honor to resume. Sir, if that be so, there is nothing else 
 to be considered. If it be a point of honor to resume, it 
 is a disgrace to think of consequences. The national 
 honor is above all other considerations ; when that is in- 
 volved, the nation that hesitates is lost. Resumption in 
 itself is easy, more easy than lying. 
 
 Pass a bill to-morrow that greenbacks can be funded 
 into fifty-year 4 per cent, gold bonds, and the day the bill 
 is signed gold and greenbacks will be of equal value. In 
 six months, if any greenbacks are outstanding, they will be 
 
286 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 at a premium in gold. If national honor is involved we 
 are disgraced ; and doubly disgraced because a redemption 
 is so easy. It is true we should drive banks into liquidation, 
 bring mortgaged property to the red flag, debtors to bank- 
 ruptcy ; but if the national honor be in pawn, we should 
 redeem it though at the price of a million lives, and it is 
 base huckstering to talk about loss of property. Perish 
 all considerations of pecuniary loss to citizens in the 
 presence of that greater loss, national honor. 
 
 Pardon me, Mr. President ; this is mere " parrot-talk," 
 it is " sound and fury." If the national honor were at 
 stake, we should not hear of it first from the money- 
 changers in the temple, but from the voice of the people 
 driving the money-changers out ; or to change the simile, 
 it would be the people, blind to all else, stalking by the 
 instinct of honor into the temple and grasping its columns 
 to save it or perish in its ruins ; for where honor is to be 
 saved nothing can be counted as lost. National honor is 
 not a thing discovered in debate and cast as make-weight 
 into the scales of argument. It is not rhetorical hyper- 
 bole. Instinct feels it before reason discovers it. It is a 
 thing for which to stand against the world, against the 
 world in arms ; supreme devotion to which would count 
 loss as gain and would feel the world dropping beneath 
 its feet with the ecstasy which consoles, sustains, trans- 
 lates, and transfigures the martyr — the feeling which makes 
 man a hero, the hero a god. I confess I am impatient 
 with phrases which are used to bridge over a want of 
 meaning. Let us look at this question of " honor " closely. 
 First, if any man of honor honestly thought after close 
 communion this were the question, to him it would be the 
 only question, and he would not stand upon the order of 
 resumption, but resume at once. Until this were done he 
 would 
 
 " Make mad the guilty and appal the free, 
 Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed 
 The very faculties of eyes and ears." 
 
POLITICAL LIFE, 28/ 
 
 Let US look into this question of honor. We have 
 passed through a war where the nation's honor and safety 
 were at stake. In preserving both we spent all the gold 
 and silver in the country (not to mention some hundreds 
 of thousands of lives which were freely given for the 
 national honor and which are not rated in money), and 
 went into debt for some $2,500,000,000. A portion of this 
 was borrowed from the people themselves, and there being 
 now no gold and silver coin left, some form of credit had 
 to be used, as some form of credit had long before been 
 used, as money ; a portion of this loan by the people was 
 so used from necessity — that necessity which is supreme 
 law. 
 
 Now, we are compelled to speak of the Government 
 and the people as distinct things ; but so far as revenue 
 and debts are concerned, the revenues of the Government 
 are derived from the people, the debts of the Govern- 
 ment are paid by the people, and in this regard at least 
 the Government is the corporation of which the people 
 are the stockholders. 
 
 Let us suppose a corporation composed of one hundred 
 stockholders, having exclusive possession of an island 
 cultivated on joint account : The corporation owes a 
 large debt, larger than it can immediately pay, one quarter 
 of which, say $50,000, is held by the stockholders in the 
 form of certificates of indebtedness. The directors say to 
 the stockholders, the corporation owes you this amount, 
 and we must borrow the money and pay you. The stock- 
 holders answer, these certificates we hold answer our pur- 
 pose as money ; if you borrow the money to pay us, you 
 will have to assess us to pay the interest on the loan ; be- 
 sides all this, our relations to each other have been adjusted 
 on those certificates ; these relations will be disturbed and 
 confused if they are retired ; if they should be retired, we 
 know we shall have to pay the interest on the loans which 
 absorb them, and that ten per cent, of our number will 
 
288 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 then furnish us certificates of their credit, which we shall 
 be compelled to use as money precisely as the certificates 
 we now use. Then the directors would answer their par- 
 rot-talk, we the corporation owe you, the stockholders, 
 and as a point of honor we must assess you to pay the 
 interest on what we shall borrow to pay you. 
 
 Some one will discover a fallacy in this illustration, 
 because the stockholders do not hold these certificates in 
 the exact proportion to their stock. To this the answer 
 is that, among the people who are the stockholders in this 
 great corporation, the American Union, there is not one 
 who holds a green-backed certificate of indebtedness who 
 cannot get for it all that it cost him in any of the ex- 
 changes of business, in the purchase of commodities, pay- 
 ment of debts, or by loan at interest. That portion of 
 the question resolves itself to this : some form of credit 
 will be used as money. At present the people are using 
 their own credit for that purpose. Shall they continue to 
 do that, or borrow the money to pay themselves, and then 
 use the credit of a part, organized into banks, in the place 
 of the whole, and give the banks the advantage to be de- 
 rived from such use in place of retaining it for the whole. 
 Shall it be national credit or bank credit ? " That is the 
 question." Let me not be misunderstood. I think it the 
 true policy of the country to bring every form of currency 
 used as money to the same standard of value ; and that 
 standard ought to be the gold standard, because that is 
 the one recognized by the commercial world, and I believe 
 it will be so recognized, whatever our legislation may be ; 
 but I am convinced that can be accomplished more easily 
 with national notes than bank-notes. 
 
 I confess I fail to perceive the important consequences 
 which were attributed by the Senator from Nevada to the 
 omission to provide for the coinage of the silver dollar in 
 1873. If he be right, the Congress of the United States, 
 like Atlas, bears the world on its shoulders. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 289 
 
 I believe I have a high appreciation of the responsibili- 
 ties of public office, but I have always consoled myself 
 with the reflection that the mighty stream of human life 
 and activity would flow on its great channel despite any 
 accidental mistake of ours. 
 
 Why, sir, the whole silver coinage of the United States 
 mints from 1821 to 1873 was less than $140,000,000. For 
 more than twenty years the silver dollar had not been in 
 use in the United States and was not known outside the 
 collections of curious coins. To say that the value of 
 silver and the monetary market throughout the world and 
 the conditions of all values and all contracts was disturbed 
 by an omission to provide for doing that which we had 
 long ceased to do, may be true to that faculty, the imagi- 
 nation, which can construct the known out of the un- 
 known, but is at least doubtful to the understanding, 
 which can only reason upon facts. And, sir, if we had 
 authorized its coinage from that day to the first day of 
 this month, the only use we could have put it to would 
 have been to receive it for customs and pay on our funded 
 debt. Of this I shall speak hereafter. 
 
 The Senator's theory, if I correctly understand, is that 
 embraced by the amendments of the Senator from Mis- 
 souri, which would result in the use of silver alike in place 
 of greenbacks in general business, and of gold in payment 
 of the principal and interest of the funded debt. The 
 plan is not without its advantages. One is, it would con- 
 tinue existing contracts substantially upon the same basis 
 on which they were formed. This, however, would be 
 destroyed if the hypothesis of the Senator from Nevada 
 be correct that the value of silver would be enhanced by 
 the new use created for it. Granting it, however, for the 
 moment to the full, what is the advantage in this par- 
 ticular of exchanging one system for another at a large 
 expense, simply for maintaining relations which will be 
 equally maintained under the present system ? Is it 
 
290 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 alleged that the advantage will accrue in that silver will 
 appreciate to the gold value ? National notes can be 
 made to do so with far more ease and certainty. Is it 
 argued that we shall get the benefit of the double stand- 
 ard ? The true philosophy of the double standard is 
 that the two metals should start with a common unit of 
 value, that their variations might mutually correct each 
 other. 
 
 To start with one thirteen degrees below the other is 
 simply to adopt the lower standard and to abandon the 
 only benefit — mutual corrections — which is claimed for 
 the double standard. It is not the " double standard " 
 in any proper sense where all offices of both must from 
 the nature of things be performed by one. 
 
 Is it argued that with silver currency we shall escape 
 the bug-bear of inflation that haunts the timid mind ? 
 Silver currency cannot be inflated, because it costs labor 
 to get silver. Costs whom and how much ? The man 
 who does get it ; a dollar in service to get as much as will 
 pass for a dollar. So long as it costs a dollar in service 
 to get a national note for a dollar, there is no more dan- 
 ger of inflation in one system than the other. This much 
 for the substitution of silver for national notes as currency 
 in the general business of the country on the basis of 
 value proposed in the bill. 
 
 Let us examine for a few moments the theory of sub- 
 stituting silver for gold in the payment of the principal 
 and interest of the funded debt. If we have a right to 
 do this, it is purely technical. At the time when we 
 agreed by law to pay principal and interest in coin, gold 
 was cheaper than the silver which it is now proposed to 
 pay, and that was the reason of our election to pay in 
 gold. At that time the silver dollar which we now pro- 
 pose to pay had no existence in fact ; it was only a legal 
 possibility, a very " barren ideality," for it had passed out 
 of memory and did not enter the imagination ; it was as 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 29 1 
 
 obsolete then in fact as it is now in law. The revenues 
 which were set apart for the payment of this debt were 
 collected in gold, for there was no silver with which to 
 pay them, and no one contemplated there would be any. 
 The silver dollar was not so much eliminated from the 
 law as it dropped out of it. What shall we gain now by 
 availing ourselves of a technical legal right to pay in silver 
 that which we elected to pay in gold when it was our in- 
 terest to do so, and which election has determined the 
 market value of our bonds at home and abroad, the price 
 at which they are bought and sold ? 
 
 We shall scale down our funded debt thirteen per cent., 
 say $200,000,000. But if the argument be correct that the 
 use of silver for all purposes of money will bring its value 
 on the basis of the proposed coinage to that of gold, then 
 shall we take nothing by our device, for Banquo we shall 
 have filed our mind. 
 
 What shall we lose? We shall lose the high estimation 
 of public opinion, which is the world's conscience. We 
 shall lose that fine sense of honor which is the soul of 
 credit, and which it is even more profitable to the debtor to 
 observe than to the creditor to exact. In the distinction 
 between a moral obligation and a legal right we shall 
 place ourselves upon the lower plane. 
 
 A nation that owes vast sums, and whose policy it is to 
 use its credit at the lowest rate of interest, cannot afford 
 even to seem to seek a temporary advantage by availing 
 -itself of a technical right. 
 
 By keeping upon the high plane of moral obligation, 
 by maintaining our credit to a nice sense of honor in the 
 forum of the conscience of the public opinion of man- 
 kind, we shall not only honor ourselves and our insti- 
 tutions, but we shall receive a temporal reward far 
 exceeding any the tempter can offer. By so doing we 
 shall be able to convert our funded debt into a security 
 (and there is a world of meaning in the word security ; it 
 
292 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 does not mean insecurity), into a security bearing an 
 interest of three per cent, per annum. If we begin to 
 palter in a double sense, and keep the word of promise 
 to the ear only, we shall lose the opportunity to save 
 quadruple our questionable gains. 
 
 Something has been said of the Shylock spirit of the 
 creditor which exacts the pound of flesh. The phrase is 
 somewhat musty. It is to be remembered that the 
 heroism of Antonio is shown in his willingness to submit 
 to the penalty of his bond as he understood it as well as 
 the rapacity of Shylock in exacting it ; and it is only an 
 evidence of a sad tendency in human nature that the 
 rapacity is immortalized, the heroism is forgot. If 
 Antonio had promised to pay ducats — elected to pay 
 gold ducats when that was his rightful advantage, after- 
 ward sought to discharge the debt in silver when he found 
 a profit therein, the world's verdict in the case of 
 Shylock vs. Antonio would have been different ; Portia's 
 legal quibble as amicus curicB would hardly have been 
 justified, her divine appeal for mercy sadly out of place. 
 
 Sir, there is one rule of morals which can seldom mis- 
 lead : in a doubtful question which involves your own • 
 interest, give the doubt against yourself. The nation 
 which observes this rule will find its reward exceeding 
 great in this world as certainly as the man who does will 
 in the world to come. 
 
 I have reached certain conclusions which I shall state, 
 not in their logical or natural order, but in that which is 
 most convenient for my purpose : 
 
 First. That the funded debt of the Government 
 should be paid in gold. 
 
 Second. That the " double standard " requires at the 
 time of its adoption a common unit of value, and to 
 avail ourselves of its supposed benefits we must increase 
 the silver dollar. 
 
 Third. That all forms of currency in use at any given 
 time ought to be equivalent in value. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 293 
 
 Fourth. That gold by the common consent of the 
 commercial world is the ultimate standard by which all 
 values are measured. 
 
 Fifth. That some form of credit is now and always 
 will be used as money in every civilized commercial 
 country. 
 
 Sixth. That with us we ought to use the national 
 credit directly in the form of national notes and not lend 
 it to the banks for that purpose, and that we can and 
 ought as a matter of wise policy to make national notes 
 as good as gold. 
 
 It is only the last proposition which I intend further to 
 discuss, and I trust I shall be pardoned if in the hurry of 
 preparation I sometimes use language and illustrations 
 which I have used upon another occasion. 
 
 I believe our funded debt can be reduced to the lowest 
 possible rate of interest in the United States notes appre- 
 ciated to the gold standard and maintained there by the 
 use of an interconvertible bond the interest upon which 
 is payable in gold. 
 
 I know the term " interconvertible bond" is wont to 
 fright us from our propriety. To some it suggests the 
 supernal, to others the infernal ; to some it is a badge 
 of repudiation, to others the harbingers of the millennium ; 
 to some it is a charm to exorcise every devil, to others 
 a very devil which no exorcism can lay. To me it is a 
 harmless instrument which cannot accomplish miracles, 
 but does furnish the best practical solution of the cur- 
 rency question. There is no easy road out of the present 
 depressed state of our business and industry. It is the 
 necessary result of our history ; it is one of the after- 
 effects of the war and as inevitable as its bloody foot- 
 prints. It is the mortgage left on our estate by the war. 
 War is destruction — destruction of property as well as life. 
 Imagine a million of men in this country idle for four 
 years ; how vast the loss to production. But a million of 
 men, all their energies perverted for four years from pro- 
 
294 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 duction, to destruction, when often the act of a moment can, 
 destroy the work of years, who shall estimate the difference 
 or calculate the loss? But the business of the Northern 
 States was never more prosperous than during the war. 
 Why ? The war, though it was the business of destruction, 
 was still a business, giving employment to vast numbers 
 of men and stimulating every industrial pursuit into the 
 highest activity to supply the demand created by the war. 
 The war was a great iire, into which every man was 
 throwing his goods at an extravagant price, which the 
 nation borrowed the money to pay. Revelling in the 
 riches of the pay, we did not pause to reflect that we, the 
 people, were the nation, and must pay the debt ourselves. 
 Our riches were like fairy gold. We squandered our 
 inheritance, borrowed of the world, and discounted our 
 future at usurious interest. No man is so prodigal as the 
 borrower who does not think of pay-day, none so poor 
 as he when pay-day comes. 
 
 But our prosperity continued years after the close of 
 the war. Yes, we seemed to be rich on the very waste 
 of the war ; the evidences of our own indebtedness were 
 counted as riches. We, the nation, owed us, the people ; 
 the fairy gold had not vanished. There was one ele- 
 ment of prosperity more real while it lasted, an active 
 demand for labor to supply the vacuum created by the 
 war. In the daze of the hour prices were factitious, 
 extravagance the habit, credit inflated, and labor wasted 
 in unprofitable enterprise. 
 
 But there is no such inexorable creditor as time, and 
 pay-day has come. Seven hundred and fifty million 
 dollars collected in taxes every year is a burden upon the 
 industries of this people which no magic can conjure 
 away. There are those who fancy we are suffering from 
 over-production ; as if there could be too great a produc- 
 tion of what is necessary to the sustenance, the comfort, 
 and enjoyment of life, while vast numbers are in want. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 295 
 
 Over-production means inability of consumers, and every 
 one is a consumer. It is not too much capital at one end, 
 but too little at the other. We complain that capital 
 does not seek new enterprise. How can it, successfully, 
 when taxation is higher than interest in many other 
 countries. I am not of those who believe that relief can 
 come from all this except through patience, labor, and 
 economy. Through these I know it can, and there is no 
 other way opened up. 
 
 What would a man or a corporation do when embar- 
 rassed by debt ? One thing, certainly : reduce the inter- 
 est to the lowest possible rate. A nation may use its 
 credit with greater advantage than an individual or cor- 
 poration. It is perpetual, and the markets of the world 
 are open to it ? What species of loan will command the 
 lowest rate of interest ? A long loan, on account of its 
 permanence as an investment, and a loan on call, by 
 reason of its convertibility at pleasure. The national 
 bond which would unite these qualities in the highest 
 degree would be perpetual, but convertible at the pleas- 
 ure of the holder. 
 
 The English consol is a perpetual 3 per cent, worth 95 
 per cent, and practically as steady as gold. The differ- 
 ence between 3 and 5 per cent, on our national debt com- 
 pounded for thirty-five years would pay it off. Visionary 
 as it may appear, that is one effect which I believe can 
 be accomplished by a bond perpetual in terms, interest 
 payable in gold, and convertible at the pleasure of the 
 holder into United States notes. 
 
 How can such a bond be put upon the market success- 
 fully? By making greenbacks and bank-notes now in 
 circulation convertible into it, and when it advances to 
 par in gold redeem with it the outstanding 6 per cents. 
 But if it does not advance to par? All legislation is to 
 some extent experimental, and this will cost nothing; our 
 5 per cent, loan was offered long before it was all taken. 
 
296 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 The monetary system of a country, like all its institu- 
 tions, is far more the result of its experience of the acci- 
 dents and exigencies of its history than of any deliberate 
 predetermined plan. Universal experience has demon- 
 strated certain fundamental principles, but the methods of 
 their application must vary with circumstances. No one 
 in this country advocates the establishment of an insti- 
 tution like the Bank of England, however wise its 
 adaptation may be to the wants and interests of the 
 United Kingdom. The Bank of Amsterdam has sub- 
 served a most useful purpose, but no one proposes to 
 copy it. 
 
 The great body of our circulating medium consists of 
 greenbacks and bank-notes. In what respect is the latter 
 superior to the former? I admit that our present system 
 of free national banking is the best that we have ever had. 
 Perhaps it is the best system of banks of issue that can 
 be devised. It is incomparably better than that which 
 made shinplasters, wildcat, red-dog, and blue-pup familiar 
 and significant names for paper-money ; when a bank- 
 note caught astray over a State line was arrested as a 
 trespasser ; when a counterfeit-detector and bank-note 
 list were as indispensable to every counting-house as a 
 cash-book or diary ; when exchange on New York could 
 reach 10 percent, premium in the Western States without 
 an appreciable difference in the solvency of the banks ; 
 when a man going from St. Louis to Boston would 
 pass through as many systems of currency as States, and 
 sometimes find a State system checkered with county 
 lines like a schoolboy's atlas, and his " money of account" 
 in the morning would be of no account in the evening. 
 Our present system is infinitely better, because it is based 
 upon better credit. There is absolute security for the ul- 
 timate redemption of national bank-notes. Redemption 
 of what? The notes of the United States. It is not the 
 credit of the banks which makes their notes good and 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 29/ 
 
 gives them uniform value wherever they circulate, but 
 the credit of the Government. 
 
 Now, in political economy as well as in mechanics, all 
 unnecessary machinery is a loss of effective power. Fric- 
 tion is to be avoided as much in one case as in the other. 
 Examine the practical working of our banking system 
 and see if there be not some unnecessary machinery and 
 waste of power. 
 
 The Government could only have two objects in 
 issuing greenbacks : first to obtain a loan without interest ; 
 second, to furnish a form of credit which should circulate 
 as money. 
 
 A national bank is organized ; it deposits a hundred 
 thousand dollars in United States bonds and five 
 thousand dollars in greenbacks in the United States 
 Treasury, and receives $90,000 in bank-notes signed by 
 the United States Treasurer, upon which it agrees to pay 
 the United States i per cent, per annum. In plain Eng- 
 lish, what is this but the bank borrowing the credit of 
 the Government for i per cent, per annum, and leaving 
 security, with a fair margin, upon which security 
 the Government pays the bank 5 or 6 per cent, per annum ? 
 That is, the bank pays the Government upon one form of 
 its credit i per cent., and the Government pays the bank 
 upon another form of its credit 5 or 6 per cent, in the 
 same transaction — and that not for one year, but while 
 the bank charter continues. 
 
 Now if the first object, a loan without interest, controls 
 the Government in issuing the greenback, that is defeated 
 by this operation to the extent of all bank circulation. 
 
 If the second, it is unnecessary, for the bank-note 
 never can be better than the greenback in which it is 
 payable. 
 
 You will observe I am speaking of the condition of 
 things which exists, and not what would be if the green- 
 back were eliminated. 
 
298 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Now suppose, for any cause, the bank goes into liqui- 
 dation. The Government sells the securities, and, after 
 redeeming the bills of the bank in Government bills 
 (for which as yet there is no plan of redemption), pays 
 over the residue to the stockholders. All this circum- 
 locution, from the first establishment of the bank to its 
 liquidation, to get back to the United States note, which 
 could have just as well been issued directly in the first 
 instance. 
 
 If it be necessary, by all means let us put fifth wheels 
 on our coach, devise engines to drive engines, invent a 
 grate to warm the fire, and grease water that it may 
 run down hill ! 
 
 It is constantly said that the Government ought not to 
 engage in the business of banking. It is engaged in the 
 " business of banking," and it undertakes to wind up 
 banks and to administer upon their assets in a manner as 
 unprofitable as unnecessary. It maintains a redemption 
 agency for bank bills at the expense of the Treasury. 
 It receives deposits and issues certificates. It issues bank 
 bills to banks, requires reports from banks, regulates the 
 reserves of banks, examines the affairs of banks, and keeps 
 that kind of surveillance over banks which bank officers 
 and stockholders are supposed to do. It does everything 
 pertaining to banking which a bank might, could, would, or 
 should do, except discount bills and sell exchange, which, 
 in addition to receiving deposits, are the only things a 
 bank should do, and which no one proposes the Govern- 
 ment shall do. 
 
 The issuance of bills of credit to circulate as money is 
 not a function of banking, but of Government, and no 
 bank or individual is permitted to exercise it under any 
 wise policy except by the consent and delegation of 
 Government. That is evidenced by the care we exercise 
 to guard the privilege. It is a privilege, and that is an 
 odious part of it. True, it is a free privilege, but only 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 299 
 
 free to those whose circumstances or ability enable them 
 to avail themselves of it. 
 
 If the present system owes its confessed superiority to 
 the fact (as it confessedly does) that it is based upon the 
 Government credit, why not go one step further and use 
 the Government credit directly in place of lending it at 
 I percent, (out of which the expenses of the Government's 
 connection with banks must be deducted) and paying 5 
 or 6. 
 
 If one quarter the thought and attention had been given 
 to improving the national currency that have been to 
 dovetailing into it the bank-note and maintaining and 
 reconciling a system artificially complicated, the greenback 
 would have been at par with gold long ago. 
 
 It seems to be apprehended on the one hand that with- 
 out banks of issue there would be a deficiency of cur- 
 rency — that is, that it is necessary to pay some one to 
 keep up a supply of currency — and, on the other, that but 
 for the intervention of banks the Government would 
 " inflate " the currency. Suppose the Government to-day 
 could substitute greenbacks for the bank-notes in circu- 
 lation, — the volume of currency would be the same, the 
 quality no worse. Do you fear there would be a failure 
 of the necessary machinery for the proper distribution of 
 currency to meet the wants of the people and for the 
 accommodation of business? Have the receiving of 
 deposits, drawing exchange, and lending of money sud- 
 denly become so unprofitable or irksome a business that 
 no one will engage in it without the added premium of 
 a power to issue money ? 
 
 Suppose the substitution made, and to-morrow the 
 currency should be made convertible into a perpetual 3 
 per cent, gold bond, would not that improve the currency 
 to the value of such a bond ? Make the bond interconver- 
 tible with currency; will not that give it additional value, 
 by making it the receptacle of the money of estates of 
 
300 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 decedents and bankrupts under administration and giving 
 it a power of absorbing money temporarily idle but 
 wanted " on call " ? Is there an apprehension that its 
 absorbing qualities would become so great that the cur- 
 rency of the country would rush into it and disappear 
 from circulation ? That could only happen when such a 
 bond was worth a premium in gold ; then the gold of the 
 world would seek it as an investment, until our 6 per cent, 
 bonds could be exchanged for threes, a result I could 
 contemplate with very considerable philosophic com- 
 posure, even if it were nearer than I anticipate ; while 
 the catastrophe of an entire disappearance of our currency 
 would be effectually prevented by the option of the 
 Government to redeem it in gold. When that period 
 arrives men will take their gold to the United States 
 Treasury and exchange it for Government notes on ac- 
 count of their superior convenience. 
 
 Very seriously, I do believe a 3 per cent, interconvertible 
 gold bond would appreciate to par, carrying the green- 
 back with it with reasonable rapidity and certainty ; that 
 it would eventually take up all our bonds ; that, as such 
 a security would for many purposes be more valuable at 
 home than abroad, it would be held in larger proportions 
 at home than our present bonds are — large enough to 
 afford an ample basis for any expansion of currency, if any 
 should become necessary. 
 
 Under such a system, if more currency were necessary, 
 in place of the circumlocution of lending Government 
 credit to banks, the capital which now organizes banks 
 would take Government bonds to the Treasury, get notes 
 for them, with the absolute certainty that when, for any 
 cause, the notes came home, they would find the exact 
 security left in pledge for them. Government promises 
 under all circumstances would be fulfilled to the letter. 
 
 In place of accumulating gold in the Treasury to redeem, 
 enhancing its value by a large sudden demand, creating 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 3OI 
 
 an artificial stringency of money — the Treasury hoarding 
 gold upon the one hand and the people hoarding currency 
 upon the other to get the gold when the door of the 
 Treasury is opened — we should redeem the United States 
 notes with an instrument which would be a draft at sight 
 upon the treasury of the world, an open sesame to the 
 universal cash-box. 
 
 What an anomaly it is : a 4 per cent, forty-year bond 
 is worth par, in gold throughout the civilized world ; a 
 United States note is worth 13 percent, less than gold at 
 home. This anomaly, in my judgment, is owing to our 
 system of banks of issue. 
 
 It is urged with plausibility that the interconvertible 
 system would enable operators " for a corner " to retire 
 large amounts of currency from circulation and create an 
 artificial dearth. The objection is more seeming than 
 real. Such operations seldom extend their effects beyond 
 stock-gambling. The ease with which the vacuum could 
 be filled under the interconvertible system would greatly 
 prevent the attempt. Every day we should know the 
 exact amount added to or withdrawn from circulation ; 
 and this publicity would make a corner almost impossible. 
 We should have a signal-bureau to predict a financial 
 storm with infallible accuracy. It would be more easy to 
 create a stringency on the banking plan whenever we reach 
 any system of specie payment by investing in British 
 consols. But is the banking system so perfect that it can 
 discover so small a flaw as this and call it fatal ? Are 
 bank-notes subject to no vicissitudes? 
 
 While human nature continues as it is, with its thirst 
 for sudden riches, its spirit of speculation, its moral epi- 
 demics, its periods of elation and depression, we shall be 
 subject to financial crises at the meeting of ingoing and 
 outgoing tides. Even bank of^cers are not steel against 
 human emotions or proof against moral epidemics, the 
 excitements of hope and the despondency of fear. When 
 
302 NEWTON BOOTH, 
 
 revulsions come, as come they will, what can banks do to 
 mitigate them ? The danger to banks is from all sides. 
 Their depositors will be clamorous for pay, their note- 
 holders for gold, their debtors never so little able to assist 
 them. They must contract from every quarter, add 
 calamity to misfortune, and redouble the ruin which their 
 notes redeemable in gold have made them powerless to 
 withstand. In no American system of banking we have 
 ever had or shall have, can any bank in the most pros' 
 perous times redeem its obligations except by going into 
 liquidation. Albert Gallatin truly said : " The bank- 
 note is a direct promise to pay on the part of the maker, 
 with an implied promise never to ask payment on the 
 part of the receiver." 
 
 The interconvertible system has been called inflation. 
 Nothing can be further from the truth. Under it no one 
 can put a dollar in circulation without depositing security 
 for a dollar. In that it resembles and has all the ad- 
 vantages of the national-bank system. Under the na- 
 tional-bank system a bank desiring more currency deposits 
 United States bonds in the Treasury, gets currency, and 
 draws interest on the bonds deposited ; under the inter- 
 convertible system, whoever wants more currency must 
 deposit bonds just as the banker now does, but, unlike the 
 banker, he would draw no interest. Whatever defects 
 are chargeable to the latter system, inflation is not one 
 of them. But, under the banking system, whatever profit 
 there is on circulation is an inducement to inflation ; to 
 an unwise expansion of credit. From the very nature of 
 the system of banks of issue expansion and contraction 
 are periodical and ruinous. Banks only issue currency 
 for the sake of the profit on the circulation ; they will 
 inflate it whenever it can be done with profit, and must 
 contract whenever their safety is menaced. They con- 
 tribute alike to the excitements of speculative periods 
 and to the depressions which follow. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 303 
 
 Dean Swift by his Draper letters prevented the cir- 
 culation in Ireland of a copper coin authorized by act of 
 Parliament and certified by Sir Isaac Newton to be of the 
 weight and fineness required by law, because the privilege 
 of making it had been granted to a private party. The 
 idea of farming out to banks the privilege of supplying 
 the people with currency is an absurdity whose enormity 
 is only concealed by custom. It is reconciled to the 
 habits of men, not to their convictions. 
 
 There are many who advocate the funding of a fixed 
 amount of greenbacks per month, until by a reduction of 
 their volume they should be appreciated to gold. That 
 volume would vary with the necessities of business ; it 
 would vary with the seasons from day to day, be influ- 
 enced by the " moving of the crops," and all the vicissi- 
 tudes of business. It would at all times be controlled by 
 the banks who would share with the Government the 
 privilege of issuing currency. It is a mechanical method 
 of feeling the way up to the specie point by a series of 
 experiments instead of rising there through natural causes. 
 In what respect is it superior to the interconvertible plan 
 with a bond payable in gold ? The bond it offers bears 
 a higher rate of interest. It would compel the Treasury 
 to keep a large gold reserve, and enable the banks grad- 
 ually (and I suppose this to be the merit of the plan in 
 the minds of its advocates) to convert the United States 
 notes into gold and monopolize the whole field of cir- 
 culation. 
 
 One thing is certain, under any system either the 
 greenback or the bank-note will disappear from our 
 circulation. No arbitrary fixing of the amount of green- 
 backs will or ought to keep them in circulation as mere 
 tenders to bank-notes. We shall eventually have one 
 system or the other. If we have the banking system, 
 there will be no real resumption, no holding of gold as a 
 reserve which gives an absolute assurance of payment on 
 
304 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 presentation — the credit of the bank-note will still depend 
 upon the credit of the Government behind it. There 
 will be a great many banks of issue located at points 
 distant from business centres, and not of the most con- 
 venient access. The profit on circulation given to the 
 banks will be a premium offered for inflation, and a temp- 
 tation to it, which even the superior human nature of the 
 average bank director will not always resist. 
 
 Again, it is urged that under the interconvertible sys- 
 tem the Government will become a borrower of the idle 
 capital of the country. Why, sir, the Government is a 
 borrower now to the amount of more than $2,000,000,000, 
 and it can certainly be no disadvantage to transfer any 
 portion of this loan from the idle capital of Europe to 
 that of this country and from a higher to a lower rate of 
 interest. But it is a strange misuse of terms to call the 
 conversion of the greenback, which is one form of Gov- 
 ernment obligation, into a bond, which is another form of 
 obligation, borrowing. That ought to be the right of 
 the holder of the greenback if the Government does not 
 redeem in gold. Equally strange is it to call that a loan 
 by the Government if the holder of the United States 
 bond converts an obligation which bears interest to one 
 which does not. The whole theory of the plan is to 
 organize the credit of the Government so that the interest 
 paid shall be reduced to the lowest possible amount ; 
 that a creditor of the Government shall at all times have 
 the option of taking a bond which bears interest, or notes 
 without interest that will circulate as money ; and that 
 the bond and the note alike shall appreciate to par with 
 gold with as much rapidity as is equitable to existing 
 contracts ; and that we shall have one currency, good for 
 every purpose, bearing one device known of all men ; not 
 representing a privilege, but the credit of the nation ; 
 not regulated in bank parlors, but by the necessities of 
 the time ; not an idle promise to pay if you do not want 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 305 
 
 payment and a broken one if you do, but convertible at 
 all times into an instrument which is a draft at sight upon 
 the treasury of the world. 
 
 The Senator from Ohio in his speech advocating the 
 silver bill eloquently reminded us that he proposed to re- 
 introduce the dollar of the Revolution, and invoked upon 
 it the blessing of sacred memories. I was not aware 
 before that any silver dollars were coined by the United 
 States in the revolutionary period of our history. 
 
 Sir, we have currency that is consecrated by memories 
 more recent and not less glorious. We can preserve it as 
 a memento of a heroic time, make it the symbol of un- 
 broken faith and the pledge of a fraternal re-union, whose 
 consummation is alone worth the precious blood that it 
 has cost. 
 
 Much as I hope for the whole good that can be accom- 
 plished by this system, I do not imagine that if adopted it 
 will at once start the laggard wheels of industry and make 
 the waste places glad, but I do believe it will inspire 
 hope, courage, and confidence, and that its simplicity and 
 justice will commend it to the reason and conscience of 
 the American people. 
 
 Mr. President, there is one monarch of the world to-day 
 whose throne is above dominions and powers and princi- 
 palities, whose rule is supreme over law, edict, and decree. 
 That monarch is debt. It is the annual tribute he levies 
 upon the industry of this country I am anxious to reduce. 
 
 LETTER 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF "THE REPUBLICAN," DECEMBER, 1875. 
 
 CURRENCY SUGGESTIONS. 
 RADICAL REFORM BY WAY OF THE 3.65 CONVERTIBLE BONDS. 
 
 If the abstract question whether a currency of par 
 value with gold is better than one which is not, could be 
 propounded to the country, there would be but one 
 
306 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 answer. The theory being conceded, the practical ques- 
 tion is to bring the currency we have to par, and to keep 
 it there, with the least possible disturbance to business 
 and existing contracts. I believe that the device of the 
 interconvertible bond may be used for this purpose more 
 successfully than any plan which has been proposed, and 
 I beg to offer a few suggestions in the hope that they will 
 elicit that discussion which will expose any fallacy there 
 may be in the theory. 
 
 If Congress should enact that all legal-tender notes 
 should be convertible into fifty-year 5 per cent. Govern- 
 ment bonds, principal and interest payable in gold, green- 
 backs would become par the day the bill was signed, but 
 their absorption would be so rapid as to derange business, 
 ruin debtors, and drive many of the national banks into 
 liquidation. No one has proposed so heroic a remedy 
 for a depreciated currency. As the bond I have described 
 would very soon be worth a premium in gold, the entire 
 circulation of the national banks would be returned for 
 redemption — if it were not for the fact that the banks can 
 redeem in gold or greenbacks at their option. To-day 
 greenbacks and gold coin are both legal-tenders, and if a 
 bank-note should be presented for redemption it would be 
 paid in greenbacks; if greenbacks were fundable into a 
 bond worth more than its face in gold, the banks of course 
 would elect to pay in coin. In that event, all greenbacks 
 issued by the Government would disappear from circu- 
 lation, just as gold coin now does. Practically the bank- 
 note now is never presented for redemption because of 
 the absolute security of its ultimate redemption. The 
 convertibility of the bank-note into the greenback gives 
 them both the same value, though that is the only value 
 the bank-note has. They are, in fact, interconvertible — 
 either being given in exchange for the other in all busi- 
 ness transactions. It requires no demonstration that two 
 instruments issued by the Government and made inter- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 307 
 
 convertible will have the same value so long as both 
 exist. 
 
 The problem then is to make a bond into which cur- 
 rency may be converted, in which absorption would not 
 be too rapid, and which would gradually appreciate to par 
 as its credit would become estabhshed in the markets of 
 the world. The English consol is a perpetual 3 per cent, 
 bond, worth now 95 per cent., and it fluctuates so little 
 that its value is as stable as that of gold. A perpetual 
 American bond bearing 3.65 interest in gold, would become 
 of par value whenever its credit was as well established 
 as that of the English consol. Why not authorize the 
 issuance of such bonds, and make them and the currency 
 we now have interconvertible ? It would " improve " the 
 currency, and make its gradual appreciation to a gold 
 standard a reasonable certainty. The bonds could be 
 " registered " only, or of a denomination large enough to 
 prevent inflation by their circulation as money. The 
 interconvertible clause would add to their value, and make 
 them slightly more valuable at home than abroad. The 
 option of the Government to redeem greenbacks in gold 
 would prevent their entire absorption in case the bonds 
 should at any time be worth a premium in gold. 
 
 All legislation is experimental. Here is an experiment 
 which can be made without changing any existing law, 
 and with a positive assurance that it would do no harm. 
 If successful in all particulars, in a few years the whole 
 interest-bearing debt of the United States could be con- 
 verted into the new securities ; the Government would 
 be able to furnish the currency of the country upon a 
 promise that could alway be redeemed without the inter- 
 vention of blanks of issue ; and the volume of the cur- 
 rency would be self-regulating, in at least as high a degree 
 and with less friction than through any system of banking 
 which has been yet devised. 
 
308 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 LETTER 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF " THE REPUBLICAN," JANUARY I, 1876. 
 
 I am moved by both The Republican s approval and 
 criticism of my recent currency-reform suggestions (in the 
 communication signed " N. B." on the i6th ult.) to un- 
 fold more fully the principles and probable operation of 
 the scheme there briefly outlined. The pith of that com- 
 munication was, that a 3.65 gold bond, interconvertible 
 with paper currency at central Government agencies, 
 with an alternative privilege to the Government of re- 
 deeming its bills in gold instead of the bonds, would be 
 likely to operate slowly, but effectively, in restoring our 
 currency to the standards of cosmopolitan commerce, and 
 furnish, in a simpler, and cheaper, and even more effective 
 form, than the national-banking system, our whole supply 
 of paper money. On the last point, TJic Republican 
 remarks : " On the other hand, we are not sanguine that 
 it could accomplish all which the writer of the communi- 
 cation hopes for it, especially in ultimately superseding 
 banks of issue, which, in this country, either state or 
 national, and in England, both private and national, have 
 always constituted an important factor of American and 
 British finance." 
 
 The monetary system of a country, like all its institu- 
 tions, is far more the result of its experience, of the acci- 
 dents and exigencies of its history, than of any deliberate, 
 pre-determined plan. Universal experience has demon- 
 strated certain fundamental principles, but the methods 
 of their application must vary with circumstances. No 
 one in this country advocates the establishment of an 
 institution like the Bank of England, however wise its 
 adaptation may be to the wants and interests of the 
 United Kingdom. The Bank of Amsterdam has sub- 
 served a most useful purpose, but no one proposes to 
 copy it. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 309 
 
 Any monetary system, to be successful, must have that 
 permanence which is the result of a public confidence that 
 it is the best practicable. Our present system of free 
 national banks is in many particulars the best we have 
 ever had, but no one is satisfied that our currency is the 
 best possible or practicable. Until we attain one which 
 satisfies the public conscience and sense of equity, we 
 shall pass through a season of unrest and insecurity which 
 is disastrous to business, and preventive of the healthy 
 growth and distribution of capital. 
 
 Definitions sometimes become important. It is usual 
 to speak of gold as the measure of value in the same 
 sense that a pound is the measure of weight. The fallacy 
 ought to become apparent when we consider that gold is 
 a substance, the pound an abstraction — a conventional 
 unit, a necessary " ideality " — used, among other pur- 
 poses, to determine the value of any given quantity of 
 gold. The value of a bushel of wheat is not measured 
 by twenty-three grains of gold, any more than the value 
 of the gold is measured by the wheat. The wheat has a 
 value for certain uses, the gold for certain other, and the 
 relative value of given quantities of wheat and gold is 
 determ.ined by their relative weight. The wheat may be 
 weighed on Fairbanks' scales, the gold at the United 
 States Mint, but both are brought to the same test — 
 gravitation. In the early days of California the merchant 
 there weighed the goods he sold, and the gold he received 
 in payment. The only oflfice the Mint subserves is, that 
 it assays and weighs the gold more correctly and with 
 less expense than the merchant or banker could. 
 
 Adam Smith announced the true measure of value 
 nearly a hundred years ago — it is labor. Of course, to 
 apply the measure, the article itself must have value to 
 be measured. The relative value of two articles will be 
 the relative labor necessary for their production. Their 
 interchangeable value at any given time or place may be 
 
3IO NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 influenced by a great many accidents not now necessary 
 to be taken into account, and whose consideration would 
 simply involve the discussion of the difference between 
 price and value. In our currency we use the word 
 " dollar " as the unit for the measurement of value 
 (labor), as we use the word "pound " as the unit for the 
 measurement of weight (gravity). Both are abstract 
 terms. A sovereign government may decree that its 
 dollars shall be one thing to-day, and another to-morrow, 
 just as it could change the statute definition of the word 
 pound ; but neither values nor gravitation are changed 
 by a change of definition. 
 
 If gold is not the measure of value, what is it, and what 
 office does it perform ? It is the representative of value 
 and instrument of exchange. The exchange of a bushel 
 of wheat for twenty-three grains of gold is the exchange of 
 equivalents of labor. What gives gold any value to be 
 measured by the labor of its production ? Two things : — 
 1st, its uses in the arts ; 2d, and principally, the necessity 
 for some instrument of universal exchange, and the fact 
 that gold is the material which best meets the conditions 
 required for such an instrument. Its value for the second 
 use is just as real and as little arbitrary as for the first ; 
 just as intrinsic as that of railroad iron — in facilitating 
 exchange, it performs the same office the railroad does. 
 
 We can scarcely conceive of the labor and inconven- 
 ience of a system of direct barter. Under it what we 
 know as civilization would be impossible. Money — the 
 use of some form of value, which can be converted into 
 every other form — is the most efficient labor-saving de- 
 vice ever discovered. Now, whether we like it or not ; 
 whatever different nations may establish as " lawful 
 money," the factor to which each is reduced to deter- 
 mine its value is gold — gold, because that is the product 
 of labor best suited for that purpose. The Frenchman 
 will keep his accounts in francs, the Englishman in ster- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 3II 
 
 ling, the East Indian in rupees, the American in green- 
 back dollars ; but the French, English, East Indians, 
 and Americans are buying and selling of and to each 
 other every day ; the ramifications of their international 
 trade constantly reaching every individual in each nation, 
 and every day the balance is adjusted in gold — gold tried 
 only by weight, without regard to alloy, " image or super- 
 scription." 
 
 The material which can perform this office in the 
 world's economy need not suffer by poetical contrasts 
 with the sword. I do not wish to be extreme or para- 
 doxical, but I am by no means sure that, if all nations 
 should, by law, demonetize gold, its value would be im- 
 paired — so necessary is it to have some common factor, 
 the essential conditions of which gold best supplies. It 
 would still remain the world's money, in spite of the 
 world's laws, just as to-day it will buy 14 per cent, more 
 of commodities, and pay 14 per cent, more on a debt, 
 than greenbacks will, in spite of legal-tender laws, in the 
 United States. 
 
 By this time you will acknowledge I am enough of a 
 " bullionist " to suit the " straitest of the sect." It does 
 not follow, however, that because gold is necessarily the 
 " world's money " — the material on wJiich labor can most 
 easily mark the Jinits of value for the purpose of universal 
 measurement — that it should or can be made the circulat- 
 ing medium of the various countries of the world. Per- 
 haps it follows, for that very reason, that it should not, 
 and cannot, be. If it were abundant enough to circulate 
 through all the channels of daily business in the civilized 
 world, it might be so common as not to be precious 
 enough to perform its great office of a final adjuster. If 
 it could have met both these conditions, I am enough of 
 a believer in the " survival of the fittest " to suppose it 
 would have been adopted for both, by common consent, 
 as certainly as it has for one. 
 
312 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 I am not ignorant that the number of transactions 
 which can be consummated by the same dollars, the same 
 day, is large and varied. But consider — the national, 
 state, municipal, and corporation debts of the world, over 
 twenty thousand millions of dollars, with interest to pay 
 — the vast expenses of governments — the daily buying 
 and selling between some hundreds of millions of people ; 
 gold would have to be winged swifter than meditation to 
 accomplish all this. 
 
 There must be some additional labor-saving device in 
 the machinery of commerce to perform the daily drudgery 
 of exchange, and square its accounts, every day, with 
 gold as the common adjuster. That device is credit, 
 utilized as money. Every nation that uses or authorizes 
 "paper money" adopts that expedient. It may not be 
 the best expedient, but human ingenuity has found no 
 other — suggests no other. 
 
 Here, then, are two points of agreement reached by 
 the common experience of civilized commercial nations : 
 
 First. — That gold is the most accurate representative of 
 value, and therefore the factor into which all other values 
 are ultimately resolved to determine their relations. 
 
 Second. — That credit may be used as money and to 
 facilitate exchanges. 
 
 Each nation determines for itself what form of credit 
 to use. It ought to be the best — " as good as gold," if 
 possible. 
 
 I have said that our present banking system was, in 
 many particulars, the best we have ever had. It is so, 
 because it is based upon the best credit. There is abso- 
 lute security that bank-notes will be redeemed. Redeemed 
 in what ? — the notes of the United States. It is not the 
 credit of the banks which makes their notes good and 
 gives them uniformity of value wherever they circulate, 
 but the credit of the Government. 
 
 Now in political economy, as well as in mechanics, all 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 313 
 
 unnecessary machinery is a loss of effective power. Fric- 
 tion is to be avoided as much in one case as in the other. 
 Examine the practical working of our banking system, 
 and see if there be not some unnecessary machinery and 
 waste of power. 
 
 The Government could only have two objects in issuing 
 greenbacks : 1st, to obtain a loan without interest, 
 2d, to furnish a form of credit which should circulate 
 as money. 
 
 A national bank is organized ; it deposits a hundred 
 thousand dollars in United States bonds, and five thou- 
 sand dollars in greenbacks in the United States Treasury, 
 and receives ninety thousand dollars in bank-notes signed 
 by the United States Treasurer, upon which it agrees to 
 pay the United States i per cent, per annum. In plain 
 English, what is this but the bank borrowing the credit 
 of the Government for i per cent, per annum, and leaving 
 security, with a fair margin, upon which security the 
 Government pays the bank 5 or 6 per cent, per annum ? 
 That is, the bank pays the Government upon one form of 
 its credit i per cent,, and the Government pays the bank 
 upon another form of its credit 5 or 6 per cent, in the 
 same transaction — and that not for one year, but while 
 the bank charter continues. 
 
 Now if the first object — a loan without interest — con- 
 trols the Government in issuing the greenbacks, that is 
 defeated by this operation to the extent of all bank 
 circulation. 
 
 If the second, it is unnecessary, for the bank-note 
 never can be better than the greenback in which it is 
 payable. 
 
 You will observe I am speaking of the condition of 
 things which exists, and not of what would be if the 
 greenback were eliminated. 
 
 Now suppose for any cause the bank goes into liquida- 
 tion. The Government sells the securities, and, after 
 
314 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 redeeming the bills of the bank in Government bills (for 
 which as yet there is no plan of redemption), pays over 
 the residue to the stockholders. All this circumlocution, 
 from the first establishment of the bank to its liquidation, 
 to get back to the United States note, which could have 
 just as well been issued directly in the first instance. 
 
 If it be necessary, by all means let us put fifth wheels 
 on our coaches, devise engines to run engines, invent a 
 grate to warm the fire, and grease water that it may run 
 down hill ! 
 
 It is constantly said that the Government ought not to 
 engage in the business of banking. It is engaged in the 
 "business of banking," and undertakes to administer 
 upon the assets of banks in a manner which is unprofit- 
 able and unnecessary. 
 
 The issuance of bills of credit to circulate as money is 
 not a function of banking, but of Government, and no 
 bank or individual is permitted to exercise it under any 
 wise policy, except by the consent and delegation of the 
 Government. 
 
 You say you " are not sanguine that the plan suggested 
 would succeed in ultimately superseding banks of issue, 
 which in this country and in England, both private and 
 national, have always constituted an important factor of 
 American and British finance." " Important," I admit, 
 but in our case certainly not always a helpful one. I can 
 remember when "wild-cat," "blue-pup," and "red-dog" 
 were the familiar and significant names of the paper 
 money current in certain Western States ; when " cord 
 for cord " was called a fair exchange between " Gallipolis 
 bank-notes " and cord-wood at the steamboat landings on 
 the Ohio ; when a bank-note caught astray over a State 
 line was arrested as a trespasser ; and when exchange 
 between Indiana and New York was at 10 per cent, 
 premium, though the Indiana State bank was as solvent 
 as any in the Union. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE, 315 
 
 The present scheme is incomparably better, I admit — 
 better because based upon the Government credit. Why 
 not go a step further, and use the Government credit 
 directly, in place of lending it at one per cent, and paying 
 six? 
 
 If one quarter the thought and attention had been 
 given to improving the national currency that have been 
 to dovetailing into it the bank-note, and maintaining 
 and reconciling a system artificially complicated, the 
 greenback would have been at par with gold long ago. 
 
 It seems to be apprehended, on the one hand, that 
 without banks of issue there would be a deficiency of 
 currency ; and on the other, that without them the 
 Government would " inflate " the currency. Suppose 
 the Government, to-day, could substitute greenbacks for 
 the bank-notes in circulation ; the volume of currency 
 would be the same, the quality no worse. Do you fear 
 there would be a failure of the necessary machinery for 
 the proper distribution of currency to meet the wants of 
 the people and for the accommodation of business ? 
 Have the receiving of deposits, drawing exchange, and 
 lending of money suddenly become so unprofitable or 
 irksome a business that no one will engage in it, without 
 the added premium of a power to issue money? 
 
 Suppose the substitution made, and to-morrow the 
 currency should be made convertible into a perpetual 3.65 
 gold bond ; would not that improve the currency to the 
 value of such a bond ? Make the bond interconvertible 
 with currency ; will not that give it additional value, by 
 making it the receptacle of the money of estates of dece- 
 dents and bankrupts under administration, and giving it 
 a power of absorbing money temporarily idle, but wanted 
 " on call " ? Is there an apprehension that its absorbing 
 qualities would become so great that the currency of the 
 country would rush into it and disappear from circulation ? 
 That could only happen when such a bond was worth a 
 
3l6 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 premium in gold ; then the gold of the world would 
 seek it as an investment, until our 6 per cent, bonds 
 could be exchanged for 3.65 's, a result I could contem- 
 plate with very considerable philosophic composure, even 
 if it were nearer than I anticipate ; while the catastrophe 
 of an entire disappearance of our currency would be effec- 
 tually prevented by the option of the Government to 
 redeem it in gold. When that period arrives, men will 
 take their gold to the United States Treasury and ex- 
 change it for Government notes on account of their 
 superior convenience. 
 
 Very seriously, my dear Mr. Editor, I do believe the 
 bond I have mentioned would appreciate to par, carry- 
 ing the greenback with it with reasonable rapidity and 
 certainty ; that it would eventually take up all out 
 bonds ; that, as such a security would for many purposes 
 be more valuable at home than abroad, it would be held 
 in larger proportions at home than our present bonds are 
 — large enough to afford an ample basis for any expansion 
 of currency, if any should become necessary. 
 
 Under such a system, if more currency were necessary, 
 in place of the circumlocution of lending Government 
 credit to banks, the capital which now organizes banks 
 would take Government bonds to the treasury, get notes 
 for them, with the absolute certainty that when, for any 
 cause, the notes came home, they would find the exact 
 security left in pledge for them. Government promises 
 under all circumstances would be fulfilled to the letter, 
 and paper money would no longer be a lie. 
 
 The plan may not be the best conceivable — is it not 
 the best practicable ? I do not imagine that it would 
 start at once the laggard wheels of industry and make 
 the waste places glad, but I believe it honest, practicable, 
 and that it offers the most favorable conditions for gradual 
 improvement and healthy growth of any yet suggested. 
 
 One thing is certain : either the greenback or the bank- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 317 
 
 note will disappear from our circulation. No arbitrary 
 fixing of the amount of greenbacks will or ought to keep 
 them in circulation as mere tenders to bank-notes. We 
 shall eventually have one system or the other. If we 
 have the banking system, there will be no real resumption, 
 no holding of gold as a reserve which gives an absolute 
 assurance of payment on presentation — the credit of the 
 bank-note will still depend upon the credit of the Govern- 
 ment behind it. There will be a great many banks of issue 
 located at points distant from business centres, and not of 
 the most convenient access. The profit on circulation 
 given to the banks will be a premium offered for inflation, 
 and a temptation to it, which even the superior human 
 nature of the average bank director will not always 
 resist. 
 
 At the risk of becoming prolix, let me recapitulate : 
 
 First. — Greenbacks will be worth as much as the bonds 
 into which they may be made convertible. 
 
 Second. — Making bonds and greenbacks interconvert- 
 ible will give the bonds additional value by making 
 them desirable for a large class of investments which 
 would not otherwise seek them, and, by as much as is 
 added to their value by this quality, the interest will be 
 reduced which the Government is required to pay in order 
 to bring its bonds to par with gold. 
 
 Third. — As the English consol, a perpetual 3 per cent, 
 gold security, is worth 95, an American gold bond on long 
 time or perpetual at 3.65, with the added value of the 
 interconvertible clause, would appreciate to par with gold 
 as its credit would become established, which would be 
 as rapidly as the country can return to the specie stand- 
 ard in justice to existing contracts. 
 
 Fourth. — The" interconvertible " character of the bonds 
 would enable the Government credit to circulate as 
 money in just such volume as the business of the coun- 
 try would demand, without the intervention of the cum- 
 
3l8 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 bersome, expensive, and unnecessary machinery of banks 
 of issue, whose notes have no value except that of the 
 Government credit. 
 
 Fifth. — There would be no occasion for the exercise of a 
 power of doubtful constitutionality and dangerous policy 
 in the creation of corporations by the General Govern- 
 ment. 
 
 Sixth. — When Government notes appreciate to the spe- 
 cie standard, the legal-tender quality can be removed with- 
 out opposition, and we shall again be within constitutional 
 limitations on the subject of finance. 
 
 Holding no opinions from which I can be deterred from 
 changing, under conviction, for better ones, by the fear of 
 inconsistency, 
 
 I am, dear sir, 
 
 Your obedient servant, 
 • Newton Booth. 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 CHINESE IMMIGRATION. 
 
 The Senate, as in Committee of the Whole, having resumed the consid- 
 eration of the joint resolution (S. No. 20) relative to Chinese immigration, 
 Mr. Booth said : 
 
 Mr. President : No question of graver importance or 
 more absorbing interest to the people of the State I have 
 the honor in part to represent has ever been presented 
 to the consideration of the Senate than that to which I 
 invite attention. To most of you, Senators, it is an ab- 
 straction ; to them it is vital, touching not only the dom- 
 inance of parties, forms of government, and methods of 
 law, but the organization of society itself. I do not think 
 I overstate the gravity of the situation in asserting my 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 319 
 
 belief that early legislation by Congress upon this subject 
 may prevent a convulsion in California which will shake 
 the foundation of social order. I deem it my solemn 
 duty to express my conviction that if it shall be decided 
 that the policy of free, unrestricted immigration of Chin- 
 ese is right and must be maintained, the Government 
 should be prepared to maintain it by force and to over- 
 awe a community which on this subject is rife with dan- 
 gerous discontent. 
 
 It may be that it is wrong that it is so ; doubtless many 
 of you believe it to be grievously wrong, but you are en- 
 titled to know the truth, however it may influence your 
 opinions or action. 
 
 On this question there is as general unanimity of public 
 sentiment in California, and I believe in her sister States 
 on the Pacific border, as is ever attained upon any politi- 
 cal question in time of peace, and there is a deep-seated 
 feeling that the sentiment of the community immediately 
 interested in and practically familiar with the subject is 
 not to be put aside as an exhibition of prejudice, ebulli- 
 ence of passion, or treated as a corrupt humor of the 
 blood, but is entitled to grave consideration. 
 
 Public opinion is agitated in California and the most 
 conservative sentiment is alarmed. We constantly decry 
 agitation, but the only agitator to be feared is the presence 
 of wrong ; and while that continues there will be agitation 
 or the stagnation of political death. The theory of our 
 Government is not one of repression, but of voluntary 
 obedience to laws which represent public opinion. When 
 Enceladus stirs beneath the surface, the foundations of 
 the temples are but as straw and stubble. 
 
 The people of the Pacific coast are widely separated from 
 the great mass of their countrymen in distance, but they 
 are blood of their blood, bone of their bone, and they yield 
 to none in their devotion to the traditions of the Republic 
 and love for its institutions. California is not yet a gen- 
 
320 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 eration old. Its active men of to-day, its forming minds, 
 went out from your midst, carrying with them American 
 ideas, to meet new and strange conditions of life. It was 
 a novel experience, and to those who enjoyed it it is like 
 first love, the memory of which is sweeter than present 
 possession. 
 
 No community ever better illustrated the American 
 capacity for self-government. Social order preceded 
 the restraints of law. The pioneers of the new " El 
 Dorado " carried the American State in the " book and 
 volume of their brain." There was no necessity for vice- 
 roy or charter or letters-patent. Men from every section 
 of our common country, thousands of miles from the 
 homes they had left behind them, met in a land so 
 recently acquired that it still seemed foreign soil, under 
 conditions so novel they seemed hardly a part of 
 the daily life of human experience, and by a common 
 impulse improvised a State. It is a new chapter in 
 history and the best imprint of American civilization is 
 upon it. 
 
 I trust I have not transcended the limits of good taste. 
 I am not endeavoring to exalt the State of my adoption 
 above other States, but to illustrate the adaptability of 
 American character and the American idea of government. 
 There are no States, few counties in any State, which were 
 not represented in the early emigration to the Pacific coast. 
 There is probably no Senator on this floor who was not 
 bound by some tie of kindred or personal friendship to 
 some of the pioneers of Oregon and California, who 
 crossed the continent and buttressed the arch of the 
 Republic on the shores of the western sea. No com- 
 munities to-day better represent the average type of 
 American character than the people of the Pacific States. 
 And I reassert the claim that their general verdict on a 
 question which lies at their doors, comes home to them, 
 is entitled to grave consideration. The conditions which 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 32 1 
 
 create unanimity of sentiment there would create it 
 elsewhere. 
 
 If China were situated relative to our Atlantic coast 
 as it is to the Pacific, and a Chinese immigration had 
 entered our Atlantic ports of the same character as that 
 which enters the Pacific, and in volume as large in pro- 
 portion to the population of the Eastern States as that 
 is to the population of the Pacific, there would be no 
 occasion to argue this question. It would demand and 
 receive prompt, decisive action. If there were in New 
 York, Massachusetts, or Iowa, or Georgia, one hundred 
 Chinese male adults to every one hundred and fifty 
 American voters, and it were realized that this was but 
 a beginning, that the stream might swell to an Amazon 
 without visibly affecting the vast reservoir from which 
 it flows, the subject would be regarded here as it is in 
 California, as one of paramount, supreme importance, 
 touching the whole future of the Republic, its political 
 institutions, industrial, and social, life. 
 
 Mr. President, if we confront Asia as we do Europe ; 
 if we realize that this continent might become, not the 
 opportunity for the full development of that civilization 
 which is the highest achievement and most precious in- 
 heritance of our race, but a conflict between two forms 
 of civilization opposite in tendency and in the types of 
 character they produce, every power of the Government 
 would be invoked to avert such a catastrophe. This 
 civilization in which we live is so familiar to us that we 
 accept it as a matter of course, as much a part of our 
 daily life as air and sunlight. Free institutions are its 
 bright consummate flower. They are possible in no 
 other. They depend for their maintenance not upon 
 the discipline of the law, but upon the devotion of the 
 people. 
 
 Introduce into the people a foreign element, incapable 
 of assimilation, of a type fixed in its unchangeableness 
 
322 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 by immemorial ages, alien in race, tradition, custom, and 
 you will inevitably modify the social conditions which 
 underlie government and give it form and character. 
 Free men are necessary to create and preserve free insti- 
 tutions ; independent, self-relying citizens are essential 
 to an enlightened, stable, popular government, men 
 imbued with American ideas to the American Gov- 
 ernment. It is the people who give form and character 
 to the government, not the government to the people. 
 They may interact, but the primary source and govern- 
 ing influence is from beneath. 
 
 Sir, the centre, the source of the civilization in which 
 we live, of the institutions we believe to be its highest 
 outgrowth, is the family. 
 
 Take away the bond of family, the feeling which 
 identifies home with country, the ties of blood which give 
 the strong kinship of race, from our civilization, and 
 what is there left which is worth retaining ? The immi- 
 gration which comes to us from kindred races and plants 
 the family on our soil is welcome. It will add to our 
 strength, and its blood will soon blend with and become 
 a part of the American type. But any immigration 
 which does not come under these conditions will attack 
 and destroy the foundations of our institutions, social and 
 political, in proportion to its volume. 
 
 Mr. President, I appeal to all who are personally familiar 
 with the subject to corroborate or refute my statement, 
 that in the ninety-odd thousand Chinese population in 
 California, eight ninths of which are male adults, there 
 are no families ; among them the marriage relation is 
 practically unknown. Their numbers are recruited 
 from China. Their presence will eventuate, not in a 
 blending of people of a common race, nor in a blending 
 of races, but in a conflict of races. It is only a question 
 of time and numbers. 
 
 Sir, the problem of popular government on this conti- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 323 
 
 nent is difficult enough, doubtful enough, without this 
 new disturbing quantity, this insoluble complication. 
 
 I appeal to history, when and where have races 
 so diverse, so antagonistic in character, been able vol- 
 untarily to maintain the same form of government? 
 When has their commingling failed to reach the 
 subordination of one to the other or collision injurious 
 to both ? 
 
 We are the creatures of a day, but time and universal 
 experience do not change. We are not exempt from 
 their conditions. We must meet this question at the 
 threshold. It is the riddle of the sphinx. We must 
 solve it or it will destroy us. If the advocates of the 
 policy of unrestricted Chinese immigration are right, we 
 should open wide the doors to the four hundred million 
 Chinese, who are practically nearer to us to-day than 
 Europe was fifty years ago. 
 
 Mr. President, the competitions of modern civilized 
 life are sharp. It is a competition not merely for pre- 
 cedence but for existence. The character, the future, the 
 destiny of our Republic depend far more on the condi- 
 tion of those who toil than of those who enjoy. 
 
 I am not speaking to California ; I am not speaking 
 to the Western coast : I am trying to speak to the 
 East, and above all to you, Senators, to your patriotism, 
 reason, and judgment; and I ask you what will become 
 of the American idea which is founded upon the per- 
 sonal independence of American citizenship, of American 
 institutions, and of that civilization on which they are 
 based, and whose corner-stone is the family, if the Ameri- 
 can laborer, if the great mass of our fellow-citizens who 
 bear life's burdens, fight life's battles — our battles — whose 
 daily sweat waters the tree of luxury whose fruits we 
 enjoy, is brought into direct competition for daily bread 
 with a class who have no families to support, and give 
 no bonds to fate and country, if the family becomes a 
 
324 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 luxury of those who have achieved success, and not a 
 condition of daily life ? 
 
 Mr. President, you have been taught to look upon this 
 question as one of mere labor agitation. If it were that 
 only, it would be entitled to consideration and not sneers. 
 The essential conditions of society are to be found, not 
 upon its surface, but in its depths. It is far more necessary 
 to peace, progress, and good order that the daily laborer 
 should be satisfied with the conditions of his life and the 
 rewards of his toil than the capitalist, banker, or we who sit 
 in senatorial chairs. He should be able to feel at all times, 
 that promotion is from the ranks. His burden is heavy, 
 and he should not be deprived of the hope, which is the 
 solace of his toil, that his children may obtain the prizes 
 of life which fortune has denied to him. That hope is one 
 of the great conservators of society, reconciling men to 
 the distinctions in life which, if they were regarded as 
 unchanging as they are inevitable, would result in the 
 sullen acquiescence of caste or the open revolt of com- 
 munism. Destroy that hope and you must substitute 
 the armed repressive force of absolute government for 
 voluntary obedience to law or relapse into the tideless 
 sea of despair. 
 
 When the common interest of labor speaks, the states- 
 manship which does not heed its voice is drunken with 
 pride or besotted with folly. The laborers of the Pacific 
 coast say to the American public, " We have families to 
 support, children to educate, the burdens of citizenship to 
 carry. We contribute to the support of the State in peace, 
 are prepared to defend it in war to the shedding of our 
 blood, to the sacrifice of our lives, and we are brought into 
 direct competition for daily bread with a class who claim 
 the protection of our laws but who bear none of these 
 burdens, acknowledge none of these obligations, and we 
 must renounce the ties of family or of country." Is it 
 any reply to him to say that cheap labor hastens the 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 32$ 
 
 development of the material resources of the State and 
 increases the aggregate of its wealth ? He will answer, 
 " Of what benefit is it to me if the resources of the State 
 are developed and its wealth increased if my share in these 
 advantages is diminished by the very means adopted to 
 secure them ? " Will he listen with patience to the argu- 
 ment that cheap labor increases production as labor-saving 
 machinery does, and is a like factor in progress and 
 civilization ? Will he graciously regard that progress 
 which reduces or eliminates him ? 
 
 Few great mechanical inventions have ever been made 
 which did not, at the time of their introduction, cause dis- 
 tress among artisans and operatives, whose employment 
 was suspended and whose skill was rendered useless. 
 Even these great triumphs of peace, like the splendid 
 triumphs of war, have their human victims and are bought 
 with sacrifice. 
 
 The compensation, and I admit it to be a general com- 
 pensation, and of little worth to him who is crushed 
 beneath the " Juggernaut," is, that ultimately labor will 
 arm itself with these improved implements and share in 
 the benefits of increased production. 
 
 Here you propose not an arming, but a substitution ; 
 not an increased power of production, but an elimination 
 in favor of another human factor which will produce more 
 at less expense. This is to consider a man as a mere 
 machine, whose value is to be ascertained by the amount 
 he produces less the amount he consumes. It is to leave 
 out of the calculation blood and brain, aspiration, want, 
 and despair. It is to ignore the elemental forces by which 
 and for which society exists. I know these cold specula- 
 tions of the economists which assume that the tree would 
 flower if the root were destroyed. I know these calcula- 
 tions which estimate the value of society by the amount 
 which is heaped up and not by the distribution — whose 
 end is splendor and not happiness. 
 
326 NEWTON BOOTH, 
 
 Chinese immigration simply plants a foreign colony in 
 this country constantly recruited from abroad, alien in 
 race, distinctive in laws, manners, habits, and in so far as 
 it tends to cheapen labor it also tends to degrade it by 
 making the toilers a class ; fixing and hardening the social 
 distinctions which the spirit of our civilization and the 
 genius of our institutions require should be fluid and 
 changing. 
 
 Mr. President, in the sentiments I have endeavored to 
 express there is no feeling of hostility to the Chinaman. 
 There is no man so poor, so humble, so despised that I do 
 not recognize and reverence in him the likeness of that 
 image after which we are all made. I rejoice at the ad- 
 vancement of every race, at the amelioration of all of 
 human kind. But I love my own race, my own country 
 best, and believing this question touches the interest of 
 these, I ask for it, Senators, your early, earnest, and can- 
 did consideration. 
 
 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, JANUARY, 1878, 
 ON THE 
 
 LIFE AND CHARACTER OF OLIVER P. MORTON. 
 
 (senator from INDIANA.) 
 
 Mr. President : To epitomize the life and character of 
 Oliver Perry Morton in the few moments devoted to 
 these observances is impossible to mortal utterance. The 
 stalwart proportions of his living presence are but realized 
 by the void his death has made. 
 
 But yesterday he was one of us, of like clay and pas- 
 sions. The echoes of his voice have scarcely died in this 
 Chamber. To-day he is as far from us as Demonsthenes 
 or Abraham or the generations that perished before the 
 Flood. 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 32/ 
 
 Less than most men intellectually his equals does he 
 need the voice of eulogy. The clearness of his purposes, 
 the boldness of his opinions, his tireless activity, his in- 
 domitable will, have impressed " the very age and body 
 of the time." His life was a force which cannot die. 
 
 That fireside criticism which dwells apart in the seclu- 
 sion of its own self-importance, and would not soil its 
 dainty fingers by contact with affairs, which believes 
 government is a science as exact as mathematics, that 
 human nature is plastic as clay and cold as marble, may 
 dwarf his image in the penny mirror it holds up to the 
 universe and in which the only colossal figure it beholds 
 is the reflection of itself ; but he has made his own place 
 in history " safe 'gainst the tooth of time and razure of 
 oblivion." 
 
 He lived in a heroic age — this age — an age so great 
 that the distance of intervening centuries will be neces- 
 sary to measure its heroism, its achievements, and its 
 sacrifices. 
 
 We, as Americans, must be excusable for believing, we 
 should be inexcusable if we did not believe, that no 
 political question of graver consequence to all succeeding 
 time was ever confronted by any people than that which 
 culminated in our civil war. History will record that 
 the war was the inevitable result of an irrepressible conflict 
 of moral forces, for which peace had no arbitrament. 
 Morton's life was cast in a State where this conflict of 
 opinion was eager, passionate, and doubtful. He was at 
 the meeting of the currents in the circling of the maelstrom. 
 What to others was a conviction, a sentiment, to him 
 became an inspiration and a passion. He was intensely 
 American. For his large nature, and for his great ambi- 
 tion too, the continent was none too wide. That his 
 country should play a subordinate part in human affairs 
 never entered his imagination to conceive. He would 
 have enlarged the bounds of destiny to give it scope and 
 
328 NEWTON' BOOTH. 
 
 amplitude. The sentiment that this, is a " nation, one, 
 indivisible, indestructible," so permeated his intellect that 
 any other seemed political profanation and sacrilege. 
 With him this was not a theory of construction, but a 
 source and centre ; not an abstraction, but living faith. 
 Not Webster has expressed his faith with more massive 
 strength, nor Baker with more impassionate fervor. 
 
 No man had an earlier or clearer apprehension of the 
 magnitude of the war on whose verge we stood, and the 
 tremendous issues it involved. Of Titan mold, near to 
 nature, elemental powers were his familiars. He had an 
 instinctive sense of the awful forces that are unleashed 
 by war. He knew that in the air, so still it would not 
 stir the floating down, the fury of the tempest slept. 
 
 In the halcyon days, amid delusive promises of peace, 
 he saw that war was inevitable, and rose to the supreme 
 height of the occasion. In a speech on the 22d of 
 November, i860, which rang through the country like 
 a call to arms, he said : " Seven years is but a day in the 
 lifetime of a nation, and I would rather come out of a 
 struggle at the end of that time defeated in arms, con- 
 ceding independence to successful revolution, than to 
 purchase present peace by the concession of a principle 
 that must inevitably explode this nation into small, dis- 
 honored fragments." 
 
 He flunked nothing, concealed nothing. He knew the 
 uncertainties of war, its dread sacrifices, and declared 
 that all these, though followed by defeat, were better 
 than inaction or the compromise of a principle he deemed 
 essential to the existence of any republic on this continent. 
 
 This was at once his confession of political faith and 
 the keynote of his character. In the cause he cham- 
 pioned, he would have dared fate itself to the lists, and 
 matched his will against the courses of the stars. 
 
 There is neither time nor necessity to trace his career. 
 To leave out Morton and his influence would be to re- 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 329 
 
 write the history of this country for the past eighteen 
 years, and to modify it for all time to come. In the 
 great struggle on which the existence of the Union was 
 staked he held the central fort. No living man can tell 
 what the result would have been if he had not been 
 where and what he was. 
 
 In character his will dominated his intellect, great as 
 that was. He seemed incapable of indecision. To 
 resolve was to leave doubt behind. Thought, resolution, 
 action, were constant. 
 
 As a debator he was an athlete trained down to pure 
 muscle. In speech, careless of the graces of oratory and 
 polish of style, his earnestness enchained attention, his 
 directness carried conviction, and there was a natural 
 symmetry in the strength of his statement above the 
 reach of art. 
 
 He was a partisan ; instinct and experience taught him 
 that organization was essential to the triumph of any 
 political principle or the successful administration of a 
 popular government. He was a born leader, conscious of 
 his power and jealous of his right to lead. He was ambi- 
 tious ; but blessed is the memory of him whose ambition 
 is at one with the best aspirations of humanity, whose 
 death is a loss to the weak, and whose grave is wet with 
 the tears of the humble and the despised. 
 
 Large brained, large framed, and brawny muscled, his 
 vigorous health, freedom of motion, physical indepen- 
 dence, manly presence, were his joy and pride, and a part 
 of that full endowment of mind and body which gave 
 him commanding rank. But when at life's meridian he 
 was stricken with the cruel paralysis from which he was 
 never to recover, he accepted his lot without repining. 
 What to another would have been a warning to quit 
 active service and an excuse for ease and rest, to him was 
 the occasion of increased exertion and mental activity. 
 The broken sword only made the combat closer. 
 
330 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 When the fatal symptoms of his malady appeared some 
 months before his death, he said to a friend that he 
 realized the end had come, but he felt his career was in- 
 complete, his life-work not finished. Perhaps he felt, too, 
 that death was stepping between him and the great prize 
 of his personal ambition. He knew the night was settling 
 on the home of which his love was the day-springs 
 
 From that time the American people watched the 
 wasting sands of his life and counted his failing pulse. 
 He fought death as an equal for every inch of time until 
 " worn out," — worn out by long suffering and hard con- 
 flict, he yielded to the conqueror of all. 
 
 However long expected, the death of one we honor 
 or love comes at last as a shock. No preparation can 
 take away its final suddenness. There is not a precinct 
 in all this broad land where Morton's death was not felt. 
 The nation was bereaved. His State was his chief 
 mourner. Political friends and opponents vied with each 
 other to honor his memory. A hundred thousand men, 
 women, and children took a last look at his face, softened 
 and refined by death, every trace of suffering, every 
 mark of conflict gone. On a chill November afternoon a 
 vast concourse followed him to the grave. The shades of 
 night were falling when the last rite was spoken and the 
 great crowd dispersed, leaving him alone with the dead. 
 
 There will be music and song, revelry and mirth. " The 
 seasons in their bright round will come and go ; hope, 
 and joy, and great ambition will rise up as they have 
 risen." Generations will pass on the swift flight of years. 
 Battle-storms will smite the earth, peace smile upon it, 
 plenty crown it, love bless it. History will write great 
 chapters in the book of time. He will come no more. 
 His life is " blended with the mysterious tide which bears 
 upon its current " events, institutions, empire, in the 
 awful sweep of destiny. Nor praise nor censure, nor love 
 nor hate, " nothing can touch him further." 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 33 1 
 
 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, MARCH, 1879. 
 ON THE 
 
 LIFE AND CHARACTER OF JULIAN HARTRIDGE. 
 
 (a representative from GEORGIA.) 
 
 Mr. President : When an observance like this occurs in 
 the busy hours of a closing session, it is apt to seem like an 
 idle ceremony. The duties of public life are so varied 
 and pressing, its calls so incessant, its avocations so ab- 
 sorbing, that there is little time left for sentiment or the 
 indulgence of grief. 
 
 Our numbers are constantly changing by death and by 
 the vicissitudes of political fortune ; but the leave-taking 
 is short, and the business of to-morrow will make the 
 grief of to-day only a memory. " The strong hours con- 
 quer us." It will be so when we shall severally disappear 
 — even those of you, Senators, who play the greatest 
 parts on this great stage. The actor makes his exit ; and 
 however well he may have performed his part, whatever 
 plaudits he may have won, the curtain does not fall, and 
 the play goes on. 
 
 The time has gone by, if indeed it ever was, when the 
 loss of any life will seriously influence the permanent di- 
 rection of public affairs. It is true that no man's place 
 can be filled by another ; it is equally true that it is not 
 essential it should be. In the vast aggregate the value 
 of the largest unit is scarcely appreciable. A heart has 
 ceased to beat ; it is one of millions. The struggle of a 
 life has ended ; the struggle of human life never ends. 
 How insignificant is the individual life to the whole of 
 humanity ! Yet what an awful gift it is to each of its 
 possessors, this strange personality of ours, which isolates 
 us from all else and yet makes all that is a part of us. Nor 
 sun, nor moon, nor stars, nor past, nor present can be, 
 save as they are a part of us. 
 
332 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Life with its possibilities is an awful gift, and when it 
 is bereft the event is unspeakably solemn. Custom fami- 
 liarizes us with the forms of death, fashion hides their 
 significance with pageantry ; only the " stricken heart of 
 love " realizes with what dark eclipse they come. It is 
 well that we should pause, even in the busiest hours, 
 when a comrade falls, not more as a mark of respect for 
 his memory than to receive for our own good the lesson 
 of his life and death. 
 
 The memory of Julian Hartridge cannot be other 
 than a priceless possession, even in their sorrow, to those 
 who loved him. It was not my pleasure to know him, 
 but by order of the Senate I was one of the committee 
 which attended his remains from this Capitol to the 
 beautiful city where he was born, where he was married, 
 where his children were born to him, where he had spent 
 his whole life, and where he is buried with his fathers. In 
 that community which had known him all the days of his 
 life, all his outgoings and incomings, I felt that I knew 
 him too. There was a tenderness in the mention of his 
 name by all classes, which only a life filled with tender 
 respect for the rights and feelings of others could have 
 won. There was a warmth of expression that showed how 
 he had grappled his friends with hooks of steel. There 
 was that high respect which is only conquered by a life 
 of probity and courage. 
 
 I think his life must have been a happy one. The lines 
 seem to me to have fallen to him in pleasant places. No 
 life is free from struggles, trials, temptations, and failures, 
 of which the world little knows, and the deepest scars are 
 within. His life was in a great epoch. It marks its great 
 transition, that the slaves who had borne him on their 
 backs and fondled him on their knees in his childhood, as 
 free men tenderly carried his body to the grave ; still 
 loving the dear young master, panoplied in American 
 citizenship, they walked beside his hearse. His lot was 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 333 
 
 cast with a community cultivated, tasteful, generous, hos- 
 pitable, and self-respectful. There he lived for fifty years, 
 and dying left no enemy or reproachful friend. Who of 
 us can desire or deserve a more fragrant memory' ? 
 
 MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE SENATE AND HOI.'SE OF REPRESENTATI\'ES, DECEMBER 
 21 AND 22, 1S76. 
 
 LIFE AND CHARACTER OF ALLEN T. CAPERTON. 
 
 l,A SENATOR FROM WEST VIRGINIA). 
 
 Mr. President : We have paused in our daily labor, 
 turned aside from the routine of business and from the 
 consideration of those grave questions which disturb the 
 public mind with vague alarm, to pay tribute of respect to 
 one who in his brief service in this body, by his kindness, 
 courtesy, and frankness, made each of us his friend, and 
 who discharged his public duties with industry, intelli- 
 gence, fidelity, and honor. 
 
 This chamber is the arena of intellectual combat, and 
 when the great monarch drops his baton the conflict of 
 opinion is suspended. 
 
 In all stations, in every allotment of life, it is well that 
 we should sometimes be brought to the absolute contem- 
 plation of death and the realization that to each of us it is 
 inevitable and near. The days of our life are numbered ; 
 at each sunset there is one less. The sands of our life 
 are measured. While I speak they are wasting. 
 
 Though death is as " common as any, the most vulgar 
 thing to sense," though it hath been " cried from the first 
 corse till he that died to-day ' tJiis viust be so,' " it still 
 remains the great mystery whose overshadowing presence 
 awes us into a sense of our insignificance, and shows us 
 the objects of our pursuit and passionate desire in their 
 cold, naked reality. And this is its ofifice to the living. 
 
334 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Not lips touched with the fire of genius can so solemnize 
 us to a sense of duty, so plead for the right, so admonish 
 us of the vanity of human expectation as the dumb, cold 
 lips of the dead. Beneath these forms and trappings, 
 beneath this covering of flesh, our skeletons are marching 
 to the grave. And everything on earth that we long for, 
 seek, strive for, is but a covered skeleton. Adorn it as 
 we may, cheat ourselves as we will, " to this complexion 
 it must come at last ; " and then dust and ashes. 
 
 Six months ago, if Allen Taylor Caperton had entered 
 this chamber and passed to his seat it would have been a 
 commonplace incident, as little noted as your or my 
 coming to-day. If he should enter that door now, what an 
 awe would fall upon us all. If he should rise at his desk to 
 speak, with what rapt suspense we should listen. Not the 
 most eloquent words that ever fell from mortal lips could 
 so enchain attention as the lightest syllable from his. 
 
 Yet if he could come back from the " undiscovered 
 country " and speak to us as in the flesh, do we not 
 know what his message would be ? Would he not counsel 
 peace and good will ? Could he inculcate a higher lesson 
 than that taught of old, that " righteousness exalteth a 
 nation," that " error shall pass away like a shadow, the 
 truth shall endure forever?" Could he not tell us that 
 self-seeking is not the highest wisdom, that safe guidance 
 is not found in passion, and that institutions can neither 
 be built nor preserved by hatred or violence? Could he 
 reveal a diviner precept than " love," a more sacred 
 duty than " charity " ? If it has been permitted him to 
 pass in review the procession of events in the unnumbered 
 ages since man appeared on the earth and to realize that 
 history has but begun, that in the curtained future there 
 are countless ages to be, could he not tell us that in the 
 grand sweep of destiny mere personal success, the pride of 
 place, the lust of power, are of as little worth as the foam 
 on the river ? 
 
POLITICAL LIFE. 335 
 
 This is the message from the dead past to the Hving 
 present ; this is the lesson of the silent centuries ; this is 
 the voice from the grave of all who have gone before. 
 
 Those who knew Senator Caperton better than I have 
 already spoken of the traits of his character and the 
 incidents of his life. In our brief acquaintance he im- 
 pressed me as a man of culture and refinement ; of strong 
 practical sense, impatient with what he regarded as ab- 
 stractions, zealous for the promotion of every material 
 interest, and devoted to a reunion of hearts and hands 
 through all the land. His neighbors told me he was a 
 man of active habits, interested in every enterprise for 
 the advancement and improvement of the country where 
 he lived, strong in his convictions, outspoken in his 
 opinions, steadfast in his friendship, and of bountiful 
 hospitality. 
 
 He had this true test of genuine worth : his character 
 and temper softened and mellowed with years and experi- 
 ence. Children loved him, and the dumb beast regarded 
 him as a natural protector. 
 
 He hved, where his ancestors had for several genera- 
 tions, in a region of great beauty of landscape — a high 
 plateau, with mountain peaks in the distance, with inter- 
 vales and opening vistas of surpassing loveliness — off the 
 great lines of travel, and where the stream of life seemed 
 to eddy into a quiet circle. It was a spot where old 
 customs survive, old fashions prevail, and old faiths are 
 cherished. From his beautiful home, through the broad 
 English lawn — almost a park — we bore his remains to the 
 village church, where his old friends and neighbors had 
 gathered from all the country round. The solemn service 
 for the dead was spoken. We followed him to the grave- 
 yard on the hill and left him with his fathers. 
 
 His task is finished. He has no part or lot in all that 
 is done beneath the sun. No more for him the voice of 
 love, the song of gladness, the load of care, the cup of 
 
33^ 
 
 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 sorrow. Not for him the beauty of spring, the splendor 
 of summer, the glory of autumn, the uncrowned majesty 
 of winter. Flowers will spring from his grave ; storms 
 will beat upon it ; morning will greet it with her earliest 
 light, night crown it with her stars, and the earth, rolling 
 in her great orb in infinite space, will bear his dust with 
 hers, till time shall be no more. 
 
 Ah, mystery of death, and greater mystery of life ! 
 Both are in the hand of Him without whose knowledge 
 not a sparrow falls ; obedience to whose will the tides of 
 human destiny ebb and flow, and unto whom a thousand 
 years are but as yesterday when it is gone, or a watch in 
 the night. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 LECTURES. 
 
 Destruction of Manuscript — Charles James Fox — Morals and Politics. 
 
 In the seclusion of his library, contemplating the near 
 approach of death, Mr. Booth destroyed a large mass of 
 manuscript, including his voluminous correspondence, un- 
 delivered lectures, the diary kept during boyhood and 
 college life, and his notes of travel. Such destruction was 
 not sudden or impulsive, but was deliberate — continued 
 for weeks. The loss thus inflicted is a public one, and is 
 much regretted. If he had elected to edit and publish his 
 works, instead of pursuing the course he did, the result 
 would have been a much larger volume than this of con- 
 tributions to American literature of permanent value, en- 
 hanced by touches from the author's own hand, and by 
 the illuminating power of his fertile and active mind. 
 
 Of the lectures given herein, that upon Charles James 
 Fox is perhaps the most entertaining. 
 
 No connected story of the life and works of Fox was 
 extant, and the lecturer infused into his effort the powers 
 of an historian — the crystallized result of wide reading, 
 analytic study, clear comprehension, accurate memory. 
 The illustrious Englishman was the brilliant, fearless, 
 powerful advocate in the English Parliament of the inde- 
 pendence of our United States during the war of the 
 Revolution. It may be that Newton Booth — living with- 
 
 337 
 
338 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 in himself sufficiently to be capable of such abstract emo- 
 tion and impulse, — in his patriotism and out of a sense of 
 appreciation and gratitude, paid this enduring tribute to 
 the memory of a great man. 
 
 It is an enduring tribute. No Englishman, during the 
 three quarters of a century that had elapsed since Fox 
 died, had done so much for his memory. There was no 
 biography of him to be found. That by the descendant 
 of one of his noted contemporaries was published " only 
 last year." The lecture is comprehensive, scholarly, and 
 brilliant. The personality and the history of Fox are 
 merely resplendent central jewels in a setting and display 
 redundant with gems of like nature fully as attractive. 
 
 The lecture on " Morals and Politics " is unique. It 
 embodies a philosophy, emanates a warning, inculcates 
 principles for political action — by turns excoriates, in- 
 structs, commands, condemns. It flashes forth a fierce 
 light beating upon his individuality, the nature of his 
 convictions, the motive power of all his public work. 
 
 LECTURE ON THE STEAM-ENGINE. 
 
 JANUARY 17, 1854. 
 
 A great work in literature is the production of a single 
 and unaided intellect. In its conception and execution 
 there is exhibited the power and capacity of one mind. 
 It is true that all the teachings of the past, all facts, truths, 
 and experiences, all outward forms, everything that is, aid 
 the development of genius and furnish the materials for 
 its work. But as the silkworm converts the leaves that 
 it feeds upon into its own beautiful and delicate fibre, so 
 does the great soul transform all gross substances into 
 the threads of its life, the fibres of its being, to be woven 
 in the mysterious texture of its thought. 
 
LECTURES. 339 
 
 A blind old man had heard the story of the siege of 
 Troy, and his immortal song floating above the storms of 
 time has come down to us over the graves of thirty cen- 
 turies. Shakespeare had read a childish tale about a bar- 
 barous king who, in his old age, divided his kingdom 
 between two deceitful, treacherous daughters ; a third, 
 who loved him, he loaded with his curse, and she, faithful 
 in her love, followed his evil fortunes to the grave. And 
 from his wonder-working soul came Lear, with the depths 
 of its meaning and the overshadowing greatness of its 
 thoughts — with its tenor of passion — its power, language, 
 delicacy of feeling, tenderness of pathos, and sublimity of 
 description, — the world's masterpiece. 
 
 We cannot penetrate the author's being and watch this 
 gradual process of mental elaboration as it goes on with- 
 in the man, — the mind's secret, hidden even from itself, 
 by which this miracle is wrought. We cannot go down 
 into the silent chambers of the soul, and watch the spirit 
 as she sits in her high solitude weaving her web of thought ; 
 it is only when the work is finished, a radiant, immortal 
 vesture, that it is given to the world, as the highest evi- 
 dence of man's individual greatness, the noblest testimony 
 that the hand that made us is divine. 
 
 Science differs from literature in this, that the former is 
 the growth of ages — the joint contribution of myriads of 
 minds engaged in the investigation of the same subjects. 
 No single mind can claim exclusive property in its sys- 
 tems ; they are not the exponents of individual abihty, 
 but the monuments of the power and progress of the 
 race. 
 
 See for one moment the illustration of the truth of this 
 in the history of the progress of mathematics. The idea 
 of number must have been one of the very earliest sug- 
 gestions of the mind ; though there have been tribes dis- 
 covered so deeply sunken in barbarism that they had no 
 means of counting five, and to express more than this 
 
340 NEWTON BOOTH-. 
 
 they could only say, "a great many" ; — " more than we 
 can number." The first simple computations were 
 made with the aid of pebbles, or strings of beads, and 
 these results retained by piles of stones and by knotted 
 cords. 
 
 How many minds studied and worked in this pure de- 
 partment of human inquiry, what slow ages of progress 
 went by before Euclid could build up his grand arch of 
 dependent truths. Patient labor and slow investigation 
 went on and on. At length was made that high, shall 
 I say highest, achievement of human intellect, the grand- 
 est because the simplest production of art, and the most 
 wonderful instrument of mental labor-saving machinery 
 ever conceived — the invention of Arabic numerals and 
 the method of decimation, by which ten simple characters 
 are made to express all that the mind can conceive in 
 number, and more — infinitely more — for what understand- 
 ing can grasp the ideas of heavenly distances that are 
 held perfect in these transparent symbols ! How do their 
 combinations simplify abstruse questions ! What mazes 
 of doubt and difficulty perplexing and bewildering the 
 mind do they make clear as noonday ! How do they 
 hold the deductions of the intellect in solution, and give 
 them back again to the mind if it desires their use in a 
 new application ! How do they enter into and make easy 
 the business and traffic of life ! How do they solve 
 problems which had else bafifled forever the power and 
 ingenuity of reason — these ten simple characters that the 
 school-boy scratches upon his slate ! 
 
 And still the work went on. Old achievements were 
 but stepping-stones to new principles : round after round 
 was added to the ladder by which the mind ascends, until 
 Newton could rise to that high, upper air of intellectual 
 abstraction where thought crystallizes, and look out as 
 through a mighty dome of glass upon the infinite ; until 
 La Place could encircle and environ nature and life and 
 
LECTURES. 341 
 
 art with the pure transparency of mathematical reason. 
 And yet the science of numbers and quantities is still in 
 its infancy, and it will continue to progress and develop 
 while the soul of man beats with the pulse of aspiration. 
 
 In astronomy, too, how slow yet how wonderful has 
 been the growth. Four thousand years ago the Chaldean 
 shepherds watching their flocks by night gazed upon the 
 stars and rudely sketched the constellations in the sand. 
 Forty centuries of restless human inquiry have gone by, 
 and now astronomy is in the vigor of her youth. With 
 telescopic eye her vision penetrates the far depths of 
 heaven ; by the aid of the higher principles of mathe- 
 matics she carries the chain and compass through the far 
 depths of space, traces the planets in their orbs, weighs 
 the world in her balance, and poises the universe upon its 
 centre. 
 
 See chemistry with her original speculations about the 
 four elements, her doctrines of antagonism and election ; 
 see her afterward with her philters, her spells and incan- 
 tations, seeking after the philosopher's stone, the elixir of 
 life ; still growing in strength and gathering truths, until 
 now no hidden natural process is safe from her sleepless 
 search. She carries her torch into the darkness of mys- 
 tery, brings to light the hidden laws of unity of combina- 
 tion, of proportion and affinity, and enriches the arts 
 with the secrets of the great laboratory of nature. 
 
 In medicine, how many intellects centre within and 
 think through the intelligent physician who feels your 
 pulse. He is heir to the intellectual wealth of a long 
 line of professional ancestry, reaching back to the days 
 of old Hippocrates. 
 
 Out of how many ages of experience is derived the 
 system of laws administrated in our courts. 
 
 In politics, out of the wrecks of how many splendid 
 schemes of government are our own institutions built. 
 How have the principles of constitutional liberty come 
 
342 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 down to us, not as the discoverers of isolated intellect, 
 but as the hard achievements of humanity— heirlooms 
 from a thousand battlefields — baptized in the blood of 
 martyrs. 
 
 In the development of science it is not alone the great 
 and the wise who are employed. The mass of facts from 
 which her principles are deduced is furnished by the 
 unskilled — the result of the experience of every-day life. 
 
 In literature the unity of one mind is expressed. In 
 science the harmony of nature's laws is discovered. In 
 literature attainment is limited by the stretch and inven- 
 tion of individual power ; the domain of science is as 
 boundless as the universe of God, and fathomless as the 
 powers of the race of man. 
 
 In the features we have observed the fine arts bear the 
 same relation to the practical or mechanical arts that 
 literature does to science. The productions of the first 
 are the creations of the mind, those of the latter are the 
 application of the forces of nature. The painter or 
 sculptor embodies his own idea of beauty, gives form and 
 being to the conceptions of his own soul, and his work is 
 the exemplar of his single-handed power and the witness 
 of his individual immortality. The mechanical arts are 
 the fruits of the world's experience, — the energies of 
 humanity pushing out to a full and free development, the 
 triumphs of want over necessity, and they are the symbols 
 of the power and the types of the destiny of our race. 
 The one is like the dewdrop of the morning, beautiful 
 with the colors of the rainbow ; the other is like the 
 swelling march of the billows of the sea — resistless. The 
 grandest representative of these, the noblest symbol of 
 man's power, the truest type of his destiny, is that highest 
 achievement of mind over matter — the steam-engine. 
 
 In the early ages of history men led roving lives, living 
 without culture and with but little exertion. The spon- 
 taneous fruits of the earth, the fishes of the river, and the 
 
LECTURES. 343 
 
 wild animals of the forest supplied them with food, and 
 the skins of the latter furnished them with clothing. 
 Their first inventions were those of prime necessity to 
 supply natural wants. They were rude and simple. The 
 bow and arrow, the sling, a wooden spear pointed with 
 bone or flint, a few utensils of cookery, a boat made from 
 the body of a tree hollowed out with fire, and one or two 
 barbarous instruments of music. And these first inven- 
 tions of barbarous life were the beginnings — the germs 
 from which have arisen the wonder-working implements 
 and world-wide appliances of modern art. 
 
 From the bow and arrow, the sling and wooden spear, 
 as a natural sequence, as a logical deduction, we have those 
 terrible engines of destructiveness that belong to warfare 
 now. From the spit and earthen kettle we have the com- 
 plicated arrangements of our kitchen-craft. Every step of 
 improvement can be distinctly traced from the awkward, 
 round-bottomed canoe, to the majestic clipper with her 
 beautiful proportions that sweeps upon the wings of the 
 wind like a very creature of the elements. From the 
 pencil reed and raw-hide drum we have the flute with its 
 soft cadences, the violin with its fairy strains, and the 
 grand-tuned organ with its swelling power and solemn 
 pomp of sound. 
 
 In the history of civilization, as the race of man increased 
 in number the chase came to afford but an uncertain and 
 precarious subsistence, and wild animals were tamed, 
 domesticated, and driven in herds from place to place 
 for the convenience of pasturage and water. Pastoral life, 
 of which we have such beautiful pictures in Oriental 
 literature, succeeded to barbarism. Fleeces were used in 
 place of skins to supply clothing. The distaff was in- 
 vented, and garments were woven or rather knit by hand. 
 Through the thousands of years that have gone by since, 
 this idea has been developing and unfolding, and its 
 present maturity can be seen in the machinery of Lowell 
 
344 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 and Manchester — all of which is but the growth of the 
 spinning-wheel. 
 
 The next step in civilization was from nomadic pastoral 
 life to agriculture. In order to meet growing demands it 
 was found necessary to cultivate wild fruits and grains to 
 increase their productiveness and improve their quality. 
 The soil must be tilled. The first rude artificers in metals 
 commenced the manufacture of clumsy instruments for 
 working the earth ; and these first awkward tools made 
 from metals were the germs which, after centuries upon 
 centuries, have flowered in the operations of Sheffield 
 and Birmingham. 
 
 As the number of men still increased, these early simple 
 methods of life failed to yield them a subsistence, while 
 new desires were stimulated into activity. Thus by 
 "necessity's sharp pinch " man was driven in upon him- 
 self — upon the resources of his reason. He must conquer 
 from nature the tribute she refused to yield. He asserted 
 his prerogative as master of the universe. The elements 
 became the slaves of his will, natural forces were pressed 
 into his service to bear his burdens and to do his toil. 
 And this was the dawning of the era of mechanical power, 
 whose first rude device was the awkward wind-mill, the 
 crowning conquest of whose glory is the steam-engine. 
 
 Thus is it in the moral as in the natural world, 
 great results are the effect of gradual development and 
 slow growth. The neglected acorn springs up into the 
 giant oak, but it requires centuries to unfold the vitality 
 wrapped up within the germ. The knowledge of truth is 
 such a germ. Cast into the rich waxen soil of humanity, 
 its powers unfold through the still lapse of ages— it sends 
 its roots abroad — its trunk springs up — up — through the 
 thousands of years of history, until its branches wave 
 among the stars, and its golden fruit shines in the gardens 
 of Hesperides. And this is that great law of progress 
 everywhere illustrated — from the lowest plant of earth, to 
 
LECTURES. 345 
 
 the mightiest seen in space — from the meanest animalculae 
 that die with the first breath of their being, to the soul 
 of man rejoicing in the strength of immortahty. 
 
 Thus is it, too, that the great results of life are not the 
 attainment of exalted individual endowment. They are 
 the growths of time — the quality of the race — the fruits 
 of universal humanity, to whose production the highest 
 and humblest have alike contributed. And this is a high 
 teaching of equality — a seal of universality — a revelation 
 that the same rights and privileges belong to all — God's 
 signet attesting the divine doctrine of democracy. 
 
 It is a favorite hypothesis with some that the power of 
 steam was known to the ancient Egyptians, and used by 
 them in the construction of their pyramids and temples. 
 There is no direct evidence bearing upon the question ; 
 the argument in favor of the supposition is, that we do 
 not now know of any other force suf^ciently great to 
 accomplish such stupendous results. 
 
 The earliest authentic account that we have of the 
 application of steam as a mechanical power, is in the 
 works of Hero of Alexandria, who lived about a century 
 before the Christian era, and he speaks of it rather as 
 known fact than a new discovery. Its principle, probably 
 its only application then, was in accomplishing the pre- 
 tended miracles of priestcraft. Its power was unknown 
 to the populace, and by its hidden agency inanimate 
 figures were made to move around the altar during the 
 hour of sacrifice, sending forth mysterious sounds. 
 
 It is probable that during the Middle Ages ingenious 
 steam toys were frequently constructed, whose only ob- 
 ject was to excite wonder and curiosity. The intellect of 
 these times was too much taken up in the discussion of the 
 transcendental nothingness of nominalism and realism to 
 descend to the investigation of anything having a practical 
 bearing and substantial interest. Great men then had to 
 settle the question whether an angel could be translated 
 
346 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 from one planet to another without passing through in- 
 termediate space, — and whether two spirits could occupy 
 the same place at the same time. 
 
 Early in the seventeenth century, Solomon De Cours, 
 a Frenchman, used the power of steam in the construction 
 of artificial fountains in the gardens of Charles the First, 
 of England, then Prince of Wales. He also published a 
 translation of the writings of Hero upon pneumatics. 
 
 Edward Somerset, the Marquis of Worcester, an English- 
 man who lived about fifty years afterwards, was the first 
 to comprehend and appreciate the power and capabilities 
 of this wonderful element. He was the inventor of a 
 steam-engine which he called " the semi-omnipotent ma- 
 chine," about which he says : " I do intend a model of it 
 shall be buried with me." Certainly there could be no 
 nobler symbol of the soul. The Rosicrucian lamp that 
 was to burn forever in the tomb compared to this was as 
 "a rush light to the sun." 
 
 During the next hundred years, a number of practical 
 improvements were made in the steam-engine, but it still 
 remained a very expensive power and could only be used 
 when fuel was exceedingly cheap. The principal service 
 it rendered was in the pumping of water from coal mines. 
 During all this time, the real power employed was that of 
 atmospheric pressure, and steam was only used in creating 
 a vacuum. 
 
 About the year 1760, the immortal Watt constructed 
 the modern steam-engine, bringing the action of steam 
 directly to bear, and dispensing with the atmospheric 
 pressure. 
 
 And now that mysterious power which had originally 
 been used to assist in the juggleries of priestcraft — then 
 to excite the wonder of the ignorant — to adorn the pleas- 
 ure grounds of a prince — the sphere of whose utility had 
 been confined for a hundred years to the pumping of water 
 from mines, — became at once the giant agent of modern 
 
LECTURES. 347 
 
 civilization, turning the current of history, and shaping 
 the destiny of humanity. 
 
 Less than a hundred years have gone by since the 
 invention of the modern steam-engine, yet it has revolu- 
 tionized the arts of peace, as the invention of gunpowder 
 did the art of war. In its myriads of forms of application 
 to the manufactures, railroads, the printing-press, in- 
 ternal and ocean navigation, it has permeated every in- 
 terest, is witnessed in every phase of our existence. It 
 has become " semi-omnipotent," breathing the breath of 
 life into forms inanimate ; it is to-day the mighty heart 
 beating beneath the world's policy, felt in every quickening 
 pulse of industry and life. 
 
 It is the expansive power of steam that has subdued 
 the wilderness of our country — steam that binds our 
 widespread population into one nation — steam is the 
 weapon in the hands of Young America with which she 
 will accomplish her manifest destiny. It is steam that is 
 thundering at the gates of Oriental exclusiveness — steam 
 is to open the magnificent valley of the Amazon to cul- 
 tivation, redeem the lost paradise of Central America, 
 build up great nations in Australia, upon the western 
 slopes of the Andes and Sierra Nevada, and develop upon 
 the Pacific a commerce worthy of the sea of seas ; upon 
 the wings of that commerce it will carry the teachings of 
 Christianity and doctrines of democracy ** to the isles of 
 the sea and the uttermost parts of the earth " — for steam 
 is the world's great missionary power and highest apostle 
 of freedom. In view of the influence of the steam-engine 
 in the first hundred years of its existence, who shall set 
 bounds to its effect in the cycles of future history. 
 Through the invention of Ericsson, its legitimate off- 
 spring, or through some other means it will become so 
 cheap a power that it will be used upon every farm, in 
 the simplest mechanical contrivances, and make a part 
 of the furniture of every extensive household. Through 
 
348 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 improvements already indicated in ocean navigation and 
 by increased railroad facilities it will become so great a 
 power that it will weld sentiments together, cement 
 nations, melt the world into one people having one 
 policy — universal peace and unrestricted free trade. 
 
 But behind all this there arises a great question, upon 
 the answer to which depends the character of the ul- 
 timate influence of steam, whether it be evil or whether it 
 be good, and that is the effect it produces upon social 
 inequality. 
 
 It is contended by many that the necessary tendency 
 of labor-saving machinery is towards the accumulation of 
 capital and degradation of labor, that it makes the poor 
 poorer and the rich richer, increases social distinctions, 
 multiplies caste, and exalts one portion of society at the 
 expense of another. And indeed so far is the argument 
 pressed that it is actually gravely asked whether it is 
 better to be a slave to the necessity to daily toil in the 
 world's manufacturing capitals, or to the caprice of a 
 master who buys and sells the thews and sinews of 
 manhood. 
 
 By the invention of the modern steam-engine alone it is 
 fair to assume that the productive capacity of the world 
 has been more than doubled, yet want still exists gaunt 
 as ever, misery is unalleviated, penury the universal 
 dread, and the opportunities for high mental culture the 
 prize of the few, not the free gift to all. That there is a 
 dark wrong somewhere in our social organization is but 
 too true. We cannot ignore it if we would. It meets us 
 every hour of our life. It stares us in the face in a hun- 
 dred varying forms — in individual deprivations, in ill- 
 requited labor, in the degradations of service, in crimes 
 instigated by want ; in our own country ; in the necessity 
 for strikes, combinations, and trade unions ; in Europe, 
 in the restlessness of the masses and the volcanic upheav- 
 ing of revolutionary fires. It is the unbidden guest that 
 
LECTURES. 349 
 
 shakes its gory locks at the world's feasts, thrusts us from 
 our stools, and will not down at our bidding. While the 
 laws of production are intensely active, the principles of 
 distribution are intensely unjust. True history, however, 
 teaches us that this injustice is neither caused nor aggra- 
 vated by labor-saving machinery. The man who toils 
 to-day for his daily bread without the use of capital may 
 enjoy privileges that wealth could not buy two hundred 
 years ago. Written history too often preserves only 
 the beautiful pictures of the past, and leaves the dark 
 side of humanity — the shadows of life — without a record 
 or a witness. We know well, however, that when art ex- 
 isted only in its crude conceptions, the laborer himself was 
 a mere machine, not recompensed for his toil, but barely 
 sustained that his body might be kept in working condition. 
 Every aspiration of his soul was crushed beneath an iron 
 fate. No hope of a kinder future cheered him. Death 
 was the only relief from the house of his bondage. 
 
 Go to the East, to China and Japan, where labor-saving 
 machinery is comparatively unknown, where the hands 
 alone must perform life's heavy tasks, and see how the 
 millions are crushed to the earth by the grievous load 
 they bear. There the law of caste is as inexorable as the 
 law of fate, and its slightest infringement inevitable death. 
 
 The feudal system, with its dark oppression of the 
 masses, has been destroyed by the progress of art in its 
 application to commerce and manufactures. Entails, long 
 terms, and secret uses are dying out from the operation of 
 the same causes. Commercial restrictions, fetters upon 
 trade, and land monopoly must yield to the same benefi- 
 cent influence. Slavery in every form must eventually 
 disappear before the progress of inventive power, for 
 servile labor can not be applied to the highest employ- 
 ment of art ; and in the future perfection of art the nation 
 that is not armed Avith all its implements can no more 
 meet one that is, in the competitions of peace, than could 
 
350 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 an army of barbarians with their war clubs and bows and 
 arrows stand before the thundering charge of Napoleon's 
 old guard. 
 
 Great inventions, the offspring of democratic principle 
 are always democratic, equalizing in their tendency. God's 
 great gifts dispense their blessings unto all, and the higher 
 man arises in creative power the more do his works re- 
 semble God's in that highest quality — universality. What 
 a sun to the whole human race is the printing-press ! 
 What a mighty precursor in human progress is the steam- 
 engine ! How do barriers that rose like Alps in its path- 
 way go down before the tread of this giant leveller ! How 
 do deluding errors, the frightful chimeras of darkness, 
 vanish into thin air before the breath of its fiery nostrils ! 
 
 These are but the forerunners of inventions to come 
 after them, whose shoes they are not worthy to unlatch. 
 Nature has yet myriads of secrets undisclosed. Art is 
 still in its infancy, nor will it attain perfection until it 
 shall appropriate and embody all the undiscovered, inex- 
 haustible forces of nature, become the perfect representa- 
 tive of the outward world — man's creation reproducing 
 God's. Then will the means of production become so 
 simple, so cheap, so entire, they will be within the reach 
 of all ; life's blessings will be as incapable of monopoly as 
 God's great gifts, the sunshine and the air, and social 
 privileges be as free as the offers of His mercy. 
 
 Contrast for one moment man as he was — the child of 
 nature, and as he is — the master of art. See him at his 
 original creation, when his own right arm was the sole 
 representative of his energy and power. The earth 
 spread around him full of dreary deserts and interminable 
 wildernesses, mountains reared to the clouds their rocky 
 barriers above him, the ocean stretched out impassably 
 before him, the stars from their immeasurable heights 
 looked down in mockery upon his existence. Less fav- 
 ored than the animals, he had no instinct to guide him, no 
 
LECTURES. 351 
 
 natural protection against winter's cold and summer's 
 heat. The elements were at war with his person, the wild 
 beasts sought his destruction, hunger was his hourly craving, 
 disease his portion, weakness his nature, want his life. Poor, 
 frail wanderer, alone in the immensity of creation, what 
 was there left for him but to die, and let the winds and 
 the rains beat out the impress of his footsteps ! 
 
 Behold him now. He has subdued nature and made 
 the elements the creatures of his will. The desert blooms 
 and the wilderness is made glad at his touch. The sea 
 sends its broad-backed waves to his feet to bear his bur- 
 dens. Nature's great power, clothed with the strength 
 and terror of a thousand thunders, is his patient, humble 
 slave. He says to the lightnings, " Go," and they go, the 
 winds do his bidding and minister to his pleasure. Great 
 thoughts are breathing to him from all the past, high 
 voices calling to him from the future. The enchantments 
 of art are around him. Strains of music charm his spirit 
 away over the elysian fields of fancy to the secret halls of 
 melody. His searching eyes look down into the dark 
 mysteries of the earth and her secrets are as plain to him 
 as an open book. He sends his rapt soul through the 
 mysteries of the stars, his spirit walks at home amid the 
 high courts of heaven, sits down in the council chambers 
 of the gods, and reads the laws of the universe. " How 
 infinite in faculties, how noble in reason, in form and 
 movement how express and admirable ! In action how 
 like an angel ; in apprehension how like a god ! " 
 
 LECTURE ON THE SPIRITUAL. 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, SACRAMENTO, 
 OCT. 28, 1863. 
 
 A Scotchman who was asked the definition of meta- 
 physics, made this answer : " When the speaker din na 
 ken what he speaks, and the hearer din na understand 
 what he hears ; that 's metaphysics." 
 
352 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 I believe that this definition expresses a popular idea 
 of the science of mind or the laws of spiritual action. It 
 is quite generally believed that when one commences the 
 investigation of mental phenomena, he leaves the domain 
 of the actual, the positive, and enters a region of vague 
 shadows and unrealities — a region of ghosts, hobgoblins, 
 and chimeras, where the sunlight of reason is no longer 
 his guide, and even the twilight of the imagination gives 
 place to the weird starlight of dreams. Pity for the 
 wanderer on this " Plutonian shore." He is given over 
 to a kind of mild insanity ; he peoples the airy nothing 
 with the bodiless creatures of his fancy ; the objects of 
 his pursuit are the very specters of thought, less real than 
 the mirage of the desert, but the shadows of a shade, the 
 dreams of a dream. 
 
 In contradistinction from this, it is assumed that in the 
 study of material things and physical forces we stand upon 
 the sure and firm-set earth. Here we are dealing with the 
 objects of sense that the understanding can take hold of. 
 Here men can exercise their sober faculties, theories can 
 be verified by experiment, speculation can be tested by 
 trial. Matter is a verity, a positive existence — it is a sub- 
 stance, it has form and color — it can be seen, touched, 
 handled, weighed, divided, analyzed ; and the physical 
 sciences are not the air-built castles of the brain, but solid 
 structures of the masonry of fact. 
 
 And yet, if it be not to consider the subject too curi- 
 ously, it may, perhaps, appear that the mystery of matter 
 is as great as the mystery of mind. If the soul be that 
 strange being in the universe which like the eye cannot 
 see itself, and if creation has no mirror that can reveal its 
 unearthly lineaments, matter is the very Proteus whose 
 ultimate form eludes our sharpest search, whose essence 
 baffles the sense, escapes the power of retort and crucible, 
 whose highest mystery its union with the spirit, its dark 
 upbuilding in this clay tenement around the flashing light 
 
LECTURES. 353 
 
 of the soul, its strange blending with and tempering of the 
 fires of thought, is not more past finding out than are its 
 lower offices as seen in vegetable growth and mineral 
 crystallization, and that even its very existence is a thing 
 to be inferred, not realized or understood. 
 
 Matter you say has color, weight, form, extension. But 
 what is the color of the air? Will you give me a pound 
 of electricity, or a gallon of light, or a cubic foot of mag- 
 netism ? Matter the object of sense? Touch a needle 
 with the magnet; how does it acquire polarity? Why 
 point true to its mysterious attraction, the chambers of 
 the north ? The magnet loses no weight, no quality ; 
 nay, like virtue, its force is increased by the power it im- 
 parts ; like charity, giving increases its abundance. How 
 does the click of the telegraph repeat itself instantly thou- 
 sands of miles away ? Can material forces be measured 
 and estimated ? 
 
 You have just listened to a beautiful piece of music. 
 You were made conscious of its sounds by vibrations of 
 the atmosphere ; its notes rippled through the air, and 
 broke in melody on your ears. So soft was the motion 
 the floating mote was not stirred by it, and yet that ripple 
 of the air which did not move the flame of the gas, pulsed 
 through these solid walls and fell upon ears outside. 
 
 If a stringed instrument attuned in unison with an 
 organ be suspended to it, it will echo every note the organ 
 sounds, even as the chords of the human heart answer in 
 sympathy when some great master like Patrick Henry, or 
 Clay, or Cicero, sweeps with magic touch the lyre of feel- 
 ing and passion. Why is it that the deep sound which 
 moves the heavy chord will not stir the finer one, but that 
 too answers only when its own key-note is struck ? 
 
 There is a form of matter compared to which the 
 atmosphere seems solid, and electricity gross. As sound 
 passes through the air by airy waves that strike upon the 
 ear, so there is diffused through all the universe a sub- 
 
354 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 stance called by natural philosophers ether, by whose 
 undulations light falls upon the eye, and we are made 
 conscious of the visible word. Sound moves by undula- 
 tions of the air sixty-three thousand feet in a minute. The 
 undulations of ether carry light two hundred thousand 
 miles a second, twelve million miles a minute. They pass 
 through the air, through glass, through the diamond, 
 through the pupil of the eye and break upon the most 
 delicate nerve of our system so gently they occasion no 
 pain, but bear to the soul the exquisite sense of the beauti- 
 ful. A scarlet-colored object causes four hundred and 
 seventy-five million millions of these undulations to fall 
 upon the retina of the eye in a second ; a violet color 
 seven hundred million of millions. 
 
 In the open pipe of an organ, thirty-two feet long, the 
 reed vibrates sixteen and a half times in a second, making 
 that note C, which is the deepest tone in music. In a pipe 
 half as long, sixteen feet, the vibrations are twice as rapid, 
 thirty-three to the second, and the note is one octave higher. 
 Thus the pitch of the note depends upon the number of 
 the undulations of the air that strike upon the ear in a 
 given period. Twenty-four thousand vibrations in a second 
 produce the highest appreciable note ; seven and three 
 quarters the lowest audible sound, and within this range 
 all musical tones are made. In the same manner, if an 
 object sends four hundred and seventy-five million millions 
 undulations of ether to the retina of your eye in a second, 
 you are made conscious of the color of scarlet ; seven hun- 
 dred million of millions make violet visible, and between 
 these limits all other colors are formed. The light of the 
 sun reaches the earth in about eight minutes, travelling 
 ninety-five million miles. It requires ten-years for the light 
 of some of the brightest fixed stars to reach us. Through 
 a telescope, stars of the twelfth magnitude can be seen, 
 whose light travelled four thousand years before it falls 
 upon the eye. These undulations of ether, rolling two 
 
LECTURES. 355 
 
 hundred thousand miles a second for four thousand years, 
 pass through the earth's atmosphere, through the lens of 
 the telescope, to the eye of the beholder, and reveal what 
 seems to be a point of fire, what is a central sun. The 
 mind sinks in the contemplation of such distance, as in 
 the presence of the idea of eternity. But if you could 
 stand upon that sun, there are stars, so far beyond it, their 
 light, travelling since the creation's morn, had not reached 
 that point ; and all the interstellar space is radiant with 
 revolving worlds, suns, and starry systems. These worlds, 
 suns, systems, galaxies, all float in this boundless, shore- 
 less sea of ether, seven hundred million millions of whose 
 waves can break upon the retina of the eye in a second of 
 time. This impalpable, ineffable ether, is as truly matter 
 as is the solid granite or the rock-ribbed earth, and you 
 know as much of it as you do absolutely of matter in its 
 most familiar forms. 
 
 Examine for a few moments the qualities of matter in 
 its forms that are most familiar to the sense. Take a bar 
 of steel ; it weighs, we say, ten pounds. Place above it a 
 magnet of a given power, it weighs but half as much ; in- 
 crease the power of the magnet, it weighs nothing. Why ? 
 By its weight you simply express the amount of the earth's 
 influence over it, an influence that can be counteracted by 
 one similar in quality, but of more intense concentration 
 existing in the magnet. The earth can be considered a 
 great magnet, drawing to its centre all terrestial objects. 
 Weight, then, is not a property that belongs to the bar of 
 steel in itself. If the earth were four times as dense, the 
 steel would weigh four times as much ; if the matter of 
 the sun were condensed into the size of the earth, and the 
 ten-pound bar of steel placed upon its surface, it would 
 there weigh three million five hundred and fifty thousand 
 pounds. Placed equally distant between two worlds of 
 the same size and density, it would remain suspended, 
 poised in mid air. Of themselves, objects have no weight ; 
 
356 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 it requires the presence of another body of matter to de- 
 velop this quahty. The weight of any sublunary object 
 is simply the amount of attraction between it and the 
 globe. The weight of the moon is its tendency to gravi- 
 tate to the earth ; the weight of the earth is its tendency 
 to gravitate to the sun ; the weight of the sun is its ten- 
 dency to gravitate to the great centre of our starry sys- 
 tem ; and if you weigh a barrel of flour or a pound of 
 sugar, you simply determine its exact relation to the great 
 law that runs through all the worlds, which is the harmony 
 of the universe, the key-note of the creation. 
 
 Of what single essential property of matter do our senses 
 give us any absolute knowledge? You have a black, granu- 
 lated mass which you call gunpowder. You can see it, 
 feel it, weigh it ; it is ugly, passive, inert ; touch it with 
 fire — in the twinkling of an eye, it becomes air ; its vol- 
 ume is increased four hundred and fifty times — its expan- 
 sive force equals forty-eight thousand pounds to the square 
 inch. Pile mountains upon it, and it rends its way like a 
 risen earthquake ; a moment after this volcanic display of 
 strength, a lady can wave her fan through it and scarcely 
 stir the down of its trimming. But the same elements 
 compose it in solid and in gas, when it rends its way up- 
 ward and when it floats upon the bosom of the air ! 
 
 Water at one temperature is ice — clear crystal ; at an- 
 other, steam — the invisible spirit of power ; it becomes 
 vapor ; is piled into clouds ; forms the islands of light that 
 glow like molten rubies and sapphire in the setting sun ; 
 it weaves itself into more than fairy-like beauty in the 
 gleaming tracery of the frost, or clothes itself in the sin- 
 less purity of the snow-flake ; it glistens like tears of joy 
 in dew-drops; it comes down like liquid diamonds in the 
 summer rain, sinks into the earth to reappear in the ver- 
 dure of the grass and leaves, in the beauty of flowers and 
 fruit ; yet in all these beautiful transitions — in ice and 
 steam, in frost, snow, and rain, in grass, in fruit, and in the 
 
LECTURES. 357 
 
 red blood that warms the heart and blushes in the cheek 
 of beauty, it is the same substance. 
 
 Take a bar of silver — a " Washoe brick " ; surely that is 
 a thing tangible to sense. You can learn its exact specific 
 gravity, assay it and determine what foreign matters are 
 present, if any ; you can ascertain its commercial value. 
 Certainly, there is no mystery about this, except to get it 
 and keep it. Take a part of it ; polish it on copper ; ex- 
 pose it to the vapor of iodine, and it becomes sensitive to 
 the light ; will receive and retain images cast upon it, as 
 wonderfully as do the mysterious tablets of the memory 
 the impressions made upon them. Take the remainder ; 
 dissolve it in nitric acid ; that which was a white, gleaming 
 solid, is a liquid, almost colorless ; heat it — it becomes air. 
 
 Take the diamond — one of the hardest of substances ; 
 with a heat sufficiently powerful, it will be consumed — 
 become a gas less than half as heavy as the air. Will 
 not some empirical philosopher to whom matter is fact, 
 spirit a myth, send out and impress into his services this 
 airy, volatile essence, solidify it, crystallize, and make a 
 diadem for his favorite science, whose royal, radiant, 
 flaming, flashing splendor shall pale the Koh-i-noor into a 
 glittering bauble — a nursery plaything? 
 
 If the diamond — a substance harder than flint — is 
 but the imprisoned spirit of the air, what is there palpable 
 to feeling and to sight ? Why, if the earth were sud- 
 denly stopped in its revolution, instantly checked in its 
 whirl around the sun, it would melt in its own fires, 
 consume with fervent heat, vanish into thin air, " and, 
 like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wreck 
 behind." 
 
 But matter does not change. The chemist will tell 
 you the elements are indestructible — they only change 
 in form and appearance. What is that thing that 
 remains unchanged in all these transitions of form and 
 appearance ; which is the same in the solid, the liquid, 
 
358 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 the gas ; in organic life and decay ; which is not size, 
 or weight, or form, or color, or life, or death ; but in 
 which all these things inhere, and which still exists 
 when they are purged away? What is that substance 
 on which the Creator paints the beauty and glory of 
 the universe ; through which He reveals His laws, and 
 makes manifest His power? 
 
 That is a sealed book — an inscrutable mystery. Some 
 philosophers have denied the existence of this base, 
 and contended that the external world was simply 
 an appearance — a mere show — like the image seen 
 in a mirror, that ceases to be when there is no eye to 
 regard it. 
 
 Chemistry instructs us there are about sixty elements, 
 that is, sixty forms of matter incapable of further analysis 
 with the present means of science. These elements are 
 described by their properties ; as oxygen supports 
 combustion, vitalizes the blood, etc. But what is that 
 thing which supports combustion and gives life to the 
 blood ? There, science is as dumb as the sense. The 
 chapter of mystery is reached. How is it that hydrogen, 
 the lightest of the gases, combines with oxygen in one 
 proportion in this glass of water ; and in another in this 
 flame of gas ? 
 
 The elements, only twelve of which are found in 
 abundance, in various combinations form the material 
 universe. Sometimes science discovers a new substance 
 which it cannot analyze, thus adding to the list ; some- 
 times it succeeds in resolving one to two simples which 
 were before known, thus reducing the number. It is 
 possible, if we had an alembic sufificiently powerful, all 
 forms of matter might be reduced into one substance 
 which we see only in different conditions — one pure 
 ethereal essence — the absolute, about which the alchem- 
 ists so wildly dreamed, for which they so madly sought ; 
 in that pure, absolute form, purged of the properties that 
 
 I 
 
LECTURES. 359 
 
 change and decay, in the ethereahzed essence of matter, 
 the bodies of the saints may appear, " when this corrupt- 
 ible shall have put on incorruption." 
 
 We might pursue the metaphysical line of argument 
 and reach the same conclusion, that we can know noth- 
 ing of matter as it absolutely is. We are conversant 
 with ideas, not with objects. We know what a rose is 
 only from the impression it makes upon the mind 
 through the senses. To the blind man it has no color : 
 to one without the sense of smell, it has no sweetness, 
 to one devoid of sentiment, it has no beauty. The artist 
 will discover in it a symmetry and proportion we fail to 
 see ; the poet and the lover a depth of meaning we can 
 not appreciate ; the microscope will reveal qualities 
 hidden from the naked eye. We can imagine a being 
 marvellously endowed with senses and sensibilities we 
 do not possess, for whom it will have a beauty and a 
 sweetness, a life and a meaning mortals can never 
 realize. 
 
 Take a harp and play upon it in the presence of one 
 who is deaf, and though your touch be as skilful as 
 David's before Saul, it will be to him " inexplicable dumb 
 show." There may be an intelligence whose soul and 
 sense are so in accord with the harmonies of creation 
 that the universal space is filled with symphonies such as 
 never ravished mortal ear. 
 
 All that we know even of the qualities of objects is 
 from the images they cast through the medium of the 
 senses in the mirror of the soul, and as the senses 
 are but darkened windows, and the soul clouded 
 by mortality, these images are dim and obscure 
 reflections of the real objects God has created. When 
 the film of the flesh is removed, and we see no longer as 
 through a glass darkly, the glory of the material universe 
 will stream upon us, radiant with the living presence of 
 Omnipotence. 
 
360 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 If, then, we know of the existence of matter, only by its 
 appearances and phenomena, we know of the existence 
 of spirit in the same manner, by its powers and its works. 
 Matter reveals itself in forms and forces ; the life of 
 the spirit, its divine effluence, is thought. We cannot 
 comprehend what matter is, and we cannot lay bare 
 the fiery pulses of the soul and watch the play of its 
 life. We know it only in its results ; we can study its 
 laws and conditions — its processes are hidden even from 
 itself. Its operations that seem most familiar, are as 
 mysterious as its great efforts that challenge our wonder 
 and command our reverence. The machinery of its 
 hourly action is the same that moves the hand of fate 
 through the circle of the centuries. The birth of a thought 
 is as great a mystery as the creation of a race or the fact 
 of human life. 
 
 You try to think of a name which you cannot recall ; 
 you knit your brows and endeavor to concentrate your 
 powers and shut out every other thought ; you attempt to 
 recollect how it looked when you saw it written, how it 
 sounded when you heard it spoken — you almost hear it 
 and see it — but it glides from you. But you have started 
 some hidden wheel of your being in motion, and in 
 a moment of listlessness the word unsought drops from 
 your lips. 
 
 Your seat yourself at the piano to play a piece from 
 memory — are you conscious of the thought and the will 
 that controls every touch of the fingers as they flash over 
 the keys ? Why the very fingers seem to think, and 
 give you leave to think and talk of something else, 
 while they wander through the mazes of music and untie 
 the harmony of sound. 
 
 Whence comes that easy flow and sparkle of language 
 in animated conversation, when your thoughts come to 
 you clothed in words, and you are surprised by your own 
 fancies and startled by your own suggestions ? 
 
LECTURES. 361 
 
 Whence is the sudden power of intellect in moments of 
 great passion or strong feeling, that quick, deep insight 
 which reveals a hidden world like a flash of lightning in 
 the dark ? 
 
 Whence came that elevation, that lofty serenity to 
 Buffon when the ardor of composition possessed him, 
 when his being was transfused with a glow of light, when 
 he could almost hear the circulation of his blood, when 
 words formed themselves beneath his pen, and to write 
 was like listening to music ? 
 
 In what deep cavern of his being, in what dark recess 
 of his nature was the soul of Socrates, when he stood in 
 sublime abstraction day and night, barefooted, on the ice, 
 listening to the inner voice ? 
 
 What fingers of light anointed the eyes and unsealed 
 the spiritual sight of Swedenborg to the presence of min- 
 istering angels ? 
 
 What ecstasy of vision fell upon the soul of Joan of 
 Arc when she saw forms and heard voices in the air ? 
 
 Witness the power and mystery of living thought in its 
 out-flashing from the soul. See Demosthenes before the 
 Athenian multitude, his being aglow with the earnestness 
 of passionate conviction, every word, tone, look, motion 
 electric, kindling the blood and firing the soul until the 
 mass arise as one man and shout " lead us to Philip." 
 See Felix trembling and Agrippa convicted before the 
 spiritual power of Paul, the chained prisoner. Behold 
 Webster, when, at the close of his great speech, he turns 
 his face upward and sees the flag of this country floating 
 from the dome of the Capitol, and in rapt inspiration he 
 touches its folds with seraphic fire, sublimer than the 
 light of battle, an imperishable spiritual glory ! 
 
 Witness the beauty and mystery of thought in its 
 development and growth within the soul. Who can 
 tell by what subtle chemistry the flower draws from the 
 coarse earth its beauty and sweetness ? Wlio can instruct 
 
362 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 US how the acorn becomes an oak — how the tree sends its 
 roots deep into the ground to get a fast hold upon Hfe, 
 how it gathers strength in the storm, beauty in the sun- 
 shine, how it draws from earth and sun and air the mate- 
 rials for its wooden fibres, for its tough and knotted trunk, 
 its branching limbs and coronal of leaves. 
 
 Even so some germ may unfold its latent powers with- 
 in the soul, send its roots downward in the being to the 
 sources of spiritual life, may draw strength and beauty 
 from joys and sorrows, from all sweet and bitter experien- 
 ces, from peace, passion, and suffering ; from temptations, 
 trials, and triumphs — from incommunicable dreams and 
 quickening aspiration — from the agony and bloody brain- 
 sweat of intense thought — from the still bliss of reverie, 
 the ecstasy of vision, the rapture of contemplation, the 
 transports of love ; from all knowledge and insight ; from 
 faith, the communion of spirits, the sunshine of God's 
 presence, until it becomes an excellence, a beauty, a joy, 
 and a living glory forever and forever. 
 
 Thus, a blind old man heard the story of the siege of 
 Troy, and his immortal song floating above the storms of 
 time has come down to us over the graves of thirty 
 centuries ; it is heard in the lullings of the battle, it blends 
 with the hum of labor, with the voices of the day and the 
 night, and charms the stillness of solitude and peace. 
 Thus Shakespeare heard a tale of a barbarous king, who, 
 a thousand years ago, divided his realm between two 
 pernicious daughters, a third, who loved him, he loaded 
 with his curse, and she, faithful in her love, followed his 
 evil fortunes to the grave ; and from his wonder-working 
 soul came Lear, with its passion and suffering, its night, 
 tempest, crime, madness, and death, blending in a strain 
 of awful grandeur and terror, the world's masterpiece of 
 sublimity and pathos. 
 
 Thus, too, he read the legend of a Danish prince 
 who feigned madness to escape the vengeance of the King 
 
LECTURES. 363 
 
 — and gave to the world Hamlet, demanding of the grave 
 its mysteries, of eternity its secrets, of life its philosophy, 
 of death its meaning, to endow his marvellous creation 
 with thoughts that lie beyond the reaches of our souls. 
 Newton, from the falling of an apple, evolved the law of 
 gravitation, 
 
 " That golden everlasting chain, 
 That binds in its strong embrace the earth and heaven and main." 
 
 Watt saw the lid of a tea-kettle raised by an invisible 
 force, and chained the tireless power of steam to the 
 chariot of the world's progress. Milton read " there was 
 war in heaven," another morn rose on his sightless eyes, 
 and he painted and hung in the gallery of time that great 
 picture of heaven and earth and hell, at which all pass- 
 ing generations turn to gaze with wonder and delight. 
 
 What bright ideas illumined the soul of Raphael before 
 he gave his Madonna and Transfiguration to the canvas. 
 In what august spiritual temples knelt the spirit of Angelo, 
 what lofty domes of thought lifted their skyey presence 
 above him before Saint Peter's arose in its marble grandeur 
 like an embodied dream of the gods. 
 
 Beethoven, when deaf to outward sounds, could still 
 listen to spiritual harmonies, feel fountains of melody 
 gushing within his being, and pour his thoughts, "too 
 deep for tears," in music, the ethereal expression, the 
 primal language of the soul. 
 
 How poor and dull often seem the symbols and drapery 
 of thought. There are five lines, there are bars, there 
 are stems, circles, dots, and marks, to represent notes in 
 music. In themselves how uncouth and meaningless, 
 but into these empty forms the composer breathes a 
 power, a divinity that soothes the turbulence of passion, 
 melts the heart with tenderness, fires the blood with en- 
 thusiasm, lifts the soul with reverence or enraptures it 
 with love. The power, the divinity, may sleep in its 
 
364 NEW TON BOOTH. 
 
 dark entombment for ages, but at the master's magic 
 touch it wakes in all the mystery of its meaning. 
 
 There are twenty-six letters — look at them as they 
 appear in an unknown language, the Hebrew or Greek 
 or German text, what idle characters, figures without 
 symmetry or expression, a blank, blind riddle ; but these 
 characters have received the baptism of the spirit, they 
 are interpreters from the dead to the living — they en- 
 shrine the lessons of wisdom and experience, the dreams 
 and revelations of poetry, the commands and promises 
 of God. 
 
 What utterances of jargon are mere words. Listen to 
 them in a strange tongue. What prattle and babble and 
 gibberish, not musical like the notes of birds or the hum 
 of insects ; not grand like the roar of wild beasts — con- 
 ventional combinations of articulate sounds — but '' words, 
 words, words " — how they can glow with feeling and 
 genius ; how are they quickened with intellect and pas- 
 sion ; what spiritual bodies do they become for immortal 
 thought ; what winged messengers of love. Spoken, they 
 are the living oracles of the soul ; written, they receive 
 its fleeting life into their deathless forms and eternize it, 
 making all the ages one, so that Plato is our companion, 
 Seneca our instructor, Montaigne our friend, making the 
 present musical with the psalms of David, rich with the 
 wisdom of Solomon, holy by the Saviour's death. Strike 
 them from existence, and time would become a sea of 
 darkness and sky of blackness without one star. 
 
 These two, these characters and symbols, these letters 
 and words, are the creatures of the spirit and attest its 
 power ; created by it that through them thought might 
 not die, but have immortal life. Ay, upon all that is, 
 which redeems life from the perishable quality of the 
 beasts, and refines it to the temper of the skies, the spirit 
 has set its seal, and claims it for its own. All conquests 
 from rudeness, ignorance, and savage life belong to the 
 
LECTURES. 365 
 
 spirit ; the sciences are parts of the domain of nature 
 illumined by its light. The arts are its thoughts em- 
 bodied in visible forms, great actions, lofty characters; 
 noble lives are its purest manifestations ; all progress, the 
 unfolding of its powers ; history, the map of its being. 
 Whatever has been said, written, or done, all achieve- 
 ments, inventions, discoveries, have first had an existence 
 within the soul — are types of the inner life. The soul, 
 working in secret and darkness, creates, moulds visible 
 forms to its unseen will. Thought, its silent, inscrutable 
 agent, controls and guides the events and revolutions of 
 human affairs. Fate is but the limitation of its powers ; 
 destiny, their final result. 
 
 " The inarticulate thought of a dreaming youth of to- 
 day, to-morrow is opinion ; then revolution ; then an 
 institution." Would you see the grandest triumph of 
 spiritual power? Eighteen hundred years ago, a patient 
 sufferer walked the earth — " the first gentleman that ever 
 breathed." Born in a manger, he was crucified between 
 thieves. To-day, art dedicates its noblest temples to his 
 worship, its divinest paintings to his memory, its grand- 
 est anthems to his praise. No soul is so high as to be 
 above his power; none so low as beneath his influence. 
 His spirit permeates all civilization, and opens the gates 
 of illimitable progress. 
 
 Men die — thoughts never. The spirit of Peter the 
 Great still animates Russia. For two thousand years 
 Aristotle gave direction to human inquiry. The large- 
 souled Plato, though we are told there are never twenty 
 men living at once who can read and understand him, is 
 still the horizon of the intellect. Bacon is an energizing 
 presence to minds that never heard of his " Organum." 
 What a long line of professional ancestors think through 
 the physician who feels your pulse. You look at your 
 watch, but he who first mapped the constellations on the 
 sky ; he who traced the path of the sun, and divided the 
 
366 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 zodiac ; the first artificers in metals ; the inventor of 
 Arabic numerals ; the inventors of the hour-glass, the 
 horologe and the dial, all lived and thought to enable 
 you to tell the hour and the day. Their minds move the 
 wheels of your chronometer, and guide its hands as they 
 follow the diurnal circuit of the sun. You have lands, 
 houses, and goods ; but it is the experience of all the past 
 that cultivates, and builds, and weaves. Your crops are 
 sown and harvested ; your habitations are made homes, 
 and your garments are fashioned by arts that were once 
 thoughts ; but for them, you would have no implements 
 to subdue the wilderness ; your houses would be huts ; 
 your raiment, the skins of animals ; your meat, " locusts 
 and wild honey." You speak to your neighbor, but the 
 language through which your meaning is expressed is the 
 fossilized thoughts of races that have perished. 
 
 Not alone through men as individuals, is spiritual 
 power made manifest. It gives to nations, races, and 
 to the whole race of mankind, a unity of life and pur- 
 pose. Nations are great actors on the stage ; with 
 spiritual individuality, Rome and Greece were as real as 
 Caesar and Pericles. England is truer than Palmerston ; 
 France nobler than Louis Napoleon. What a controlling 
 and guiding power is national existence. To-day, to 
 meet the necessities of its growth, it directs the energies 
 of its people to the invention of the steam-boat and tele- 
 graph, the reaper and cultivator ; to-morrow, amid the 
 the exigencies of danger, to casting columbiads, build- 
 ing monitors and ironsides. To-day, it colonizes gold 
 fields ; to-morrow, it organizes armies. To-day, it finds 
 voice in song, essay, and oration ; to-morrow, in procla- 
 mations of freedom, the thunder of battle. Woe, woe, 
 to the man who would lay irreverent hands upon the 
 unity of a nation's spirit when it has been anointed 
 from on High and consecrated to the utterance of 
 freedom. 
 
LECTURES. 367 
 
 Men write books, make inventions and discoveries, 
 embody their thoughts in their lives. Nations build 
 governments, establish laws, direct the current of life 
 in the great channels of history. Races create languages 
 — the grandest achievement of intellect — perfect arts, 
 for in the unity of a race's history, the lives of its great 
 men appear as different parts of one train of thought ; 
 hew the temples of civilization from the rough granite 
 of barbarism. 
 
 Standing on the vantage-ground of the present, look 
 at the great picture of human life as it reaches backward 
 through the past — through the deep vista of the ages 
 that are gone, until it is lost in the darkness of oblivion. 
 See the grand procession of events — arts, arms, laws, 
 literatures, languages, cities, empires, heroism, imperial 
 forms like the limning of destiny, — all this is but the 
 outward representation of the spirit of man, tJie inner life 
 projected on the canvas of time. 
 
 "The power whereby the present era gathers into itself 
 the results of the past, transforms the whole human race into 
 a colossal man, whose life reaches from the creation to the 
 day of judgment." Through the still hours of the morning 
 of time, when Jehovah walked with the children of earth, 
 through the glimmerings of prophecy, the revolutions of 
 science, the inspiration of song; through dark wrestlings 
 with wrong, the agony of revolutions, the bloody sweat 
 of battles ; through the dawning of freedom, the bless- 
 edness of peace, amid the teachings of nature, and 
 beneath the flaming cross of Christ rising into mid- 
 heaven, and blazing with unspeakable spiritual power, 
 this " colossal man " is growing up to his full maturity. 
 
 Are you impatient that the growth is slow ? That is 
 but the evidence of the grandeur of his destiny. Flowers 
 are the children of a season, but nature gives thousands 
 of years to the trees of Calaveras, the great periods of 
 geology to fit the earth as a dwelling-place for man. On 
 
368 NEWTO.V BOOTH. 
 
 a clear summer night you can see in the heavens a thin, 
 mist-like substance, that looks like a breath upon a 
 mirror. There, in the depths of space, a great ocean of 
 matter, in its primitive form, circles like a maelstrom. 
 Millions of ages go by and it solidifies into revolving 
 rings. Another great astronomical epoch elapses, and 
 these rings are rolled up into worlds, and a new system 
 wheels into place to measure some new cycle in the 
 boundless aeons of eternity. 
 
 Room in your midst, ye highest spiritual intelligences 
 of the universe, make room for man, " time's giant pupil, 
 when he shall attain his majority," grow up to his full 
 stature, and encircle his forehead with a diadem of 
 stars ! 
 
 But there is a higher revelation of spirit, " as the 
 heavens are higher than the earth " ; man's spirit em- 
 bodies itself in the works of time ; God clothes his thoughts 
 in the wonders of creation. 
 
 We divide and classify the sciences. We speak of 
 astronomy and chemistry, geology, botany, and physi- 
 ology, but as we enlarge the boundaries of each they 
 grow towards each other, and will ultimately meet in an 
 harmonious whole. The mathematician turns his back 
 upon matter and investigates abstract truths. He endeav- 
 ors to read without intervention the thoughts of Omnipo- 
 tence, and he finds that the principles of this, the most 
 spiritual of sciences, underlie all the others, and unite 
 them together. Shelley beautifully said, "that all poems 
 are but episodes to that great poem which all poets, like 
 the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built 
 up since the beginning of the world." So are all arts 
 reflections of the beautiful in the soul — all sciences parts 
 of one plan — all truths parts of one revelation from on 
 high. 
 
 Take the wings of the light and pierce the immensity 
 of space. Space is illimitable, for what is on the other 
 
LECTURES. 369 
 
 side, and wherever space is, there are galaxies of worlds. 
 What is all this but the expression of the thought, the 
 manifestation of the spiritual life of Him who paints 
 the violet, and breathes the perfume in the rose. All, 
 all are but shows ; spirit alone is real, unchangeable, 
 eternal ! 
 
 LECTURE ON THE PRESENT HOUR. 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE M. E. CHURCH, SACRAMENTO, MARCH 29, 1865. 
 
 When the Palace of the Louvre was completed in Paris, 
 in 1857, the Emperor Louis Napoleon, in his speech at 
 the dedication of the building, said in effect that it had 
 been commenced as the royal dwelling of the sovereignty 
 of France by Francis L, embellished by Henry IL, con- 
 tinued by Louis XL, Louis XHL, Richelieu, Louis XIV., 
 XV., and XVL, by the Committee of Public Safety during 
 the terrors of the Revolution, by the genius of the First 
 Napoleon amid the triumphs and splendors, the mis- 
 fortunes and defeats of his consulate and imperial reign, 
 by the restored monarchy of the Bourbons and the 
 Orleanists, even recognized as a national work by the 
 ephemeral Republican Government of 1848,30 that in its 
 completed state under his own reign, it was a monument 
 to the glory of France, built by her oft-changing govern- 
 ments, reflecting the spirit of her people, to which each 
 succeeding dynasty and passing generation had con- 
 tributed, and in which fleeting events had left a substan- 
 tial record. It was, so to speak, the history of France, 
 written in stone and emblazoned by art. 
 
 It occurred to me that I might borrow from this an 
 illustration of the leading idea I desire to present in this 
 lecture — which is — that everything which now exists, is 
 so much the production, the work, or growth of the past, 
 that, in arts and in arms, in character, institutions, knowl- 
 edge, and events, all the ages that are gone live again in 
 the present hour. 
 
3/0 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Perhaps I might draw a more striking illustration from 
 the history of the Cathedral at Milan. Of this, we are 
 told " the present building is the third, perhaps the fourth, 
 re-edification of the original structure, which St. Ambrose 
 in a letter to his sister Marcellina calls the great, new 
 Basilica. The primitive Cathedral was destroyed by 
 Attila. When rebuilt it was burned by accident in 1075. 
 It was again destroyed by Frederick I., in 1162. These 
 demolitions were probably only partial. The first stone 
 of the present Duomo was laid by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, 
 in 1387 — who sought and found an architect among the 
 Free Masons of Germany." This building thus recom- 
 menced a hundred years before the " Great Admiral " had 
 revealed to the Old World the enchanting vision of the 
 New, before the printing-press had sent forth the Bible, 
 its first printed book, has been continued with scarcely an 
 interruption ever since, and is still incomplete. For al- 
 most five hundred years the sound of the hammer has 
 been there continuously heard, and the workman of to- 
 day is busy upon nave or cornice, column or capital, frieze 
 or buttress, chancel or altar, niche or spire, that was com- 
 menced by a fellow-craftsman whose form had mouldered 
 into dust before Columbus was born ; and his hands are 
 working close beside the skeleton hands of co-workers of 
 twenty successive generations, each of which has there 
 left the silent record of the labor of a life. Through all 
 the vicissitudes of history the work has still gone on, and 
 still kept same register of the changing hours. That 
 noble temple of religion and art seems like the embodied 
 presence of the past. Here, before the Basilica, the cru- 
 saders paused in admiration as they swept into the East 
 to rescue the Holy Sepulchre. These walls and columns 
 were rising when an Emperor held the stirrup of the 
 Pope — when the thunders of the Vatican dethroned 
 Kings — when Luther rang his blast of defiance and nailed 
 his challenge to the door of the church, and still the 
 
LECTURES. 371 
 
 work goes on, under the impulse of the far-off past, 
 when the encyclical letter of the Pope is unheeded, 
 his voice drowned by the whirl of machinery, the 
 clangor of arms, the outburst of revolution, and when 
 the thunders that shake the thrones of kings come not 
 from Rome, but from the awakened majesty of popular 
 power. 
 
 But a voice from the past, even more distant than that 
 of St. Ambrose or Attila, speaks to us from the Duomo. 
 It is built in the form of the cross — a form that received 
 its sanctity in architecture, as in religion, from the death 
 of the Saviour. It was ancient Rome that taught the 
 builder how to curve these arches ; Greece, how to rear 
 these columns and carve these capitals ; Egypt, how to 
 lay the foundations and build the walls. Before a stone 
 was laid, the ideal temple existed in the mind of the 
 architect, and the hut by the Ganges, the pyramids by 
 the Nile, the temple of Solomon, the Parthenon of Athens, 
 the Coliseum of Rome, were all studies that enabled him 
 to form this ideal. Thus the whole history of civilization, 
 the progress of humanity from babarism to refinement, 
 are reflected in the plan of the temple. Nay, more ; as 
 religious ideas are essentially associated with forms of 
 art, all the spiritual experiences of the race, its worship 
 of " the fair humanities of old religion," its intense striv- 
 ings for the light of truth through the teachings of nature, 
 and the unfolding of the solemn plan of redemption, were 
 all necessary before this triumph of architecture could be 
 achieved. Thus rehgion, art, civilization, in all their his- 
 tory, meet and blend in visible form, to perpetuate the 
 past through all the future ; and thus somewhere, in some 
 form of art, in some custom of society, in some living 
 thought, or existing institutions, all the hours of the dead 
 past still live. Not one of them has perished. To-day is 
 but the reflex and epitome of all the days that are gone. 
 No prophet has spoken, no martyr died, no statesman 
 
372 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 built, no philosopher searched, no workman toiled, whose 
 influence is not felt to-day. 
 
 We need not go to monumental piles, and structures 
 of a thousand years, for illustrations ; we ourselves, in our 
 own beings and characters, are examples of the same 
 truth. What we are now is the result of our past 
 lives and the whole of our ancestry. Our bodies are 
 strong, robust, with free, bounding, joyous pulses, and 
 senses that are outlooks upon the universe, or they are 
 feeble, frail tenements, the habitations of insidious disease 
 and lurking sickness, as we and our fathers have con- 
 formed to or violated the laws of life and rules of health. 
 
 Then, too, our moral natures are no less a reflection of 
 the past. The temptations we have met and overcome, 
 the hardships we have endured, the struggles we have 
 passed through, all pour their strength into the life-tide 
 of to-day. The temptations to which we have yielded, 
 the sins of the past ; who has not realized the traces they 
 have left upon the soul ? The sorrows we have suffered, 
 the friend, the child, or the mother whom we buried 
 years ago, have given depth and compass to our beings, 
 and marked the character with grief lines eternity may 
 not erase. 
 
 The ambition, the dream, the aspiration of boyhood 
 all live in the fires of manhood, and slumber in the 
 embers of old age. Even the awakening thoughts, the 
 dim perceptions, the first sensations of infancy become 
 parts of the character we carry with us to our graves — 
 else why, when all these are forgotten, do we retain the 
 sense of identity that links the strong man battling in 
 the ranks of the world, with the helpless infant sleeping 
 in his cradle forty years ago ? 
 
 But the influences that have moulded us to what we 
 are reach far back of our own lives. Our temperament, 
 strength of character, force of will, we may have received 
 from our fathers ; out mental capacities and moral sus- 
 
LECTURES. 373 
 
 ceptibilities may be the birth-gift of our mothers ; and 
 that which they bequeathed to us, they received from 
 their fathers and mothers before them. Take as an 
 illustration, that terrible calamity, hereditary insanity. 
 It may sleep through generations, but its taint is upon 
 all the blood, and it reappears to mark the heir of an 
 ancestor dead a hundred years ago. 
 
 If we could enter a picture gallery of our ancestors 
 reaching backward through all the past, we would find 
 no figure in the endless line, a part of whose nature does 
 not still survive in us. Faces we would find there, whose 
 stern and lofty justice would shame the degeneracy 
 of their children — faces whose dark crimes and coward 
 weakness would make us blush that we are their descend- 
 ants — faces grim with resolution, and soft with the 
 tenderness of sentiment, radiant with hope, dark with 
 despair. Perhaps we could trace back through pioneer 
 and puritan, and Saxon and Scandinavian pirate and 
 Tartar robber, back to the plains of the East and the 
 dreamers of the Orient, and each and all of these have 
 furnished the elements that are mingled in our own blood 
 and judgment to-night. 
 
 Thus we are, each of us, the representatives of the 
 past. The past, dim, mysterious, and impassable, gone 
 like a forgotten dream, gone like a strain of music that 
 moved the air and died, so perished we can scarce realize 
 it has ever been, still lives, moves, breathes, thinks, acts, 
 throbs in us. 
 
 All this is still more grandly true in the history of 
 empire. A nation's laws, manners, customs, institutions, 
 character, and the forms of her religion are the necessary 
 result of her history in the past. 
 
 That grand old dreamer, Plato, could construct a 
 model republic, but it lives only in his dream. In the 
 imagination of Sir Thomas More there was framed a 
 beautiful Utopia, perfect in design, but it still continues 
 
374 NEWTOM BOOTH. 
 
 the Utopia of the air. Locke framed a constitution for 
 Carolina, but that embodiment of philosophic wisdom 
 yielded and gave way to the enactments of the Provincial 
 Assembly. The countries of South America and Mexico 
 endeavored to plant the institutions of the United States 
 upon their own lands, but the seedlings died — they were 
 not the outgrowths of the soil. 
 
 In the madness of revolution, nations may sometimes 
 pass beyond the controlling influence of their own tradi- 
 tions, but the revolution goes by, and the conservative 
 power of the unconquerable past resumes its sway. 
 England dethroned and beheaded her King, but the 
 spirit of royalty remained, and when the strong arm of 
 Cromwell was removed, a new head sprang from the old 
 hierarchy, and the throne was built on the old founda- 
 tions. France passed from monarchy and military dicta- 
 torship, through the fire of revolution and the blood of 
 the reign of terror, back to monarchy and military 
 dictatorship. 
 
 But see how the past will perpetuate itself despite of 
 power and circumstances. The Saxon descends upon 
 the shores of England and utterly subdues and enslaves 
 the Briton. He almost blots the race from histon,-, but 
 from that despised and enslaved race the Saxon himself 
 receives the first teachings of that religion which is here- 
 after to control his destiny. In his turn the Saxon yields 
 to the Norman Conqueror. His shrines are all over- 
 thrown — his political and civil rights are ignored — he 
 sinks below the protection of the government. At the 
 sounding of the mournful curfew-bell the light of his 
 cottage is darkened. He may not meet ten of his neigh- 
 bors, save a minion of the law is with them — yet Saxon 
 laws and Saxon institutions triumph over Norman force 
 and Norman power, and the Saxon furnishes the base 
 of that language which is hereafter to contain the great 
 ideas of our race. 
 
LECTURES. 375 
 
 Norman, Saxon, and Briton are all blended in the Eng- 
 lishman, and the thousand years of her insular history 
 are all reflected in the England of to-day. 
 
 The Puritan landed upon the bleak shores of New 
 England. His character had been sharpened by contro- 
 versy, hardened by persecution, elevated by religious 
 enthusiasm. He brought with him his own traditions 
 and hopes. A barbarous race stood in the pathway of 
 his empire. In the conflict which ensued the savage was 
 exterminated, but the Indian has imparted to the character 
 of his conqueror his own stoicism and cruelty, restlessness 
 of restraint, and wild love of freedom. The perished race 
 lives again in the dominant, mingling the qualities of its 
 own wild nature with the stern character of its relentless 
 foe. 
 
 The adventurer and cavalier brought to the richer lands 
 of the South their dreams of wealth and power. Their 
 pride, impatience of authority, and desire of place were 
 all fostered and developed by the enslaved race that 
 acknowledged their command. 
 
 A love of freedom, of personal independence was a 
 part of the heritage of the American people. That love 
 was explained by the grandeur of the scenery amid which 
 they dwelt. The greatness of the continent given them 
 to inhabit, where nature works only upon the loftiest 
 scale, imbued their souls with aspirations for a glorious 
 destiny for the race. The hardships and dif^culties of 
 their daily life imparted to them strength and persistency 
 of purpose, a dauntless spirit and unyielding will ; and in 
 vain upon them did the strongest nation of the earth en- 
 deavor to impose the restraints of arbitrary power. The 
 character formed by circumstances could not be crushed 
 by force. In the war of the Revolution the ideas of 
 liberty, independence, and union were developed and em- 
 bodied in the institutions and government of the country, 
 and that government, an organic whole, incarnates the 
 
376 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 spirit of the past, the history of the people. Lexington 
 and Monmouth, Saratoga and Yorktown still live — live 
 in the spirit of the American people. There may they live 
 forever. 
 
 It has been our fate during the past four years to wit- 
 ness the awful meeting of two adverse currents of destiny, 
 whose sources are far back in the history of man. 
 
 Does any one now dream that the civil war that con- 
 vulses our land is the accident of an hour ; that it could 
 have been postponed by expedients, averted by com- 
 promises ; that it is anything else than the conflict of 
 moral forces, old as time, the enforced meeting of antago- 
 nistic principles, the inevitable result, the inexorable logic 
 of events? From their thrones in the distant and shad- 
 owy past, these two principles, Justice proclaiming free- 
 dom, and Power ordaining slavery, have again sum- 
 moned their champions to refight the oldest battle of 
 humanity, and to crimson the green fields of the New 
 World with the most precious blood of a generation. 
 
 " Oh, keeper of the sacred key 
 And great seal of destiny, 
 Whose eye is the blue canopy, 
 Look down upon the warring world and tell us what the end will be." 
 
 Let the wrong triumph now, and " earth's base is built 
 on stubbles, and the pillared heaven is rottenness." 
 
 Thus every nation, from old China, still lingering in the 
 dusky morning dawn of civilization, to young America, 
 sweating great drops of blood as she wrestles with the 
 evil spirit in her history, each is the product and represen- 
 tative of her own past. 
 
 Let us see for one moment how all the past survives in 
 one of the arts of the present. We open a book, and its 
 printed pages mirror all the ages that are gone. Even 
 the leather of its binding carries us back to the primi- 
 tive state of man — to the time when the skins of wild 
 
LECTURES. 377 
 
 beasts furnished the hunter with clothing — for the art of 
 dressing and tanning leather dates its first suggestion and 
 rise at that remote period. The paper on which it is 
 printed is the papyrus of the Egyptians three thousand 
 years old. 
 
 The art of printing, as evidenced in its pages, is the 
 slow growth of four hundred years — and the letters, 
 the characters that embody its thoughts, are the results 
 of that picture-writing whose origin was a forgotten an- 
 tiquity when burned Nineveh and desolated Tadmor 
 were living realities. 
 
 Then, too, it is written in the English language — a 
 language whose Saxon and Celtic elements are as old as 
 the Chaldee and the Syriac — and can be traced back to 
 the nomadic tribes of Asia and the plains of Shinar. 
 A language the elegance of whose diction, and accuracy 
 of whose scientific expression, are the bequest of Roman 
 and Grecian history, and whose fulness, richness, and 
 poetic imagery are the results of the intermingling of 
 Briton, Saxon, Norman, and Dane, the commerce of ideas 
 with all the world, and the growth of the most glorious 
 literature of all time. 
 
 Thus all times past, all ages gone have worked together 
 to produce the book that beguiles the hours of your 
 leisure, or opens for you a new vision of thought. 
 
 And what are times past, and how is it that having 
 utterly ceased to be, they are so intimately identified 
 with everything which is ? 
 
 We are so much in the habit of speaking of the suc- 
 cessive generations of men, we almost unconsciously 
 adopt the idea that there is a marked transition from one 
 age to another ; that one generation passes from the stage 
 of action and another comes on ; that the curtain of his- 
 tory falls upon one set of actors, the scene is changed, 
 and it is uprolled upon another. Nothing can be more 
 fallacious. The new grows old so imperceptibly, the 
 
378 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 events of time are so linked together and interwoven, it 
 is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. 
 The man of to-day was a boy thirty years ago, but he 
 never knew, and can point to no time when he became a 
 man — when he first felt the passions and thoughts of 
 manhood in his blood and brain. His youth unfolded 
 into maturity — his being was a growth. 
 
 All the actors of our Revolutionary era have gone — 
 but when did they pass away ? There has been no day 
 when the nation could go into mourning and say, yester- 
 day they were, and to-day they are not. There is no 
 marked page in history to separate their era from ours. 
 Socrates died more than two thousand years ago. He 
 belongs to the far distant past. Since then nations have 
 arisen and fallen, races have perished, a new world has 
 been discovered, a new and divine religion revealed ; yet 
 all the events that have transpired since have been so 
 linked together, so dependent upon each other, they 
 constitute like the flowing current of a river, an un- 
 broken whole. What we call the generations of men in- 
 termingle. We divide them in our speech as we divide 
 the life of a man into youth, manhood, and age, but they 
 flow into each other, so that a separation in fact is impos- 
 sible. From the dawning of time to this very moment, 
 hour has succeeded hour, event followed event in neces- 
 sary connection, and it is all one piece, one web and woof, 
 one undivided, indivisible whole. 
 
 The present, the very present, is a mere point in time. 
 We divide the day into hours, the hour into minutes, the 
 minute into seconds, we might subdivide the second into 
 a thousand parts, and still the minutest fraction would be 
 too large to represent what we know as now. It is gone 
 ere we can speak the word. It is fleet as one thought. 
 " It is like the lightning which doth cease to be ere one 
 can say it lightens." It is, and it flashes by us, and per- 
 ishes forever, before we can syllabic its name. Yet it is 
 
LECTURES. 379 
 
 this infinitesimal point, this pulse-beat of time that marks 
 the progress of the centuries. This is the flashing shuttle 
 of fate, that weaves the great figures of history in the 
 tapestry of destiny. No thread is broken, no figure left 
 imperfect — the whole is a unit — the design of Providence, 
 the thought of God made manifest in the doings of man. 
 
 The hours as they pass seem trivial and unimportant. 
 How small "will this dim spot that men call earth " ap- 
 pear when the telegraph shall place us in instant com- 
 munication with every part of it — when but a moment 
 will separate us from England and Russia, from India 
 and China. Even now it seems shrunk to a nutshell from 
 its magnificent proportions when New York was a month 
 from London and a year from Canton — how shrunken 
 from its sublime incomprehensibility when the sailor of 
 Egypt or Carthage would look out on the mysterious 
 waters of the ocean and wonder if they did not wash the 
 shores of other worlds that bordered upon the stars, or 
 break upon the boundaries of the Infinite. To-day the 
 overland telegraph brings us news from every quarter of 
 the globe, and it fills a column or two of the daily news- 
 paper, and is served up with our coffee at breakfast. Five 
 years ago, how trifling seemed the events that made up 
 the world's daily budget of news. The rise and fall of 
 stocks under the pressure of the bulls and bears — the 
 price of cotton, tobacco, and flour — the result of an elec- 
 tion where place and power only were at stake — a treaty 
 of trade — Flora Temple's best time — the description of 
 a fight between Tom Sayers and the Benicia Boy, and the 
 wonderful feat of Blondin in crossing Niagara on a rope! 
 
 Yet beneath this brief record a million million hearts 
 were throbbing, a million million hands were toiling, a 
 million million brains seething with thought, threads of 
 all lives were running out, the nations marching forward 
 in the pathway of destiny, and the races fulfilling the 
 mission ordained them from eternity. 
 
380 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 And now passing history, as if grown tired of trifles, 
 writes daily the rise and fall of a nation's hopes with the 
 varying price of gold, chronicles blood-bought victories, 
 blood-stained defeats — illumines her pages with heroic 
 names — hallows them with the memories of freedom's 
 martyrs, and every moment we await the flashing intelli- 
 gence that shall seal the brightest consummation of time. 
 
 But amid the fierce activities, the burning hopes, the 
 drowning clamors of the hour, through all the vaulted 
 arches of the ages gone, comes the weird voice of the past, 
 controlling the battle-storms of the present and prophe- 
 sying the shapes of the coming future, while from above 
 the stars look down calmly on fields of blood as on the 
 valleys of peace, and over all reigns the unseen God, be- 
 neath whose awful eye the tides of human destiny ebb 
 and flow, and unto whom a thousand years are but as 
 yesterday or a night that is gone. 
 
 Another fallacy that has arisen from the inaccuracy of 
 language in reference to time, is that exposed by Lord 
 Bacon, alluding to ancient times as the '^ old world'' as if 
 humanity were younger now than it was three thousand 
 years ago — as if history and human experience were not 
 growing older day by day — as if this hour we did not 
 stand at a point further down in the designs of Providence 
 and nearer the consummation of all design than ever be- 
 fore. No. The world in relation to the past is now old, 
 in relation to the future doubtless still in its youth. 
 
 We are in the habit of speaking of our age as the " age 
 of light and knowledge," of civilization, refinement, and 
 art as if we were upon the very millennial dawn, the 
 darkness of error all fleeing away. But how narrow is 
 the view of our race that suggests this idea. We look 
 at the arts where we find them in the greatest perfection, 
 at the nations and races that have made the greatest 
 progress and lead the vanguard of humanity, at the great 
 lights of time that still shine for us, even at the constella- 
 
LECTURES. 381 
 
 tions of the past that yet gleam in the highest heaven 
 above us, and forget there is a darker shading to the 
 present. Why, even among nations most highly favored, 
 how does truth still struggle with error, and old super- 
 stition keep fast hold on the popular mind ! 
 
 A few years ago, I witnessed a trial at law which 
 developed the singular fact that in a community of at 
 least average intelligence, where schools and churches 
 were abundant, there was a whole neighborhood of 
 believers in witchcraft, where only power was wanting 
 to revive the persecutions of Salem. About the same 
 time, under the very shadow of the walls of Yale College, 
 a sect of crazy fanatics was broken up in New Haven, 
 the members of which had required one of their number 
 to sacrifice his life to appease the divine wrath. After 
 almost every capital execution, the sheriff is besieged 
 with requests for pieces of the rope used in the hanging, 
 to be worn as cures and preventives of disease, and 
 carried as charms and amulets against evil. How many 
 persons are here who believe in seventh-son doctors, 
 haunted houses, or who would hesitate to begin a journey 
 or any important undertaking on a Friday? Of course, 
 you never consult the Egyptian astrologer to learn some- 
 thing about your future wife or husband, the event of a 
 lawsuit, the result of a speculation, or any other problem 
 of chance or time ; but a great many of your neighbors 
 have, and will again, pay for the answers they get, and 
 hug them to their souls as the responses of an oracle. 
 Certainly the genius that presided at Delphi some thou- 
 sands of years ago had more of the pomp and circum- 
 stance of prophecy than is to be found current amongst 
 us to-day, and Numa, who was tempted to read the 
 dark hieroglyph of the future by the strange spells and 
 sweet fascinations of Egeria, might still have resisted the 
 blandishments of our local psuedo-prophets. 
 
 The Mormons of Utah present the strange anomaly of 
 
382 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 a people within this Republic, who claim to derive their 
 government directly from God, and who revive in the 
 nineteenth century the patriarchal institutions of the 
 days of Abraham. And has it not been possible in our 
 day to raise immense armies ready to fight to the death, 
 anxious to rend the being of the nation, in order to per- 
 petuate an institution which incarnates the very spirit of 
 the darkest barbarism ? 
 
 All these things are in the United States, where in- 
 telligence is more generally diffused and knowledge more 
 popularized than in any other country. But the nations 
 that can claim to enjoy the blessings of advanced civili- 
 zation do not number a third of the population of the 
 globe. They are like islands raised from the surrounding 
 ocean of darkness. If we would study the different 
 phases of the intellectual development of our race in its 
 progress from barbarism to refinement, we need not go 
 to the pages of history for a record of the past — the 
 present affords the living reality of that of which history 
 presents only the dim picture. 
 
 Sitting here in this social and intellectual circle, sur- 
 rounded by the arts and refinements of life, we are 
 within ten days' travel of wandering tribes of Apaches 
 and Comanchcs, fiercer and more uncultivated than any of 
 the barbarian hordes that ever yielded to the conquering 
 legions of Caesar. Now, the Esquimaux earths himself 
 in his smoky hole and regales his appetite with the fat 
 of the seal during the long polar winter, while the South 
 Sea Islander tattoos his body with hideous figures, buries 
 his father alive when he becomes infirm, and eats the 
 enemy whom he slays in battle. Now, the Arab roams 
 over the desert, re-lives the traditions a thousand years 
 old, levies his contributions upon towns, enslaves the 
 shipwrecked stranger, and makes his pilgrimage to the 
 temples of the sacred city, whose doors are closed 
 against the " Christian dog." Now, the face of the 
 
LECTURES. 383 
 
 Turkish woman is veiled in the sunHght of heaven, and 
 she has no soul for the Moslem paradise. Now, in the 
 depths of India, is still continued the worship of the 
 mysterious Vishnu and awful Brahma, a worship whose 
 rites began ages and ages before the law was given to 
 Moses upon Sinai. Now, the Persian cherishes the faith 
 of Zoroaster and kneels in prayer to the fire and the sun. 
 Now, the Tartar adores the Grand Lama, and believes 
 the soul of the blest passes into the form of a dog. Now, 
 the Chinese dwells in the first light of that splendid 
 civilization that was arrested at its early dawn. Five 
 hundred years before the European, he invented printing, 
 and still uses the block letter and prints by hand. Cen- 
 turies before the European, he invented gunpowder, and 
 has made little progress in its application to the arts 
 of peace or war, and to-day he is essentially the same 
 being he was in the days of Confucius— furnishing the 
 one example in history of a nation that neither pro- 
 gresses nor decays. Now, the African worships bugs and 
 insects; and the wild Bushman lives and dies, whose mind 
 is unillumined with one ray of light or gleaming percep- 
 tion of a God. 
 
 These are the elements that surround and interpenetrate 
 the civilization of the present. Humanity marches for- 
 ward, it is true ; not, however, with its unnumbered hosts 
 breast to breast in single rank, but in a grand, endless 
 procession that reaches from the noonday of civilization 
 back to the midnight of barbarism. In front rank, be- 
 neath the blazing noontide, move the nations of Europe 
 and America, bearing the symbols of commerce and art. 
 Before them, not now as a cloud by day, but a fiery 
 pillar, brighter than the brightest noon, moves through 
 the heavens, the Holy Bible. And these nations, rank 
 behind rank, reach from the noon backward to the dawn- 
 ing of the morning, and there in the dim light of that 
 day, whose morning sun never dawns, move the nations 
 
384 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 of the East, the Chinese, the Hindoos, and Persian fire- 
 worshippers ; and these, gleaming with barbaric gold, 
 bearing aloft their rude arts and the idols of their 
 worship, reach backward towards the midnight; and 
 there, in the blackness of a midnight that is moonless and 
 starless are ranged the wild tribes of Africa. This is the 
 grand procession of humanity. It is moving onward now. 
 Its march commenced at the birth of time. Hark ! 
 through all the ages that are gone you can hear the echoes 
 of its measured tramp. It has come down by the pyra- 
 mids of the Nile, by the fountains of Judaea, by the temples 
 of Greece, by the amphitheatres of Rome, by the cruci- 
 fixion of Christ, by the fires of the martyrs, by the 
 pageantry of the chivalry, by the schools of the Middle 
 Ages, by the cities and palaces of modern art, its ranks 
 ever changing, never changed, its march ever onward and 
 onward, but, oh ! whither? No light from the past illu- 
 mines, no voice from the future proclaims, no portent 
 from Heaven reveals. Out of the darkness, into the 
 mystery, onward and onward forever ! 
 
 There is another thought in connection with the pres- 
 ent hour, that should give it a ground of significance. It 
 is a familiar expression that we cannot comprehend the 
 idea of eternity, and this in one sense is true. We can- 
 not grasp it — the mind reels and sinks in the attempt. 
 And yet it is a necessary idea, for no man can conceive 
 of a beginning to time, for what went before ? And no 
 man can conceive of an end to time, for what shall come 
 after — and time, without beginning or end, is eternity. 
 Far back through the unrecorded ages, before the creation 
 of man, science can trace the laws of matter, and they 
 have always been the same. The stability of the uni- 
 verse, and the justice of God's government require that 
 physical and moral laws should always continue the same. 
 Our own death will bring us into new relations with 
 spiritual intelligence, but will not change any of the laws 
 
LECTURES. 385 
 
 of Spirit or of matter. Now, through all the myriads of 
 the stars the same laws are in operation that govern 
 and keep in order the motions of the earth. Now, 
 through all the illimitable universe, illimitable as space, 
 spiritual life exists in obedience to the divine will, and 
 governed by the same moral laws that govern us. Now, 
 around us moves the grand panorama of the universe — 
 above us roll the ceaseless ages of the everlasting. Now, 
 over all and in all God reigns and rules. We are already 
 in eternity ! 
 
 LECTURE ON EMANUEL SWEDENBORG. 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE SACRAMENTO LITERARY INSTITUTE, 
 APRIL 4, 187I. 
 
 Emanuel Swedenborg, generally regarded by the great 
 public as a dreamer, a ghost-seer, " a visionary, and elixir 
 of moonbeams," is claimed by the small public of his 
 admirers to be a divinely illuminated man, the author of 
 a new and profound philosophy, the true interpreter of 
 the Bible and Christian religion. In his strange nature 
 two lives seem to be represented — sometimes flowing in 
 parallel streams, sometimes one lost, sometimes the 
 other; sometimes both blended into one. In his soul, 
 as in a mirror, were reflected the images of unseen 
 objects, which are regarded on the one hand as the phan- 
 tasms of insanity ; on the other, as the realities of the 
 spiritual world. 
 
 He was born at Stockholm, Sweden, in 1688, about 
 the time our New England ancestors were hanging 
 witches at Salem ; in an age distinguished at once for 
 its intellectual activity and splendid scientific discoveries, 
 and for its gross superstition and universal belief in com- 
 munication with the supernatural world. He never was 
 
386 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 married. He died in London in his eighty-fifth year, three 
 years before the declaration of American independence 
 — at a period when, in the reaction from superstitious 
 credulity, the skeptical philosophy was supreme in the 
 intellectual circles of Europe, teaching men to believe in 
 nothing, not even in themselves. His father was a Bishop 
 in the Swedish Church — a branch of the Lutheran — a 
 man of great learning, active, piety, worldly prudence, 
 and unworldly wisdom. In his youth the father believed 
 that he, too, had enjoyed celestial visions and the com- 
 panionship of angels. 
 
 In his childhood, up to his twelfth year, Emanuel was 
 regarded by his father as one set apart for a great and 
 peculiar work. It was noticed that while at prayer his 
 breath was often curiously withholden within him, while 
 his soul was aglow with the fervor of devotion. He was 
 also remarkable for great intellectual precocity and won- 
 derful spiritual insight. In his youth he was a constant 
 and untiring student, going to nature, when possible, 
 rather than to books, for his facts, but otherwise not 
 different from his companions. 
 
 He never was an ascetic. He grew up into a man of the 
 world, something of a courtier and a man of fashion ; his 
 morality of that respectable type which passes current 
 in social life ; always, however, loving truth devotedly 
 and unselfishly as an intellectual pursuit, and always an 
 omnivorous student. 
 
 Emerson says: " His truth and training could not fail 
 to be extraordinary. He was a scholar from a child. 
 Such a boy could not whistle or dance, but goes prjang 
 into Chemistry and Optics, Philosophy, Mathematics, 
 and Astronomy, to find images fit for the measure of his 
 versatile and capacious brain. At the age of twenty- 
 eight he was made Assessor of the Board of Mines by 
 Charles XII. He spent four years at the Universities in 
 Holland, Germany, France, and England. He performed 
 
LECTURES. 387 
 
 a notable feat of engineering by hauling two galleys, five 
 boats, and a sloop, fourteen miles overland for the royal 
 service. In 1721 he journeyed over Europe, to examine 
 mines and smelting-works. In 17 16 he published his 
 Dcdaliis Hyperboreiis, and for the next thirty years was 
 constantly engaged in the preparation and pubhcation of 
 his scientific works. The very catalogue of these works 
 is appalling to a desultory reader. One of the Missou- 
 riums and Mastodons of literature, he is not to be meas- 
 ured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars. His stalwart 
 presence would flutter the gowns of an University." 
 
 When he was about fifty years old, having made the 
 circuit of the physical sciences of his day, he directed his 
 studies to the nature of the soul, and to those religious 
 problems which sooner or later present themselves to every 
 man of thought. Two or three years afterwards his great 
 intellectual labors began to tell upon his faculties ; his 
 mind became obscured, and when he was fifty-six he had 
 a short attack of violent insanity. For the two years 
 preceding his unmistakable madness his " spiritual diary " 
 is little else than a record of his dreams ; and while it 
 contains flashes of his genius and startling guesses at 
 truth, as a whole it is scarcely superior to the literature 
 of a fortune-teller's dream-book. 
 
 His attack of mania occurred in London. Referring 
 to his condition then and for a year previous, his biogra- 
 pher says : " Considering that Swedenborg was at this 
 time at the crisis of a great physical and mental change, I 
 have no surprise to spare for any aberration in his behav- 
 ior. He was staggering confused in an access of new light. 
 As Carlyle says : ' Such transitions are ever full of pain ; 
 thus the eagle when he moults is sickly, and to attain a 
 new beak must harshly dash off the old one against the 
 rocks.' " 
 
 Swedenborg dates what he calls his " divine illumina- 
 tion " from his recovery ; and from that time until his 
 
388 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 death, twenty-seven years afterwards, he had almost at 
 will those wonderful visions, in which he believed that 
 Heaven and Hell and the whole economy of spiritual 
 things were as " level to his apprehension as daylight to 
 the eye " ; and which, taken in connection with his ca- 
 pacity, culture, and attainments, his sober belief in the 
 reality of what he saw, his far-reaching insight opening 
 great perspectives of thought, and the philosophy, subtle 
 in meaning, sublime in outline, which he taught as a part 
 of the revelation he received, make him, whether we con- 
 sider him sane or crazy, a phenomenal man — a character 
 alone and apart in the whole history of our race. Hence- 
 forward he regarded his past studies but as a learner's 
 " copy-book " ; and he paid no more attention to his 
 scientific attainments than we do to the motions of the 
 lips in speaking, or the letters of the alphabet in reading. 
 
 At a later period of his life Swedenborg was undoubt- 
 edly a clairvoyant. We know very little more of clair- 
 voyance than this : that there are at rare intervals persons 
 who have interior perceptions of things which lie beyond 
 the reach of the organs of sense ; who seem to have the 
 power of being mentally in two places at the same time. 
 It is as well established as any fact of clairvoyance can be 
 by historical evidence, that on the evening of the 19th of 
 July, 1759, Swedenborg, while he was at Gottenburg, saw 
 and correctly described a fire then raging at Stockholm, 
 three hundred miles away; that he mentioned the streets 
 through which it spread, various buildings . as they 
 caught ; that he was greatly agitated while it was burn- 
 ing, and became calm when it was extinguished, a few 
 doors from his own house. 
 
 This, which might at one time have been accepted as 
 evidence of his divine credentials, would now be only re- 
 garded as going to show that there are certain occult fac- 
 ulties in human nature, acting under peculiar conditions, 
 which the future may or may not utilize and explain. To- 
 
LECTURES. 389 
 
 day we do not certainly know but a diseased brain may 
 be one of these conditions ; and certain physiologists 
 maintain that it is. 
 
 We understand so little of the operations of the mind 
 in its every-day moods, that its abnormal conditions ex- 
 cite our surprise rather because we are unaccustomed to 
 them than by reason of any special mystery. 
 
 If you were required to sit down at once and make a 
 statement of all you know upon every subject, you might 
 be surprised to find the catalogue so short. But if every- 
 thing you do know, from your earliest reading of your 
 mother's face up to the latest memory of last night's 
 dream, could be photographed, you would be more as- 
 tonished at its extent ; though Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 says that in the same manner the London Times was 
 sent into Paris under the wing of a carrier-pigeon, the hu- 
 man brain is large enough to hold a photographic copy, 
 on a microscopic scale, of every impression received in the 
 longest life. Now, where is all this knowledge when you 
 are not thinking about it — when it is not consciously pres- 
 ent in your mind ? How is it kept stored away, ready for 
 future use ? And what part of it have you consciously 
 acquired from instruction, by observation, by voluntary 
 study, and what part by the unwatched processes of your 
 mind — self-evolution — growth ? And how has that portion 
 you have consciously acquired from without been assimi- 
 lated to you, until it ceases to be the thing you learned, 
 and becomes you — a part of your intellectual power — just 
 as sunshine may become stone, coal, rose-bud, or cucum- 
 ber? Why is it that your thought, memory, fancy, will 
 sometimes obey your will, and at others not, as if the intel- 
 lectual circuit were broken, and each mental faculty were 
 acting upon some caprice of its own ? You meet an ac- 
 quaintance twenty times ; each time his face suggests his 
 name ; the twenty-first you cannot get it for all your 
 coaxing, but when his back is turned you find it on your 
 
390 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 tongue. How easily after school was out you could an- 
 swer the question you missed at recitation ? What bright 
 things you think of going home, which you ought to have 
 said at the party ! What strong arguments and apt illus- 
 trations suggest themselves, after the speech is made or 
 the article is published. 
 
 We should explain why we blush, or laugh, or weep 
 involuntarily ; why we are at times fluent, at others 
 tongue-tied ; how a perfume can recall old memories, 
 distant scenes, absent faces ; how thoughts come to us in 
 words, or rise before us like pictures, before we waste our 
 wonder on the facts that the somnambulist can write page 
 after page correctly in the dark ; or that " Blind Tom," 
 who cannot frame twenty words into an intelligible sen- 
 tence, and seems scarcely conscious of his personal identity, 
 can repeat, after one hearing, the longest and most diffi- 
 cult pieces of music, tell every note that is sounded when 
 an arm is thrown at full length on the key-board of a 
 piano, and give expression to his feelings, voiceless in 
 words, in improvised music ; or that an untaught negro 
 boy can instantly solve complicated questions of arithme- 
 tic, by an intuitive method which he cannot impart to the 
 most skilful accountant — which a La Place or Newton 
 could not learn : or that Coleridge, awaking from sleep, 
 finds a poem in his mind waiting to be written down ; 
 that Napoleon sees his star, brightening and paling, the 
 portent of victory or defeat ; Socrates hears the voice of 
 his familiar spirit ; and Joan of Arc beholds legions of 
 angels in the air. 
 
 The mind can no more comprehend the process of 
 thought than the eye can see itself, or any form of matter 
 act as its own solvent. In closest introspection we learn 
 perhaps least of the mind's methods, for in the very act 
 of self-examination we divert the faculties from their 
 natural, unconscious play, and there is nothing to watch. 
 It is as if the actors should all take their seats with the 
 
LECTURES. 391 
 
 audience to watch the play, leaving the stage vacant. 
 If we could only double on ourselves, and catch ourselves 
 unawares ! 
 
 It is only when we are self-unconscious that we do our 
 best. Sometimes we have astonished ourselves, as well 
 as our friends, by an unwonted flash of wit ; the repartee 
 or retort comes to our lips itself as if lying in wait for 
 the occasion. Like meteoric stones, or objects thrown 
 by the spirits, we do not see them until they strike. 
 A powerful stump-speaker of this coast, a man self-con- 
 tained, and oaken-fibred in the texture of mind and body, 
 says that often in the fervor of speech he seems to get 
 outside himself, and listen to the words which come from 
 his mouth, while his mind runs by its acquired momen- 
 tum ; but he must stand still and listen ; if he attempt to 
 put in a word, or pry into the secret of the movement, the 
 machine stops, and he has to take hold of the crank himself. 
 Burns, sitting down to write, not knowing what would 
 come to him, says : " It may be a sang, it may be a 
 sermon." Thackeray was surprised into a knowledge of 
 his own genius by the exultation of Becky Sharp at her 
 husband's defiance to Lord Steyne, in the novel he was 
 himself writing. Hawthorne sobbed like a heart-broken 
 child over the pathetic and tragic passages in his own 
 stories. Sir Walter Scott would say to his muse : " Spin, 
 ye jade, spin." Milton saw with an inward sight ; and 
 Homer invoked the heavenly goddess to sing the tale of 
 Troy. All poets and novelists of creative power bear 
 testimony that the creations of their brains often 
 become to them living beings, distinct individualities, 
 uttering their own thoughts, and creating their own situa- 
 tion. In fact, the dividing line drawn between genius 
 and talent is : " Genius does what it must ; talent what 
 it can." 
 
 We have all at times experienced a state of double 
 consciousness. We have dreamed we were dreaming, and 
 
392 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 striven to awake. Before going to sleep we often pass 
 through a condition that is neither sleeping nor waking. 
 We know we are lying in bed, and are conscious of all our 
 surroundings ; broken sentences sound in our ears ; we 
 listen to or take part in a dialogue ; strange scenes and 
 faces rise dimly around us ; we know we are dreaming, 
 and that if we will turn over the illusion will be dispelled. 
 After a dose of morphine, in sickness, our bed is floating 
 in the air, multitudes of spectral faces, horrible and 
 grotesque, are leering and grinning around as in devilish 
 mockery, while we know the bed is on the floor and no one 
 present but the nurse. Now, these scenes, faces, shapes, 
 voices, are but our own unconscious thoughts thrown 
 from within outward ; our fancies putting on shape and 
 semblance, in reason's despite — like Macbeth's air-drawn 
 dagger, the bodiless creations of the brain. 
 
 Now, imagine a man whose unconscious mental secre- 
 tions have been drawn for fifty years of study from a 
 circuit of inquiry wide as the knowledge of his day ; who 
 in the love of scientific truth had followed every path 
 of nature open to him into new fields and undiscovered 
 regions ; who had sounded the deeps of philosophical 
 speculation ; who had tracked the soul to its fastness ; 
 who had endeavored to purge the film from his spiritual 
 sight by gazing on the undimmed brightness of the Crea- 
 tor, and who had been dazzled, dazed, perhaps, by the 
 Divine effulgence ; invest him with the creative power of 
 the poet which works only in the dark ; give him this 
 state of dual consciousness we have all experienced, but 
 in a degree far more vivid and intense than we have 
 known — so real that while he stands on earth, in form of 
 clay, with mortal breath, senses, presence, his thoughts 
 are projected from him, and compass him about as objec- 
 tive realities — become his continent and horizon, his earth 
 and sea, and air and light, his morning, noon, and night, 
 and star-crowned sky, and you will have, I think, the con- 
 
LECTURES. 393 
 
 ditions under which Swedenborg beheved the veil of 
 mortality was lifted, and he saw the scenes of other 
 worlds, heard the voices of angels, and received a revela- 
 tion from God. 
 
 His own theory and explanation were quite different 
 from this. He taught that there is a spiritual creation, 
 the type of and corresponding to the material creation ; 
 that there is a spiritual sun, the immediate source of 
 spiritual life, as the material sun is of physical life, that 
 interpenetrating the earth, from its central fires to its 
 tenderest blade of grass, is a spiritual earth ; that per- 
 meating our natural body is a spiritual body, with spirit- 
 ual senses capable of taking cognizance of spiritual things. 
 Thus we are in the natural and spiritual worlds at the 
 same time, drawing light and life from both, and only 
 the grossness of the clay tenement that we wear as out- 
 side covering and shell prevents us from realizing the 
 spiritual world of which we are unconscious inhabitants. 
 He claimed that by the special gift of his peculiar organ- 
 ization he could husk himself from this physical shell, 
 take off his carnal '' overcoat," and bring himself into 
 direct relations with spiritual things and intelligences. 
 In this abnormal condition he believed that he explored 
 Heaven and Hell, and discovered an intermediate 
 world, not recognized in Protestant theology, and some- 
 what different from the Catholic purgatory ; also, that 
 he met spirits from the planets, who described to him 
 and enabled him to see the general condition of affairs 
 and manner of life in Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mer- 
 cury, and the Moon. All the inhabitants of the planets 
 are members of the human family, our fellow-citizens of 
 the universe. What he says of them seems ridiculous to 
 us, but perhaps a description of us would seem quite as 
 absurd to them. He says, indeed, the accounts of the 
 wars on Earth are incredible to our neighbors in Jupiter. 
 They cannot comprehend, either, how luxury and want, 
 
394 NEW TON BOOTH. 
 
 splendor and squalor, learning and ignorance, should 
 be here next-door neighbors, and jostle each other in 
 the streets. They think their faces far more beautiful 
 than ours, and their carriage more graceful, though they 
 do not walk erect, but inclined, using their arms in a 
 kind of swimming motion. Jupiter is not only the larg- 
 est, but most densely inhabited of all the planets. The 
 people are mild and gentle. They live about thirty of 
 our years. About a year before they die they lose their 
 hair. Baldness is a certain sign of approaching death. 
 No hair restorative will save them. Death, however, is 
 without pain, and brings no regret, as they know it is 
 only a transition to a higher life. 
 
 Our nearest neighbors — on the Moon — are dwarfs not 
 larger than children seven years old with us. In Saturn 
 they are religious, but not scientific. In Mercury, in- 
 quisitive and arrogant ; loving knowledge for the sense 
 of personal superiority it confers, and not for its benign 
 uses. Venus is like the Earth in this, it has very good 
 and very bad people. Mars seems to be the best of the 
 lot, and society there is quite angelic. It may be con- 
 soling to our vanity to learn that they do not know how 
 to read and write on either of the planets, have no rail- 
 roads and telegraphs, have never made a sewing-machine, 
 and never struck oil. With all the faults, shortcomings, 
 and miseries of human life, our world seems a more 
 interesting if not a happier place to live in than either of 
 the other planets as reported by Swedenborg. 
 
 He teaches that the Bible is divinely inspired, but that 
 it has an interior as well as a literal meaning ; one mean- 
 ing to men, another to the angels of wisdom, another to 
 the angels of love. The higher a spirit arises in the 
 realms of being the greater depth of truth and divine 
 beauty will he discover in the sacred scriptures. 
 
 The Last Judgment, as described in the Apocalypse, 
 has already occurred. That great assize of humanity was 
 
LECTURES. 395 
 
 held in 1759, and Swedenborg alone of mortals in the 
 flesh was allowed to witness its awful scenes. 
 
 After death man does not pass immediately to Heaven 
 or Hell, but into a spiritual world so similar to the Earth, 
 novitiates, mistaking their spiritual for natural bodies, are 
 often unable to realize they are dead. In this limbo of 
 spirits Swedenborg met Calvin, and disputed with him 
 on some point of doctrine, but so far from being able to 
 convert the great Genevan, he could not even convince 
 him he was dead. 
 
 In this intermediate state the predominant love of the 
 heart gradually asserts itself until it becomes a supreme 
 and governing passion. The good lose all evil desires 
 and imaginations ; the bad lose the sense of moral re- 
 straint, and each is carried by the momentum of the 
 character formed on Earth to the society and place most 
 congenial to his feelings, whether in Heaven or Hell. 
 
 Both good and evil spirits, in the Swedenborgian 
 system, by some kind of spiritual magnetism, influence 
 life upon Earth. Our purest inspirations are airs from 
 Heaven ; even the blasts from Hell are not wasted in 
 this spiritual economy, but utilized in communicating 
 to business, commerce, and to the government of Church 
 and State the energy of self-love, which is a necessary 
 element in human affairs, and which the self-denying 
 Christian spirit fails to furnish. The most eminent living 
 student of Swedenborg says the Devil has been greatly 
 misunderstood ; that he is fast becoming quite an accom- 
 plished gentleman, who in his busy self-seeking way 
 manages to accomplish a great deal of good without mean- 
 ing it. " He has been from the first our only heaven- 
 appointed churchman and statesman — the very man of 
 men for doing the showy work of the world, namely : 
 persuading, preaching, cajoling, governing, which is re- 
 quired to be done, and which is fitly paid for by the honors 
 and emoluments of the world. What kind of a Pope 
 
396 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 would Fenelon have made, and how would political 
 interests thrive with the Apostle John at the head of 
 affairs. I confess for my part I would bestow my vote 
 upon Louis Napoleon or General Jackson any day, simply 
 because they are, I presume, very inferior men spiritually, 
 and therefore incomparably better qualified for ruling 
 other men, which is spiritually the lowest of human voca- 
 tions." This, however, was written before Sedan had 
 demonstrated the incapacity of Louis Napoleon to grap- 
 ple with great events in the conflicts of physical force. 
 
 If we could really believe that Swedenborg had seen 
 Heaven and Hell, we would desert all other books to 
 read his. If, however, we consider his descriptions of 
 spiritual scenery as the pictures of his own imagination, 
 we shall find them inferior to Dante's in grandeur of 
 conception, unity of design, and perfection of detail. 
 The fact that he believed he was divinely illuminated 
 prevented him from sitting in judgment on himself and 
 sifting his thoughts. The trifling and the grand were of 
 equal importance, as the whole was a divine revelation. 
 
 His general idea of Heaven is that it is an earthly 
 paradise ; with beautiful landscapes, mountains, val- 
 leys and plains, woods and fountains, and flowing 
 streams ; with flowers, fruits, and sweet odors ; with 
 dawn and twilight ; with villas, cottages, palaces, cities, 
 and celestial societies. Everything lovely and of good 
 report on Earth has its etherealized counterpart in 
 Heaven. Angels are men and women, in the forms 
 they were on Earth, etherealized and made beautiful 
 by the characters which shine through them. They 
 have homes, individual characters, active employments, 
 studies, arts, amusements, duties, and friendships. 
 They marry, and enjoy all the delights of mutual love. 
 The longer they live the younger they grow ; or rather 
 the nearer they approach the perfection of immortal 
 youth. There are many Heavens, and different orders 
 
LECTURES. 397 
 
 of angels. There are spiritual angels, to whom the 
 wisdom of God is revealed as light to the eye ; and 
 celestial angels, to whom His love is revealed as a glow 
 in the heart. 
 
 There are as many Hells as Heavens, and the spir- 
 its of the wicked take up their several abodes in the 
 society most congenial to their depraved inclinations. 
 They too, marry, but their marriages are not made in 
 Heaven. Though Hell is a place of abomination to the 
 pure, it is not necessarily one of continual torment to the 
 wicked. Their punishment seems to be that their appear- 
 ance, character, and all their surroundings are wrought into 
 the image of their sinful desires. Their own deformity 
 may seem beautiful to them, and what should disgust, 
 delights. They realize the terrible self-imprecation : 
 " Evil, be thou my good." 
 
 Swedenborg finds one law in every condition of 
 spiritual life. " What a spirit is he sees." What 
 exists in the soul as an affection or thought becomes a 
 tangible thing to the sense. If an angel desires to go 
 anywhere, he does not have to pass through space, but 
 his desire accomplishes the result, and he is there. 
 If he long for the society of another angel, he is trans- 
 lated to his presence. When he feels the love of God 
 in its divinest fulness, that is his heavenly noon ; if 
 that love grows dim, the sombre twilight comes on, 
 which is the only night known in Heaven. The ap- 
 pearance, the spiritual scenery, the surroundings, the 
 society of every spirit, whether in Heaven or Hell, 
 correspond to the loves, desires, and thoughts of his 
 heart. What he desires, he is ; what he thinks, he sees ; 
 what he loves, he possesses. 
 
 The following passage from his Arcana is a very 
 literal illustration of his theory. He says : " I heard 
 two Presidents of the English Royal Society — Sir 
 Hans Sloane and Martin Folks — conversing together 
 
398 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 in the spiritual world concerning the existence of seeds 
 and eggs, and their production on earth, Sloane insist- 
 ing that nature was endued from creation with the 
 power of producing such things from the sun's heat. 
 Folks said the power of production is continually 
 from God in nature. To determine the dispute, a 
 beautiful bird was exhibited to Sir Hans Sloane, and 
 he was told to examine and see whether in the least 
 thing it differed from a similar bird on Earth. He 
 held it in his hand, examined it, and said there was no 
 difference. At the same time he knezv that the bird ivas 
 nothing else than the external representative of an affection 
 of a certain angel, and that it zvould vanish with the angel's 
 affection, as indeed it is." 
 
 From this theory of correspondence between the 
 interior and exterior world — the world of thought and 
 of appearance — by a grand generalization Sweden- 
 borg reaches the doctrine which distinguishes his 
 philosophy from every other. His constant rule, as 
 stated by Emerson, is that " Nature is always self- 
 similar." Thus : given water circling in an eddy, and 
 you have the revolutions of the planets around the 
 sun — of the universe around its pivotal centre. Given 
 the life of a man, you have the history of the world, 
 for " the history of our race is but the life of a co- 
 lossal man, reaching from the creation to the last day." 
 But in his most daring speculation he transcends 
 nature. As each spirit lives in a world which is the 
 manifestation of his interior self, so the whole universe 
 is but the outward manifestation of the being God. 
 There is but one reality — God ; all other things only 
 seem to be. Neither natural bodies, nor spiritual 
 bodies ; neither earth, nor sun, nor stars ; neither men, 
 nor angels, nor demons, have any existence save as 
 God imparts to each a portion of himself. All the 
 universe, animate and inanimate, material and spirit- 
 
LECTURES. 399 
 
 ual, is but the rainbow of His shining presence over- 
 arching universal space. There has been no creation, 
 in the sense of God making man and making matter. 
 As matter and Hfe are simply God's thoughts, they 
 are co-eternal with him, and all the changes through 
 which they pass are but the outward manifestations of 
 His will. We need not seek through nature for a first 
 cause — cause and effect are one. 
 
 This is not a theory of moral government, but of 
 creation ; for Swedenborg avoids the conclusion of 
 Pantheism by teaching " that God imparts himself so 
 unreservedly to man " that man will always seem to 
 be and always believe himself to be real. The purest 
 angel, though forever approaching the Divine Light, 
 and brightening in its approach, will never be re- 
 absorbed in the Infinite Being: and the most fallen 
 spirit, though forever falling in darkness, will never 
 lose all the Divine Spark originally imparted to it. 
 Of all beings who ever wore form of clay, only Christ 
 knew that he was of the very substance of God. With 
 Him alone the dividing line in self-consciousness was 
 removed, and He knew that He and the Father were one. 
 
 Swedenborg's theory of spiritual bodies is almost 
 restated in scientific terms in a recent lecture by Pro- 
 fessor Huxley, in which he shows that life is only finely 
 organized matter, of the same constituents and pro- 
 portions in every form, from the stinging nettle up to 
 man. Then, having reached the brink of materialism, 
 this eminent naturalist corroborates the grand specula- 
 tion of the religious mystic by admitting that he uses 
 *' a material terminology," for convenience, but that 
 matter and mind are both names for unknown quantities, 
 and that the existence of neither can be demonstrated. 
 
 It is true this idea of Swedenborg's, that we are but 
 shadows, cannot be carried into daylight and common 
 life. We know that we are real, and surrounded by real- 
 
400 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 ities. Let us see, however, if the doctrine, so false to 
 reason and to sense, may not be true to the imagination 
 — the inner sight. 
 
 In the days when the stoics taught that suicide might 
 become an act of the highest heroism and virtue, one of 
 the disciples of that philosophy seemed partly to regret 
 and partly to exult in the thought that this was one pre- 
 rogative that God did not enjoy with man. The Divine 
 Being could not destroy Himself. 
 
 Imagine for one moment that this limit to Omnipo- 
 tence could be removed. Suppose the Life of the 
 universe could be extinguished — that the all-sustaining 
 Power could be destroyed — that God could die ! What 
 then ? Would day succeed to night, the seasons come 
 and go, and man's life go on in successive generations? 
 Would disembodied souls continue to exist as incorpo- 
 real entities ? Would the stars rush together in the 
 mad vortex of ruin, and the world be piled on world in 
 the final conflagration of matter? No! Instant anni- 
 hilation would ensue. In the twinkling of an eye crea- 
 tion would vanish like a dream. The empty black void 
 of nothingness would swallow the universe in rayless and 
 eternal night ! 
 
 We are but shadows ; shadows all that we pursue. 
 There must be substance somewhere. That substance, 
 the Divine Reality, science and sense can never find. 
 Science in investigating physical laws uses a " material 
 terminology," on the assumption that mind and matter 
 are what they seem. At last, however, reason and 
 sense pause at the ultimate question : " Whence is all 
 this — why, and whither?" Then Swedenborg takes up 
 the system, transmutes it with a touch — dissolves opaque 
 bodies in the Divine Light — saying : " To this point 
 sense and reason are right, but as an ultimate truth there 
 is no mind, there is no matter — only God is, or was, or 
 will be ! " 
 
LECTURES. 401 
 
 LECTURE ON MORALS AND POLITICS. 
 
 Dean Swift in his history of Ireland devotes one chap- 
 ter to snakes. It consists of the single sentence " There 
 are no snakes in Ireland." 
 
 I doubt not there are those who believe that a lecture 
 upon the subject of " Morals and Politics " might be con- 
 densed into a sentence equally brief and equally true — 
 " There is no connection between morals and politics." 
 
 It is by no means certain that this sentiment is not a 
 stronger satire upon the morals than upon the politics of 
 the age. If it be true, so much the worse for the morals. 
 
 In a monarchy the morals of the Court may be better 
 or worse than those of the people. Under Trajan and 
 the Antonines they were doubtless better, under Charles 
 the Second, Louis the Fifteenth, and the dethroned Isa- 
 bella of Spain probably worse ; but in a popular govern- 
 ment if the moral sentiment of the community has not 
 vigor enough to control public affairs its influence will 
 soon cease to be felt upon private character. That in- 
 definite something we call the public is but the aggrega- 
 tion of units, and public corruption is the sure indication 
 of general individual weakness or dishonesty. 
 
 Speculative opinions are well enough : we do not lack 
 culture, what we want is moral force, illustrated in char- 
 acter, embodied in action, felt in results. That highly 
 respectable morality whose chief pleasure is self-admira- 
 tion and that supposes because it is virtuous there " will 
 be no more cakes and ale " ; that fireside, sentimental 
 morality, too precious for public use, kept strictly for 
 home consumption, that takes its ease in slippers and 
 morning-gown, indulges in the luxury of fault-finding but 
 shrinks from the labor of preventing or correcting faults; 
 that civited, perfumed, " odi profamini vulgjim " moral- 
 ity that fears to mingle with the multitude lest it should 
 
 touch pitch and be defiled ; that timid morality that 
 26 
 
402 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " wishes it were bed-time and all were well," may have 
 grace enough to save itself but not enough to save any- 
 thing else, and in saving self saves that which is scarcely 
 worth salvation. 
 
 There are men " and we have heard them praised and 
 that highly " who wear good clothes, pay their debts, 
 their taxes and their pew-rents, subscribe to charities, eat 
 with their forks, and do all things the usages of polite 
 society and the etiquette of a good conscience require 
 decently and in order, and who fancy they are public- 
 spirited good citizens, who would suffer a note to be pro- 
 tested rather than go to a primary election : or wear a 
 last year's coat, enter a pest-house, join the Mormons and 
 take seven wives or do any ridiculous or absurd thing, as 
 soon as they would attend a political convention. They 
 know that not more than half their fellow-citizens are 
 absolutely perfect and without flaw. If they have to 
 employ a lawyer, a doctor, a mechanic, a clerk, a porter, 
 or a girl in the kitchen they give the matter personal at- 
 tention and are not always able to suit themselves ; but 
 in politics they act as though they supposed there was 
 an elective afifinity between offices and good men, and 
 that whenever an office is to be filled the right man will 
 be drawn to the position by the mysterious magnetism 
 that " place " has for integrity and capacity. 
 
 Their conversation, however, is very inconsistent with 
 this supposition. In their vocabulary the word politician 
 expresses everything that is bad. It is the most libellous 
 in the language. A politician is — Well, a bummer, who 
 lives on the precarious charity of free lunches when out 
 of office, and grows rich on public plunder when in. 
 
 It is a pity for these men that some kind of machinery 
 of government could not be devised that would run it- 
 self. Their virtue is not of a kind that saves states, re- 
 dresses or prevents wrongs. 
 
 There are others, not many in time of presidential 
 
LECTURES. 403 
 
 election, still there are some, who are still higher-toned. 
 They tell you with an air of infinite condescension they 
 never vote, have not indulged in that youthful indiscre- 
 tion since the days of Jackson, or since the old Whig 
 party died. They have no political opinions, such are in 
 bad taste — in fact, vulgar. They have nothing to do with 
 parties, which are beneath their dignity — too corrupt for 
 their saintly perfection. Torch-light processions are sin- 
 ful in their eyes, newspapers incarnate slang, public dis- 
 cussions bores, the Fourth of July an abomination, the 
 election a farce, and popular government a humbug. 
 
 I like a high-toned man. Dignity, deportment, are 
 grand things — useful too in their way — they serve to 
 make one who comes in contact with them feel so insig- 
 nificant, so infinitesimal — as though he ought to apologize 
 for being alive — and humility is a good thing. But I 
 submit that this character is pitched just one octave too 
 high for practical good. He ought to be exalted to some 
 serene height of pure emptiness where he could indulge 
 the endless vanity of self-contemplation undisturbed, 
 where even the flatteries of sycophants should fall upon 
 his ear softened to a lullaby and peacefully blend with 
 his dreams of his own infinite perfection. 
 
 It may be assumed that the majesty of this man, val- 
 uable as it might be at a full-dress dinner party, or evening 
 service, would not so overawe a New York or California 
 lobby that they would forget or forego their schemes. 
 As a citizen, a member of the commonwealth, he is worth 
 less than the humblest elector who expresses an honest 
 conviction by his vote — infinitely less, he scarce deserves 
 the name of manhood when compared to the poorest, 
 most illiterate soldier who was ever ready to shed his 
 blood for the sublime ideal of country. Are we only to 
 catch glimpses of that ideal in the flashes of the battle- 
 storm ? Is the roar of cannon necessary to awaken our 
 patriotism ? Do we require " the volcanic energies of 
 
404 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 revolution to send capacity to the front ? " Shall open 
 foes be met with lives, countered with hearts, and insid- 
 ious dangers baser and not less fatal steal in through 
 supineness and neglect ? Is the government which has 
 cost so many lives worth no more than to be given over 
 to the control of whiskey-rings, and railroad-rings, and 
 gold-rings — bank-rings, land-rings, Indian-rings, and rings 
 within rings, until political economy becomes merely a 
 study of concentrics, the science of government a kind of 
 spherical trigonometry? 
 
 Let us recognize the truth: these things will not be if 
 there is active virtue in the people to prevent. Public 
 corruption is — not the evidence of it is — private decay. 
 It is not the hands or dial that are wrong, the main-spring 
 is relaxed. Mere criticism, cynical barking, and fault- 
 finding that stop at that are worth nothing. Opinions 
 held as abstractions, kept for show are worth nothing. 
 An opinion like a bayonet is useless without a man 
 behind it — like a man it must be vitalized by a heart- 
 throb every instant. Public opinion — what is that but 
 the bold utterance of the few who think what they say, 
 dare to say what they think, and seek what they want, 
 and the silent acquiescence of the many who are too in- 
 dolent for thought or too timid for action. 
 
 Active principles govern everywhere and money is 
 always active — sleepless — ever seeking its own, and more 
 too. It knows by a kind of instinct where and how to 
 seek. It is a continual pressure that always finds the 
 weak place. If patriotism and integrity will not control 
 the government, money will, in its own interest. Gold 
 will be king, ignorance its dupe, and vice its ministers. 
 
 We are too apt to think that the government at Wash- 
 ington is charged with and responsible for the destiny of 
 the nation : forgetting the while it is the people who shape 
 the government, not the government the people. The 
 general government is but a small part of the popular 
 
LECTURES, 405 
 
 scheme. Local, Municipal, County, State, ordinances, 
 laws, and administrations touch us more nearly than 
 presidential policies and Acts of Congress. They are 
 not more important in the large sense as to the nation's 
 influence on universal humanity, but they more intimately 
 concern our daily life and business. Extravagant State 
 or Municipal legislation is felt in the taxes of next year ; 
 neglect of sanitary regulations, in the presence of the 
 pestilence; a well- or ill-organized police, in immediate 
 personal security ; while an ignorant or corrupt Judge may 
 relax the restraints and impair the respect of law. It is 
 all one system from president to constable, from school- 
 board to Congress, the sovereign will of the people work- 
 ing through different parts of the same machinery, and a 
 failure in any particular is an imperfection in the whole. 
 In point of fact local self-government preceded, nurtured, 
 and accomplished natural independence and established 
 the general government. Our Yankee forefathers — as 
 Emerson puts it — discovered that the pomp and shows of 
 royalty, with horse-guards and foot-guards, masters of the 
 rolls, masters of the hounds, masters of the bed-chamber, 
 masters of the gold-stick were unnecessary. Selectmen 
 and town-meetings would answer the same purpose and 
 were cheaper. We have gotten rid of a good many 
 shams — the wigs and gowns that never made Mansfields 
 and Marshalls of berigged and begowned nobodies — of 
 the spangles, ceremonies, and stage-effects of royalty and 
 court-life, dear to royal fools and court-flies, which could 
 not make an Alfred or William of Orange little, nor the 
 Jameses or Georges great, let us now rid ourselves of the 
 idea that government can do anything for us we will not 
 do for ourselves. Buckle says that the most beneficent 
 acts of legislative bodies have always been, not the pas- 
 sage of new laws positively good, but the repeal of 
 old ones positively bad. Government is only one 
 of the agencies of progress, and in this age not the 
 
406 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 greatest. When Professor Morse applied to Congress for 
 aid to perfect his invention he was made the butt of con- 
 gressional wit and raillery : it was proposed to include 
 in the appropriation asked a sum to build a telegraph to 
 the moon — but how many Acts of Congress would it take 
 to equal in results the invention of the magnetic tele- 
 graph ? Stephenson was for months with his railway plans 
 before Committees of Parliament — bothered, pestered, 
 and delayed by wise and dignified members who thought 
 that in an encounter between a cow and a locomotive the 
 locomotive would get the worst of it — threatened with the 
 mad-house for predicting that railroad trains would attain 
 a speed of twelve miles an hour — but Stephenson's rail- 
 way has been of more value to mankind than all the acts 
 of the British Parliament for two hundred years. 
 
 It is the theory of the British constitution that Parlia- 
 ment can do anything. One of the old law-writers 
 doubted whether it could make a man or woman, and 
 fixes that as the limitation of its power. A good many 
 people seem to entertain a similar idea of the omnipotence 
 of legislation in this country. They hold the government 
 responsible for the morals of the community, and an 
 administration for the result of a bad season or a short 
 crop ; they think a national debt can be wiped out by some 
 kind of legal legerdemain without the trouble of payment 
 or disgrace of repudiation ? and are almost prepared to 
 believe that the millennium could be inaugurated by 
 legislative enactment, if we could only find a legislator 
 wise enough to bring forward the proper measure. When 
 we do find the man and the measure both will be unnec- 
 essary, the millennium will already be here. 
 
 Our nation is cast for a great part in the drama of 
 history, but whether it shall be played well or ill the 
 result only will determine. We cannot avoid the re- 
 sponsibility of our position or the verdict of history. We 
 are already one of "the great powers," and, we claim, are 
 
LECTURES. 407 
 
 destined to be the greatest. We seem to swell in individ- 
 ual importance when we speak of the four million square 
 miles of our territory. It ministers to our personal vanity 
 when we recall the rapidity of our growth and reflect 
 that the Continental republic has oceans for boundaries, 
 i^and seas for lakes, and that Niagara is singing the 
 hymn of its destiny. We lift up our voices and prophesy. 
 We estimate the growth of our population and wealth 
 for a hundred years, discount the result, throw it into the 
 sum of our present glory, and go off in a general blaze 
 of patriotism and pyrotechnics. 
 
 But it is not material wealth that makes a nation great, 
 but wealth of soul — not number of men, but quality of 
 manhood. China has a population of three or four hun- 
 dred million — so large that a mistake of a hundred million 
 is of no consequence — but China has less influence on the 
 living thought of the world, outside the Empire, than the 
 London Times or New York Tribune. 
 
 In the first administration the United States had but 
 four million people, yet I suppose it is no disparagement 
 to our present executive to say that Andrew Johnson is 
 not a greater or wiser man than George Washington. 
 We would be glad to borrow from that age an Alexander 
 Hamilton for Secretary of the Treasury, a Thomas 
 Jefferson for Secretary of State, and possibly might be 
 willing to exchange the diplomacy of Reverdy Johnson 
 for that of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 It is not more men so much as more manhood that we 
 want. The three hundred who stood with Leonidas at 
 Thermopylae were worth three hundred thousand of the 
 Persian Host — worth more in history than three million 
 times three hundred thousand. Who cares to know 
 whether Athens were a Httle larger or smaller than San 
 Francisco, or tries to ascertain the assessed value of her 
 property when he recalls the roll of her great men .? Attica 
 did not have a territory as large as Sacramento County, 
 
408 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 yet she made the eloquence, literature, arts, and achieve- 
 ments of Greece the glory of all time — has made the ages 
 forget her narrow boundaries in geography in contem- 
 plating the vast space she fills in history. 
 
 Mere increase in wealth and population is not a positive 
 good. Ignorance and corruption may increase in even 
 greater ratio. Carlyle in his cynical way said of his 
 countrymen : " Great Britain has a population of thirty 
 million — mostly fools." A New Hampshire farmer said 
 that the greatest difference he saw between stages and 
 railroads was, that more mean men rode by rail than 
 used to by stage. As our great Western train sweeps 
 forward on the track of destiny we must see to it that 
 the passengers improve as well as increase. 
 
 We rely greatly, perhaps too much, on our system of 
 schools and general education to leaven the coming 
 generations with intelligence and virtue. We are justly 
 proud of our schools. But everyone must have noticed 
 a tendency more or less active in American training to 
 educate the pupil into a genteel uselessness, an incapacity 
 and contempt for productive labor, a morbid desire to be 
 suddenly rich or great without effort, and a vague ex- 
 pectation of some time being made president of the 
 United States — so as almost to give color to the sardonic 
 satire of a modern Diogenes, that when a boy was well 
 educated the best thing to be done with him was to drown 
 him and save his board. 
 
 The conditions of life are rapidly changing throughout 
 the civilized world, and more rapidly here than elsewhere. 
 American life has given to history two new characters — 
 the desperado of the frontier, and the city rough of the 
 blood-tub, plug-ugly class. The bowie-knife and the art 
 of ballot-box stuffing are both American inventions — 
 unpatented. The desperado never was dangerous to 
 society, for his outlawry was acknowledged and his war 
 declared. He will soon disappear from our history, for 
 
LECTURES. 409 
 
 our frontiers now advancing from the East and West are 
 about to meet and vanish in mid-continent. While the 
 continent is rapidly filling up, towns and cities increase 
 in population in even greater ratio than the country. 
 Commerce, manufactures, and the arts are constantly 
 drawing manual labor from agriculture. Many of us can 
 remember when farming was simply hard work by 
 hand. The farmer's tools were the sickle, the scythe, 
 the flail, the shovel-plow, and the like — his guide and 
 vade niecum the Dutch almanac filled with wise weather 
 predictions and equally wise maxims that enjoined the 
 sowing of seeds in the new moon, the planting of trees 
 and roots in the old. Now, agricultural implements have 
 made farming an art, almost a fine art, and much of the 
 labor that would otherwise be required on the farm 
 is transferred to the shop. Steam plows will make 
 farms larger — and cities more populous. Improved 
 methods of transportation and travel have made every 
 part of the world a buyer and seller with every 
 other part, and commerce is vastly increased. The 
 tendency of population is now strongly towards com- 
 mercial and manufacturing centres. The influences 
 referred to only strengthen a natural tendency. Men are 
 gregarious from instinct : love a crowd for its own sake. 
 Like seeks like, and there is no character so eccentric, no 
 taste so odd, no opinion so peculiar it cannot find its 
 fellow in a large city. 
 
 Cities, too, make their own attractions. They get the 
 earliest and latest strawberries, the choicest steaks — get 
 the news damp from the press — have the best markets, 
 the best schools and churches, the most varied amuse- 
 ments, the most tempting dissipations ; open the greatest 
 avenues to fortune ; give talent the largest rewards, 
 fraud the best opportunities, vice and crime their favorite 
 haunts, securest retreats, and most congenial associates. 
 Once monarchs built cities for pohtical capitals ; now 
 
41 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 commerce, capital, labor, wealth, religion, folly, pleasure, 
 vice, and crime build them ; erect their houses and taber- 
 nacles side by side and elbow each other in the street, 
 with polite unconsciousness of anything beneath the 
 exterior. 
 
 The city was the birthplace of civilization ; it is now 
 the bane and danger. It was the nurture of free institu- 
 tions ; it is now the hardest strain and severest trial upon 
 democratic theory of government — the place where it 
 will first fail if fail it must. 
 
 From the slums of cities there comes up a fungus- 
 growth of civilization, a five-point, Barbary-coast, Chinese- 
 beating, prize-fighting population that looks upon society, 
 the law, and its ministers, as natural enemies. In cities 
 over-refinement ends in luxury and effeminacy. In cities 
 ingenuity contrives artificial vices to stimulate the appe- 
 tite destroyed by dissipation. In cities concentrated 
 capital becomes kingly power, making war for monopolies, 
 seeking new fields of wealth as a conqueror invades 
 kingdoms regardless of the rights of men, and esteeming 
 government as a name to impose on the patriotism of the 
 simple, while it is made subservient to and a part of 
 schemes of private advantage. 
 
 If we regard the city as the world in little, and can see 
 in it the forces of human nature in full play, we may 
 almost be surprised not that governments, and politics if 
 you please, are not better, but that they are not worse : for 
 government, political life in all its forms, is the exponent 
 of the active agencies of the community, not the reflec- 
 tion of passive opinions. It represents action far more 
 than it fears criticism. One positive has more power 
 than all negatives. An ounce of selfishness boldly thrown 
 into the scale of public affairs weighs more than a ton of 
 good intentions severely kept at home. 
 
 For these growing evils there is but one remedy — not 
 moral sentiments, but moral force. We want a public 
 
LECTURES. 411 
 
 opinion " not a pipe for fortune's finger to sound what 
 stops she pleases on," but a weapon, an armory of weapons 
 offensive and defensive, an enlightened public opinion 
 which it shall be more dangerous to offend than it is to 
 ofTend prejudice or interest, clique or ring — a public 
 opinion not proscriptive, but tolerant of individual con- 
 victions and personal rights. And above all we want 
 personal manliness that will champion its own convictions 
 to the uttermost ; that would rather be right with the 
 weak party than wrong with the strong ; that does not 
 fear unpopularity in the cause of truth ; that realizes that 
 all reforms are brought forward by minorities — realizes 
 that expediency is for honor, policy for a day, laws 
 change, governments are modified — ideas are indestruc- 
 tible. 
 
 For our future, these things are fixed : We have got 
 to live together as one people, speaking one language, a 
 great population inhabiting one territory, under one 
 government republican in form, democratic in theory. 
 This outline is fixed as fate. The filling up, all that 
 will make our history a glory or shame, depends not 
 upon president or cabinet. Congress, politicians, governors, 
 or statesmen, but upon the American people. 
 
 There is in every people a capacity, a latent moral 
 power and heroism, sufficient if active to create a nation 
 that would pale all the glories of the past and make our 
 wildest dreams of destiny tame. We see this spirit 
 flashing out upon occasions, sometimes humble occasions, 
 transfusing humanity with celestial light. On the fourth 
 of last July at the Oakland landing, Italians perilled their 
 lives to save men, women, and children from drowning. 
 On the fifth we would have passed Carlo Sonoquini with- 
 out a thought — there were none so poor to do him rever- 
 ence : on the sixth we stood uncovered while the hearse 
 bearing his poor body — bearing the dust of royalty — 
 went by. 
 
412 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 An English transport foundered at sea. When all hope 
 was gone the Colonel mustered his men under arms. 
 Calmly as on parade they fell into line, obeyed every 
 word of command, and went down with a " present 
 arms ! " greeting death with the honors due to the great 
 Conqueror. When the ill-fated Central America was 
 lost the men who voluntarily stood upon her decks 
 awaiting their doom, the strong yielding to the weak, 
 while the women and children went off in the boats, were 
 made heroes by that hour. 
 
 When our country confronted danger and dissolution 
 the American people became the hero of the War — 
 peerless in history ! 
 
 If the popular heart would always beat with its noblest 
 pulsations; if we, " the people," would always look aloft 
 where the stars are shining, not beneath where the earth- 
 worms crawl ; if the ideal of country should ensphere us 
 all in the very atmosphere of unselfish patriotism until 
 we should realize " he is a freeman whom the truth makes 
 free, and all are slaves besides," our nation would move 
 through the century with the momentum of forty millions 
 in one — through the future with the resistless power of 
 destiny. The spirit of liberty would go forth from us 
 in majesty and might — ride upon the winds and move 
 upon the waters until all nations would join in the 
 jubilee of freedom. 
 
 LECTURE ON CHARLES JAMES FOX. 
 
 In the preparation of this lecture I have considered 
 Charles James Fox as the central figure of his contempo- 
 aries. In the narrative portions I may sometimes have 
 inadvertently fallen into the language of others, but 
 never intentionally except where a literal quotation was 
 necessary to historical accuracy. 
 
 The reign of George the Third is famous in general 
 
LECTURES. 413 
 
 history as the era of the American and French revolu- 
 tions and the Napoleonic wars which grew out of the 
 latter. It is distinguished in English annals as a period 
 of Parliamentary oratory. It was made illustrious by 
 Chatham, Burke, Mansfield, Fox, Sheridan, Pitt, Erskine, 
 and adorned by others who would have been esteemed 
 great if there had not been giants in those days. 
 
 It would be difficult now to find, either in the Ameri- 
 can Congress or English Parliament, a man who is dis- 
 tinctively great as an orator. There are accomplished 
 debators, brilliant speakers, able party leaders — but where 
 is the orator? — the man whose very presence is magnetic, 
 whose soul is so refulgent with his theme that it glows 
 in his eyes, beams in his face, transfigures his person, blends 
 voice, action, manner, language, thought into a supreme 
 harmony, fuses reason, passion, imagination into one 
 power — that ethereal fire which makes speech electric ? 
 
 A friend once told me that to hear Henry Clay in the 
 excitement of debate was like listening to an inspired 
 voice of orchestral power, from a presence of fire ; that 
 there was a whole oration in his " Mr. President," and that 
 he would have walked miles to hear him pronounce the 
 word " Louisiana." 
 
 In the British Parliament discussions now are for the 
 most part conducted in the colloquial tone. Gladstone 
 is often vehement, John Bright has, or rather had, the 
 pomp of declamation, but the speakers in Parliament 
 seldom rise above the tone and manner of animated 
 conversation. The sharply cut epigrams and stinging 
 retorts of Disraeli, as they fell from his lips, would 
 scarcely be intelligible to an American hearer unaccus- 
 tomed to his voice and pronunciation. The canons of 
 good taste have become severe and repressive. The exhi- 
 bition of feeling has gone out of fashion. Anything like 
 the theatrical display is fatal. No one now would dare 
 in the House of Commons, like Brougham, to drop one 
 
414 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 knee at the close of a speech, and supplicate the House 
 not to reject a Bill ; or, like Burke, to throw a dagger upon 
 the floor in the midst of a speech to emphasize a sen- 
 tence, or like Chatham " make his crutch a weapon of 
 oratory." 
 
 There are good reasons doubtless for this change of 
 taste, and decline of Parliamentary oratory. One is that 
 the immensely increased pressure of public business de- 
 mands from public men a constant and laborious atten- 
 tion to details, and makes despatch more valuable than 
 speech — the committee-man more useful than the orator. 
 For example : about 5000 Bills were introduced at the last 
 session of Congress. Another reason is that public 
 opinion was formed by the debates of Parliament and 
 Congress : now, legislative action is governed by public 
 opinion, and the journalist has acquired the influence and 
 importance which the orator has lost. 
 
 The political orator has no place in the early history of 
 England, so long as great public questions were decided 
 in the field rather than in the forum, by the collision of 
 arms rather than of debate. Freedom of speech is 
 essential to greatness of speech. There could be little 
 true oratory in Parliament beneath the overshadowing 
 power of the Throne — when the displeasure of the 
 King was equivalent to a bill of attainder, when 
 the very summary method was in vogue of moving 
 that previous question which shuts off all debate by 
 sending the leaders of the opposition to the Tower, and 
 when a troublesome man's mouth could be effectually 
 stopped by cutting off his head. 
 
 In the revolution which brought Charles the First to the 
 block and Cromwell to power, there was eloquence, but 
 scarcely oratory. Hampden, Pym, Eliot, Digby, and 
 the Parliamentary leaders spoke as though their words 
 were weighed, minted, and stamped with exact value to 
 be current for all time. Occasionally a great sentence 
 
LECTURES. 415 
 
 would break its way through all restraints and sweep the 
 field of debate like the discharge of a park of artillery, 
 but usually they seemed to apply the methods of mathe- 
 matical reasoning to questions of morals and politics — of 
 life and death. Strafford in his own defence was eloquent, 
 but he spoke with the freedom of despair and as a man 
 standing in the shadow of death. 
 
 Confessedly the Englishman who first, and in the high- 
 est degree, united the natural elements of a Parliamentary 
 orator, was the elder Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham, who 
 entered the House of Commons in the reign of George 
 the Second, but whose public service reached far into the 
 reign of George the Third. He was not so profoundly 
 versed as many of his contemporaries in the principles of 
 government, technically not so good a debater, but he 
 was born to command. Dignified in person, impassioned 
 but easy and graceful in manner ; with a face and eye of 
 wonderful power of expression, a voice which had at 
 times the softness of the flute, the swell of the organ, and 
 the dissonance of the trumpet ; master of satire, of ridicule, 
 and invective ; at once fluent and accurate, daring and 
 imperious ; not logical in his methods he could convince 
 the reason through the feelings and incite the feelings 
 through the reason, flash conviction by a sentence, kindle 
 enthusiasm by a tone, overawe with a look, and silence 
 by a wave of the hand. 
 
 Much of the oratorical effect he produced was due to 
 his character and position. He spoke with authority. 
 He was the voice of England. Some of the anecdotes 
 told of the triumphs of his manner, in the absence of the 
 living presence of the man himself seem incredible and 
 even absurd. It is related that upon one occasion he 
 began a speech upon some question of commercial inter- 
 course with the words " Sugar, Mr. Speaker." There 
 was something ludicrous in the tone, words, and his 
 momentary pause, and an audible titter ran around the 
 
4l6 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 benches. The orator was amazed. He laughed at ! 
 The Jupiter Tonans of the House ridiculed ! Towering 
 to his full height, his eyes blazing with wrath, he swept 
 the circuit of the benches with his extended arm and 
 long forefinger, and pronounced the word Sugar three 
 times " in a loud voice, rising in its notes and swelling 
 into tones of vehement anger, until the hall rang and 
 reverberated with the sound." The members were awe- 
 struck as though they had heard the trump of doom. 
 After a scornful pause he exclaimed, " Which of you 
 dare laugh at Sugar now ! " and went on with his speech. 
 It is possible that a clever actor witnessing this scene 
 might have learned to imitate and reproduce the tone and 
 manner of Pitt, but the effect would have been no more 
 alike than the burning rosin and sheet-iron thunder of the 
 stage are like "Jove's oak-cleaving thunderbolt." For 
 Pitt was privileged to dare everything. Macaulay says : 
 " He was the greatest man in England and had made 
 England the greatest country in the world. His name 
 was spoken with awe in every palace from Lisbon to 
 Petersburg, and his trophies were in every quarter of the 
 globe." 
 
 After George the Third came to the throne, the Par- 
 liamentary rival and leading political opponent of the 
 elder Pitt was Henry Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, and 
 the father of Charles James Fox, the life-long rival and 
 political opponent of Pitt's son. Without claim to elo- 
 quence, he was regarded as even a more powerful debater 
 than Pitt. Pitt called him " a boisterous and impetuous 
 torrent." He had in an eminent degree Danton's three 
 requisites, alike essential to success in revolution and 
 debate — " audacity — audacity — audacity." Unscrupu- 
 lous in the use of means, Macaulay says he was the most 
 unpopular statesman of his time, not because he sinned 
 more than many of them, but because he canted less. 
 From his office of paymaster of the forces, the most lu- 
 
LECTURES. 417 
 
 crative in the Government, he amassed an immense for- 
 tune, and was rewarded with the peerage for his services 
 in buying up a majority in the House of Commons in 
 support of Bute and opposition to Pitt. No such shame- 
 less corruption has been known in EngHsh politics — or 
 any other. It made the practice of Walpole respectable. 
 Without attempt at concealment, members were paid 
 for their votes from the secret-service fund, the prices 
 varying with the exigencies of the Government, almost as 
 openly as stocks are sold on California streets. Appoint- 
 ments to office were made, not on account of fitness but 
 of political influence. All over the country, men who had 
 grown gray in the civil service and knew no other pur- 
 suits, often men who had been disabled in their country's 
 battles, were pitilessly removed and reduced to want, to 
 make room for the favorites and dependants of members 
 of Parliament. (This was in England more than one 
 hundred years ago ! ) 
 
 The eldest son of Lord Holland, on account of a 
 physical infirmity, was incapacitated for a successful public 
 career, and the hopes of the father were fixed upon the 
 third, Charles James Fox, as the successor of his political 
 power and leadership. Charles was descended by his 
 mother from the beautiful French adventuress, the 
 Duchess of Richmond, who was sent to the English 
 coast by Louis the Fourteenth to fascinate the " Merrie 
 Monarch " and control his policy in the French interest, 
 and who suceeded in both. He was born in 1746, nine- 
 teen years after Burke, two years before Sheridan, and 
 ten years before the younger Pitt. He was trained 
 for public life from his birth. His childhood was 
 remarkably precocious, and he was constantly brought in 
 contact with the leading public men of that day. The 
 paternal discipline of his father can scarcely be com- 
 mended to general imitation. It was his rule not to 
 thwart his son's wishes in anything, for fear of breaking 
 
41 8 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 his spirit. When not more than four years old Charles 
 one day exclaimed that he wanted to break a gold watch 
 which his father was winding up in his presence. His 
 father remonstrated that it would be very foolish. " I 
 must break it, I must ! " was the reply. " Then break it, 
 my son," said the father, handing it to him, and it was 
 dashed on the floor, breaking to his heart's content. 
 Upon another occasion, Charles had been promised that 
 he should see a stone-wall blown up which it had be- 
 come necessary to remove in repairing the grounds of the 
 estate. By some mistake of the workmen the mine was 
 exploded in his child's absence. The father was duly 
 taken to task at his next meeting with his son. 
 
 " Father, you promised I should see that wall blown 
 up. 
 
 " Yes, my child, and I am very sorry my orders were 
 not obeyed." 
 
 " Father you promised I should see it." 
 
 * ■ I did, and you shall see it " — and he had the wall re- 
 built and again blown up in the child's presence. 
 
 In after-life Fox used to relate that when he was about 
 five years old he overheard his mother say to his father — 
 " I do not know what will become of Charles, he is so 
 passionate." His father replied : " He is a sensible little 
 fellow, and will learn to control his passions." 
 
 The incident made an impression upon him which he 
 never forgot : and after all the vices, follies, and dissipa- 
 tions of his youth and earlier manhood, he was described 
 by Burke, who never had a vice, a folly, or a dissipation, 
 " as a man made to be loved " ; and amid the acerbities, 
 contentions, and animosities of public life, then seven 
 times heated, in his personal and social relations his tem- 
 per was sweet as summer, his disposition open as the day. 
 To the day of his death his friends usually spoke of him 
 as " Charles " — but who ever spoke of Burke as Edmund, 
 of Pitt as William, or even of Sheridan as Richard ? 
 
LECTURES. 419 
 
 At school and the university he was alike distinguished 
 for his application to study and for his habits of dissipa- 
 tion. His Oxford tutor said that Charles Fox was the 
 only pupil he ever had whose application he felt it a duty 
 to discourage. He left the university at eighteen, pro- 
 ficient in the studies of the curriculum of that period — 
 finding " entertainment " in mathematics, dehght in Latin 
 and Greek, with a love for literature which amounted to 
 a passion ; and a passion for gambling which was the bane 
 of his life. His father had taught him to gamble before he 
 was fourteen, as a part of a worldly education. 
 
 After leaving the university he spent two years on the 
 Continent, where he learned to speak French and Italian 
 fluently, and where he so bettered the instruction of his 
 father as to lose immense sums at play. He is reported 
 to have said that " next to winning, losing at cards was 
 the greatest pleasure in life." Cheerful winners are pro- 
 verbial at gaming-tables, but so cheerful a loser is an 
 anomaly. He had need of this philosophy, for he habit- 
 ually lost. Before his death Lord Holland had paid in 
 the aggregate more than a million of dollars of the value 
 of our money for his son's losses at play. It was well 
 for the father that he struck the bonanza in the office of 
 " paymaster of the forces " ! 
 
 During this tour also Charles was seized with the am- 
 bition of being the best-dressed man in Europe. His 
 red heels and Paris cut velvet were displayed in every 
 court on the Continent, and he was very near becoming 
 the most noted coxcomb of his day. 
 
 Lord Holland, becoming alarmed at the result of his 
 own instructions, recalled his son from Europe in his 
 twentieth year, and had him returned to Parliament a 
 year before he was eligible, in the hope that his ambition 
 would conquer his absorbing passion for play. 
 
 At this time English high life was almost as profligate as 
 in the days of Charles the Second, and young Fox natu- 
 
420 NEWTON BOOTH, 
 
 rally fell in with the wits and beaux of society, and that 
 large class of public men who frequented Brooke's, Al- 
 mack's, the Goosetree, and other fashionable gambling 
 clubs. Horace Walpole in his graceful style describes 
 an evening at Almack's — the players — the fashionable 
 men of the town, sat around gaming-tables, their coats 
 turned wrongside out " for luck," or wearing great frieze 
 coats, the ruffles of their shirt wrist-bands turned back 
 and covered with leather cases like those worn by foot- 
 men in scouring knives ; with steeple-crowned straw hats 
 sometimes fantastically garlanded with flowers, the brim 
 drawn down over the face to conceal its expression ; the 
 stakes rouleaux of gold sometimes amounting to $50,000 
 on a single game. 
 
 These men would bet upon anything and everything. 
 Upon one occasion a man fell in a fit in the street before 
 the door of the Club. Bets were immediately laid as to 
 whether he would die or recover. He was brought in, 
 and the men who had bet on his death objected to call- 
 ing a surgeon, as it would interfere with the fairness of 
 the wager. " A writer in Blackwood relates that Lord 
 Barrymore, commonly called ' Cripplegate, backed himself 
 to eat a live cat, and challenged the Duke of York (the 
 King's son) to try which of the two could wade farthest 
 into the sea, and won by a few yards." 
 
 In 1772 " Gibbon, the historian, describes Fox as 
 preparing for a solemn discussion in the House (on the 
 marriage bill) by spending twenty-two hours at hazard, 
 his devotions costing him about i^500 an hour, in all 
 ;:^ 1 1,000" ($55,000). One morning, after a night when 
 Fox's losses had been ruinous, one of his friends went 
 to his rooms expecting to find him in the depths of de- 
 spondency, and fearing he would be tempted to suicide. 
 He found him lying on a lounge, reading Herodotus in 
 Greek. To an expression of surprise, he replied : " Why, 
 what would you have mc do ? I have not a shilling in 
 the world." He is reported to have said upon another 
 
LECTURES. 421 
 
 occasion " that a man could not afford to lose both his 
 money and his temper." 
 
 After he had squandered the gifts of his father, and 
 the patrimony he received from the estate of his mother, 
 when he was about forty years old, his friends by a sub- 
 scription settled a life annuity upon him, sufficient for 
 the reasonable wants of a man in his position. Some- 
 one, thinking of the delicacy which would be required, 
 wondered " how Fox would take it." " Take it," replied 
 the witty George Selwyn, " why, quarterly, to be sure ! " 
 After this settlement he renounced play, and it can be 
 said of him as it has been of Henry Clay, that he outgrew 
 the follies of his youth, and the longer he lived the better 
 he became. 
 
 To the surprise of some of his friends Fox described 
 himself as a painstaking man, and Lord Russell confirms 
 the description by stating that after he became Secretary 
 of State he took lessons of a writing-master and followed 
 copy like a school-boy to improve his penmanship ; and 
 that while in office he personally attended to minute 
 details which are usually left to clerks; while his method 
 of despatching official business, and his frank, open, 
 accessible manners were the delight of all with whom he 
 was brought in contact. 
 
 His physical constitution must have been one of the best 
 ever given to man, for during all the period of his gam- 
 bling, with its attendant dissipations, he was assiduous in 
 his attendance at Parliament. He said that he made 
 himself a speaker at the expense of the House ; that for 
 eight successive sessions he spoke every evening except 
 one, and only regretted he did not speak on that. Burke, 
 in many respects the most eloquent man who ever spoke 
 English, said : " Fox made himself by slow degrees the 
 most brilliant and accomplished debater the world has ever 
 known," Sir James Mcintosh, a calm and philosophic 
 observer, said : *' Fox certainly possessed above all mod- 
 erns that union of reason, simplicity, and vehemence 
 
422 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 which formed the prince of orators. He was the most 
 Demosthenean speaker since Demosthenes." 
 
 When Fox was but twenty-four, in 1773, " on the 
 ninth of April Horace Walpole heard him speak in the 
 House of Commons, and heard him with admiration. 
 * Fox's abihties,' he writes to Horace Mann, ' are amazing 
 at so very early an age, especially under the circumstances 
 of such a dissolute life. He had just arrived from New- 
 market, had sat up drinking all night, and had not been 
 in bed. How such talents laugh at Tully's rules for an 
 orator! Cicero's labored orations are puerile compared 
 to this boy's manly reason." 
 
 From a fop, he became almost a sloven. He could 
 often be seen going from his rooms to the Club, slip- 
 shod, in a faded morning-gown, shirt unbuttoned, expos- 
 ing a broad chest which suggested the hide of a black 
 bear. In the House of Commons, after the American 
 War at least, he wore the colors of Washington and the 
 Continentals, buff vest and blue frock coat — but well- 
 worn and soiled. His appearance at the trial of Warren 
 Hastings, in full dress, was so unusual as to occasion 
 remark. He once however visited Paris attired as became 
 his position, during the reign of Napoleon, and he was 
 followed by the street crowds on acccount of his kingly 
 appearance, as, long after, Daniel Webster was followed 
 in England. 
 
 The only preparation he made for a speech was to 
 master the subject, by going to its very heart and marrow, 
 making it his for all time: language, illustration, and 
 arrangement he left for the excitement of the occasion. 
 Sitting in the House of Commons, slovenly dressed, 
 square and heavily built, broad shouldered, inclined to 
 corpulence, under medium height, brown complexion, 
 large black eyes with shaggy overhanging eyebrows, un- 
 combed black hair falling in matted locks over his fore- 
 head, he might have been taken for a Yorkshire farmer. 
 
LECTURES. 423 
 
 But on his feet, in the excitement of debate, his eyes 
 flashing, face illumined, voice sometimes rising to a 
 scream, every muscle of his body quivering with intense 
 mental activity, he was the incarnation of living intel- 
 lectual power. 
 
 A distinguished German who heard him in one of his 
 great contests with Pitt described him in Blackwood as : 
 " Rising towards the end of a long debate, and bursting 
 into a speech as unmethodical as it was impetuous, he 
 yet recalled without a single omission every topic of 
 importance which had been touched on through the 
 night. When he sat down it seemed as if he had been 
 like the Pythoness, filled and agitated with a divine fury. 
 His whole body was dissolved in floods of perspiration, 
 and his fingers continued for some minutes to vibrate as 
 if he were recovering from a convulsion." 
 
 Fox's early political training was as unfortunate as his 
 moral. His father, from being a personal friend of Wal- 
 pole, and an earnest Whig under George the Second, 
 became under George the Third the highest of high 
 Tories, and an ardent advocate of the extreme preroga- 
 tives of the Crown. 
 
 Only the briefest reference can be made within the 
 limits of a lecture to the political questions of the long 
 reign of George the Third. They were among the most 
 momentous of English history, but underlying them all 
 was the constant struggle between the prerogatives of the 
 Crown and the rights of a free Parliament. 
 
 Upon the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the Elector 
 of Hanover had been called to the throne as George the 
 First. He was then fifty-four years old, spoke English 
 very imperfectly, was gross in his tastes, offensive in his 
 manners, had imprisoned his wife, had quarrelled with his 
 son, after the custom of the House of Brunswick, dis- 
 liked the English people, and was disliked by them. 
 
 He would sometimes get into a pet with his ministers, 
 
424 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 and threaten to go back to Hanover for good and leave 
 England without a king. He died after a reign of 
 thirteen years, while making a journey to Hanover, at 
 Osnaburgh. 
 
 Thackeray relates that when his great minister, Wal- 
 pole, went to break the intelligence of the King's death 
 to his son and heir (then forty-four years old) he found him 
 taking an afternoon nap. Dropping on one knee beside 
 him, he aroused him, told him his royal father was dead, 
 and greeted him as George the Second by the Grace of 
 God, King of Great Britain, Ireland, and France, The 
 new King hated Walpole, and as he rubbed his eyes his 
 first royal utterance was " Dat ish one beeg lie." Almost 
 his first royal act was to commit a felony by destroying 
 his father's will, to cut off the legatees ; his excuse being 
 that his father had committed two similar felonies and 
 deprived him of legacies by destroying the wills of his 
 mother and grandmother. He resembled his father in his 
 dislike for the English, his love of Hanover, and if possible 
 excelled him in his hatred to his son Frederick, the heir- 
 apparent — whom he drove from the royal palace. 
 
 These two reigns covered a period of forty-six years, dur- 
 ing which the personal influence of the King was scarcely 
 felt, and the Crown was practically " held in commission 
 by the great Whig families." During most of this 
 time the Government was administered by the two great- 
 est Ministers, if we except Cromwell, who was his own 
 Minister, England has ever known — Robert Walpole and 
 William Pitt, who were respectively made peers as Lord 
 Oxford and the Earl of Chatham, The constitutional 
 government through a Ministry thus became silently but 
 firmly established, and the power of ParHamcnt increased 
 as that of the King declined. 
 
 Frederick died before his father, and George the Second, 
 was succeeded by his grandson George the Third, who came 
 to the throne in 1770, at the age of twenty-two. Poorly ed- 
 
LECTURES. 425 
 
 ucated, he had that cunning which often distinguishes nar- 
 row minds, and that obstinacy of purpose which belongs to 
 men who are sincere but bigoted in opinion. His blame- 
 less private life, his domestic virtues, and the fact that 
 he was English born, commended him to the affections 
 of the people, and gave him a power for evil which a more 
 unpopular monarch would never have possessed. It was 
 his misfortune to fall under the influence of Lord Bute, 
 who encouraged him in the congenial sentiment that he 
 was born in the purple, a King in his own right, and 
 should govern as well as reign. He endeavored to control 
 Parliament through court influence, and sometimes suc- 
 ceeded in defeating the measures of his Ministers by the 
 votes of an odious body of men known in Parliament as 
 " the King's friends." 
 
 Thus was the old question between Charles the First 
 and his Parliament revived after more than a century, 
 modified only by the changed conditions of society. 
 Charles the First desired to govern without a Parliament, 
 George the Third through Parliament. 
 
 Fox entered Parliament in the ninth year of the reign 
 of George the Third, and from the influence of his father 
 and early associations he was the supporter and advocate 
 of Kingly prerogative. His first speech in Parliament 
 was in favor of depriving Wilkes of the seat to which he 
 had been fairly elected. Wilkes was a man of brilliant 
 parts, without moral or political principle, or even a 
 decent sense of propriety. He was utterly lacking in 
 sincerity and regarded life simply as a game of hazard. In 
 the latter part of his life when he had grown conservative 
 and become something of a courtier, the King one day 
 inquired after one of his early friends. 
 
 " He was no friend of mine," replied Wilkes. " He was 
 a Wilkite — I never was ! " 
 
 His face was so ugly that it could not be caricatured. 
 The Nasts of that time gave up the attempt in despair. 
 
426 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 They could not alter a line of his face without improving 
 his looks. He used to say that in conversation with 
 ladies other men had twenty minutes the start of him. 
 It took him that long to talk off the effect of his face. 
 
 This man, so odious in personal appearance and moral 
 character, became a popular idol because he represented 
 two rights dear to Englishmen and their descendants 
 everywhere — the right of free speech and of free votes. 
 He had accused the King of falsehood and had been 
 arrested for libel at the Monarch's personal request. 
 The people elected him to Parliament. The House 
 rejected him. He was re-elected and rejected, and 
 finally forced in against King, Court, Ministry, King's 
 friends and party, by an indignant public opinion which 
 at one time threatened to swell into a revolution. 
 
 Fox made his Parliamentary debjit in support of a mo- 
 tion to reject Wilkes and give his seat to Colonel Luttrell, 
 his competitor, who received only three hundred votes. 
 His maiden effort was received with great favor by his 
 father and friends, but Fox lived to regret it. 
 
 He continued to act with the Tories, and to advocate 
 the measures of the Ministers and principles of the King 
 for about three years, and there is to be said in excuse 
 for this portion of his political career, that in his detesta- 
 tion of the overweening influence of the aristocracy over 
 the Crown as exhibited in the reigns of George the First 
 and Second, he lost sight of the danger to free govern- 
 ment from the controlling influence of the Crown over 
 Parliament. 
 
 The King quite naturally distrusted him on account of 
 his dissolute life, and disliked him on account of his in- 
 tractability. He was too fiery a spirit to work well in 
 harness. He was outspoken when policy required con- 
 cealment, and too frank in his nature to seek the tortuous 
 paths of expediency. He was often refractory, as an 
 ardent soul must be as it chafes against the restraints of 
 
LECTURES. 427 
 
 inherited opinion. Finally he gave unpardonable of- 
 fence by carrying a measure in the House by his bold 
 and open advocacy against the wishes of his chief. He 
 disclaimed any intention of going over to the opposition, 
 but a few days afterwards was dismissed from the office 
 he held as one of the Commissioners of the Treasury, 
 with this brief note from Lord North, the Prime Minister : 
 " His Majesty has thought proper to order a new Com- 
 mission of Treasury to be made out in which I do not 
 see your name." 
 
 If his Majesty had realized what a servant he was to 
 lose, what an antagonist he was to gain, the note at least 
 might have been less curt. Not many years afterward, 
 Dr. Johnson, who was almost servile in his adulation of 
 the King and his devotion to Kingly prerogative, said — 
 " Fox is an extraordinary man. Here is a man who has 
 divided a Kingdom with Caesar, so that it was in doubt 
 which the nation should be #ruled by, the sceptre of 
 George the Third or the tongue of Mr. Fox." 
 
 His dismissal from office was the occasion rather than 
 the cause of the change in his political opinions and con- 
 duct. The change must have come sooner or later from 
 the growth and self-assertion of his large nature as he 
 receded from the influence of early association, and ex- 
 perience in public life broadened and deepened his con- 
 victions of public duty. 
 
 His early and devoted friendship for Burke was one of 
 the great good fortunes of his life. More than any man 
 in modern history, Edmund Burke combined the charac- 
 teristics of the moralist, the scholar, the philosopher, the 
 statesman, and the orator. Fox, in replying to a compli- 
 ment upon one of his own speeches as published, said, 
 " If it reads well, it is a poor speech." 
 
 Burke was unfortunate in his delivery, but his speeches 
 as printed, splendid in diction, adorned with the imagery 
 of an exuberant fancy, and illustrations drawn from a 
 
428 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 learning which " had taken all knowledge for its prov- 
 ince," surcharged with the earnestness and enthusiasm of 
 strong conviction, will live as models and marvels of 
 eloquence so long as the language is spoken or read. 
 They are like lenses in receiving the scattered light of 
 the past and concentrating it in a glowing focus upon the 
 future ; like prisms in giving to common subjects the 
 beauties of rainbow tints ; like mirrors, reflecting the 
 images of all time and all nature. Late in his life Fox 
 said that if he had to renounce all the political knowledge 
 he had learned from books, his own experience, and gen- 
 eral intercourse with men, on the one hand, or on the 
 other what he had acquired from his familiar association 
 with Burke, he should hesitate which to choose. 
 
 Until he became alarmed and terrified by the excesses 
 of the French Revolution, Burke was extremely liberal in 
 his opinions, an ardent advocate of popular rights and 
 representative governmen^i In 1780 he gave the support 
 of his great name and character to Dunning's resolution 
 " That in the opinion of the House, the power of the 
 Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be dimin- 
 ished." 
 
 Fox was dismissed from office in 1772. At this time 
 the American question, whose solution on the battle- 
 fields of the Revolution resulted in the independence of 
 the United States, was looming up and rapidly over- 
 shadowing eveiy other interest in English politics. Fox 
 took his stand with Burke and his friends and soon be- 
 came their acknowledged leader. Lord Russell quotes 
 Gibbon the historian as saying : '' From the adverse side 
 of the House an ardent and powerful opposition grew up, 
 supported by the lively declamation of Barr^, the legal 
 acuteness of Dunning, the profuse and philosophic fancy 
 of Burke, and the argumentative vehemence of Fox, who 
 in the conduct of a party approved himself equal to the 
 conduct of an Empire." 
 
LECTURES. 429 
 
 Russell says also that when Grattan, the great Irish 
 orator, was asked which were the best speeches he had 
 ever heard, he replied without hesitation, " Fox's during 
 the American War." 
 
 The war was essentially the King's, whose habit of 
 mind it was to identify all his wishes and opinions with 
 the obligations of his coronation oath. Even Lord North, 
 the Prime Minister, who was personally opposed to the 
 measures which precipitated the war, is said to have been 
 overruled in the Cabinet by a majority of a single vote, 
 and he continued in ofifice only at the importunate plead- 
 ing of the King. 
 
 North has suffered in American estimation because he 
 was necessarily the exposed point in the attacks upon the 
 King's government by the friends of America in Parlia- 
 ment, and he has been held up in our school-books as our 
 fathers' " bete 7ioire.'" 
 
 With a will too weak for leadership in so stormy a 
 period, he was really one of the kindest and most amiable 
 of men, possessing an equanimity of temper and a fund of 
 humor which made him personally loved. He had the 
 misfortune as a speaker to have a tongue too large for 
 his mouth, so that his articulation was thick, and his 
 utterance as though he spoke through wool, but his state- 
 ments when read were clear and direct. He had another 
 physical infirmity — a disposition to somnolence. He 
 could not keep awake through a long debate, and slept 
 through a great deal of the abuse and invective intended for 
 his ear. He was often awakened to reply to a long speech 
 of which he had only heard the opening, and used to say 
 that he only wanted to hear the first third of a speech to 
 answer it, as the remainder was sure to be repetition and 
 reiteration. Upon one occasion, when a member after a 
 ranting declamation on the condition of the nation, 
 pointed at North and exclaimed — " There sits the noble 
 Lord, asleep amid the ruins of the country he has de- 
 
430 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 stroyed," he opened his eyes and replied fronn his seat, 
 " I wish to heaven I were ! " Once when he was on the 
 floor, a furious dog rushed from under the benches, bark- 
 ing violently, to the excitement and alarm of the members. 
 North stood calmly until the dog was put out, and then 
 resumed his speech, saying — " The member from Barks- 
 dale having yielded the floor, I will proceed." 
 
 His Ministry was long and disastrous. It lost to Eng- 
 land the American Colonies, the brightest jewels of her 
 crown. At its beginning England was the arbiter of 
 Europe, at its close she was without an ally or a pro- 
 nounced friend. He had been attacked in Parliament 
 with terrible severity. He had been threatened with im- 
 peachment, and even with the block. On the night of 
 the 20th of March, 1782, he unexpectedly announced to 
 the House that the King had accepted his resignation. 
 The members, expecting an all-night session, had not 
 ordered their carriages until morning. North's was the 
 only carriage in waiting, in the bitter and driving storm 
 of snow and sleet. As he stepped in, he pleasantly bade 
 good night to his opponents who crowded the cloak 
 room, saying, " You see, gentlemen, the advantage of 
 being in the secret ! " 
 
 He came into office again, in the famous coalition 
 between himself and Fox, and it is one of the strange 
 freaks of the whirligig of time that, at the celebration of 
 Fox's election for Westminster, North appeared in the 
 American Continental colors, blue and buff. 
 
 He had no antagonist on the floor more bitter and 
 pitiless than Colonel Barr^. In their old age they both 
 lost their sight. At an accidental meeting, while talking 
 about their past contests, North took his old enemy by 
 the hand, saying: "Notwithstanding our former ani- 
 mosities, I am convinced there are not two men in Eng- 
 land who would rather see each other than you and I." 
 
 About the time Fox entered Parliament his mother 
 
LECTURES. 43 1 
 
 met the second son of Lord Chatham, then only eleven 
 years old, at his mother's house. She was so struck with 
 his manly behavior and ability that she wrote to her hus- 
 band, " Mark my words, this boy will become a thorn in 
 Charles' side." Ten years after, William Pitt the younger 
 entered Parliament. I condense from Jesse the account of 
 his first speech. The House was filled to hear him, more 
 than five hundred members being in their seats. He was 
 the son of the imperial Minister and peerless orator of Eng- 
 land's history, and stood in the shadow of his fame. He 
 was in the presence of many who had felt the spell of his 
 father's matchless eloquence and who would necessarily 
 compare him with the enchanter he was to succeed. 
 Apparently unconscious of his own position and the ex- 
 pectant curiosity of his hearers, this boy of twenty-one 
 arose with the self-possession of a veteran of debate. 
 Without the fire of Chatham, the lambent flame of his 
 genius, he showed a strength, clearness, and accuracy of 
 statement, a fulness of comprehension ; and the sentences 
 which flowed spontaneously from his lips in a rhythm 
 rounded and perfect, were marshalled and directed in a 
 method so logical, and with a purpose so clear and dis- 
 tinct, his success was assured from the first. It was said 
 to be the best first speech ever made in Parliament. 
 When he sat down there was a murmur of applause. 
 " A chip of the old block, " said a member to Burke — 
 "No," replied Burke, — " it IS the old block." 
 
 Among the first to congratulate him was Charles Fox. 
 "You may well compliment him," said General Grant, an 
 old member, " you are the only man in the House who 
 could make so good a speech, and I hope to live to see you 
 boys battling it out, as your fathers did before you." Fox 
 was disconcerted by the ill-timed remark, but Pitt parried 
 it with ready gracefulness, saying," I have no doubt. 
 General, you would like to live as long as Methusaleh." 
 
 At twenty-two Pitt, with an air which was called im- 
 
432 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 perial by his friends, and petulant by his enemies, said he 
 would accept no office which did not give him a seat in 
 the Cabinet. At twenty-three he was Prime Minister, 
 and for nineteen years he wielded a power and enjoyed a 
 popularity such as no other English Minister has known. 
 
 The great mistake of the political life of Fox was his 
 coalition with Lord North, by which he became really 
 the head of the Government in 1783. The keen, cold 
 eyes of young Pitt saw at once his advantage, and he was 
 instant to improve it. If Fox had patiently waited for 
 the sceptre of leadership, it would have come soon and 
 been securely his through the triumph of his political 
 principles ; he snatched it, and it vanished to air in his 
 hand. The unripe fruit he shook from the tree turned to 
 ashes on his lips. 
 
 The immediate cause of his removal from office, how- 
 ever, was as creditable to him as his method of gaining it 
 was inexcusable. As the leader of the administration he 
 introduced a bill for the government of India, and the 
 regulation of that great commercial monopoly and politi- 
 cal corporation, the East India Company. It brought on 
 a contest, one of the first between the chartered powers 
 and vested privileges of a corporation upon the one 
 hand, and the natural rights of men and supremacy of 
 law upon the other. The bill incidentally curtailed the 
 patronage of the Crown, and thus excited the jealousy of 
 the King, whose cunning never slept and whose hatred 
 of Fox never abated. The bill passed the House of Com- 
 mons but was defeated in the House of Lords, uncon- 
 stitutionally and corruptly, by the personal influence, 
 patronage, and threats of the King. Fox went out of 
 Ministerial office, Pitt came in, and the life-long intel- 
 lectual duel between these giant political gladiators began. 
 
 Their personal habits were so different that George 
 Selwyn, with almost as much truth as wit, compared them 
 to the idle and industrious apprentices of Hogarth's car- 
 
LECTURES. 433 
 
 toons. They had two unfortunate resemblances. Both 
 were deep drinkers — Pitt, however, " for his stomach's 
 sake " — and each had a faculty for getting in debt. 
 Pitt's passion was ambition. He did not gamble, and in 
 that licentious time his continence was often a subject of 
 sarcasm and ridicule. 
 
 Politically they did not always differ upon particular 
 measures. They were too large minded for that. Pitt 
 was a close student of political economy as taught by 
 Adam Smith, in which Fox admitted he took little inter- 
 est, and time has demonstrated that Pitt's views on ques- 
 tions of trade and commercial intercourse were larger and 
 more correct than his rival's. Both supported the meas- 
 ures of Wilberforce for the abolishment of the slave trade. 
 They were substantially together upon the question of 
 the government of Ireland, though Fox went much fur- 
 ther and declared he would rather see Ireland separated 
 from the Crown than held in subjection by force. Both 
 advocated the removal of the disabilities from Roman 
 Catholics, but Fox carried his advocacy so far as to lose 
 the support of his warm friends, the dissenters, while Pitt 
 was silenced by the King, who told him that if compelled 
 to sign a bill enfranchizing Catholics, it would be a viola- 
 tion of his coronation oath and would drive him mad. 
 But upon the principles of political government, the 
 powers and duties of Crown and Parliament and their 
 reciprocal restraints, and underlying all the rights of the 
 people, they differed widely, as in personal character and 
 methods of thought. Pitt, the son of Chatham the great 
 Whig leader, became the leader of the Tories, and Fox, 
 the son of Holland the tower of strength to the Tories, 
 became the leader of the Whigs. The fundamental 
 nature of their political difference can be best explained 
 by the statement of the fact in which it culminated : In 
 1798 Pitt had Fox's name stricken from the list of the 
 Privy Council, because the latter had proposed as a toast 
 
434 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 at a Club meeting — " Our Sovereign — the People ! " and 
 threatened him with a prosecution for uttering treason ! 
 
 The great oratorical triumvirate of this period was 
 Burke, Fox, and Pitt. In endeavoring to compare these 
 men as orators I have imagined them three generals, each 
 required to capture a fortified city. Burke would encircle 
 and besiege with great armies, armed with every imple- 
 ment of destruction, glittering with heraldry and insignia, 
 banners flying, music playing, glorious in the pomp and 
 circumstance of war. Pitt, from a commanding eminence, 
 would bombard the place with heaviest artillery. 
 Fox would find the weakest spot in the walls, breach 
 them with a battering-ram, and enter at the head of his 
 forces, sword in hand. 
 
 The political differences between Fox and Pitt became 
 personal and were embittered by the conduct of Pitt, as 
 unwise as unjust, in endeavoring to exclude Fox from 
 the representation of the great constituency of West- 
 minster, to which he had been fairly elected. It was in 
 this election that a scene memorable in English politics 
 occurred. The poll was kept open forty days. Among 
 others who canvassed the City for Fox was the beautiful 
 Duchess of Devonshire. One day she encountered a 
 burly butcher and solicited his vote. " I don't mind," he 
 replied, with a look at her fair face ; " I will vote for 
 Mr. Fox if you '11 give me a kiss." Whereupon the 
 Duchess presented her face, in the open street, and amid 
 the cheers of the crowd the butcher received the most 
 tempting bribe ever offered to an English elector. I won- 
 der how many American voters would have resisted it ! 
 
 Perhaps it was the embittered personal feeling of these 
 great rivals which once led them to seem to exchange 
 positions — upon the question of the regency. 
 
 George the Third's first attack of insanity was in 1765, 
 in the twenty-sixth year of his age and the fifth of his 
 reign. It was mild in form, of short duration, and the 
 
LECTURES. 435 
 
 nature of his disorder was concealed from the public. 
 Twenty-five years after, in his fiftieth year, he was attacked 
 with more severity. In the discussions in Parliament, Fox 
 contended that the Prince of Wales, by virtue of his 
 position as heir-apparent, was entitled as of right to be 
 Regent during the King's disability, while Pitt held that 
 the two Houses of Parliament should designate the man 
 by whom the King's office should be administered. The 
 truth was Fox would come into power with the Prince 
 of Wales as Regent, and Pitt go out. Thurlow was at 
 this time Lord Chancellor. He was the ablest and most 
 learned man in the House of Lords, with an appearance 
 so grand and Jove-like that the witty and versatile genius 
 CharlesTownsend said of him, " He must be a hypocrite ; 
 no man can be as wise as he looks." He had a grave 
 manner, and a ponderous eloquence in keeping with his 
 august presence. He held the seal of his ofifice from the 
 King, and preferred to hold that bauble (with the salary 
 and position) from the Prince, to giving it up. To be on 
 good terms with both sides he secretly betrayed the 
 plans of Pitt to the Prince, and felt prepared for any emer- 
 gency. The long-continued illness of the King decided 
 him to declare openly for the Prince, when just in the 
 nick of time he learned privately that the King was 
 improving, and the attending physicians were sanguine 
 of his recovery. Then to the surprise of every one, at 
 the last moment the speech he was to deliver in the 
 House of Lords in favor of the Prince and Mr. Fox was 
 pronounced in favor of the King and Mr. Pitt. He 
 closed in the most solemn manner, with the words — 
 " When I forget my King, may my God forget me ! " 
 
 " That 's the best thing he can do for you," exclaimed 
 Burke, in that Irish brogue which he never lost. 
 
 " Forget you," said Wilkes, with as much wit as pro- 
 
 faneness, " He '11 see you d d first ! " and even Pitt 
 
 ejaculated, " Oh ! the miserable scoundrel ! " 
 
436 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Thurlovv's information was correct. The King re- 
 covered so as to resume his office, and his Lordship 
 continued to hold the Great Seal. 
 
 The art of political trimming and dodging was known 
 — at least in the good old days of our grandfathers, and 
 practised — outside of a republic. 
 
 Meantime the great phenomenon of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, the French Revolution, was coming on, darkening 
 and dwarfing every other consideration by its alarming 
 portents. At length it burst in terror and the world stood 
 aghast. 
 
 For twenty years Burke and Fox had stood together, 
 and their friendship had been tried and cemented until it 
 surpassed the love of woman. Each had a window in 
 his soul for the other's eye, without a wish, a thought, or 
 yearning to conceal. That volcanic force which shattered 
 a throne, convulsed an empire, and shook the founda- 
 tions of every government in Europe sundered these two 
 hearts, whose fibres had intertwined until they beat as 
 one. Burke saw in the Revolution only the destruc- 
 tion of order. Fox hailed it as the dawn of liberty. 
 Burke was shocked by its excesses ; Fox filled with the 
 inspiration of its hopes. Burke contemplated with horror 
 the Queen, whom he had seen in her youth, " glittering 
 like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy," 
 beheaded by the guillotine. Fox remembered with no 
 less horror the men who had been gibbeted for present- 
 ing an humble petition to the throne for the redress of 
 their wrongs. Burke was indignant at the enormities of 
 popular passion. Fox with the oppressions which had 
 kindled feeling into passion, passion into fury, and made 
 even Justice vindictive. Burke saw a government 
 subverted, a system overthrown, property in ruins, streets 
 running blood, amid the mad orgies of an enraged popu- 
 lace. Fox reflected that it had been a government of 
 oppression, where license ruled the Court, want the 
 
LECTURES. \IJ 
 
 hovel ; where the rich ground the poor ; where it was 
 safer for a peer to kill a peasant than for a peasant to kill 
 a hare ; and where armies could be led to death at the 
 whim of the King's paramour ; and he clung to his faith, 
 the sheet-anchor of his political life, that from the ruin 
 and chaos of the passing hour manhood long crushed and 
 suffering would rise in the dignity of natural rights, blessed 
 in the enjoyment of freedom. 
 
 Differing so widely on the passing acts of this terrible 
 drama, their separation occurred when the curtain was 
 just rising upon its awful scenes. 
 
 Fox had become almost a republican. He was in the 
 habit of sneering at hereditary rank and titles of nobility 
 as relics of barbarism, and the great object of his political 
 life was to restrict the power of the King. He had 
 spoken, outside of Parliament, of the French Constitution 
 as "■ the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty 
 which had been erected on the foundation of human 
 integrity in any time or country." Burke desired to reply 
 to the sentiment in parliamentary debate, and on May 
 15, 1 791, while discussing a bill for the government 
 of Canada, he attacked the French Constitution. He 
 was called to order by one of Fox's friends. Fox satiri- 
 cally interposed that the gentleman had a right to attack 
 the Constitution of any country. Burke was allowed to 
 proceed and in closing his speech said substantially — 
 " that he had often differed with Fox without loss of 
 friendship, but this French Constitution taints everything 
 it touches. It was certainly indiscreet at his time of life 
 to provoke enemies or give his friends occasion to desert 
 him ; yet if his steady adherence to the British Constitu- 
 tion placed him in such a dilemma, he would risk all, and, 
 as public duty taught him, with his last breath exclaim, 
 * Fly from the French Constitution.' " 
 
 Fox, who sat near him, said from his seat, " There is no 
 loss of friendship." " Yes, there is," replied Burke, " I 
 
438 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 know the cost of my conduct : I have done my duty at 
 the price of my friend. Our friendship is at an end." 
 
 Fox rose to reply. For some moments emotion choked 
 his utterance and his words broke into sobs, while the 
 tears streamed down his face. No girlish tears were they 
 — no fresh-water drops — but salt — salt as the brine, bitter 
 as Marah, burning as fire. 
 
 The strong cable had broken. Henceforth they sailed 
 apart. 
 
 Six years after, Burke died. They were sorrowful 
 years to him. His temper, naturally by no means the 
 best, was irritated and exasperated by the treatment he 
 received in his long parliamentary career, until be became 
 morbidly sensitive. His long philosophical orations, 
 splendid contributions to literature, were heard with im- 
 patience, sometimes received with insult. The author of 
 the most eloquent orations ever spoken in English was 
 called " the dinner-bell of the House," because his rising 
 to speak Avas a signal for the members to disperse. " I 
 hope the gentleman is not going to read all those papers, 
 and make one of his long speeches beside," said a wooden- 
 headed member one day as Burke arose — and Burke fled 
 from the House — " an eagle put to flight by a jack-daw." 
 
 He was so filled with gloomy apprehensions that Buckle 
 is of opinion that he became deranged, though many of 
 his productions were resplendent as ever with genius. 
 His son, in whom he had garnered all his hopes, whom 
 he loved with more than a father's love, and in whom he 
 imagined he saw more than his own genius, died, and 
 Burke exclaimed, " Now I am alone. When the enemy is 
 at my gate there is no one to defend me." Years before 
 he had said, " What shadows we are — what shadows we 
 pursue," and with his great soul crowned with sorrow and 
 disappointment, he passed from the shadows of life into 
 the dark valley of the shadow of death. 
 
 Nineteen years before Burke's death Chatham came for 
 
LECTURES. 439 
 
 the last time into the House of Lords, to protest against 
 the dismemberment of the British Empire by the con- 
 cession of American independence. He had been insane 
 — sometimes rushing through England, keeping the state 
 of a mad king, sometimes shutting himself up and re- 
 fusing to see his most intimate friends for months. His 
 mental disorder was occasioned by violent remedies for 
 suppressing the gout, and his reason returned with a fresh 
 attack of the excruciating malady from which he had 
 been a life-long sufferer. He appeared in his seat as one 
 coming from the dead. His face was sallow, expression- 
 less, and shrunken, so that his wig half concealed it. The 
 voice which had charmed and terrified was husky and 
 thick ; the tongue upon which senates had hung enraptured 
 was paralytic. Only his crutch and flannels were un- 
 changed, and his indomitable spirit. In vain he called 
 upon his physical nature to respond to his fiery soul. 
 Once he sat down exhausted. He arose, attempted to 
 proceed, and fell back in his chair, dying. 
 
 Nine years after Burke, Pitt, Chatham's great son, died. 
 Deeply in debt after twenty-two years of public service 
 " he died of old age at forty six ! " He had borne the 
 burden of Atlas, and attempted the labors of Hercules. 
 Out of the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Man of Des- 
 tiny had arisen — striding from conquest to conquest, 
 while Pitt with arm of flesh barred the gate against his 
 entrance to universal empire. His three requisites of war 
 were money, money, money, and the national debt had 
 grown into frightful proportions. His theory of taxation 
 was, that taxes were to be estimated not by how much 
 was taken, but by what was left ; and the industry of 
 the country was crushed by taxation. He formed combi- 
 nations of European powers against Napoleon ; they were 
 scattered by the breath of the conqueror. He subsi- 
 dized armies ; they were swept from the earth. An occa- 
 sional victory at sea only served to light up the dark 
 
440 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 background of humiliation and defeat. The news of 
 Mack's surrender at Ulm fell like a blow upon his naked 
 heart. Then came Austerlitz, and his heart broke. "You 
 can roll up the map of Europe for twenty years," he ex- 
 claimed, and died with the words " My Country, Oh ! 
 how I love my Country," on his lips. 
 
 The eyes of the nation instinctively turned to Fox. 
 He had been in public service for thirty-five years and 
 was the last of the giants. He had passed through the 
 fire of purification, and the vices and follies of his life 
 were burnt and purged away. A short time before it had 
 been derisively said, that it was questionable whether 
 one or two hackney-coaches would be necessary to carry 
 his political friends. Now even the King was reconciled 
 to his leadership, and the people recognized that his was the 
 only arm strong enough for the helm. He was fifty- 
 six ; in the full maturity of his powers. His moral nature 
 had been chastened by disappointment, his intellectual 
 broadened and strengthened by his vast experience. 
 At last his opportunity had come. It came too late. 
 His hour had struck. Six months after the tomb of the 
 great Chatham had been opened to receive his untitled, 
 imperial son, all that remained on earth of Charles James 
 Fox was laid by the side of his rival among England's 
 illustrious dead. 
 
 Before this Fox's most brilliant coadjutor had disap- 
 peared from public life. Ten years after, Richard Brinsley 
 Sheridan, wit, dramatist, orator, and upon occasions ex- 
 celling all as each ; man of fashion, man of pleasure, yet 
 as a public man without reproach, was dying in want. 
 The manly beauty of his face was blotched ; the eyes, 
 whose sparkle had been the light of every circle, bleared 
 and sunken. His rooms had been stripped of books, 
 paintings, and even necessary furniture. A few days be- 
 fore he expired a bailiff threatened to carry him in his 
 blankets to a debtor's prison, and was only prevented by a 
 
LECTURES. 441 
 
 threat of a prosecution for murder. It is even said that the 
 costly funeral provided by the friends who had neglected 
 him while living, as if to show how hollow are the pageants 
 with which we mock the dead, was delayed, until a debt 
 of five hundred pounds was paid over the lid of hiscofifin. 
 
 Four years after Sheridan, in 1820, George the Third 
 died in the eighty-second year of his age, and sixtieth of 
 his reign. He was born to an empire great as Caesar's. 
 Who ever enjoyed more splendid opportunities for good, 
 with a sincerer wish to improve them ? The only benefits 
 mankind have received from him, were incident to his 
 greatest political blunder, and to the calamity which 
 clouded his life : his blunder in driving the American 
 Colonies from their allegiance, and forcing them to become 
 free and independent States, and his calamity in losing 
 his reason, which introduced milder and more humane 
 principles into the general treatment of the insane. 
 
 Fitted especially for the enjoyment of domestic life, 
 his sons mocked him, quarrelled with him, or were indif- 
 ferent to him. 
 
 Born to the purple, with none to dispute his title to 
 the greatest throne on Earth, who ever had promise of a 
 career so brilliant and so happy? His childhood was 
 miserable. After he was twenty-six, every moment of 
 his life was haunted by the dread of a recurrence of his 
 insanity. It was the skeleton at his feasts, the shadow in 
 his walks, the nightmare of his sleep. The journey of 
 his life lay along the borderland between reason and 
 insanity, where light and darkness contend. 
 
 Ten years before his death his daughter died ; the faith- 
 ful Cordelia to his Lear. After that he was only a weak, 
 infirm, poor, crazy old man. He became blind also. He 
 had momentary lucid intervals, glimpses of reason, but 
 so brief as only to make him conscious of the terrible bur- 
 den laid upon his life. 
 
 One day the Queen, through a half-open door was sur- 
 
442 
 
 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 prised by seeing him suddenly kneel in prayer. His long, 
 thin, gray locks were streaming on his shoulders, his sight- 
 less eyes upturned towards heaven. He prayed, almost 
 in the language of Gethsemane, that the cup of his 
 af^iction might pass from him, if such were the will of his 
 Divine Master ; if not, that he might have strength to 
 suffer to the end. He arose — his reason fled forever. 
 He became deaf, as well as blind. Never again did the 
 light of day or the voice of love reach that poor, 
 crazed soul, which went moaning in the awful loneliness 
 of its dark and silent clay prison, until death closed the 
 scene in the double darkness and silence of the grave ! 
 
 This is public life ! These are the prizes for which men 
 fret their hearts, consume their brains and peril their 
 souls ! Dust and ashes. All is vanity. 
 
 But through all the vicissitudes of individual life, the 
 stream of human life rolls on its mighty volume in unceas- 
 ing current ; and above the shows of time, above passion 
 and suffering, and joy and sorrow and great ambition ; 
 above the blinding mists of folly, the drifting clouds of 
 error, unmoved, forever bright in the infinite heights, the 
 stars are shining. Beyond them What ? 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 
 
 When impulse moved or fancy led Mr. Booth in leisure 
 moments to do so, he wrote sketches intended for Jour- 
 nals or Magazines. A few selections from them are given 
 which will serve the double purpose of illustrating his 
 lighter literary style and of interesting the reader. He 
 seldom made correction or emendation of any of his 
 work. Yet he was a quick and keen critic of the value 
 of words. When Governor, he once handed his Secretary 
 a decision to embody in the pardon of a convict. Glan- 
 cing over the completed pardon he smiled, drew his pen 
 through a sentence, and directed a corrected copy to be 
 made. A sentence reading " He is the only son of a 
 widowed mother" was changed to " He is the only son 
 of a widow." 
 
 Of his newspaper editorial work — a volume of which 
 he contributed to various journals during his lifetime — 
 only one specimen is presented : a paper on Horace 
 Greeley. It is interesting reading even at this date. 
 
 MY LAST NIGHT IN LONDON. 
 
 I was seated on the crowded top of a London 'bus 
 about to start for Kensington, when a woman, neither 
 young, handsome, nor well-dressed, carrying a heavy 
 basket, began to climb the steps with some difficulty. 
 
 443 
 
444 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 I reached down and lifted her basket, gave her my place, 
 and squeezed myself on the seat forward. The addition 
 was not particularly welcome to the prior occupants, for 
 there was only *' room for one more " ; but the old woman 
 with a basket would have been less welcome, and the 
 phlegmatic Bull on my right contented himself with a 
 grunt and a look at his watch, which plainly meant, 
 " Time 's up. St. Paul is a minute slow." 
 
 " You are an American, I perceive, sir," said the gentle- 
 man on my left. 
 
 "Yes; and you have been in America." 
 
 " I understand. You think I would have waited for an 
 introduction, if I had not. Very good ; consider that we 
 are introduced. You are Smith ; I am Brown. No cards. 
 Quite right. I spent several years in your country. 
 Came home on business — settlement of estate, you know. 
 When I get through, 1 think I shall go back and become 
 an American subject." 
 
 "Citizen, you mean." 
 
 " Beg your pardon — of course I do ; trick of the tongue, 
 you know. Citizen — subject : S-u-b-j-e-c-t, c-i-t-i-z-e-n ; 
 what a deal of difference it makes how you spell it ! 
 Nothing in a name? Give Tray a bad one, and he won't 
 think so. The world is governed by names. Do you 
 think Palmerston would be Premier if his name were 
 * Bullyrag * ? More wars have been fought over names 
 than from all other causes combined — one, I think, was 
 over the correct spelling of a name. The placing of a 
 vowel made a difference in the plan of redemption." 
 
 We rattled for some time over the stony streets, my 
 companion apparently absorbed in his philosophy, when 
 he suddenly exclaimed: "Well, you must admit the 
 gooseberries are larger in England than in the States ? " 
 
 "Yes, for the sake of the argument." 
 
 " Tut, tut, man ; for the sake of the truth." 
 
 " But names, you know — words — words — words ! " 
 
MA GA ZTNES—JO URNALS. 445 
 
 " Eh ! a palpable hit ! You can have civil and religious 
 liberty, the bird of freedom, the ballot-box that executes 
 a freeman's will, and all that sort of thing — names, you 
 know — but in the matter of gooseberries, I stand upon 
 the eternal verities. You have the longest rivers, the 
 largest lakes, the grandest falls, the fastest horses, and 
 the prettiest women, but we have the biggest gooseber- 
 ries. How long shall you stay in England } " 
 
 " A fortnight, perhaps ; there is nothing of business or 
 pleasure to keep me, only I can't get out of London." 
 
 " Right. London is a hard place to get out of. It 
 may be ugly, foggy, dingy, smoky, rainy, nasty, but it is 
 the world's maelstrom and draws everything towards its 
 vortex. Do you return to the city to dine ? I get down 
 here [We had crossed the bridge]. After dinner I shall 
 go to 19 Leicester Square, to have a bottle of wine and 
 a cigar. If you have nothing better, I shall be glad to 
 see you. There is a sign over the door ' Good wine needs 
 no bush.' Go up stairs — first room to the left. I shall 
 bring a half-dozen English gooseberries — good day ! " 
 
 I had nothing better. In fact, I was simply floating in 
 the vast circles of the London maelstrom, and after a 
 solitary dinner at the "Wellington " I found my friend 
 Brown at the place he had appointed, with his cigar, port, 
 and the Times. 
 
 " Glad to see you," said he ; " being idle, we can afford 
 to be prompt. Nothing else to think about, you know. 
 Deal of humbug about punctuality — a man is not a clock 
 — a busy man's engagements will overlap. Strike when 
 the iron 's hot — work when you are in the vein. Your 
 methodical man never gets above the treadmill." 
 
 " Is it because you are unmethodical that you are 
 reading the Times after dinner? " 
 
 "Oh, no ; I am methodical — slave to habit. Inherited 
 my servitude, I dare say ; can't remember that I ever had 
 individuality. In the morning I read the Star or the 
 
446 NEW TON BOOTH. 
 
 Telegraph — that 's my American side ; I am a Yankee in 
 the forenoon ; in the afternoon I grow conservative, and 
 take to the Post and Times. By the way, I see the 
 Government was nearly beaten last night on a test vote. 
 Should n't wonder if old Palm, had to go out and Derby 
 or Dizzie should come in." 
 
 " That reminds me — tell me how a new Prime Minister 
 is selected when the old resigns. It is a mere fiction, I 
 suppose, that the Queen designates the man who is to 
 organize and lead the Government. In the United States, 
 you know, we, the people, elect the President, and he 
 appoints the Cabinet." 
 
 " So you do ; but I believe you, the people, don't each 
 select the man you prefer and vote for him. You vote, 
 if I remember rightly, for presidential electors, and they 
 vote for a man before selected by the convention, and 
 that — you know better than I how it is. In Great Britain 
 the House of Commons is supposed to represent the peo- 
 ple, and probably does as well as the " National Conven- 
 tion " with you ; though I should not care to inquire too 
 curiously how many of the members get their seats. The 
 opposition agree among themselves who shall be their 
 leader when they come into power ; he consults with the 
 chiefs as to the make-up of the Government, kisses the 
 Queen's hand, and the seals are transferred. A lay figure 
 would answer very well for the Queen, not be so expen- 
 sive — or prolific — but names, you know ! We should not 
 be so willing to be shot or be head-shortened for her 
 Majesty of wax and wires. I forgot — here are your six 
 gooseberries, large as cherries ; you can keep the Missis- 
 sippi and Niagara — your half of it at least — but a Barbary 
 horse against a rapier we are ahead on gooseberries." 
 
 Half a dozen or more gentlemen had dropped in, taken 
 their seats at the tables, sipping and smoking, no one ap- 
 parently paying attention to his neighbors, when a young 
 fellow entered whom, if I had met in New York, I should 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 447 
 
 have taken for a genteel specimen of the Bowery boy. 
 He was short, stout, square-jawed, close-shaved and 
 cropped, and might easily be older than at first glance he 
 looked. 
 
 " Would h'any gent like to buy this 'ere wallet?" was 
 his salutation. 
 
 No one offered to invest. 
 
 " Will sell it for two crowns — can't buy one like it 
 h'on Regent Street for four." 
 
 No reply. 
 
 " If no gent wants to buy the wallet, I '11 put it h'up 
 h'against two crowns with h'any gent as wants to bet, that 
 he can't turn over the h'ace ! " 
 
 Saying which he produced three cards — ace, queen, and 
 seven — placed them bottom up on the table and began 
 moving them under and over, " French monte " fashion. 
 
 " I don't want your wallet, or care to bet two crowns, 
 but I '11 put up half a sovereign I can guess the ace," said 
 one of the company. 
 
 " Make it a sovereign, won't you ; I've got just one 
 sovereign left." 
 
 " Oh, yes ! " 
 
 He turned the queen. 
 
 " Could n't get by woman, you see ; that 's your par- 
 ticular weakness. Try again, sir ? " 
 
 A suspicion flashed across me that my philosophic 
 friend Brown had invited me there to be fleeced at " three- 
 card monte." The look of amazement of the man who 
 turned the queen could scarcely be simulated, and if he 
 had been a capper he would probably have won. I lit a 
 cigar, and watched the game with awakened curiosity. 
 Every man in the room seemed to be certain he could 
 guess the winning card. I never saw men become so sud- 
 denly interested and excited about anything so simple. 
 Bets ran up to five pounds. In thirty minutes the dealer 
 must have cleared from fifty to a hundred pounds. 
 
448 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " Try your luck, sir ? " said the dealer to me, as the game 
 lulled. 
 
 " I thank you, no ; I once saw a man hanged for play- 
 ing that game ' not wisely but too well,' and I have had 
 a prejudice against it ever since." 
 
 " If I thought there had been any cheating, I 'd throw 
 the fellow out of the window," said one of the losers. 
 
 "■ Fair game ; nothing but luck, 'pon honor," said the 
 dealer, " if h'any gent wants to try " 
 
 " Hanged ! you say ? " interrupted Brown ; " tell us 
 about it." 
 
 I told in a few words the story of young Rowe, who' 
 was hanged in Sacramento in '51 for killing a man at 
 " French monte." 
 
 " What did you call his name? " asked the dealer. 
 
 "He was a Liverpool lad : his name was Edward 
 Rowe." 
 
 It was fancy, perhaps — I thought the dealer started as 
 though stung. 
 
 " Hanged without judge or jury ! " exclaimed Brown. 
 
 " Names, names — names, you know." 
 
 " Yes, names may have their uses. Let us go over to 
 the Alhambra. We can hear some fine music there ; this 
 room is confounded close." 
 
 A few steps brought us to the Alhambra. The large 
 and brilliantly-lighted saloon was pretty well filled with 
 gentlemen and ladies — the latter, I supposed, of the demi- 
 monde for the most part — laughing, talking, smoking, and 
 sipping coffee and wine at the little tables — some hundreds 
 in all. At the far end of the room was a fine orchestra, 
 that served to fill in the pauses of conversation for every- 
 body. The scene was very gay and animated. We had 
 not sat many minutes before I observed a lady facing us, 
 three tables in front, whose face and figure would any- 
 where have arrested attention. She was a Minerva or 
 Juno — large, well-formed, with fair complexion : her arm 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 449 
 
 beneath a loose, fur cape, looked as smooth, white, and 
 firm as marble. Brown and I must have seen her and 
 noticed one peculiarity at the same time, for I heard him 
 exclaim, in an under, soliloquy tone : " Eyes blue as the 
 blue of heaven ; hair black as the hinges of h — 1." She 
 had a far-away look. One could be certain she saw noth- 
 ing, heard nothing around her. I could not but wonder 
 what visions filled her eyes, to what voices was she listen- 
 ing, and why was she there. After hearing several pieces 
 of music and two or three songs we arose to go. I am 
 sure it was not intentional on my part ; I don't know 
 which started first — the lady was immediately behind us. 
 Brown loitered for a moment. As I turned for him at 
 the door I could only observe that he had addressed her 
 a remark, and infer that her reply, whether it was a look 
 or a word, was short and unsatisfactory. It was raining 
 quite sharply. My tongue is not accustomed to speak 
 itself, but it did this time, and said : 
 
 " Shall I call a cab for you, madam ? " 
 
 " If you will be so kind." 
 
 The lady had no umbrella, I offered her mine, and 
 walked with her to the cab. I did not understand the di- 
 rection she gave the driver, but caught the words " drive 
 slow," as she took her seat. The driver still held the door 
 open, evidently supposing I was to get in. I did as 
 most Americans abroad would do under similar circum- 
 stances — yielded to the impulse of adventure; and 
 the door closed upon me as the thought came, " how 
 foolish." 
 
 "You are an American, I suppose," said the lady as we 
 started. 
 
 The similarity to the remark of Brown in the morning, 
 struck me. Could it be that this was a second scheme to 
 ensnare me ? 
 
 " Why do you suppose so ? " 
 
 " I might say, now, because you answer with a question. 
 
450 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 I did suppose from your general appearance and voice ; 
 besides, you wear a soft hat." 
 
 " You are observing." 
 
 " Sometimes." 
 
 " Did you know the gentleman who was with me at the 
 
 " I did not know there was a gentleman with you. 
 Was the man who spoke to me as I came out your 
 friend ? " 
 
 " He was my companion this evening. I never met 
 him until this morning." 
 
 " You seem to be fond of adventure ? " 
 
 The devil took possession of my tongue to say — what 
 could I have uttered more imprudent : " I am almost a 
 total stranger in London, where I shall remain but a few 
 days. Not, perhaps, naturally adventurous ; I have de- 
 liberately tied up the helm, to float wherever the winds and 
 currents shall carry me on this vast ocean of London life." 
 
 " It is a dangerous experiment," she replied, in a tone 
 that was earnest and pathetic, " this tying up the helm and 
 abandoning self-direction, even for an hour, a moment. 
 We cannot afford to play with life and opportunity any 
 more than the charioteer can drop the reins in the race." 
 
 " You believe, then, in the power of self-direction ? " 
 
 " Yes, within certain limits. Absolute free-will is the 
 vainest of all the vanities with which man ever deluded 
 himself into the idea that he was a god. We have the 
 power of choice, but within certain and very narrow pos- 
 sibilities. The mariner cannot control the winds, silence 
 the storm, or remove the reef ; but he must stand by the 
 helm. Are you a fatalist ? " 
 
 " In theory, yes ; in practice, no ! I choose among the 
 possibilities. But in reason I know my choice is prede- 
 termined by temperament, mental constitution, by all the 
 chain of ' circumstances over which I have had no control,' 
 but which have made me what I am." 
 
MA GA ZINES^JO URNALS. 45 1 
 
 " Circumstances make us what we are ? " 
 
 " Yes ; if you had been born in Turkey, would you not 
 have been a — Mohammedan ? " 
 
 " Would I had been ! Women have no souls there. I 
 have admitted the range of possibilities is narrow. Birth, 
 surroundings, etc., determine the range ; but within that 
 I insist upon a power to choose, which constitutes all we 
 enjoy of free agency. If two courses are before you, both 
 possible, can you not choose which to take ? " 
 
 " I seem to choose. But really, only that is possible 
 which I do take. Our friends can usually predict what 
 we shall do in a given event better than we can ourselves. 
 If a ball is subjected to two forces from opposite directions, 
 it must obey the stronger, though only the event proves 
 which is the stronger." 
 
 " The illustration exposes the fallacy of the reasoning. 
 You assume that mind and matter are governed by the 
 same laws — motives and forces convertible terms. You 
 cannot apply mathematics to morals, any more than you 
 can the decalogue to the stars." 
 
 " You have thought upon this subject more deeply 
 than I." 
 
 " Perhaps not. My conclusions do not come from 
 speculation and study, but from experience and suffering. 
 I am so much more a fatalist in action than you that I 
 have to-night staked the most important event of my life 
 upon an omen." 
 
 " And that omen is ? " 
 
 " Yourself." 
 
 "You will find me a good omen, I hope." 
 
 " To one who abandons self-direction — to the fatalist — 
 there is neither good nor bad, only the inevitable." 
 
 " You speak now like a fatalist from conviction, not 
 from circumstance." 
 
 " No. The possibilities with me are reduced to two. I 
 cannot choose. Fate must decide." 
 
452 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " How strange that our lives should intersect at this 
 point. When we were born the chances were millions to 
 one that we should never meet — millions of millions that 
 we should not meet to-night. Is this fate? " 
 
 " I accept it as fate. Our lives cross others constantly, 
 just as the weaver's shuttle flashes from hand to hand 
 across the web, weaving the woof of destiny. You see I 
 am a fatalist — without being able to shake off the sense 
 of responsibility. Would — but let us talk of something 
 else — the opera ; Grisi and Mario ; the Derby that was ; 
 the Osborn that is to be. My fate is not yet determined, 
 and I do not want you to be a self-conscious omen. Please 
 ask the driver to go faster." 
 
 We talked at each other, but shot wide. The driver 
 struck a pace that was not favorable to conversation, and 
 kept it up for half an hour or more. He drove through 
 narrow streets, turned to the right and to the left, until I 
 lost all idea as to the direction we were going or the part 
 of the city we were in. He stopped at last, and as I got 
 out I observed that the street was broad, well lighted, and 
 very quiet ; the houses evidently residences, many of 
 them elegant, and all of the better sort. Certainly it was 
 a " respectable " quarter. I looked around for the dome 
 of St. Paul's, to take my bearings, but could not find it, or 
 it was too dark to distinguish it. 
 
 " Wait for me," said I to the driver. 
 
 " But, your honor — " 
 
 " Here is a sovereign ; I will pay the fare when I get 
 home." 
 
 " All right, your honor." 
 
 While I was speaking to the driver, the lady had as- 
 cended the steps and stood in the open door. There was 
 no one in the hall when we entered, nor any sign of life 
 in the house, which was, however, lighted throughout. 
 The hall was wide and high, extending up through both 
 stories. The lady led the way back to a large sitting-room, 
 
MAGAZINES^JOURNALS. 453 
 
 asked to be excused for a few minutes, and left me alone. 
 The room was simply but luxuriously furnished, the pre- 
 vailing color blue with a delicate figure of black inwrought. 
 I never had seen the combination before, and thought of 
 the eyes and the hair. There were books on the table, 
 marbles and bronzes on the mantel, paintings on the walls ; 
 one of the latter had been reversed and hung with its face 
 inward. I was in Calypso's Isle, and felt the presence of 
 the siren in the very air. 
 
 The lady was absent long enough for me to become 
 somewhat nervous, and to take a pretty thorough invoice 
 of myself and of the contents of the room. The general 
 conclusions I reached with more or less certainty were : 
 that I had acted the fool — and would again under the 
 same circumstances ; that the tapestry, curtains, carpets, 
 etc., had been manufactured for my mysterious friend ; 
 that she had the use of money in abundance, whether her 
 own or not ; that something had happened, or was about 
 to ; that the reversed painting had been recently turned 
 to the wall, and was in some way connected with the real 
 or imaginary question which I was involuntarily to decide. 
 
 One feels so stupid to be found alone, doing absolutely 
 nothing, that I took a seat by the table, and commenced 
 turning over the leaves of a book with an affectation of non- 
 chalence I by no means felt. The book was a volume of 
 Shakespeare, and I opened it at Hamlet. When the lady 
 re-entered I was surprised into self-forgetfulness, and at the 
 moment would not have exchanged my folly for a crown 
 of wisdom set with rubies and diamonds. She was 
 radiantly beautiful. She seemed to have become smaller, 
 paler, and her eyes darker. She had changed her dress 
 for one of light silk, a white lace cape hung loosely from 
 her shoulders, and over it her hair was thrown back in 
 silk-like curls. Her throat, arm, bust, face, complexion, 
 head, form — I may have dreamed of such a combination 
 of loveliness ; I had never before seen it ! 
 
454 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 She carried a small, silver tray, upon which were two 
 glasses of wine. It was a time to observe everything, and 
 I noticed that the glasses were of different sizes and 
 shapes. I stood in the silent homage of admiration until 
 she placed the tray on the table, when, without speaking, 
 involuntarily I took her hand, led her to a lounge and 
 seated myself opposite to her, her face and my back to the 
 light. 
 
 " Pardon me, madam " 
 
 " You may call me Helena." 
 
 " Pardon me then, Helena, if I, too, consult an omen, 
 after the manner of the Virgilian lots." 
 
 I opened the book and read : 
 
 " // is tJie poisoned cup — it is too late ! " 
 
 I looked her steadily in the face ; it was marble in color 
 and immobility. 
 
 " Which of us," I said slowly, "shall select the glass to 
 drink? The chances of destiny may be narrowed to two, 
 still there is a choice ! Color, size, shape, position, or whim 
 may determine it — that is free agency. All unknown, 
 life may be in the one, death in the other — that is 
 destiny." 
 
 " Then," said she, " you can cheat destiny, and drink 
 neither." 
 
 " I am not sure of that, even when forewarned : and if 
 I did I might encounter the same chances in any hour of 
 my life in turning to the right or left." 
 
 " Do you imagine," she replied, after a pause, " if I had 
 intended there should be a victim, and chance select 
 which, that I would have brought dissimilar glasses? " 
 
 I opened the book and read : " Laertes zvoioids Hamlet ; 
 then in scuffling they change rapiers, and Ha^nlet wotinds 
 Laertes r 
 
 " I might," said I, " imagine a great many things, and 
 they might all be very absurd, for I confess the scene 
 seems more dream-like than real. Indulge me for one 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 455 
 
 moment if I imagine a case : One of the glasses, we will 
 suppose, is poisoned ; upon a given event you intend to 
 drink it. Would it not be better for me, to give me the 
 poison? The police can easily trace me to this house; 
 my statement of the facts would never be accepted as an 
 explanation of your mysterious death. I have no friends 
 in London, few acquaintances. I do not think I fear 
 death more than most of men, but I have some choice as 
 to the manner of my taking off, and without flattery pre- 
 fer your hand to Calcraft's." 
 
 Her fingers were clutched as though upon the hilt of a 
 dagger. 
 
 " You see, then," I added, " destiny might revenge it- 
 self if I should attempt to cheat. It is something danger- 
 ous to trifle with fate." 
 
 I arose and took up the larger glass. She did not 
 move, and I set it back. 
 
 Resuming my seat I said : " If you will allow me I will 
 relate to you a chapter from my own experience. Des- 
 tiny will not begrudge us half an hour." 
 
 She did not speak, but I understood her look and 
 changed my seat to a chair beside her, so that our faces 
 were both to the light. She was toying with the tassel 
 of the lounge ; the gesture might have been one of im- 
 patience, or of mental conflict. I was not sure that I 
 could interest her, but I proceeded as follows : 
 
 " When I was scarcely ' out of my teens,' I left my home 
 in one of the Atlantic States and went to California. I 
 will not detail the circumstances of the first two years of 
 my life there, which brought me into the mental condition 
 I am about to describe. There are follies that bring re- 
 morse like guilt, and weakness often stains like wickedness. 
 I found disappointment in my new home, suspected 
 treachery in my old. Only partially recovered from severe 
 illness, I was weak, morose, gloomy, angry with the world 
 and myself. With as much deliberation as it is possible 
 
456 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 to exercise under such circumstances, and upon such a 
 subject, I determined to commit suicide. It may seem 
 strange, but it was true, I found it more difficult to decide 
 the manner than resolve the act, I tried to familiarize 
 my imagination with different forms of violent death, 
 but the more I entertained them the more repulsive they 
 seemed. I felt that I could take poison, but feared ex- 
 posure in the attempt to get it. I was in this mood for 
 days. One evening, with the impulse of desperation, I 
 entered a drug-store in San Francisco and asked for five 
 grains of morphine. I had often been as far as the door 
 before upon the same errand, but my heart had failed me. 
 To my surprise the druggist, who was an elderly and 
 benevolent-looking man, gave me the morphine without a 
 remark, contenting himself with writing poison, in large 
 letters, upon the package. I hurried to my room, and 
 locked myself in. I dissolved the powder, and gazed 
 upon the liquid with a strange feeling of exultation. 
 Now, thought I, I am the master of my fate. At last 
 I have supreme control over what is my own. Mine ? 
 Both worlds are mine ! This key unlocks the door of the 
 great mystery. Soon I shall know more than the sages 
 of the earth of what we most desire to know, or find that 
 sweetest antidote, oblivion. Now I shall be revenged 
 upon those who have deserted or betrayed me ; they shall 
 be tortured with a vain remorse. The burden shall roll 
 from my heart upon theirs ; now I shall escape from my- 
 self. 
 
 " I drank the poison. In an instant my feelings 
 changed ; I was no longer master. I had become the 
 slave of an act that was done. I had locked the door 
 upon one world — might I not take up the burden in the 
 next to find there was no escape ? I thought of the coro- 
 ner's inquest ; the burial in ' Potter's Field ' ; the item in 
 the newspapers. Perhaps my death would bring relief 
 rather than remorse to the hearts I would wring. All the 
 
MAGAZINES^JOURNALS. 457 
 
 descriptions of the eternal doom of the wicked that I had 
 heard in my childhood came back to me. Gradually, 
 under the potent influence of the drug, I lapsed into a 
 state of semi-consciousness. My hearing became so acute 
 that the sounds from the street were like the noise of a 
 battle. I fancied that I could hear the circulation of my 
 blood, and it roared like Niagara. I know not how long 
 this condition lasted ; it seemed hours. I wondered how 
 long I should be in dying. At length I became more 
 tranquil, and felt as if sinking to sleep. I was buoyed 
 upon the air. I was floating over a vast desert plain, 
 with a sense of falling and swooning. No object was in 
 sight but plain and sky. Then, far off. a tree grew up 
 before my eyes, slowly at first, but with increasing rapidity 
 until its foliage filled the sky and shut out the sun — the 
 leaves were stripped by the storm — the tree was bare and 
 dead — it changed into the skeleton of a giant ! Then the 
 waves of the sea commenced rolling towards me over the 
 plain. They came nearer and nearer, storm-driven, until 
 the whole plain was submerged, and dashed higher and 
 higher until the sky seemed to be the object of their wrath. 
 The waters took fire and burned up. Clouds of ashes 
 filled the air, and scorched and suffocated me. The ashes 
 became snow, and chilled me to the bones — the flakes 
 increased in size and were turned into birds, great white 
 birds with red beaks and fiery eyes ; they circled about 
 me in myriads, impatient to devour. The scene changed. 
 A monstrous black eagle was rising upward, bearing the 
 sky with him while the horizon closed in around me ; 
 the sky became a bell — its great clapper struck against 
 the side with a sound like the ' crack of doom ' — the 
 door of my room was burst in, and I was half recalled 
 to my senses by the appearance of a man. 
 
 " ' Drink this,' said he, pouring a dark liquid into a 
 glass. ' It won't hurt you ; it is only cold coffee.' 
 
 " I obeyed like a child. 
 
458 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " ' You forgot to pay me for that morphine, and, as 
 administrators are sometimes troublesome, I thought you 
 might prefer to settle your estate to that extent, and I 've 
 come to collect the bill,' 
 
 " I threw some money on the table, and exclaimed : 
 * Now, sir, I do not wish to be interrup ' 
 
 " ' Yes, I understand. You do not wish to be inter- 
 rupted in the last act — the dying scene. Young man, 
 there was a mistake in the bills ; that act won't be played 
 to-night. It is postponed until there is a better house. 
 Lie down on the lounge ; it will be more comfortable, 
 and I have a few words to say to you seriously. Do you 
 think,' he went on, * any man in his senses would sell a 
 stranger five grains of morphine ? I had noticed you 
 come to my door several times, and always in the evening. 
 When you asked me for five grains of morphine, I knew 
 what it meant. If I had refused you, you might have 
 bought a pistol, a cord, a razor, or jumped into the bay. 
 I thought it best to give you a pretty good dose of mor- 
 phine — as much as you could safely stand, but what you 
 have taken is for the most part a very harmless powder. 
 You will hardly be the worse for it in the morning. Drink 
 some more coffee. I want your attention to what I am 
 to say. This suicidal disease is very apt to attack men of 
 your temperament at your time of life. The reason is 
 that at that age they begin to discover that neither the 
 world nor themselves are what they expected. How 
 either is to be benefited by the proposed remedy they do 
 not stop to inquire. When you pass twenty-five you will 
 be out of danger of a recurrence of this moral malady. 
 Now I want you to try a psychological experiment. 
 Until you are twenty-five, consider yourself dead. For- 
 get yourself. Care for no humiliations, count nothing a 
 privation, avoid no dangers ; do whatever you find in 
 your pathway, without any regard to vanity, comfort, or 
 advancement. You have given your life away, and need 
 
MA GA ZINES—JO URN A LS. 459 
 
 not give that any further consideration. Promise me, and I 
 will not call the doctor and his stomach-pump. If it is a 
 promise — drink some more coffee — call to see me when 
 you are twenty-five, and you can pay me then.' 
 
 " He withdrew ; and I was resolved to try the experi- 
 ment. 
 
 " I did not find life a great battle, where I could make 
 self-renunciation a grand act of heroism. On the contrary, 
 it was a very tame affair, and none but myself were aware 
 of the sacrifices I made. 
 
 " There were urgent reasons why I should find immedi- 
 ate employment. I accepted the first that was offered ; 
 it was to cull a lot of potatoes on the wharf, part of which 
 were spoiled. Making wages beyond a living no object — 
 I did not after that lack work. I was on the water front 
 for more than a year, assisting to load and unload vessels, 
 doing odd jobs at the grain and vegetable stores, but 
 refusing to make any long engagement, or to do any light 
 work which would necessarily bring me into any kind of 
 social relations. I slept in a sail-loft, and ate with the 
 sailors, stevedores, and 'longshoremen at the open bars 
 about the wharves. Never speaking, except when neces- 
 sary, I at length — I know not how — came to be known 
 as the ' Dead Man.' I accepted the soubriquet, and 
 adopted Dedman as my name. As anxious to avoid inter- 
 course with myself as with others, I was never idle when 
 awake. An occasional long walk on a Sunday afternoon 
 was the only thing like recreation I allowed myself. The 
 months went on ; I scarcely counted them. 
 
 " I had been in this service more than a year, however, 
 when ' destiny ' played a card that changed the tenor of 
 my life. 
 
 "Walking one Sunday evening along Meiggs' wharf, 
 near the end I observed a nurse with a little girl four or 
 five years old. A moment after I heard a scream, turned, 
 and saw that the child had fallen into the bay. Instantly 
 
460 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 throwing off hat and coat, I jumped in, and, being a 
 good swimmer, succeeded without much difficulty in 
 catching the child, and holding on to one of the piles until 
 we were taken off by a small boat that came to my assist- 
 ance. With the instinct of the drowning, the child clung 
 around my neck even after we Avere in the boat, and as I 
 loosened her little hands I impulsively kissed her. A 
 crowd of people gathered round the nurse, and, anxious 
 to avoid observation, I hurried away. I seldom read the 
 newspapers, but did the next day, curious to see whose 
 child I had rescued. I found the item giving the account 
 of the accident, and it contained a request ' that the man 
 
 who saved the child would call upon the father, at , 
 
 or send his address.' 
 
 " I had no intention of doing either ; but cut the slip 
 from the paper without conscious motive — as we are apt 
 to act when fate takes the wheel. For the following week 
 I felt a strange, unaccountable yearning to see the child 
 whose life I had saved. Against my determination a living 
 object had forced its way into my heart. I yielded to 
 this yearning far enough to do a foolish thing. I wrote 
 to the father, saying that I desired to remain unknown ; 
 but asking him to do me the favor to send me through a 
 fictitious address one of the child's curls. It was a boyish, 
 simple thing to do, but I now think not unnatural. The 
 answer soon came, and it stung me to the soul. It was 
 freezingly polite, and contained a check * to bearer ' for 
 one hundred dollars. I could read between the lines, 
 plainly as though it were written in words, that the writer 
 supposed I was a social or criminal outlaw, who wished 
 to preserve an incognito, and who desired the lock of hair 
 to identify himself at some future time, when he could 
 ask a favor which it might be inconvenient to grant. I 
 burned the check ; and in a sleepless night made two or 
 three discoveries : Self-renunciation did not consist in 
 hiding from one's self ; I had not lost the impulses of 
 
MAGAZINES^OURNALS. 46 1 
 
 affection, or the sensibility of pride ; I could love, and I 
 could suffer. 
 
 " The most virulent form of small-pox prevailed in the 
 city to an extent that created almost a panic. On the 
 next day I offered my services to the authorities as a 
 nurse at the pest-house. They were accepted, and for 
 three months I was constantly associated with sickness 
 and death in their most loathsome forms. Caring noth- 
 ing for life, I did not catch the infection ; but in seeking 
 to relieve the sufferings of others, for a time I forgot 
 myself. The pestilence at length abated. Among the 
 last patients in my ward was a miner, who, still weak and 
 suffering at the time of his discharge, entreated me to go 
 home with him. He was almost childish in his weakness, 
 and I went with him to his cabin in the mountains. He 
 rapidly recovered his strength, and I found him a man of 
 coarse but kindly nature; honest, poor, and a bachelor. 
 At his suggestion we became mining partners. For 
 many months we prospected and worked with varying 
 success, but did not average more than wages. We 
 moved from place to place, and at last, in a locality 
 which I had christened ' Dead Man's Gulch,' we opened 
 a claim which paid us well, and which in a few months 
 we sold for a handsome fortune. 
 
 " I was twenty-five. Life was no longer a burden 
 which I desired to lay down, but I feared I had lost all 
 zest for its enjoyment. I sought my friend the druggist. 
 He advised me to travel for a few years, until I had seen 
 every portion of the civilized world. I have done so. I 
 am here. Until now I did not know why I did not leave 
 London a fortnight ago." 
 
 As I finished I arose, walked to the table, took up the 
 smaller glass of wine and carried it toward my lips. 
 
 Helena sprang forward to catch my arm, and I threw 
 the glass upon the floor. 
 
 With a sigh that might have been of relief or of agony. 
 
462 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 she threw herself upon her face on the lounge, her whole 
 body quivering with emotion. At length I raised her up, 
 saw that her face was wet with tears, and felt that she 
 was saved — I knew not from what. 
 
 I walked mechanically to the reversed painting and 
 turned it toward the light. I expected to see the por- 
 trait of a lover, or a father or mother, probably a home- 
 stead in an English landscape. 
 
 It was a Newfoundland dog ! 
 
 I came back, and leaned over her, with a kiss upon my 
 lips. She drew backward, saying: " Never Again." 
 
 " Then," said I, " must I say good-bye ?" 
 
 "Yes," she answered, "you must say good-bye. I do 
 not know whether the fate that brought us together was 
 kindly or not. You can do me a personal favor. Will 
 you ? It is simple." 
 
 "I will." 
 
 " Promise me never to seek to know who I am, or 
 where you now are." 
 
 " You do not know how much you ask of me." 
 
 " You do not know how much it will be to me." 
 
 " I promise." 
 
 Taking a sealed envelope from her bosom, she said : 
 " Please take this, but do not open it until you have left 
 England. Good-bye ! " 
 
 The door closed upon me. 
 
 The morning twilight comes very early in London in 
 June, and it was quite light. Far off I heard the chimes, 
 and nearer a clock struck four. It was a long ride to 
 PimHco, where I lodged, and before I reached my rooms I 
 had determined to leave London that very morning. I 
 took the 7 o'clock train for Dover ; at noon I was half- 
 way across the Channel. I had left England. Standing 
 on deck by the taffrail I opened the envelope. It con- 
 tained a sheet of paper and a plain gold ring. Within 
 the ring was inscribed : " R. C. to S. O. Mar. 2." Scarcely 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 463 
 
 legible, in pencil, on the paper were the words : " This is 
 to be buried with me." 
 
 " It shall be ! " I exclaimed half aloud. " You are 
 dead to me, and must be buried from my sight," and I 
 dropped it into the sea. 
 
 Next morning, as I came out of my old rooms into the 
 open court, in " the Latin quarter " of Paris, charming 
 little Adele rushed up to me, took me by both hands, and 
 exclaimed in her sweetest French : 
 
 " Monsieur Redbeard, have you come back at last ? 
 How pale you look — have you been ill? " 
 
 August 15, 1874. 
 
 AFTER DARK. 
 
 We had been speaking — the Captain, Don Mateo, and 
 I — of the recent manifestations at Stockton, which Elder 
 Knapp with pious credulity attributed to the direct 
 agency, to the immediate personal presence, in fact, of 
 his old enemy, the devil. The Don, who is not a Don by 
 birth like Don Quixote or Don Juan, nor by christening 
 like General Don Carlos Buell or Don Piatt, but by 
 courtesy from long residence among the South American 
 Spaniards, insisted that this theory of demonology was 
 the worst that could be offered for the solution of a 
 mystery that neither our faith nor our happiness requires 
 us to solve at all. The idea of a corporeal devil on earth, 
 not in human flesh, was as repugnant to him as the in- 
 spiration of disordered nerves, the evolving of a new 
 religion by hypnotism, or the communion of disembodied 
 spirits through dancing tables or pirouetting planchettes. 
 " If," he concluded, " the enemy of souls can thrust us 
 from our stools, and take his seat at our feasts and fire- 
 sides, an unbidden guest, our monuments may be indeed 
 the maws of kites — the sooner the better." 
 
 I suggested that nothing could be more natural than 
 
464 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 the explanation offered for the particular fact in hand. 
 The devil, after brooding for nearly four hundred years 
 over the insult he received when Luther threw his ink- 
 stand at him, returned to earth, retorted the indignity by 
 throwing a spittoon at one of the cloth, and that his debt 
 being acquitted, he would doubtless be content to remain 
 hereafter within the bounds of his own parish. 
 
 "Your remark savors of impiety," said the Don. 
 
 " And is disrespectful to the devil," added the Captain. 
 " One ' must not calumniate even the devil or the inquisi- 
 tion,' you know. Think of the imperial Satan of Milton, 
 the accomplished Mephistopheles of Goethe, playing fan- 
 tastic tricks in the nineteenth century that would have 
 disgraced the temple of St. Anthony in the third. 
 Bunyan was literal enough, but Apollyon never would 
 have tried to keep Christian from the celestial city by 
 throwing a spittoon at his head." 
 
 The Don looked at his watch — he always does, as if to 
 time himself, when about to claim the conversational 
 floor — wiped his glasses — his invariable prelude to a 
 pathetic strain, as though he would dry the prophetic 
 moisture of a tear unshed — and without interruption, 
 said: 
 
 " I admit that this is the most gross and sensuous sign 
 of the outlying world that ever was given to a wicked and 
 perverse generation, but we must not go too far and take 
 our seats among the scoffers. These are mysteries which 
 it is alike irreverent to question and irrational to deny — 
 shadows of objects unseen that cross the domain of sense, 
 but do not belong to it, and are not amenable to its laws. 
 The dry light of intellect illumines but a narrow circle of 
 reason, and his life is close walled in who has no appre- 
 hensions beyond it. There are few so unhappy as to be 
 free from superstition, and they are alike destitute of faith 
 and spiritual sight. That existence is barren indeed which 
 has no experiences that do not transcend the inductive 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 465 
 
 philosophy. With your permission I will relate an experi- 
 ence of my own, which I have never before mentioned, 
 except to the few parties who will appear in and are a 
 part of the narrative, and which, I assure you, is religiously 
 true. 
 
 " When I was a young man I passed through a struggle 
 that exhausted all the strength of my manhood, and in 
 which I was vanquished. Wanting nothing so much as 
 rest and absence from painful associations, I took passage 
 on the first vessel that was to sail from Baltimore — care- 
 less of destination — landed at Rio, and drifted to Caracas, 
 where I remained until I came to California. I was poor, 
 and failing to find the traditional treasure buried in the 
 ruins of the old city destroyed by the earthquake, I en- 
 gaged in the business of baking. That, at least, would 
 supply me with daily bread. My housekeeper was a 
 widow who had lost her husband in the civil wars that 
 had raged so constantly in Venezuela as to make the 
 population between the sexes five men to thirteen women. 
 She had one child, a little girl about five years old, whom 
 she called Angela. Angela was a child to nestle in any 
 one's heart. She was at once the most joyous and play- 
 ful, the most thoughtful and affectionate little creature 
 I ever knew. Her presence was the very cordial my soul 
 needed, bringing rest and forgetfulness. For five years 
 we were companions — playmates. I taught her to speak 
 English, and from her prattle I learned Spanish. Every 
 one loved her and seemed to mingle reverence with love. 
 It was my custom to bake a basketful of cakes to dis- 
 tribute to the beggars on feast-days ; Angela was my 
 almoner, and the poor souls who received her bounty 
 would kiss her hands and call her their ' dear angel ' — 
 their * blessed little mother.' 
 
 " Her hair, black and silken, reached to her waist, and 
 I would often playfully torment her for one of her curls, 
 which she half playfully, half wilfully refused, hiding her- 
 
466 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 self, or running through and on top of the house to avoid 
 my threat to take it by force. One day, the next after a 
 long romp of this kind, she came stealthily into my room 
 with the first sad expression I had ever seen upon her 
 face, and handing me a long curl she had cut from her 
 hair, said : ' Don Mateo, here is a piece of my hair ; I want 
 you to keep it when I am dead — but don't tell mother.' 
 I had often wondered who would protect Angela when 
 she lost me ; it had never before occurred to me that I 
 might lose her. In that instant I felt that I must ; that 
 her words were prophetic, and that she was more neces- 
 sary to me than I to her. I could only stammer, ' Why, 
 Angela — why do you speak so ? ' and she, answering only 
 * Don't tell mother,' left the room. 
 
 " For a few days, though she was well and happy as 
 ever, I lived in constant dread of her death. But my sad 
 impression gradually yielded to her gayety, and after a 
 week or two if I thought of the circumstance it was with 
 the reflection that Angela could not always be a child, 
 and that the first shadow of humanity — the sense of 
 mortality — had fallen upon her path. A month had not 
 gone, however, before she was stricken with a malignant 
 fever : then my foreboding returned ; in a few days it 
 was realized — Angela was dead. 
 
 " We buried her at sunset on the third day after her 
 death. When we were returning from the grave the city 
 was shaken by an earthquake different from any other I 
 have ever witnessed. It seemed as if an immense mass 
 were detached from the interior of the surface of the 
 earth, falling with an awful concussion into a subterraneous 
 cavern. 
 
 " The beggars had lost their ' dear angel — their blessed 
 little mother.' 
 
 " I never knew how large a place Angela filled in my 
 heart until it was made void. The tie that bound me to 
 existence and reconciled me to it, had grown strong so 
 
MA GAZINE S—JO URN A L S. 467 
 
 silently I knew not how strong it was until broken. The 
 music and sunshine of my life were gone, 
 
 " As I had sought rest in Caracas, I now realized that I 
 must live in a deepening shadow, or give my future an 
 aim, and fill it with activity and occupation. It was in the 
 first flush of the news of the gold discoveries in California 
 and I determined to go to Rio, take passage for San 
 Francisco as soon as opportunity should offer, and join 
 in the race of fortune and adventure. 
 
 "About two years before, my nephew and his wife, 
 from Baltimore, had made me a visit and remained some 
 months in Caracas. They were childless, and became 
 greatly attached to Angela, whom they desired to adopt 
 and take with them to their home. Neither her mother 
 nor the priest would consent, however, and I was too 
 selfish to add my persuasions to theirs. 
 
 " My preparations for leaving Caracas were nearly com- 
 pleted, when I received a letter from my niece in Balti- 
 more, in which were these words : 
 
 " ' Do write immediately, and tell us if anything has 
 happened to Angela. To-day, while we were at dinner, 
 George suddenly turned pale, and upon my asking him 
 the matter, he exclaimed, " Don't you see Angela looking 
 in at the window ? " ' 
 
 " I glanced again at the date of the letter — I knew the 
 hour at which they dined — it was the day and the hour 
 Angela died. 
 
 " When I told her mother she only said, and without 
 the least apparent surprise : ' The poor, dear child — to 
 think she would go so far to tell George she was dead.' " 
 
 The Don had a faculty of sitting by one's side and lis- 
 tening as from a distance, with the power of translating 
 himself into or out of the conversation at will. He often 
 seems to regard his companions through a reversed mental 
 telescope, the focus of which he changes and adjusts to 
 suit the humor of the moment. As he finished his story, 
 
468 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 which he had told rather as thinking aloud than speaking 
 to us, he fell into a reverie ; and if he remained conscious 
 of our presence at all, he did not give attention enough 
 to the Captain's narration to show any impatience at my 
 occasional interruptions. The Captain is a Pole, expa- 
 triated for his part in the revolution of 1830. Having 
 no longer a country, he is thoroughly cosmopolitan. He 
 speaks English with a French idiom and a slight accent 
 that I can no more transfer to paper, than I could the 
 tones of his voice, or the shrug of his shoulders, and I will 
 not belittle his intellect by clothing his language in the 
 rags of bad spelling. 
 
 " That is hardly to be accounted for, Captain, by the 
 doctrine of subjective apparitions and remarkable coin- 
 cidences," said I, to break the silence. 
 
 " No, nor upon any theory of psychology, magnetism, 
 or electricity — words which we use to cover a multitude 
 of ignorances." 
 
 " When these will not suffice we can eke them out 
 with ' mesmerism.' 
 
 " Precisely. I read in the Encyclopcedia Britannica 
 only a few days ago ' that Mickiewicz, some years before 
 he was elected professor of the Sclavonic languages and 
 literature in the College of France in 1840, had fallen 
 under the influence of a religious charlatan named Tow- 
 ianski, who had persuaded him he had cured Madame 
 Mickiewicz of a mental insanity by means of mesmerism.' 
 That is the method which modern history and science 
 have of bolting facts they cannot assimilate. Madame 
 Mickiewicz told me herself that Towianski ^a'z'rt^ restore her 
 from hopeless insanity, and that, whatever the world 
 might say of him, he had been to her a savior. Towian- 
 ski was no charlatan, and if Mickiewicz yielded to a 
 delusion, it was one that might have had more influence 
 over a strong mind than a weak one. Denial, the refuge 
 of the weak, is not always open to the strong and candid." 
 
MA GA ZINKS — JO URN A L S. 469 
 
 " Did you know Mickiewicz, the Polish Byron, Captain ? " 
 " We prefer to call him the ' Dante of the North,' but 
 neither expression is apt, for genius has no parallels. I 
 knew him as a young man just entering life might know 
 one already famous, for whom he feels an admiration that 
 borders upon reverence. The first time I met Mickiewicz 
 was at a soiree in Paris. It must have been as early as 
 1835. Gurowski and Chopin were also there." 
 " I wish I had your reminiscences." 
 " I would gladly exchange them for your youth." 
 " Was that the same Gurowski who was in the United 
 States during the war, and whose criticisms upon some of 
 our Generals and public men were so sharp?" 
 
 " The same. He was a man of great ability and strong 
 prejudices. Most of the leaders of the Polish patriots 
 were aristocrats, and desired to establish an aristocratic 
 national government. Gurowski, though of noble birth, 
 was a radical democrat of the red republican school. 
 Like many others, however, extremely democratic in 
 theory, in society he was an autocrat, the infirmity of his 
 temper making him impatient of contradiction and in- 
 tolerant of difference. A careless, apparently thoughtless 
 man, he was leonine when aroused." 
 "And you have heard Chopin play?" 
 " Often. To fully appreciate Chopin's music, one 
 should have been an artist and a Pole. He had but one 
 sentiment outside his art — and that was Poland — until he 
 met George Sand. Like him, she was an artist ; but, 
 unlike his, her art included everything, even loving. 
 She was to him a passion ; he to her a plaything. No 
 wonder she grew wearied, for he was jealous of the very 
 flowers and birds she caressed. Byron's — 
 
 ' Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 
 'T is woman's whole existence,' 
 
 was reversed in this instance, and Chopin did not have 
 the poor resource ' to love again, and be again undone.' " 
 
470 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " Have you read Liszt's life of Chopin ?" 
 
 " Yes. Such candid sweetness, such drippings of honey 
 — it ought to have been written by a woman. But Liszt 
 has since become an abb^ ; and according to the French, 
 men, women, and priests constitute the three sexes of 
 humanity. Liszt dates Chopin's death from his separa- 
 tion from George Sand, and keeps him dying through 
 three years and twenty-five pages. If Charles IL thought 
 politeness required him to apologize to his courtiers for 
 detaining them so long in dying, Liszt certainly owes his 
 readers a similar apology in behalf of Chopin. After the 
 quarrel Chopin continued to teach music at twenty-five 
 francs a lesson (an extravagant price at that time), and 
 upon one occasion was human enough, on being urged to 
 play at a party soon after he had entered the salon, to 
 astonish his hostess by declining ' to pay for his supper in 
 advance.' It was during his bright days that I first saw 
 him. At that party there was great curiosity to hear 
 Mickiewicz improvise. He declined, and his friends were 
 too polite to press him. I do not know, indeed, if he 
 could exercise his gift at pleasure. Chopin seated himself 
 carelessly at the piano, and touching the keys as if at 
 random (what a touch he had — the keys seemed to live 
 beneath his fingers) commenced playing Polish national 
 airs, his own Polonaise and Mazourkas. Gradually 
 Mickiewicz drew within the charmed circle and began to 
 recite, at first slowly and in a low voice, but soon with 
 great rapidity and animation, what seemed to me then 
 living poetry — poetry on fire. For an hour the inspira- 
 tion of these two men blended in one, Chopin keeping up 
 an accompaniment perfectly eti rapport with the poet. 
 It was an enchanted hour. No one spoke or moved, 
 scarcely breathed for fear of breaking the spell. When 
 they ceased, the enthusiasm broke over all bounds of 
 fashion and decorum. Alas ! after thirty-four years, I am 
 constrained to admit that I can remember only generally 
 
MAGAZINES^JOURNALS. 471 
 
 that Mickiewicz's theme was something like that of his 
 dramatic poem ' Dziady ' — not a single line can I recall." 
 "This was before Mickiewicz met Towianski ? " 
 " About three years before. I left Paris soon after- 
 ward, and never saw * the prophet.' At this time there 
 were a great many Poles in Paris, drawn there in part by 
 the attractions of the gay capital, and in part by the hope, 
 encouraged by the oracular promises of Louis Philippe, 
 that the French Government would espouse the cause of 
 Polish independence. It was a mere game of diplomacy, 
 however, and the Polish pawns were swept from the 
 board. Living in the uncertain favor of a Prince, alter- 
 nately elated and depressed, without home associations, 
 without a country, without a future, is it any wonder that 
 many of my poor fellow-exiles sought to forget the past 
 and themselves in frivolities, follies, and dissipations ? One 
 of them, less mercurial than most of his companions, ob- 
 tained employment as corresponding clerk in a bank at 
 Strasbourg, where he married, and, I believe, still lives. I 
 cannot recall his name, but I have met him — ' his word 
 is good upon 'Change' — and I had from his own lips 
 that for three successive nights — it was in 1838, I think — 
 he dreamed that he was upon the bridge over the Rhine 
 at sunset and saw approaching him an old-fashioned 
 Polish wagon, or brycska, drawn by four horses abreast, 
 driven by a man dressed in a costume of skin and furs, 
 such as could sometimes be seen in the remote provinces 
 of Poland. The first morning after the dream it seemed 
 strangely vivid ; the second, the coincidence troubled him ; 
 the third, he accepted it as a direction — went down to 
 the bridge at sunset, where everything fell out as it had 
 in his dream. The driver, who was Towianski, accosted 
 him as though expecting him, saying he wanted money 
 to pay his expenses to Paris ; that he was the prophet of 
 Santa Maria of Ostrobramska, (literally, ' sharp-door,' 
 from the peculiar shape of the entrance to a church in 
 
472 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 Wilna, where the prophet had Hved) and that he had 
 been commanded in a miraculous vision by his patroness 
 saint to go to Paris to preach the deliverance of Poland. 
 The means for the journey were provided, and the follow- 
 ing morning the prophet proceeded on his way. When he 
 reached Paris he drove directly to the house of Mickie- 
 wicz, and forcing himself into the presence of the poet 
 proclaimed his mission. Of course Mickiewicz supposed 
 him to be crazy, but he had too recently suffered in his own 
 heart and home to treat him otherwise than kindly, and 
 he was startled when Towianski said : ' I know your 
 thought — you believe me mad. It is permitted me to give 
 you a sign of my messiahship. Your wife is insane, and 
 you have no hope of her recovery. Go with me to the 
 hotel des alieWs at Charenton. I will restore her instantly 
 to reason.' 
 
 " No wonder Mickiewicz was startled. Only a few of 
 his most intimate friends knew that his wife's malady had 
 assumed that melancholy form, and that she was confined 
 in the asylum the prophet had mentioned. He yielded 
 at once to the demand, possibly thinking that the asylum 
 was of all others the most suitable place to which he 
 could conduct this strange visitor. 
 
 "Soiled with travel, in his uncouth garb, with his singu- 
 lar establishment, an entire stranger in Paris, Towianski, 
 without taking a word of direction, drove to the asylum, 
 and, in his character of prophet, demanded to see Mad- 
 ame Mickiewicz. Esquirol, the doctor in charge, like 
 most physicians — I mean P'rench physicians who grew up 
 in the traditions of the eighteenth century — was a ma- 
 terialist, did not believe in God or devil " (the Captain evi- 
 dently considered the latter the more dangerous heresy) 
 "and rejected all idea of miracles, past or present. Had 
 he been at the asylum, it is quite possible Towianski 
 would have been restrained as a patient rather than re- 
 ceived as a prophet, but he was not ; and the assistant 
 
MA GA ZINES—JO URN A L S. 473 
 
 consented that the interview might take place, if the 
 prophet could, as he proposed, go directly to the room 
 of the poet's wife without a guide. Towianski, without 
 hesitation, led the way through the long and intricate 
 halls to the room where Madame Mickiewicz was con- 
 fined, in the ward of hopeless and dangerous patients. 
 She did not know her husband, and was at once terrified 
 and infuriated by the intrusion. Towianski ordered the 
 attendants to release her from all restraint, and, placing 
 his hand upon her head, commanded the demon, in the 
 name of Santa Maria of Ostrobramska, to depart. The 
 poor lady became quiet, and fell at the feet of the 
 prophet. Her overfraught brain found relief in tears 
 and sobs. She arose, threw herself into the arms of her 
 husband, * and was whole from that hour.' 
 
 " Did the demon thus exorcised take possession of her 
 husband ? By the verdict of common sense, he became 
 insane from the time his wife was restored. The prophet 
 had given him back his wife, and he at once accepted it 
 as a token that he could also give him back his country. 
 
 " If it be true that, like individuals, communities may 
 become crazy, never was one better prepared to receive 
 the contagion than the Polish society in Paris, which for 
 years had vibrated between hope and despair, and was 
 bound together as one man by a common sentiment. 
 
 " The prophet immediately called a meeting of Poles at 
 the Notre Dame. Three converts joined him in com- 
 munion. After mass, when the priests had left the 
 church, he addressed the meeting, recounting his miracu- 
 lous vision, the supernatural cure of Madame Mickiewicz, 
 exhorting the Poles to lives of holiness, and promising 
 the deliverance of their country as the reward of their 
 righteousness and patriotism. The beadles tried in vain 
 to restrain him. That day a society of forty persons was 
 organized, which increased within a year to nearly five 
 hundred. Carl Roycki, the idol of the young ofificers, was 
 
474 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 nominated the General-in-Chief of the new crusade, which 
 a higher power than the French Government was to 
 crown with success. The prophet exercised a wonderful 
 power over the morals, and a strange spell over the minds 
 of his followers. They yielded implicit obedience to his 
 maxims of temperance and self-denial ; many of them 
 married their mistresses, and all of their worldly goods 
 was held as common property. He preached the doc- 
 trine of metempsychosis ; and Kominsky, the Colonel of 
 my regiment, as brave a man as ever led a forlorn hope, 
 fancied he could remember when he was a cow ! His 
 wife went to the prophet and his companions, and 
 besought them to deliver her husband from this midsum- 
 mer madness, but they were all as mad as he. 
 
 " It would have been interesting to know how long this 
 glamour could have been continued among men of the 
 world, many of them learned and accomplished ; but it 
 was brought to a sudden close by the banishment of their 
 leader from France. He had been in Paris about a year, 
 when he appeared at the palace and demanded admission 
 to the King. He was turned away. The next day he 
 returned, and was again driven away, with the threat 
 of imprisonment. On the third day he came again, 
 denounced the French Government for double dealing 
 with Poland, predicted the overthrow of the house of 
 Orleans, and also, it is said, the violent death of the Duke 
 of Orleans, heir-apparent to the throne, which occurred a 
 few years afterward. Louis Philippe was the most acces- 
 sible of monarchs when he had no fear of assassination. 
 He could not have been ignorant of Towianski, and I 
 have always believed if his request for audience had 
 been conveyed to the King it would have been granted ; 
 but it was not, and, after the malediction, the prophet 
 was sent out of France. The society he had formed 
 was gradually broken up, and most of its members 
 absorbed in the great currents of life. My old Colonel 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 475 
 
 recovered from the hallucination that he had ever chewed 
 the cud, except of sweet and bitter fancy. The spell 
 upon the faculties of Mickiewicz was stronger. He inter- 
 calated brilliant lectures on Sclavonic literature, with dis- 
 sertations on the ' Worship of Napoleon,' (in the reign of 
 Louis Philippe !) the ' Messiahship of Towianski,' and 
 finally upon ' Rats.' He was permitted to retain the 
 nominal professorship for some years, but without the 
 privilege of lecturing. After the ascension to the throne 
 of Louis Napoleon, he was restored to Court favor, and, 
 in 1855, was sent on a diplomatic mission to the East. 
 He died in November of that year, of cholera, at Con- 
 stantinople. 
 
 " About three years after the banishment of the prophet, 
 I visited Paris, and even then I found some of my old com- 
 panions so deeply impressed and so fixed in the faith that in 
 some mysterious way Towianski would prove the redeemer 
 of our country, that I verily believe I was only saved from 
 sharing their infatuation by the fact that I had incurred 
 responsibilities and duties that divided with Poland my 
 thoughts, my cares, and my love." 
 
 The Don seemed suddenly to bring us within his field 
 of vision, and said : 
 
 " After all, the world would be poorer without enthusi- 
 asm and superstition." 
 
 " They are like the fire," replied the Captain, lighting 
 his cigar ; " good servants, but bad masters." 
 
 August, 1869. 
 
 SKETCH OF RUFUS A. LOCKWOOD 
 
 IN THE "overland MONTHLY," MAY, 187O. 
 
 During the term of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, in December, 1855, a stranger occupied the same 
 seat in the court-room day after day, until his presence 
 became almost a feature of the place ; and even the 
 impassive Taney realized there was a new fixed object 
 
476 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 within his visual horizon. His general appearance might 
 have been catalogued as follows: Height, above 
 medium ; figure, large and ungainly ; movements, awk- 
 ward; complexion, sallow and tobacco-smoked; eyes, 
 dark and deep, with dilating pupils edged with yellow — 
 cat-eyes in the dark ; hair, dark-brown, sprinkled with 
 gray ; head, feet, and hands large — the left hand web- 
 fingered ; features, not irregular, but without play or 
 mobility, with a fixed expression of weariness ; dress, 
 careless, almost slovenly ; age, fifty years, bearing the 
 burden of four-score. 
 
 Each day, from the opening to the adjournment of 
 court, he gave to all its proceedings — to its mere routine, 
 to the driest and most technical argument, to the most 
 absurd speech, (and speeches were made there that would 
 not have been tolerated in the Twelfth District Court, 
 Pratt, J.), and to the most finished and cogent reasoning 
 — the same constant, apathetic attention. The last 
 day of the term was reached, and the court was about to 
 adjourn, when the stranger arose, and, addressing the 
 court with a trepidation of voice and manner that his 
 will barely mastered, said he had travelled six thousand 
 miles to argue a case that stood next upon the calendar; 
 the counsel for the other side was present, and anxious 
 that the case should be heard ; if it went over to the next 
 term, it would involve an inconvenience to counsel and 
 expense to the parties, that would amount almost to a 
 denial of justice ; and, under the circumstances, he felt priv- 
 ileged to ask the court to sit one day longer. 
 
 After a brief consultation the judges acceded to the 
 request ; and it was announced that, on the following day 
 the court would hear the arguments in the case of Field 
 against Seabury. 
 
 More than the usual number of spectators were present 
 on the following day ; and there was something more 
 than curiosity to hear this lawyer, who had often been 
 
MA GA ZINES^JO URNALS. 477 
 
 heard of, but never before heard in that court. The con- 
 sciousness of this curiosity and expectation embarrassed 
 him in the opening of his speech, but his mind fairly in 
 motion soon worked itself free, and his phlegmatic temper- 
 ament glowed to its core with flameless heat. For two 
 hours he held the undivided attention of the court in an 
 argument that was pure law. He had that precision of 
 statement, skill, and nicety in the handling of legal terms, 
 which modulate the very tones of the voice, and by which 
 lawyers instinctively measure a lawyer — that readiness 
 which reveals an intellectual training that has become a 
 second nature — that self-contained confidence that is 
 based on the broadest preparation — the logical arrange- 
 ment which gives the assurance, that back of every propo- 
 sition is a solid column to support it if attacked — and 
 that strength and symmetry of expression which carry 
 the conviction, that behind utterance there is a fulness of 
 knowledge that floods every sentence with meaning, and 
 an unconscious reserve of power which gives to every 
 word a vital force. 
 
 Long before he had concluded, it was known to all 
 present that the stranger was Rufus A. Lockwood, of San 
 Francisco ; and he was that day, in the estimation of at 
 least one of the judges who heard him, the equal of the 
 best lawyer in the United States. 
 
 Though this was his first (and only) appearance in the 
 United States Supreme Court, his brief had been before 
 the court in the case of the Mariposa Land Grant (Fre- 
 mont's), had gained the case, and been closely followed in 
 the opinion. In examining that brief, Caleb Cushing — then 
 Attorney-General — exclaimed, in admiration of its legal 
 learning and research, " Who is this man Lockwood ? " 
 
 Who was he, and why was he not as well known to the 
 profession and public as Choate, Evarts, O'Connor, 
 Grimes, Benjamin, Reverdy Johnson, Stanton, Ewing, or 
 Cushing himself.? 
 
478 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 The story of his life would answer this question ; and 
 if it could be fully told, with the long, dark struggle 
 between the insanity in his blood and the spirit it almost 
 " o'er-crowed," would be as full of tragic interest as that of 
 CEdipus or Medea. 
 
 He was born in i8i i, in Stamford, Connecticut, and his 
 true name was Jonathan A. Jessup. At eighteen he was 
 a student in Yale College, in the Junior Class, distin- 
 guished among his fellows for his proficiency in Latin 
 and pure mathematics, and for his familiar acquaintance 
 with English classics. In the midst of the term, for some 
 reason known only to himself, without the consent of his 
 friends, he left college, and enlisted as a sailor on a 
 United States man-of-war. In his first cruise, he saw one 
 of his messmates tied up and flogged for a trivial fault. 
 Outraged by the injustice of the punishment, and shocked 
 by its brutality, he determined to desert ; and succeeded 
 in doing so when his vessel returned to New York, after a 
 short voyage to the Bahamas. He changed his name to 
 Rufus A. Lockwood, taking his mother's family name ; 
 worked his way to Buffalo on the Erie Canal, and took 
 passage on one of the first schooners that made the voy- 
 age of the lakes, to Chicago. 
 
 Chicago then (1830) was a frontier village, the solitude 
 of the prairies on one side almost as unbroken as that of 
 the lake on the other. Lockwood arrived there bare- 
 headed, without money or friends. A farmer from the 
 interior accidentally became acquainted with him, and 
 believing there was material in him for a country school- 
 master, took him in his farm-wagon to his home at Rom- 
 ney, Tippecanoe County, Indiana. Romney was too 
 small a place for the eye of the geographer, and had no 
 existence on the map ; but it maintained its store, black- 
 smith-shop, tavern, and " grocery " in the clearing ; its 
 only public edifice the log building that answered the 
 double purpose of a school-house in the week, and on 
 
MAGAZINES^JOURNALS. 479 
 
 Sundays a church for any travelHng preacher that hap- 
 pened in the neighborhood. For about a year Lockwood 
 taught alternate terms at Romney and Rob Roy, a sim- 
 ilar village in an adjoining county ; devoting his time out 
 of school to the study of medicine. A friend writes: 
 " For some time everything went well, but some 
 unpleasantness arose between him and his Rob Roy 
 patrons, and the warrior-habit which so distinguished him 
 in later life brought on a sharp collision. Without hesi- 
 tation, he struck out for Romney one of the coldest days 
 in winter, with the snow a foot deep. In crossing "the 
 eight-mile prairie " he lost his way, and never was nearer 
 his end until he went down in the Central America. He 
 reached my father's about ten o'clock at night, 
 with his hands and feet so badly frozen, that, though 
 every remedy was resorted to, he was disabled for the rest 
 of the winter. As soon as he was able to walk, he com- 
 menced a school. We had, at that time, a debating- 
 society in Romney that was attended by all the " natives." 
 Lockwood did not seem to have the least capacity for ex- 
 temporaneous speaking ; but every Saturday night he was 
 regularly on hand, with a half-hour's speech thoroughly 
 committed, and delivered without reference to manuscript. 
 Some of these efforts gave promise of hismaturest powers. 
 You remember his solemn manner, his deep, sepulchral 
 tones, and the force and energy with which he pressed 
 his strong points. They are all associated, in my mind, 
 with the debates at the old log school-house." 
 
 About this time he determined to study law, and, 
 borrowing a copy of Blackstone, almost literally com- 
 mitted its text. His country school of from seven to 
 twenty pupils did not afford a very promising outlook, 
 and he was induced to go to Crawfordsville. This place, 
 now the flourishing seat of Wabash College, did not then 
 contain material for two schools, and the field was already 
 occupied by one. Lockwood opened in opposition ; got 
 
480 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 into a newspaper quarrel with his competitor ; studied 
 law by night ; got married without a dollar in the world ; 
 was admitted to practice by the Circuit Court, and went 
 to Thorntown, a new place in Boone County, to establish 
 himself in his profession. He did not wait long for a 
 client : he was sued by his landlord, and made his first 
 appearance as a lawyer in his own case. He pleaded an 
 unpaid tuition-bill as a set-ofT, but judgment was given 
 against him. He was unable to give an appeal-bond, and 
 the bed he and his wife slept on was sold by the consta- 
 ble for less than $io. No incidents of his life seem to 
 have made a deeper impression on him than the flogging 
 of his messmate and the constable's sale of his bed. He 
 referred to the first with a shudder, as if the scene were 
 still before his eyes, in the last year of his life. The last 
 burned into his soul a dread and horror of debt : he never 
 forgave its author, and, in the course of his professional 
 life, found an opportunity to take a keen revenge. 
 
 Many years after, speaking of his Thorntown experi- 
 ence, he said : " I never knew how my wife lived. I know 
 I lived on potatoes roasted in the ashes." He buried 
 himself in study — sought forgetfulness in study, as men 
 do in drink. In his second case he was, fortunately, not 
 his own client — fortunately lost it, and appealed to the 
 Supreme Court. Never was a case involving so small an 
 amount more thoroughly prepared. He briefed it as 
 though thousands were pending. In after-years he often 
 referred to the embarrassment he experienced at his first 
 appearance at the Supreme Court. Morbidly sensitive ; 
 his uncouth appearance and coarse, ill-fitting clothes a 
 burden to him ; oppressed by a deep sense of poverty and 
 friendlessness — he shrank from contact with men of the 
 world as one long immured in darkness is pained by the 
 light. He had not the courage to state to the court that 
 he was present for examination as an attorney, and was 
 only relieved from this difficulty by the accidental pres- 
 
MAGAZINES^JOURNALS. 48 1 
 
 ence of the judge of his circuit, who made the necessary 
 motion. Lockwood's appearance, of course, attracted at- 
 tention ; and the manner in which he passed his examina- 
 tion, with the exhaustive argument he made in the case 
 he had carried up (Poulk et al. vs. Slocum, 3d Blackford, 
 421) made him known to the court and bar as a man of 
 mark. Even his landlady noted the changed manner to- 
 ward him, and translated him from a lumber-room in the 
 attic to the floor of his peers. 
 
 His new position, however, brought him no new clients 
 at Thorntown. He knew none of the arts by which suc- 
 cess is conciliated. He was never the next friend of the 
 clerk, the favorite of the sheriff, the intimate of the 
 judge, familiar with jurors, nor the confidant of witnesses. 
 He realized his disadvantage in the small encounters of 
 social intercourse, and avoided them. He became moody, 
 reserved, abstracted, studious. Never seeking business, 
 what little there was in his sparsely settled country did 
 not seek him. His deep love and ardent study of the 
 law as a science, were rather bars than aids to his immedi- 
 ate success ; and his poverty was unrelieved. He was 
 refused credit for a trifling amount at the village store : 
 he wrote the name of the owner in his black-book, and 
 went back to potatoes in the ashes, with salt for a luxury. 
 His home was never a happy one. He knew " the law 
 was a jealous mistress," and in his heart it had no rivals. 
 He was still under five-and-twenty ; but he never was 
 young. His life was always a struggle. He would make 
 no terms with Fortune — it was an enemy to be conquered. 
 In all his professional career he never seemed so entirely 
 himself, as when he felt that court and jury were against 
 him, and must be overcome by sheer force of intellect and 
 will. 
 
 Albert S. White, of Lafayette, Indiana, had become ac- 
 quainted with Lockwood at Indianapolis, and in the year 
 following (1836) offered him a partnership. The offer 
 
482 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 was accepted, and he removed to Lafayette. His oppor- 
 tunity at length came. 
 
 Soon after the Presidential election of 1836, a homicide 
 was committed at Lafayette that caused the most intense 
 excitement. Mr. J. H. W. Frank — a very young man, 
 the junior editor of a Democratic paper — had won a small 
 wager from Mr. John Woods, a prominent merchant, on 
 the vote of the city of New York. Frank called for settle- 
 ment, and was accused by Woods of being in possession 
 of the returns at the time the bet was made. A quarrel 
 and rencounter ensued, in which Frank killed Woods by 
 stabbing him with a pocket-knife. Woods was a man of 
 high social position, and his party regarded him as a 
 martyr whose blood was to be avenged. 
 
 White and Lockwood, and John Pettit were engaged 
 for -the defence. White and Pettit prudently, perhaps, 
 insisted that the safer course was to delay the trial, get 
 the prisoner released on bail, and forfeit the bond. Lock- 
 wood urged a speedy trial — that it was better Frank 
 should take his chance at once of suffering the penalty of 
 the law, than to be a wanderer over the earth, liable to be 
 hunted down any hour of his life. Frank coincided with 
 this view ; and Pettit and White, though continuing to 
 counsel with Lockwood, took no further part in the active 
 management of the defence. The case was continued one 
 term, on motion of the State, and Lockwood had ample 
 time for preparation. He realized that, in the event of 
 conviction, the blood of the accused would be upon his 
 hands. It would not answer to reduce the crime to man- 
 slaughter : Frank preferred suicide to the penitentiary, 
 and his lawyer applauded the choice. Those who knew 
 counsel and prisoner, could not tell which felt that he had 
 the greater stake in the result. 
 
 When the case came on for trial, Edward A. Hannegan 
 was employed to assist Lockwood, and Henry S. Lane and 
 Isaac Naylor appeared with W. P. Bryant for the prose- 
 
MA GA ZINE S—JO URN A LS. 483 
 
 cution. It was, perhaps, the most remarkable criminal 
 trial that has ever occurred in Indiana. Of the counsel 
 engaged in it, White, Hannegan, Pettit, and Lane after- 
 ward represented that State in the United States Senate. 
 
 A trial for murder is essentially dramatic, with the 
 added awful interest of a human life at stake. In the 
 trial of Frank, the legal parts were strongly cast. Lane 
 was an impetuous speaker, moving straight as a cannon- 
 ball to his mark. In his younger days — and he was young 
 then — his speech was a stream of fire. Hannegan, as an 
 orator, was not unlike Colonel Baker : inferior to him in 
 sustained power, he was his equal in vivid imagination, 
 and his superior in emotion, tenderness, and pathos. Nay- 
 lorwas a plausible man, who won the confidence of jurors, 
 and magnetized them into the impression that he was, by 
 turns, the candid friend, the impartial judge, a disin- 
 terested witness, a fellow-juror bound by his oath — any- 
 thing but an advocate. Bryant (afterward United States 
 District Judge) was cool and watchful; instant to see, 
 and call attention to any loose joint in the armor of his 
 adversary. 
 
 Fox said of one of his own speeches: " If it reads well, 
 it is a poor speech." In reading Lockwood's speech 
 on this trial, it seems, with the exception of the law 
 argument, declamatory and over-wrought ; but no pe- 
 rusal can give an adequate conception of its living 
 effect. It was level with the occasion ; fervid with the 
 excitement of the hour. The orator fairly met and turned 
 back the tide of popular passion, by the greater passion 
 of his single breast. At times, his delivery swelled to the 
 fury of the storm ; at others, sank to the plaintive moan- 
 ing of an autumnal wind. His invective was terrible. 
 He poured the gall of years of bitterness into his denun- 
 ciation of the " society " that demanded, and the clique 
 that had contributed money to secure, a conviction. His 
 statement of the law was clear and exhaustive, raising the 
 
484 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 distinctions between murder, manslaughter, excusable and 
 justifiable homicide, with metaphysical subtilty, and 
 mathematical precision. In shaping the testimony, he 
 seemed to make his own case ; and in applying the law to 
 the facts, was severe as logic. The speech lasted nine 
 hours, and one who heard it said, ** It was the best jury- 
 speech ever made on this continent — or any other ! " 
 
 Frank was acquitted. The case was for Lockwood more 
 than Erskine's " non-suit of cow-beef " ; it was his su- 
 premest triumph, bringing him, at twenty-six, from obscur- 
 ity and neglect into the full blaze of popular attention and 
 applause. 
 
 White was soon afterward elected to Congress, the 
 partnership was dissolved, and Lockwood entered upon 
 an extensive practice. 
 
 There was nothing in the history of litigation in Indi- 
 ana like the unsettled land-titles, and the conflict between 
 Old Court and New Court which made Kentucky the 
 battle-ground of legal giants ; but thirty years ago she 
 had a strong bar, and, with Blackford, Dewey, and 
 Sullivan on the bench, as able a Supreme Court as ever 
 adorned the jurisprudence of any State of the Union, 
 The habit of following a circuit makes a different, and, 
 in many respects, a better lawyer, than city practice. The 
 circuit lawyer in a new country should be well versed in 
 every branch of his profession. There is no chance for a 
 division of labor. He must be ready for the "occasion 
 sudden " ; for he will often learn for the first time the 
 leading facts of his case, while it is on trial. He will 
 seldom have access to any but the most meagre libraries, 
 and he must carry his books in his brain. With a Supreme 
 Court above him that passes no mistakes, and a back- 
 woods jury before him that would be wearied and dis- 
 gusted with a display of technical learning, and would 
 " tolerate no nonsense," he must be so grounded in ele- 
 mentary law as to be able to try his case closely without 
 
MAGAZINES^JOURNALS. 485 
 
 his books, and adhere to the lex scripta while arguing to 
 the jury as a man rather than as a lawyer. In the early 
 days of Indiana, lawyers in good practice would ride hun- 
 dreds of miles on horseback. In the small country towns 
 the people would flock to the court-house as to a show, 
 and in every important case the whole neighborhood 
 would take sides. There was not often any assumption 
 of dignity in judicial manners and bearing. Sometimes 
 the court would adjourn to allow the bar, jury, and wit- 
 nesses to go to a horse-race, where " His Honor " would 
 preside with the same impartiality that distinguished his 
 rulings on Kent and Blackstone. On one occasion, a 
 Judge whose decisions usually stood fire, is reported to 
 have said to a lawyer who afterward acquired a national 
 reputation, " Ned, you can go to the jury, but those horses 
 are to start in thirty minutes, and I advise you to be brief. " 
 Ned was brief, and the judge remembered it in his charge. 
 In the evenings, judge and lawyers would meet at the 
 village tavern in a social game of old-sledge, and discuss 
 with the same freedom a false play, and any mistake that 
 had been committed, or absurdity that had been uttered, 
 in the court-room. It was a rough school, but thorough, 
 and those who passed through it fairly earned their de- 
 grees. In addition to this training, Lockwood was always 
 a close student of books. He read nothing superficially. 
 He analyzed, made his own syllabus for, and common- 
 placed every case he ever had occasion to examine. 
 
 One who knew him well, and was, at one time, his 
 partner, writes : " Some subjects in connection with Lock- 
 wood suggest themselves at the moment, upon which I 
 would enlarge if I had leisure: I allude to his strong sense 
 of natural justice ; to his conservatism; to his indefatig- 
 able pursuit of details ; to his hatred of shams ; to his 
 contempt for the narrowness of parties and partisans. 
 How he loved his profession ! How he identified himself 
 with his cHents ! How proud in his successes, and how 
 
486 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 gloomy in his reverses ! I think I never knew a man of 
 finer impulses. 
 
 "The finest tones of his eloquence were due to his 
 reverence for sacred things — the corporal oath, the con- 
 science and religion: a reverence not paraded for effect, 
 but unconsciously permeating his speech, and giving him 
 with juries, a surpassing power. He seemed almost 
 morbidly attached to the study of such cases upon wills, 
 as turned upon the distinction, shadowy and vague, be- 
 tween sanity and insanity. His own mind was an instruc- 
 tive instance of the painful narrowness of this line of 
 demarkation — the boundary between the fine frenzy of 
 the poet and the dark frenzy of the lunatic." 
 
 For a few years his professional business was large ; 
 but, at that time, every man in the " West " was a specu- 
 lator, and in the revulsion that followed the flush times, 
 he found himself involved in debt beyond his immediate 
 ability to pay. In the spring of 1842, he deposited what 
 money he could raise in bank, for the benefit of his credi- 
 tors, reserving only a few hundred dollars ; placed his son at 
 a Catholic school in Vincennes, and disappeared. He had 
 communicated his intentions and plans to no one, and it 
 was not known, even to his own family, until long after- 
 ward, that he had gone to the City of Mexico. For some 
 months he had devoted himself to the study of Spanish 
 and the Civil Law ; but it would have been as rational to 
 have expected to make a fortune teaching Mexican chil- 
 dren their mother-tongue as in the practice of his pro- 
 fession. He was simply flying from his demon. He had 
 no acquaintances in Mexico ; it is not probable that he 
 made any. To add to his helplessness, not long after his 
 arrival he was attacked with inflammatory rheumatism, 
 and saw his small means melt away, until he had barely 
 enough left to pay a caravan-passage to Vera Cruz. He 
 set out for that place before he had fully recovered, and 
 arrived there with $2 in his pocket, which he immediately 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 487 
 
 staked at monte. He won, and pressed his luck until he 
 had won $50; paid his passage to New Orleans, and went 
 from there to Natchitoches, where he had a cousin living. 
 He resumed the name of Jessup, and again applied him- 
 self to the study of the Civil Law and the Louisiana Code. 
 After spending a year at Natchitoches in study and oc- 
 casional practice, he returned to New Orleans, and applied 
 for admission into the higher State courts. He had suc- 
 cessfully passed his examination, and was about to take 
 the attorney's oath, when he accidentally saw in the court- 
 room a man of whom he could expect, and from whom he 
 would receive, no favors — a man he had humiliated with 
 his most merciless ridicule, and tortured with his cruellest 
 sarcasm — the man who had sold his bed under exe- 
 cution ; from the shadow of whose memory he was 
 fleeing. Dreading an exposure of his changed name, 
 he instantly quitted the room. A few days afterward, 
 Sam. Judah, a distinguished lawyer from Indiana, met 
 him on the street, wearing a straw-hat, " negro-shoes," 
 and clothing to match. He wanted to borrow $20 to re- 
 deem his trunk. Judah had but $10 with him. " It is of 
 no consequence," replied Lockwood, declining the $10, 
 and went on and on, until a recruiting station attracted 
 his attention. Fairly at bay with Fate, he saw the 
 words, " Twenty Dollars Bounty " — hesitated a mo- 
 ment — then enlisted as a common soldier in the United 
 States Army ; took his bounty and paid the bill at his 
 lodgings, and was sent to join his regiment in the Red 
 River (Arkansas) country. 
 
 After a few months' trial, he liked the land-, as little as 
 the naval-service of his country. 
 
 His friend Hannegan was at that time in the United 
 States Senate, and, learning of Lockwood's enlistment, 
 obtained from President Tyler an order for his discharge, 
 which he sent him, with $100, and an earnest entreaty to go 
 home to his family. Lockwood afterward repaid this gift 
 
488 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 by a present of $10,000. After an absence of nearly three 
 years, he returned to Lafayette, found his wild lands suf- 
 ficiently advanced in value to relieve him from debt, and 
 resumed his profession. 
 
 No man on his circuit — few men anywhere — equalled 
 him in his power of abstraction and prolonged concentra- 
 tion. He held a subject as in a vice, until he had mastered 
 it. In the preparation of his cases, he knew no weariness; 
 and if his faculties began to flag on trial, he stimulated 
 them to their utmost by the use of brandy, opium, and 
 even tincture of cantharides. He sometimes erred from 
 over-preparation ; from the excessive refinement and sub- 
 tility of his distinctions, and the metaphysical cast of 
 his mind. His arguments on legal propositions were apt to 
 run into disquisitions upon general principles. He would 
 hunt a principle down until he resolved it into an abstrac- 
 tion. He erred oftener from an absorbing interest that 
 identified him with his client — or, rather, made himself 
 the real party in the case — from the violence of his per- 
 sonal feelings, the bitterness of his prejudices, and his un- 
 disguised contempt for a judgment that did not see as he 
 saw, and rest in his conclusions. He could not leave his 
 likes and hatreds at the door of the court-room, without 
 divesting himself of personality. The successful lawyer 
 should conduct the trial of his cause as the coolest gambler 
 watches his game, unmoved by the magnitude of the 
 stake. He may be excited, but must never be carried 
 away by his own vehemence ; and in the very torrent, 
 tempest, and whirlwind of his passion, must watch the 
 play of his own feelings, and measure the effect his most 
 righteous indignation and noble anger will have upon the 
 minds he seeks to convince. 
 
 These faults were all illustrated in the trial of a case, 
 the result of which was the immediate occasion of his 
 coming to California. In 1848-9 he was employed to 
 contest a death-bed will, where the testator, being child- 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 489 
 
 less, had bequeathed his property to his wife's relatives, 
 who were comparatively affluent, to the exclusion of his 
 own, who were poor. One of the principal legatees was 
 
 Holloway, (ex-Commissioner of Patents) who had, at 
 
 some time previous, refused to pay a fee charged him by 
 Lockwood, on the ground that it was exorbitant. Lock- 
 wood sued for it, recovered judgment for the full amount, 
 and remitted the judgment, with the assurance that he 
 would take his pay in some other manner. In the case of 
 Hill vs. Holloway, he saw an opportunity to make his 
 promise good, and he entered upon it with all the interest 
 inspired by a favorite intellectual pursuit, and the ardor 
 of vindictive hatred. 
 
 At the trial, he was so intent upon attributing improper 
 influences, and raising the presumption of fraud, that he 
 failed to bring out the fact, which it is possible might have 
 been established to the satisfaction of the jury, whose 
 sympathies were strongly against the will, and which would 
 have been fatal, that the testator afifixed his signature (the 
 name was illegible) in articulo mortis, and that he was dead 
 before the subscribing witnesses had signed. His argu- 
 ment took up three days : he regarded it as the ablest 
 effort of his life ; but it failed of its purpose, as what 
 three-day argument does not ? While the jury were out, 
 Lockwood sat, as usual after a hard contest, moody and 
 abstracted, fighting the battle over again in his own mind, 
 and seeing perhaps but too clearly where it had been lost, 
 if it were lost. When the jury came in, and the verdict 
 against him was read, he arose, struck the table with his 
 clenched fist, and swore he would never try another case 
 in that court. 
 
 He never did. 
 
 His friend, Mr. E. L. Beard, was making preparation to 
 go to California, and Lockwood proposed to join him. 
 He thought he could do well by shipping a lot of liquors 
 from New York in small bottles, and peddling them to 
 
490 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 miners! Beard had determined to go through Mexico to 
 Mazatlan ; Lockwood, not wishing to renew his acquain- 
 tance with the Mexicans, took passage around the Horn. 
 Before parting, the friends provided themselves each with 
 a bugle of the same tones, that they might hear and an- 
 swer each other's calls, if they should at any time get lost 
 in the wilderness of California. Beard had been in Cali- 
 fornia some months, and was living at the Mission of San 
 Jos^, when, one day, he heard the familiar sound of Lock- 
 wood's bugle. Answering the call, he soon met Lockwood 
 — covered with mud, gun on shoulder, knife and pistols 
 in belt, bugle in hand — like a modern Don Quixote going 
 to summon the surrender of a castle ; with a sailor com- 
 panion, loaded down with bundles, for a Sancho Panza. 
 
 Lockwood had suffered severely from scurvy during the 
 voyage. On arriving at San Francisco, he started for the 
 Mission, landing in a whale-boat with one boatman ; got 
 lost ; had been in the swamp all night ; had taken short- 
 cuts through sloughs and bayous ; was chilled, famished, 
 and very ill. On reaching the house, he insisted that he 
 must be bled. The only physician in the neighborhood 
 assured him that bleeding would be certain death. Lock- 
 wood maintained his opinion ; and as the only way to 
 demonstrate its correctness was by experiment, he tried 
 it — bled himself until the doctor admitted the experiment 
 was a fair one; and confounded his antagonist and science 
 by getting better, and eventually well. 
 
 Before leaving New York, he had been induced to aban- 
 don his contemplated travelling bar, and on the voyage 
 had applied himself to the study of medicine. He had 
 quarrelled with the law, and thought of going back to his 
 first love ; but his hatred of sciolism made him unwilling 
 to try experiments upon any life but his own though his 
 success in medicine, where he was his own first patient, 
 was more flattering than in the law, where he was his 
 own first client. 
 
MAGAZINES— JO UI^NALS. 49 1 
 
 He soon came up to San Francisco, and for six months 
 was clerk in a law-office, where he not only furnished the 
 law, but swept the ofifice, made the fires, and in all respects 
 complied with his agreement to " make himself generally 
 useful." He received his wages every evening ; every 
 night found him in a gambling saloon ; every morning 
 penniless. His legal service was appreciated in the office, 
 though he was spared no humiliation ; and, at the end 
 of his term, he was patronized with the offer of a partner- 
 ship, if he would stay a year. " I have fulfilled my con- 
 tract to the letter," he replied, " and you have paid me as 
 
 you agreed, but I would not remain another hour " 
 
 The close of the speech would not look well in print. 
 
 He entered into a law partnership with and , 
 
 which lasted until there was one division of profits. 
 In the allotment to Lockwood, there was $500 of State 
 scrip, which he agreed to sell to one of his partners at a 
 price named. When he brought in the warrants next 
 morning, their value had declined — at least, in his part- 
 ner's estimation — and Lockwood tore them up, and left 
 the office. 
 
 For a month or two, he worked as a day-laborer — 
 shovelling sand, coaling steamers, and doing anything that 
 came to hand. While he was thus engaged, an old ac- 
 quaintance sought him out, to get him to try an important 
 law-suit, involving title to real estate in the city. Lock- 
 wood at first refused to go ; said he was earning an honest 
 living, and did not want to be disturbed. His friend 
 persisted, and, at length, banteringly offered to double his 
 daily wages if he would go to work on his case. This 
 proposition struck Lockwood favorably, and he acceded 
 to it, stipulating that he should be paid every day, and 
 that at no time afterward should any other fee be offered 
 him, directly or indirectly ; " for," said he, " I want none 
 of my partners' earnings, and they shall have none of 
 mine." He tried the case successfully ; the profit in- 
 
492 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 volved was of great value : but he held his client to his 
 contract, and his daily wages was his only fee. 
 
 After the term of his " partnership " expired, he opened 
 an office alone, and was soon after employed as counsel 
 by Palmer, Cook & Co., and through that connection was 
 introduced to a general and lucrative practice. 
 
 Mr. Palmer was at San Jos6 in the winter of 1851, 
 during the session of the Legislature at that place, anxious 
 to secure the best possible legal services for his firm, and 
 particularly for a test-case that involved the " water-lot 
 titles, Government Reserve," etc. One evening, General 
 McD and Judge H were in his room, and it oc- 
 curred to him that he would take their opinion as to who 
 was the best land-lawyer in San Francisco. Handing each 
 a slip torn from the margin of a newspaper, he asked them 
 to write the name of the man entitled to that pre-eminence 
 in their judgment. He was surprised to find the same 
 name written by each, and more surprised that it was a 
 name — Lockwood — of which he had never heard. He 
 returned to San Francisco the following day, to find this 
 strange lawyer, who, in the trial of a single case, had im- 
 pressed two of the finest legal minds in the State with a 
 sense of his superiority. The interview and its result will 
 be given, as nearly as they can be recalled, in Mr. Palmer's 
 words : 
 
 " I found Lockwood in an unfurnished office, apparently 
 absorbed in a black-letter-looking law-book. I introduced 
 myself, and told him the case in which I wished to employ 
 him. There was no need to go into details, as the case 
 was well known by its title, having been freely discussed 
 by the newspapers. Lockwood, scarcely looking up from 
 his book, said, ' I don't think you have got any case.' 
 Piqued by his abruptness, I answered, ' When you have 
 given the matter as much attention as I have, perhaps you 
 will be of a difTerent opinion.' ' If you will come to-mor- 
 row morning,' he replied, ' I will give you a final answer.' 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 493 
 
 When I went back, he was in the same position. It did 
 not seem to me that he had moved, or turned a leaf of 
 the volume before him. Without addressing a word di- 
 rectly to me, except to acknowledge my presence, he 
 said, as if reading aloud to himself, * A conveyance that 
 is void, is void forever.' 
 
 " Not relishing that application of law, and nettled by 
 his manner, I remarked that the counsel for the other side 
 would probably be able to find that principle without his 
 assistance. Without heeding my interruption, he went 
 on, in the same measured manner, ' But the sovereign 
 power, by a sovereign act, may give validity to the terms 
 of a conveyance which is void.' 
 
 " I saw his meaning and its importance as by a flash of 
 lightning, and, appl3nng it to the case, exclaimed, ' Then 
 an Act of the Legislature may refer to a void deed for a 
 description of lands ; and it is the law which conveys the 
 title, not the deed ? ' 
 
 " ' Precisely. I will take your case, and win it.' 
 
 " From the moment he announced his position, I felt 
 that he would win it ; but when the cause was coming on 
 for trial, I was amazed and terrified by the quantity of 
 brandy he drank. I remonstrated to no purpose. Out- 
 side the court-room he became dull and stolid ; within, on 
 trial he was luminous, ready upon every proposition ; and 
 I was constantly asking myself, ' How long can he hold 
 out ? ' The case was on trial several days ; four lawyers, 
 as able as any in the State, were on the other side ; and 
 I do not remember a single instance in which Lockwood 
 was taken at a disadvantage, either in argument, authority, 
 or repartee. I recall at the moment one passage between 
 him and Isaac E. Holmes. Lockwood had quoted law to 
 the effect, I think, that under certain conditions, an ease- 
 ment might be extinguished by a change of the fee. 
 Holmes interrupted him — ' Do you state that as law, Mr. 
 Lockwood .'' ' 
 
494 
 
 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " ' Yes,' replied Lockwood, his manner for the moment 
 slow, almost to drawling ; ' I state it as law : and I have 
 tried, and gained, an important case upon that principle.' 
 
 " * That case has not been reported, I fancy. It is not 
 in the books, is it ? It is Hoosier law, I presume.' 
 
 " ' No, sir ; the case is not in the books which the gentle- 
 man has read. It was tried before an Indiana court, an 
 Indiana bar — a court and bar on which the gentleman's 
 transcendent abilities would reflect no credit.' 
 
 " He held out, made his words good, and won the case. 
 He was immediately retained by Palmer, Cook, & Co. as 
 their general counsel ; and though paid large fees, his 
 legal services were considered cheap. Of course he 
 was not always successful (the lawyer has had a small 
 practice who never lost a case), but he was always ready. 
 I never knew him to ask a continuance. A starved lion 
 were scarcely fiercer than he after a defeat. When he 
 was at bay, some one was apt to get hurt. As an instance 
 of his crushing manner: once, when a witness, whose 
 answers had been unsatisfactory, if not untrue, and whom 
 he had cross-examined at great length, was about to leave 
 the stand, Lockwood detained him with ' One question 
 more ; ' finished the sentence he was writing, looked up, 
 and transfixed him with the question, ' Would you believe 
 yourself under oath ? ' 
 
 " Our patience was often taxed by his humors ; but you 
 know one can grant everything to the eccentricities of 
 genius, who would concede nothing to the caprices of a 
 fool." 
 
 His large professional gains only fed his passion for 
 gambling. Again at war with himself and the world, he 
 determined, in the summer of 1853, to break off his associa- 
 tions, and go to Australia. Some of his clients subsidized 
 the m.aster of the vessel on which he had taken passage 
 to remain in port a week after Lockwood had gone on 
 board, to see if he would not change his mind. When it 
 
MA GA ZINES—JO URNALS. 495 
 
 was evident he would not, one of them visited him to in- 
 quire if he had any money. " Yes," he answered, taking 
 a quarter-eagle from his pocket and throwing it overboard ; 
 "but I will sail free." His friend, Mr. Beard, however, 
 had placed some clothing and money in the hands of the 
 Captain, with orders to smuggle them into Lockwood's 
 room " when his fit was over." 
 
 Arrived at Sydney, he set out to walk to Melbourne — 
 about seven hundred miles — through wide stretches of 
 uninhabited bush ; over spurs of mountains, where there 
 was not so much as a bridle path : a journey so lonely, 
 wild, and desolate, that no other White Man ever volun- 
 tarily made it alone and on foot. 
 
 He had always had a great admiration for English Law 
 Reports, and a high opinion of English courts. He loved 
 the old Common Law system of pleading ; the distinction 
 between Law and Equity proceedings ; and had little 
 respect for the code of "Law made easy," with its one 
 form of civil action and unlimited liberty to amend. He 
 thought that in an English court he would get into a 
 purer atmosphere of law — where cases would not be argued 
 by the newspapers, and prejudged by the public that 
 makes and unmakes courts. He was not destined, how- 
 ever, to have any such experience ; for a law of the Colony, 
 or a rule of court, prohibited any one not a subject of the 
 Queen from practicing law until after a residence of seven 
 years in Australia. 
 
 He remained in Australia nearly two years. At one 
 time he was book-keeper to a mercantile house ; at an- 
 other, clerk in a law-ofifice, from which he was discharged 
 for refusing to copy a paragraph into a brief, which he 
 said was not law ; and for some months he was employed 
 in the lonely, but not uncongenial occupation of herding 
 sheep. After his return, speaking of his trip to Australia, 
 he said : " I know you thought I was crazy, but I was not. 
 It was the sanest act of my life. I felt that I must do 
 
496 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 some great penance for my sins and follies. I wanted to 
 put a gulf between me and the past." 
 
 On the return-voyage, he was one day incensed by some 
 real or fancied impertinence of a waiter at the dinner- 
 table. After waiting a moment in vain ,for the Captain to 
 reprove the servant, he exclaimed, " Captain, I will never 
 eat another mouthful on your ship." The next day he 
 was not seen in the cabin, and a lady passenger, who had 
 heard his singular threat, went to his state-room and told 
 him she would bring him something to eat from her own 
 stores, in which neither the ship nor Captain had any 
 interest. " Madam," he answered, " my words were, I 
 would not eat on this ship." Fortunately, they put into 
 Honolulu before he was literally starved, and he took pass- 
 age on another vessel. 
 
 Soon after he arrived in San Francisco, he was offered 
 a very large fee, and a contingent fortune, to appear for 
 the " Peter Smith titles." It was a temptation, for he 
 was very poor, and wanted money ; wanted still more the 
 ^clat of a great law-suit, and thirsted for its excitement ; 
 but, on a collateral case, he had once given an opinion 
 against the validity of the Peter Smith sales, and, from a 
 sense of professional honor, declined the employment, and 
 refused to re-examine the question. 
 
 After his " great penance," his character grew more 
 subdued, his aims more rational, his life more steadfast. 
 He no longer sought excitement and forgetfulness in dissi- 
 pation and gambling. He had always clung to the idea 
 of immortality — but rather as a hope than a faith ; and 
 there was not a scar on his soul of which he was not pain- 
 fully conscious. His tired heart wanted rest, and he was 
 beginning to seek it — where so many other restless spirits 
 have sought — under the shadow of authority, in the teach- 
 ings of Rome. Not for him, though, was ever the undis- 
 turbed peace of the faithful ; and when the devil in his 
 blood arose, who can tell the agony of his soul's conflict ? 
 
MAGAZINES^JOURNALS. 4gy 
 
 He returned from Washington, after the argument of 
 Field against Seabury, in the spring of 1856. In the fall 
 of 1857 he was again preparing to go East on professional 
 business. To one of his friends who tried to dissuade him 
 from going, he said, " I will stay, if you insist ; but I feel 
 that I shall go mad if I do." 
 
 He sailed as he had intended. At Aspinwall he con- 
 nected with the ill-fated Central America, on her last 
 voyage. During the storm he took his turn with other 
 passengers at the pumps, until his strength was exhausted. 
 Coming up to rest, he was met by one of the ofificers, and 
 ordered back to work. 
 
 " Sir," he answered, " I will work no more." 
 
 His work was done. He went into his state-room, 
 closed the door, and was never seen again. In a short 
 time the wreck went down. 
 
 A HOLIDAY EXCURSION WITH H. C. WATSON 
 
 It was not last summer, nor summer before, it must 
 have been six years ago, going on seven ; it was that very 
 hot summer when the apples on the north sides of the 
 trees were baked by our northern sirocco — the year before 
 our dear H. C. W. went over to the majority. H. C. W. ! 
 — I wonder how many there are whose hearts used to be 
 daily stirred by the magic eloquence of his pen, who now 
 ever recall his name? The orator lives before the 
 public and behind the foot-lights. In the rounds of ap- 
 plause that cheer him on, he hears also the murmurs of 
 the coming generation. He discounts his fame ; and 
 when he dies his memory becomes a part of traditional 
 lore. Think of Patrick Henry or Sargent Prentiss, think 
 of Whitfield or Peter the Hermit — unread but unforgot- 
 ten. The eloquence of voice, presence, manner ; the 
 fitness of time and occasion when heart answers to heart; 
 the living personal magnetism, the frame sentient, the 
 
498 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 nerves quivering, the eye flashing with emotion and earn- 
 estness pass away, but the memory of the effect remains to 
 embalm the orator's name. History delights to describe 
 him, and to dwell upon his minutest characteristics and 
 mannerisms, as the thumbed books, worn clothes, and 
 broken toys of children, worthless to-day, become precious 
 mementoes to-morrow, when their little owners are dead. 
 
 The orator is one of the pet children of his age. Of 
 the dead of our State, even in the fierce activity of its 
 young life, who are the best beloved and oftenest men- 
 tioned ? Am I not right ? Tracy, Baker, and King, be- 
 cause they were orators, and Broderick because he was a 
 leader and because his death was tragic. 
 
 How different is the life, the work, the reward and 
 public recognition of the editor, under the tyrannous im- 
 personalism of the press. I write while the nation is in 
 mourning for Horace Greeley, and his name is upon every 
 tongue. But the life of Greeley marked a transition period 
 in the American newspaper. Perhaps he is the last of the 
 journalists who could make the press an instrument of 
 personal power. And even in his case, how many un- 
 known pens assisted to make the Tribime what it w'as ; 
 how many unknown hands purveyed the materials of 
 Greeley's fame. 
 
 Ordinarily we read an article in the newspaper as 
 though it had written itself, been manufactured by ma- 
 chinery, or grown up in the night. It may have suggestive 
 thought enough to furnish an oration which would win 
 popular applause and public recognition, but we read it 
 without a thought of the long vigil, the mental discipline, 
 the toil of brain which are behind it. It may be it will 
 marshal public opinion the way it ought to go, but we 
 know not and do not seek to know who gives the word 
 of command. The system has its advantages, I know. 
 Perhaps it is for the best for the public, certainly it is for 
 the newspaper ; but I cannot help thinking it is somewhat 
 
MA GA ZINES—JO URNALS. 499 
 
 hard upon editors, who, after all, are men of flesh and 
 blood, and to whose hearts words of grateful approval 
 may be as refreshing as to ours. 
 
 It is nevertheless true that this unknown knight of the 
 quill, without lance or heraldy, the Editor, will soon van- 
 quish and drive from the lists his plumed and glittering 
 antagonist, the Orator, whose name and titles are shouted 
 before him wherever he goes. In every popular audience 
 now there is one dreaded presence, the impassive reporter, 
 who holds the speaker in awe — who will not let him for- 
 get that he speaks to an hundred times as many eyes as 
 ears, and that the swelling periods, which, in the glare of 
 the gaslight, might pass unchallenged in the pomp of 
 declamation, will be tried in the morning by the cold 
 criticism of the breakfast table, with perhaps the disagree- 
 able accessories of burned steak and spoiled coffee. Fox 
 said of one of his speeches, " If it reads well it is a poor 
 speech." Now every speech upon a topic of public 
 interest, if worth hearing, will be read, and soon the 
 orator's occupation will be gone. 
 
 But I did not intend to write a lament over the decline 
 of eloquence, or a prophecy of its fall. I desired to 
 offer a passing tribute to an editor who did his life-work 
 faithfully and well. Personally he was unknown outside 
 the small circle of his social friends. His life was in his 
 profession. Every day the panorama of the world's daily 
 history passed in review before him. His duties on this 
 coast covered that thrilling period — our civil war. How 
 much of heart and brain he gave to his duties, none but 
 his associates can ever know. Nor can they. I have often 
 heard some of our orators (whose character and virtues 
 I reverence) praised for leading, shaping, and giving ex- 
 pression to the patriotic sentiment of the State, as though 
 the fealty of California was on account of their labors 
 and utterances ; and I have repressed the thought (though 
 I would not pluck a leaf from the chaplet of their fame), 
 
500 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " I knew a man who did more." His name was Henry 
 Clay Watson. Others, no doubt, did similar labor. But 
 him I knew, and knew that night after night, year in and 
 year out, his light was burning while you and I were 
 asleep ; knew that his lamp, which shed its light around 
 our paths, was fed by his life, until its source was ex- 
 hausted, and he too was asleep. 
 
 A few friendly hands have placed a modest monument 
 above him, a few pious hands keep the sod fresh and clean, 
 but how many are there who ever recall his name ? 
 
 What a long July day it was. I wonder if the days are 
 always as long as when we get up two hours early, and 
 the nights as when we can't sleep ? If so I am willing to 
 compromise on three score and ten. 
 
 H. C. W. had positively consented to take a week of 
 holidays, though Prussia had just declared war against 
 Austria, and King and Emperor were sending him mes- 
 sages by telegraph every night. There were four of us. 
 We had Mistered each other for years on the street, but 
 the handles got knocked off our names before we got to 
 Folsom. We lost our names before we got back and H. 
 C. W. christened us Oldbuck, Hardtack Carrigan, Milton 
 Tenderloin, and (himself) Winkle Jenkins. Our first day's 
 journey was to Strawberry. How hot and dusty it was 
 on the hurricane deck of the stage from Shingle up, until 
 the sun got behind the mountains and we were winding 
 around their sides in their great shadows. After sunset a 
 fire in the huge fireplace at the hotel at Strawberry actu- 
 ally looked inviting, and we realized that we had left the 
 world beneath us. It used to be a busy place — Straw- 
 berry — but it was quiet then — it may be dead now, for 
 the locomotive "passed by on the other side." 
 
 After supper (the trout had been playing in South Fork 
 within an hour) I went out to see the moon come up over 
 the bald, gray peak that rises like a sharp pyramid and 
 stands sentinel at ** Manassas Gap." It was a beautiful 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 50 1 
 
 scene ; grand, too, and solemn withal. The darkness 
 seemed to settle into the treetops and on the ground, as 
 the tops of the mountains were touched with light. 
 Around the base of the "peak "was scattered a moun- 
 tainous mass of broken stone, and on the other side of 
 the gap was a denuded mountain, an immense truncated 
 cone from which the mighty fragments might have been 
 hurled at its revival. 
 
 " War between the Titans and the gods," thought I. 
 
 " There has been something powerfuler than nitro-glyc- 
 erine about here." 
 
 I turned at the words and saw the "Judge" — whom 
 Winkle immortalized in his columns as " Ramsdale 
 Buoy." 
 
 He was a picture to look at, this FalstafT of the back- 
 woods. To my unpractised eye he seemed six feet four 
 in height, and four feet six in circumference. His heart 
 and lungs were evidently as big as those of an ox, and 
 had to have chest room. His face seemed small for his 
 frame and his eyes small for his face. The latter were 
 dark gray, of the fun-loving pattern. He was clean shaved, 
 perhaps because he had little beard. Hair reddish, and 
 cut close. He wore a cap ; a blouse whose sleeves were 
 too short, and butternut trowsers that had a similar 
 infirmity in the legs. For this reason, perhaps, his hands 
 and feet looked phenomenally large. " Brad " afterwards 
 said the Buoy's garments were always scant, as no tailor 
 could get enough for a pattern out of one bolt, and 
 suggested that his boots were " laid out " by a civil en- 
 gineer. 
 
 There was a peculiarity about the Buoy's voice. Orator 
 Puff's had two tones — his had three. Usually it was a 
 musical tenor, but it would sometimes break off into a 
 fine treble, or drop into a bass which Forrest would have 
 envied. I have seen the Buoy stop — as if In wonder 
 where that voice came from. 
 
502 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 "You are going up to Hope Valley a-fishing," said the 
 Buoy. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " How many are there of you ? " 
 
 " Four." 
 
 "Then there will be just a stage-load of us — Charley, 
 Brad and I, and the Captain are going along. Charley is 
 the best whip ; Brad is the best shot, and I am the best — the 
 best historian in the mountains. You know the Captain ? " 
 
 "No." 
 
 " He is from Frisco and writes for the papers." 
 
 He went into the house. The Captain was sitting by 
 the fire, telling a story of a sow that got drunk on brandy 
 cherries. He described (not without humor) the amaze- 
 ment of the pigs at the unnatural condition of their 
 mother, and pointed the moral — " ladies should never 
 drink" — as he finished his toddy. 
 
 The Buoy looked at him as though taking his measure, 
 and mentally soliloquized, I thought, " That may do for 
 the plains, but the imagination soars on loftier wing in the 
 mountains." 
 
 Brad was tall as the Buoy, but as thin as " Master 
 Slender " — whom he resembled in nothing else. 
 
 When we started next morning, the Captain had the 
 box with Charley. We had the Buoy and Brad inside, 
 and one other — " Unknown." We had driven five or six 
 miles when Buoy stopped the stage and said to " Un- 
 known " : "If you are going to that lake here is your place 
 to get out. I '11 tell you the way so you can't miss it. 
 Follow up that ravine about three miles till you come to 
 a deserted cabin ; veer about three points to the north- 
 east and go up the side of the mountain a mile and a half 
 till you come to a quartz boulder — whitish quartz — then 
 go nearly due east over the top of the mountain, perhaps 
 a matter of two miles, till you come to a big pine tree — 
 some of the limbs broken by the snow ; then make an 
 
 i 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 503 
 
 angle of forty-five degrees to the north ; meander around 
 for an hour or so until you get completely lost and you 
 will find that lake." 
 
 Unknown looked puzzled. " Nobody ever found that 
 lake until he got lost. If you could follow up that stream 
 you would get there in time, but nobody ever did follow 
 it. In my opinion a trout could not find its way through 
 it. You had better take my chart." 
 
 We drove on, leaving Unknown looking as if he had 
 achieved the last part of the problem first, and got lost at 
 the start. 
 
 A few miles farther on we stopped to breathe the 
 horses. 
 
 " Right here, two years ago," said the Buoy, " I saw 
 the awfullest storm that ever blew on land. Jim Green 
 had just opened his house in Hope Valley, and I had 
 been over with the boys having a good time. It was the 
 longest spree I ever heard of. Some of the boys have 
 not got over it yet ." 
 
 " Taken up the first and second extensions," interrupted 
 Brad. 
 
 " And some of them are dead." 
 
 " Struck it in the lower level," Brad parenthesized. 
 
 " I remember Jim had only one room in the loft — a 
 square one with a door in each side. About daylight 
 Tom Hunchbrug and Zeke Snyder went into this room 
 to get a nap, and saw old man Garthwait, the driver, 
 asleep in the bed. They went in at each door in suc- 
 cession. At the last Tom exclaimed, 'Zeke, are we 
 drunk, or is old Garthwait asleep in every room in the 
 house? 
 
 " We had got this far on our way back when that storm 
 came up very sudden. We heard it for a few minutes 
 roaring and crashing through the timber. The sky be- 
 came black ; we just had time to get our wagon round, 
 take the top off, chock the wheels, and get the horses out 
 
504 XEWTON' BOOTH. 
 
 when the wind came, with torrents of rain. The pine 
 trees bent like whipstocks and snapped hke pipe-stems. 
 Such sheets of Hghtning ! I thought it would strike ev^ery- 
 thing. You see that fence ? The lightning knocked it 
 down — a rail at a time." 
 
 " I wonder you escaped. You are a broad mark," said 
 Brad. 
 
 " If you had been here I should have hoisted you for a 
 lightning-rod," retorted the Buoy. '' I was saved by my 
 knowledge of science ; I insulated myself by standing in 
 a half-emptied champagne basket." 
 
 " You mean two baskets," buzzed the gad-fly, looking 
 at the Buoy's feet. 
 
 " And holding up an empty bottle in each hand," pur- 
 sued the Buoy. 
 
 " Ajax defying the lightning," I said mildly. 
 
 "Young man," the Buoy replied in his tragedy bass, 
 " don't you call me a Jack again — I won't stand it." 
 
 I felt that I was snubbed and the two-penny classics 
 insulted. The Buoy had mercy on my contrition, and 
 went on. 
 
 " It lasted about an hour. I never want to see such 
 another. It proved one thing to me — the old women are 
 right : milk will curdle in a thunder-storm. You see I 
 had been drinking milk punch, and it soured on my 
 stomach." 
 
 " They should have put you in a hay press and made 
 a cheese," Brad put in. " It would have taken the pre- 
 mium for size, and made Limburg smell like a rose." 
 
 It was one o'clock when we reached Jim Green's, in Hope 
 Valley. Just before, the Buoy called a general council, 
 and informed us that Jim was the cussedest man ever 
 born on earth ; that he was a regular snapper ; had lost 
 his front teeth, and his mouth opened and shut like a New 
 Testament with the leaves torn out. That we would have 
 to humor him — give him line. The Buoy thought he 
 
MA GA ZINE S^JO URN A L S. 
 
 0^0 
 
 could fix him all right, if he had time enough and a bottle 
 of whisky. And he did. 
 
 Jim commenced by telling us there were no trout in the 
 stream, no hay in the barn, no fire in the house, no beds 
 up ; that his wife was sick, and he was not very well him- 
 self. At the end of an hour, under the mollifying influence 
 of the Buoy's treatment, he offered us the best he had — and 
 he put it all in the bill. 
 
 Do you remember your sensations at catching your first 
 trout — the electric tingle in your elbow when you felt him 
 at the hook, the involuntary^' jerk and throw, your gratified 
 surprise at landing him, and the blended feeling of pride, 
 admiration, pity, and remorse as you took the cruel hook 
 from his throat ? I wonder if we should pity them less 
 or spare them more if they were not beautiful — the trout, 
 I mean. 
 
 We were seated around the wide fireplace that night 
 when some one asked Jim if it was not very lonesome and 
 dull when he was snowed in up there. 
 
 " Not so dull as you might suppose," he replied. " We 
 have a good deal of amusement, setting bear-traps and such 
 like. Besides, nobody is snowed in that can use snowshoes. 
 We had a ball here last winter, and men, women, and chil- 
 dren came from twenty miles around on snowshoes. Some 
 came from Silver Mountain and Markleeville." 
 
 " I remember my first experience on snowshoes," said 
 the Buoy, sending a whiff from his pipe across the room. 
 " I 'd seen the boys on them, and it looked so easy I 
 thought anybody could do it ; that it was not a thing like 
 skating and swimming, to be learned — it was simply riding 
 down hill. I got a pair, bore heavy on the pole, and 
 started down a pretty steep incline. The motion was a 
 little swifter than I bargained for. but I managed to keep 
 my perpendicular until I came to where the roads forked. 
 One foot took one fork, the other the other " 
 
 Brad — '• Well, there was not room." 
 
506 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 " There was a place in that snow that looked as if a 
 sugar hogshead had rolled over it, and a pair of snowshoes 
 to let at the bottom of the hill. 
 
 " You ought to see Snowshoe Thompson. He dis- 
 counts them all. He is as tough as any old buffalo ; 
 hardy as a pine knot. He understands navigating snow- 
 shoes as well as a native Californian does managing horse- 
 flesh. You remember the side of the mountain at Hawley's 
 grade ? " 
 
 We remembered it. It was a perpendicular or over- 
 hanging precipice two thousand feet high. 
 
 " I have seen Snowshoe Thompson come down that 
 quicker than a squirrel could jump from a tree." 
 
 Oldbuck— " Whe-ew ! " 
 
 "You think that is fabulous." 
 
 "Fabulous is no name for it." 
 
 " Truth, sir, and truth is stranger than — history — and 
 that is mighty strange sometimes. Now here is Jim 
 Green, he is no slouch, I tell you, on snowshoes ; and he 
 don't grease the bottoms of them either, as they do up 
 about Howland Flat." 
 
 " It takes a heap of knack," said Jim, " to guide your- 
 self with the pole coming down a steep hill. You have 
 to calculate ahead, for you can't turn a corner sharp. I 
 have come down the hill over by the old slide so fast the 
 pine trees looked like telegraph poles, and seemed to be 
 as close together as bristles on the back of a mad hog." 
 
 " I have seen Thompson," said the Buoy, " jump a cut 
 sixty feet wide, and go as if it were not there. Talk 
 about your acrobats and flying trapeze ! They had a 
 snowshoe race over at Silver two years ago between 
 Thompson and five or six Norwegians. There was a gap 
 in the fence they had to go through near the end of the 
 track, and the Norway fellows crowded Thompson out, 
 but he jumped the fence and beat them in — distance, half 
 a mile — time, eleven seconds and a quarter. 
 
MAGAZINES— JOURNALS. 507 
 
 I took out a note-book and commenced to make some 
 figures. 
 
 "What are you figuring at?" said the Buoy, in his 
 ominous bass. 
 
 " I was trying to calculate how long it would take a 
 stone to fall half a mile," I replied meekly. 
 
 " What has that to do with it, young vulgar fractions," 
 he retorted, deeper and fiercer than ever. " Suppose you 
 calculate how long it would take lightning to do it. I tell 
 you," in his shrillest treble, " Thompson on snowshoes is 
 lightning ! " 
 
 I subsided, and never went near that velvety tiger-paw 
 again. 
 
 Six years ago, going on seven — they have not been 
 holiday years either, they have brought a good deal of 
 toil and something of grief to the lives of those of us who 
 are left. He who enjoyed that holiday week more than 
 either of us (he had so few holidays) has been dead five 
 years, going on six. The sketches he wrote of our trip 
 contain descriptive passages equal, I think, to Irving's 
 best style in that kind of writing. Will the Union repub- 
 lish them in its New Year paper? There are thousands 
 of your old readers to whom they will be a grateful me- 
 morial of a man, the inscription from whose grave-stone 
 I reverently copy : 
 
 "HENRY C. WATSON. 
 EDITOR OF ' SACRAMENTO UNION.' 
 
 Died June 24TH, 1867, Aged 36 Years." 
 
 GREELEY FOR PRESIDENT. 
 
 EDITORIAL IN " SACRAMENTO UNION," JULY II, 1872. 
 
 Jerry Black is quoted as saying that, if this world and 
 the two adjoining were searched, there could not be found 
 a better candidate or worse President than Horace Greeley. 
 The distinction as to requisite qualities is well taken, but, 
 
508 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 whether his shall prove a name potent enough to conjure 
 life into the Democratic party, can be told better after the 
 election than before it. Fate, destiny, accident, luck, or 
 whatever you call it, has played many a strange prank in 
 affairs since the serpent interviewed Eve, but none more 
 antic than when she marked Horace Greeley as a Demo- 
 cratic candidate for the Presidency, and found his creden- 
 tials in sixty volumes of the Tribune. No man can hide 
 from his destiny, and if the presidency or candidacy has 
 determined upon a victim, not millions of reams of paper 
 swathing him in infinite folds shall protect him from the 
 arrows of fate. 
 
 There are many things which are amusing and seem 
 absurd because they are novel and unexpected, and which 
 custom reconciles to sobriety ; but this latter-day conjec- 
 ture grows more absurdly impossible and impossibly 
 absurd to the imagination the more our understanding 
 knows it is so. '* Seeing is believing " ; but in this instance 
 the more we see the more we can't believe. Rhetoricians 
 draw a distinction between the improbable possible and 
 the possible improbable ; but this is both, and it is neither 
 and is true — and truth is stranger than fiction — and there 
 is an end to homilies, and wise saws and modern instances 
 are of no further use. 
 
 If the Democratic party should die and Greeley were 
 appointed administrator, de bo7iis non (whatever that may 
 mean) ; or if Greeley should die and bequeath his anatomy 
 to the Democracy to grin the hate he could no longer speak, 
 and become a kind of articulate symbol of the mevic7tto 
 mori he has been shouting at Democratic feasts for thirty 
 years, the thing could be reconciled to our ideas of eternal 
 fitness. But dying is the last thing (as with other people) 
 which either the party of the first part or the party of the 
 second part propose to do, and the consummation of these 
 nuptials, too incredible for the fancy, passes into the 
 stranger realm of fact. 
 
MA GA ZINES — JO UNNA LS. 5 09 
 
 We might consider the matter, if it be not indeed to 
 consider too curiously, after the chop-logic manner of an 
 antique sermon (obsolete now) as first general head, in 
 regard to the party ; second general head, in regard to 
 the man ; and through each of these general divisions 
 draw parallel subdivisions : First, as to ostensible mo- 
 tives; second, real motives; third, manner; fourth, proba- 
 ble result as to parties themselves, with a pendant as to 
 the general effect and ultimate effect. We might indulge 
 in speculations as to whether both parties will die, or 
 either, and if either, which, — the man or the snake. 
 
 But still, through all the devious ways of metaphysics 
 and the wide expanse of prophecy, we should continually 
 recur to the central thought — what a game of blind-man's 
 buff it is when the Democratic party with bandaged eyes 
 catches a philosopher, shouts Horace Greeley, and finds a 
 candidate for the Presidency. Was the philosopher will- 
 ing to be caught ? Did he slyly whisper his name to 
 prevent the fatal mistake of a wrong guess? Did the 
 Democracy know the philosopher as Falstaff the Prince 
 from instinct ? Was there any secret elective afifinity be- 
 tween them, concealed from men but known to the 
 supernal powers? Or has the devil cozened them both? 
 If only one of the players is fooled, which is the dupe? 
 
 Surely the whirligig of time never brought in so keen a 
 revenge as the Democratic party compelled by force of 
 events to support Greeley, unless indeed it be when 
 Greeley seeks that support. 
 
 But there is a sad side to all this. We are sorry for 
 Greeley, and more sorry for — ourselves. We have found 
 the clay feet of our idol of the tripod. Other papers 
 have been more or less impersonal, but the Tribune has 
 been Horace Greeley. For thirty years he has been a 
 power in the land. He has been an educator of public 
 sentiment. Boys and young men who commenced with 
 the Tribune are strong men and old men now. Perhaps 
 
5IO 
 
 NEWTON BOOTH. 
 
 no man has spoken so long or to so vast an audience. 
 Few have spoken so well. Few have molded so many- 
 minds, suggested so many thoughts. His errors on the 
 side of humanity have been more pardonable than the 
 abstract logical right of others. If he " had died an hour 
 ago he 'd lived a blessed time." Alas and alas, why was 
 he not content to go into history as the great TRIBUNE 
 of the American people ? Why will men destroy what they 
 are in a vain effort to be what they are not ! 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Alabama claims, the, 272 
 
 Alphabet, the, 364 
 
 American people, the real hero of the 
 war, 211 
 
 American politics, comparison of 
 theory of with European politics, 
 26 ; the railroad problem in, 154- 
 
 74 
 American polity, leading feature of, 
 
 25 seq. 
 American Revolution, the, comparison 
 
 of the Rebellion with, 246 
 Anarchism, 270 
 Anarchy and destruction, remedies for 
 
 no evil, 222 
 Arcana (Swedenborg's) extract from, 
 
 397, 398 
 Army, standing, no need of in the 
 
 United States, 222 
 Arraignment of the Democratic party, 
 
 215, 216 
 Artificial character of the United 
 
 States revenue system, 193 
 Astronomy, slow growth of, 341 
 Augereau, Marshall, 274 
 
 B 
 
 Bacon, Lord, 380 
 Baker, E. D., 3 
 
 Baker, Senator, denounces Senator 
 Breckenridge's speech, 256 
 
 Baldwin, Judge, witty speech of, 267 
 
 Bank of Amsterdam, the, 296 
 
 Bank of England, the, 296 
 
 Barre, Colonel, 430 
 
 Barrymore, Lord, 420 
 
 Bartlett, Mr., candidate for governor 
 
 of California, 261, 269 
 Beethoven, 363 
 Belknap, William W., impeachment 
 
 of, xiii. 
 Bible, the, Swedenborg's opinion of, 
 
 394 
 
 Bidwell, John, 199, 200 
 
 Bills, legislative, number of intro- 
 duced during Governor Booth's 
 term of office, 132 (note) 
 
 Bonds, government, interest on, 225, 
 226 
 
 Booth, Newton, personal characteris- 
 tics and traits, vii.-xiv. ; birth, xiii ; 
 ancestry, xiii. ; admitted to the Bar, 
 xiii. ; commences business in Sacra- 
 mento, xiv. ; marriage, xiv. ; death, 
 xiv ; his important work in influencing 
 public opinion in behalf of the 
 Union, 3 seq. ; his opinion of the 
 value of our national holiday (the 
 Fourth of July), 5 ; his Fourth of 
 July oration at Stockton, 5 ; de- 
 livers a stirring address at Michigan 
 Bluff, 6 ; his address on " The 
 Debit and Credit of the War," 6 ; 
 his address at Sacramento before 
 
512 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 the National Encampment of the 
 Soldiers of the Grand Army, 7 ; 
 reminiscence of early life in the 
 "Far West," 105, 106; early 
 friendship for the Central Pacific 
 Railroad Company, 123 ; speech at 
 Sacramento at the ceremony of 
 breaking ground for the Central 
 Pacific Railroad, 123 ; his services 
 in the State Senate in behalf of the 
 railroad, 123, 124 ; his strong op- 
 position to the encroachments of the 
 railroad, 124 ff\ popularity of, 124 ; 
 tribute of to the Sacramento Union, 
 131 ; course as governor of Cali- 
 fornia, 131 j^^., number of legisla- 
 tive bills introduced during his term 
 of office, 132 (note) ; his reasons 
 for commuting the death sentence 
 of William Williams, 132 ; his mes- 
 sage advocating the abolition of 
 capital punishment, 132 ; firmness 
 of in maintaining the laws, 133 ; 
 sympathetic nature of, 133 ; pro- 
 ceeds against a State Board of Com- 
 missioners for corrupt practices, 134 ; 
 his services in the United States 
 Senate, 134 seq. ; extract from 
 speech in the United States Senate 
 in opposition to the proposed 
 Hawaiian treaty, 135, 136 ; his 
 speeches on Pacific railroads in the 
 United States Senate, 136, 137 ; 
 hostility of corporations to, 137, 
 
 138 ; attitude toward the silver 
 question, 138, 1 39 ; misrepresenta- 
 tion of his services by the press, 
 
 139 ; discouragement consequent 
 upon, 139 ; retirement from public 
 service, 140 ; his personal refer- 
 ence to his public life, 140 ; ex- 
 tract from speech of Hon. Henry 
 Edgerton nominating him for gov- 
 ernor of California, 140, 141 ; his 
 speech of acceptance, 141-4 ; his 
 
 debt of gratitude to California, 236, 
 237 ; destroys a large mass of manu- 
 script, 337 ; public loss through, 
 337 ; contributions to periodicals, 
 443-510; literary style, 443. 
 
 Breckenridge, Senator, 256 
 
 Bright, John, 219 
 
 Broderick, Senator, speech of, 256, 
 
 257 
 
 Brougham, Lord, 413 
 
 Buchanan, James, 258, 259 
 
 Buffon, 361 
 
 Burke, Edmund, 414, 421, 427, 428, 
 437, 438 
 
 Burlingame Swift treaty, the, 268, 
 269 
 
 Bushworth, Richard, 16 
 
 Business, private. Congress not com- 
 petent to direct, 194 
 
 Bute, Lord, 425 
 
 Butler, Benjamin^32 
 
 California, condition of during the 
 War of the Rebellion, i seq.\ popu- 
 lation of in 1861, I ; College of, 
 oration at commencement of, 66-77 I 
 "State Grange" of, address before 
 at San Jose, 96-107 ; the importance 
 of providing irrigation in, 100, loi ; 
 Newton Booth's course as governor 
 of, 131 j^^. ; Newton Booth's earnest 
 labors in the United States Senate 
 in behalf of, 135 ; amount of money 
 given to railroad companies by, 170 ; 
 amount of annual payment by on 
 the bonds of the Central Pacific 
 Railroad Company, 170; its fight 
 against the Central Pacific Railroad, 
 igS ; cost to the State of maintain- 
 ing the public schools of, 210 ; 
 phenomenal natural features of, 
 233 ; Governor Booth's debt of 
 gratitude to, 236-7 
 
INDEX. 
 
 513 
 
 Caperton, Senator Allen T., memorial 
 address on life and character of, 
 
 333-6 
 
 Capital and labor, 218 seq. 
 
 Capital, danger to the country by the 
 concentration of, 166 ; should take 
 care of itself, 185 
 
 Capital punishment. Governor Booth's 
 message advocating the abolition of, 
 132 
 
 Capital stock of the United States 
 bank in 1832, 188 
 
 Capture of the schooner J. IV. Chap- 
 man, 2 
 
 Carlisle, John G., 265 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 208, 219, 387, 408 
 
 Cathedral at Milan, 370 
 
 Central America, the, wreck of, 412 
 
 Central Pacific Railroad Company, 
 Newton Booth's early friendship 
 for, 123 ; his speech at Sacramento 
 at the ceremony of breaking ground 
 for, 123 ; his services in the State 
 Senate in behalf of, 123, 124 ; fight 
 of the Sacramento Ujiion against, 
 130 ; amount of annual payment by 
 the U. S. Government on the bonds 
 of, 170 ; amount paid by California, 
 170 ; see also 195, 196, 232, 235-7 
 
 Changes in methods and principles of 
 transportation caused by railroads, 
 159 jf^. 
 
 Change of principles of the Democratic 
 party, 214, 215 
 
 Charles the First, 425 
 
 Chase, Judge, decision of concerning 
 greenbacks as legal tender, 228 
 
 Chatham, Lord, 414-6, 424 
 
 Cheatam, John, 16 
 
 Chemistry, the elements of, 358 
 
 Chinese immigration, 241, 242, 268, 
 269 ; speech upon, delivered in the 
 U. S. Senate, 318-26 
 
 Circulating medium of the United 
 States, 275 
 
 Civilization, limited spread of among 
 the nations of the earth, 382, 383 
 
 Clairvoyant power possessed by Swed- 
 enborg, 388 
 
 Clay, Henry, oratory of, 413 
 
 Cleveland, Grover, 266 ; first admin- 
 istration of, 271, 272 
 
 Clive, Lord, 161 
 
 Coal, injustice of import duty upon, 
 189 
 
 College of California, the, oration at 
 commencement of, 66-77 
 
 Committees on which Newton Booth 
 served while United States Senator, 
 
 135 
 
 Concentration of capital, the, danger 
 to the country by, 166, 1S5 
 
 Confederacy, the, comparison of the 
 " Tories" with, 246 
 
 Confederate Government, 253, 254 ; 
 free trade held out by, to England 
 and France, as an inducement to 
 recognition, 266 ; attitude of Great 
 Britain toward, 272, 273 
 
 Congress, not competent to direct 
 private business, 194 ; rebel gener- 
 als in, 212 
 
 Connecticut, amounts paid by the 
 State for the maintenance of its 
 public schools, 210 
 
 Consols, English, value of, 295 
 
 Constitution, humorous proposal for in 
 France during the Revolution, 219 
 
 Contract and Finance Company, the, 
 123, 125, 160, 170, 207 
 
 Corporations, hostility of, to Senator 
 Booth, 137, 138 ; wealth of, a source 
 of danger to the country, 157 : 
 special grants to, 238 
 
 Courage, physical, 247 
 
 Crane, Addison M., 3 
 
 Credit Mobilier, the, 125, 160, 170, 
 194, 195, 207 
 
 Currency, varying opinions concern- 
 ing, in the different States, 227 ; 
 
514 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 speech upon, delivered at Sacra- 
 mento, 213-30 ; inflation of, 285 
 seq. ; speech upon, delivered in the 
 United States Senate, 275-305 ; 
 letters to the Republican concern- 
 ing, 305-318 
 Curtis, Judge, 225 
 
 D 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, 259 
 
 " Debit and Credit of the War," the 
 (address), 6 ; speech delivered at 
 Sacramento, in 1862, full text of, 
 53-66 
 
 Debt, of the various States in 1873, 
 103 ; of the railroads in the United 
 States, in 1873, 103 ; public, reduc- 
 tion of, 226 ; of the United States, 
 287 
 
 Debt the supreme monarch, 305 
 
 Debts of the nations of the world, 
 total of, 103 
 
 Decoration Day oration, delivered at 
 Sacramento, in 1877, 107-16 
 
 De Cours, Solomon, 346 
 
 Democratic party, change of princi- 
 ples of, 214, 215 ; arraignment of, 
 215, 216; dependence of upon the 
 Southern States and New York 
 City for any national success, 266 
 
 Demosthenes, 361 
 
 Destruction and anarchy, remedies for 
 no evil, 222 
 
 Devonshire, Duchess of, 434 
 
 Duncan, John, 16 
 
 Diamonds, composition of, 357 
 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, 219, 413 
 
 " Double standard " in currency, 282 
 scq. 
 
 Duomo, the, 371 
 
 Earth, the, gravitation of, 355, 356 
 East India Company, 432 
 
 Edgerton, Henry, 3 ; extract from 
 
 speech of, nominating Newton 
 
 Booth for governor of California, 
 
 140, 141 
 Education, opportunities for in the 
 
 United States, 224 
 Elections, moral significance of, 208 ; 
 
 military control of, 244 
 " Elevator Case," the decision in, 239 
 Emancipation of Slaves, 250, 257 
 Emancipation Proclamation, the, 6 
 Emerson, Ralph W., his estimate of 
 
 Swedenborg, 386, 387 
 England, free trade held out to, by 
 
 the Confederacy, as an inducement 
 
 to recognition, 266 
 England under the Georges, 423 seq. 
 English consols, value of, 295 
 English language, the, 377 
 Ericsson, John, 347 
 European politics, comparison of 
 
 theory of. with American politics, 
 
 26 
 Ewing, Mr., 217 
 
 "Far West," frontier life in the, 105, 
 
 106 
 Felton, John B., 175 ; open letter to, 
 
 175-83 
 
 Financial responsibility of the United 
 States government, 228 
 
 Fisk, James, 185 
 
 Folks, Martin, 397 
 
 Fourth of July, the, Newton Booth's 
 opinion of the value of our national 
 holiday, 5 ; oration at Stockton 
 (Cal.), in i860, 23-36; oration at 
 Michigan Bluff, in 1861, 40-53; 
 oration at Nevada City (Cal.), in 
 1872, 89-95 ; oration at Sacramento, 
 in 1877, 116-21 
 
 Fox, Charles James, 337, 338 ; lecture 
 on, 412-42 ; parentage, 417 ; anec- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 515 
 
 dotes of boyhood of, 418 ; early 
 vanities of, 419 ; propensity for 
 gambling, 419-20 ; entei's Parlia- 
 ment, 425 ; dismissed from ofifice, 
 427 ; friendship for Burke, 427 ; 
 becomes the leader of the Whigs, 
 433 ; death, 440 
 
 Fox, Henry, (Lord Holland), 416, 417 
 
 France, free trade held out to, by the 
 Confederacy, as an inducement to 
 recognition, 266 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 407 
 
 Free Trade, held out by the Confed- 
 eracy, to England and France as an 
 inducement to recognition, 266 
 
 Free trade and protection, 266 seq. 
 
 French Revolution, The, (Thomas 
 Carlyle), parable from, 208, 209 
 
 French Revolution, the, 436, 437 
 
 French troops in Mexico, 273 
 
 Frontier life in the "Far West," 105 
 106 
 
 Funded debt of the United States in 
 1S73, 103 ; of the various States in 
 1873, 103 
 
 Funded debt of the United States 
 should be paid in gold, 292 
 
 Gallatin, Albert, 302 
 
 Gates, General, 246 
 
 Genius and talent, the dividing line 
 between, 391 
 
 George the First, 423, 424 
 
 George the Second, 424 
 
 George the Third, 412-4, 434, 435, 
 441, 442 
 
 Gladstone, 413 
 
 Glover, Mrs. OctavineC, marriage of, 
 to Newton Booth, xiv 
 
 Gold, circulation of, on the Pacific 
 coast, 275 ; the most accurate rep- 
 resentative of value, 312 
 
 Gold dollar, weight of, 281 
 
 Goodman, Joseph T., tribute of, to 
 
 Newton Booth, 12S, 129 
 Gould, Jay, 1S5 
 Government aid in construction of 
 
 railroads, 160 
 Government bonds, interest on, 22 5 , 226 
 Grant, General U. S., 153, 257 
 Great Britain, attitude of, toward the 
 
 Confederacy, 272, 273 
 Greeley, Horace, 147, 254, 507-510 
 Greenbacks, unlimited issue of, 225 ; 
 as legal tender, 228 ; decision of 
 Judge Chase concerning, 228 ; and 
 silver, relative values of, 276 seq. 
 Gunpowder, 356 
 
 H 
 
 Haight, Governor, 231 
 Hamilton, Alexander, 407 
 Hancock, General, 245, 252, 268 
 Hartridge, Julian, memorial address 
 
 on life and character of, 331, 333 
 Hayes, President, policy of, 213, 230 
 Haymond, Hon. Creed, 126 (note), 
 
 128 (note) 
 Hawaiian treaty of 1875, extract from 
 
 Senator Booth's speech in opposition 
 
 to, 135. 136 
 Heaven, Swedenborg's conception of, 
 
 396, 397 
 Hendricks, Governor, 227 
 Hero, of Alexandria, earliest authen- 
 tic account of the application of 
 
 steam, in works of, 345 
 Hill, Senator (of Georgia), 254 
 Holiday excursion with H. C. Watson, 
 
 497-507 
 Holland, Lord, 416, 417 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 389 
 Hostility of corporations to Senator 
 
 Booth, 137, 138 
 House of Representatives, power of 
 
 the Speaker of, 265 
 Huxley, Professor, 399 
 
5i6 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Ideal republic, the, i88 
 
 Immigration, Chinese, 241, 242 ; 
 speech upon, delivered in the 
 United States Senate, 318-26 
 
 Incorporating, mania for, 195 
 
 Independent Order of Odd Fellows, 
 anniversary address, 7-22 ; organi- 
 zation of, in Baltimore, in 1819, 16 
 
 Industries, revolution in, caused by the 
 invention of the steam engine, 220 
 
 Inflation of the currency, 285 seq. 
 
 Injustice of import duties for the 
 benefit of private enterprises, 189 
 seq. 
 
 " Innocuous desuetude," 271 
 
 Interest on government bonds, 225, 226 
 
 Irrigation, the importance of, for the 
 welfare of California, 100, loi 
 
 J 
 
 Jackson, General, message vetoing the 
 
 United States Bank bill, in 1832, 
 
 18S, 407 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 223, 407 
 Jessup, Jonathan A., (see Lockwood, 
 
 Rufus A.) 
 Johnston, General A. S., 3 
 Johnson, Reverdy, 407 
 Journals, Mr. Booth's contributions 
 
 to, 443-510 
 y. VV. Chapman, 7"//^ (rebel schooner), 
 
 capture of, 2 
 
 King, Thomas Starr, 3, 260 
 " Knights of the Golden Circle," the 
 plans of, 2 
 
 Labor and capital, 218 seq. 
 Laboring classes, prosperity dependent 
 upon the condition of, 234 
 
 Labor-saving machinery, 349 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 233 
 
 Lands, public, amount of, given to 
 
 the railroads, 1 70 
 Language, the English, 377 
 Lee, Fitzhugh, 212 
 Legal tender of silver coin, speech 
 
 upon, delivered in the United States 
 
 Senate, 275-305 
 Legislative bills, number of, intro- 
 duced during Governor Booth's 
 
 term of office, 132 (note) 
 Lincoln, Abraham, tribute to, 113, 
 
 114, 259 ; death of, 250, 251 ; call 
 
 for troops by, 255 
 Local officers, importance of care in 
 
 the election of, loi, 102 
 Lockwood, Rufus A., sketch of, 475- 
 
 497 
 Lotdsville Courier-yonrnal, The, 265 
 Louvre, Palace of the, 369 
 Luttrell, Mr., 217 
 
 M 
 
 Mcintosh, Sir James, 421 
 Magazines, Mr. Booth's contributions 
 
 to, 443-510 
 Mania for incorporating, 195 
 Manning, Daniel, suggests the stop- 
 ping of the coinage of silver, and 
 the reduction of the tariff, 266 
 Mason and Slidell, seizure of, 272 
 Matter, the mystery of, 352 seq. 
 Mechanics' Institute of San Francisco, 
 address at the opening of the Sixth 
 Industrial Exhibition of, 77-86 
 Metaphysics, a Scotchman's definition 
 
 of, 351 
 Mexico, French troops in, 273 
 Michigan Bluff (Cal.), address at, 6 ; 
 Fourth-of-July oration at, in 1861 
 (full text of), 40-53 
 Milan, cathedral at, 370 
 Military control of elections, 244 
 
INDEX. 
 
 517 
 
 Milton, John, 363 
 
 Mind, the mystery of, 352 seq. ; opera- 
 tions of the, 389 seq. 
 Model constitution proposed for 
 
 France during the Revolution, 219 
 Money, amount of, given by the State 
 
 of California to railroad companies, 
 
 170 
 Moon, the gravitation of, 355 
 Morals and politics, lecture on, 401- 
 
 412 
 Mormons, the, 381, 382 
 Morrison, Colonel, 265 
 Morse, Professor, 406 
 Morton, Senator Oliver P., memorial 
 
 address on life and character of, 
 
 326-30 
 
 N 
 
 Napoleon, Louis, 273, 369 
 
 Nation, the true wealth of the, 407 
 
 National banks, system of circulation 
 of notes of, 228 
 
 National debt of the United States, 
 287 
 
 National notes, redemption of, 278 
 seq. 
 
 Natural features of California, phe- 
 nomenal character of, 233 
 
 Natural issues, speech upon, de- 
 livered at San Francisco, 245-59 
 
 Nevada City (Cal.), Fourth-of-July 
 oration at, 89-95 
 
 New Almaden mine, 189 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 303 
 
 New York Central Railroad Company, 
 the, 161 
 
 New York City, dependence of the 
 Democratic party upon, for any 
 national success, 266 
 
 Nineteenth century, wonderful indus- 
 trial progress made during, 77 seq. 
 
 North, Lord, 429, 430 
 
 O 
 
 Odd Fellows, anniversary address, 7- 
 22 ; organization of, in Baltimore, 
 in 1819, 16 
 
 Officers, local, importance of care in 
 the election of, loi, 102 
 
 Oration at commencement of the Col- 
 lege of California, 66-77 
 
 "Our Railroads — a Problem," speech 
 delivered in San Francisco, 183-g 
 
 Over-production, 294, 295 
 
 Oxford, Lord, 414-6, 424, 439 
 
 Pacific coast, circulation of gold on, 
 
 275 
 
 Pacific Mail Steamship Company, 206 
 
 Pacific Railroad Acts, speech on, in 
 the United States Senate, 136 
 
 Pacific railroads, extracts from speech 
 on, in the United State Senate, 137 
 
 Page, Mr., 218 
 
 Palace of the Louvre, 369 
 
 Palmer, Governor, 194 
 
 Paper money, 282 
 
 Papyrus, 377 
 
 Patriotic action of Southern leaders 
 in Congress, 217 
 
 Pendleton, Mr., 217, 225 
 
 Pennsylvania Central Railroad Com- 
 pany, the, 161 
 
 People's Independent Party, speech in 
 support of, delivered in San Fran- 
 cisco, 199-213 
 
 " Perfectionists" (religious sect), 263 
 
 Perkins, George C, 230 seq. 
 
 Phelps, Mr. , 209 
 
 Phenomenal natural features of Cali- 
 fornia, 233 
 
 Physical courage, 247 
 
 Pitt, William (Lord Chatham), 414, 
 416, 424, 439 
 
 Pitt, William, the younger, 431 seq. 
 
 Pitts, Hannah, xiii. 
 
5i8 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Politics, comparison of American and 
 European theories of, 26 ; indiffer- 
 ence of the public in regard to, 402 ; 
 patriotism in, 403 seq. 
 Politics and Morals, lecture on, 401- 
 
 412 
 Population of California in 1861, i 
 Power of railroads and other large 
 
 corporations, 161 seq. 
 Present hour, the, lecture on, 369-85 
 Presidential campaign speech, de- 
 livered in San Francisco, in 1872, 
 
 144-54 
 
 Printing, 377 
 
 Private property, the sacredness of, 
 187 
 
 Proclamation of Emancipation, 257, 
 25S 
 
 Property, private, sacredness of, 187 
 
 Prosperity dependent upon the con- 
 dition of the laboring classes, 234 
 
 Protection and free trade, 266 seq. 
 
 Public debt, reduction of, 226 
 
 Public lands, amount of, given to rail- 
 road companies, 170 
 
 Public schools, comparison of cost of 
 maintenance of, in California and 
 Connecticut, 2 10 
 
 Public ser\-ices of Newton Booth, his 
 personal reference to, 140 
 
 Puritans, the, 375 
 
 Quicksilver, injustice of import duty 
 upon, 189 
 
 Railroad problem in American poli- 
 tics, the, address upon, delivered in 
 San Francisco, 154-74 
 
 Railroads in the United States, funded 
 debt of, in 1873, 103 
 
 Railroads, changes in methods and 
 principles of transportation caused 
 
 by, 159 seq. ; government help in 
 construction of, 160; the New York 
 Central Railroad Company, 161 ; 
 the Pennsylvania Central, 161 ; 
 power of, 167 ; money given to, by 
 the State of California, 170 ; amount 
 of public lands given to, 170 ; rapid 
 growth of, 184 ; arguments against 
 State aid of, 186 seq. ; decision of 
 the Supreme Court of the United 
 States in regard to the rates charged 
 by, 239 
 
 Randall, S. J., 265, 266 
 
 Raphael, 363 
 
 Rebel generals in Congress, 212 
 
 Rebellion, the, credit due to the Re- 
 publican party for the suppression 
 of, 247 ; the war of, 253-8 
 
 Red Blui? Lodge, No. 76, I. O. O. F., 
 of California, anniversary address 
 before, 7-22 
 
 Reduction of the public debt, 226 
 
 Republic, the ideal, 188 
 
 Republican party, credit due to, for 
 the suppression of the Rebellion, 
 
 247 
 Republican^ 7"//^, letter to, on currency, 
 
 305-7 ; further letter upon the same 
 
 subject, 308-18 
 Revenue system of the United States, 
 
 speech upon, 189-99 ; artificial and 
 
 complicated character of, 193 
 Rhodes, A. L., 232 
 
 Sacramento, address at, before the 
 national encampment of the soldiers 
 of the Grand Army, 7 ; speech upon 
 the " Debit and Credit of the War" 
 delivered at (full text of), 53-66 ; 
 Decoration-Day oration delivered 
 at, 107-16 ; Fourth-of-July oration 
 at, 1 16-21 ; Newton Booth's speech 
 at the ceremony of breaking ground 
 
nXDEX. 
 
 519 
 
 for the Central Pacific Railroad, 
 123 ; speech upon the currency ques- 
 tion delivered at, 213-230 ; State 
 campaign speech delivered at, 260- 
 
 74 
 
 Sacramento Union, The, its work in 
 behalf of the Union, 3 ; fight of, 
 against the Central Pacific Railroad 
 Company, 130 ; failure of, 130 ; 
 Newton Booth's tribute to, 131 
 
 Sacredness of private property, 187 
 
 San Francisco, Sixth Industrial Ex- 
 hibition of the Mechanics' Institute 
 at, address at the opening of, 77- 
 86 ; Presidential campaign speech 
 delivered in 1872, in opposition to 
 the election of Horace Greeley, 144- 
 54 ; address upon " The Railroad 
 Problem in American Politics," 
 delivered at, 154-74; campaign 
 speech in support of the candidacy 
 of George C. Perkins, delivered at, 
 230-45 ; speech upon national issues, 
 delivered at, 245-59 
 
 Sa7i Francisco Bulletin, The, its work 
 in behalf of the Union, 3 
 
 San Francisco Call, The, its work in 
 behalf of the Union, 3 
 
 San Jose, address before the California 
 "State Grange," delivered at, 96- 
 107 
 
 Sargent, Senator, 218 
 
 Schools, public, comparison of cost of 
 maintenance of, in California and 
 Connecticut, 210 
 
 Science, slow growth of, 339 
 
 Scott, General, 152 
 
 Scott, Thomas A., 185 
 
 Selwyn, George, 421 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 362, 363 
 
 Shelley, Percy B., 368 
 
 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 440, 441 
 
 Shields, General James, 3 
 
 Silver and greenbacks, 276 seq. 
 
 Silver coin as legal tender, speech 
 
 upon, delivered in the United 
 States Senate, 275-305 
 
 Silver coinage of the United States 
 mints from 1821 to 1873, 2S9 
 
 Silver dollar, weight of, 281 
 
 Silver question, the, Senator Booth's 
 attitude towards, 138, 139 
 
 Sixth Industrial Exhibition of the 
 Mechanics' Institute in San Fran- 
 cisco, address at the opening of, 
 77-86 
 
 Slaves, emancipation of, 250 
 
 Sloane, Sir Hans, 397 
 
 Smith, Adam, 309 
 
 Socialism, 270 
 
 Socrates, 361 
 
 Somerset, Edward, Marquis of Wor- 
 cester, 346 
 
 Sonoquini, Carlo, 411 
 
 Sound, movement of, 354 
 
 Southern leaders, patriotic action of, 
 in Congress, 217 
 
 Southern States, dependence of the 
 Democratic party upon, for any 
 national success, 266 
 
 Speaker of the House of Representa- 
 tives, power of, 265 
 
 Special grants to corporations, 23S 
 
 Spiritual, the, lecture on, 351-369 
 
 Spiritual power, manifestation of, 366 
 
 Springfield Republican, the, 198 
 
 Standing army, no need of in the 
 United States, 222 
 
 Stanley, Edward, 3 
 
 "State Grange" of California, ad- 
 dress before at San Jose, 96-107 
 
 Steam, first authentic account of ap- 
 plication of as a mechanical power, 
 345 ; lectures on, 338-51 
 
 Steam engine, powerful revolution in 
 industries caused by the invention 
 of, 220, 347 seq. 
 
 Stockton (Cal.) oration at, 5 ; Fourth- 
 of-July oration at, in i860 (full text 
 of), 23-36 ; speech upon the United 
 
520 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 States revenue system delivered at, 
 189 
 
 Stockton and Visalia Railroad, ig6 
 
 Subsidies, arguments against payment 
 of in aid of railroads, 186 seq, 231, 
 232 
 
 Sumner, Charles, 211 
 
 Sumner, General, 3 
 
 Sun, the, gravitation of, 355 
 
 Superstition, hold of upon the popu- 
 lar mind, 381 
 
 Supreme Court of the United States, 
 decision of in regard to rates 
 charged by railroads, 23S 
 
 Swedenborg, Emanuel, lecture on, 
 385-400 ; birth and parentage, 385, 
 386 ; Emerson's estimate of, 386, 
 387 ; cause of his mania, 387 ; his 
 "divine illuminations," 387, 388; 
 his clairvoyant powers, 388 ; his 
 own theory and explanation of his 
 doctrine, 393 seq. ; his conception of 
 heaven and hell, 396, 397 ; extract 
 from the Arcana, 397, 398 ; dis- 
 tinguishing feature of his philoso- 
 phy, 398 
 
 Swedenborgianism, 393 seq. 
 
 Swift, Dean, 303, 401 
 
 Swift, Mr., candidate for governor of 
 California, 1886, 261, 268, 269 
 
 Talent and genius, the dividing line 
 
 between, 391 
 Taxation, the burden of, 294 
 Taxes should be levied only for the 
 
 necessary purposes of government, 
 
 187 
 Telegraph, the, 379 
 " The Present Hour," lecture on, 
 
 369-85 
 
 Thought, the mystery of, 360 ; im- 
 mortality of, 365 
 
 Thurlow, Lord, 435 
 
 Tories, comparison of the Confederacy 
 with, 246 
 
 Tracy, F. P., 3 
 
 Trade-dollar, 275 
 
 Transportation, changes in methods 
 and principles of, caused by rail- 
 roads, 159 seq. 
 
 Treaty with Hawaii (1875), extract 
 from Senator Booth's speech in 
 opposition to, 135 
 
 Trent affair, the, 272 
 
 True wealth of the nation, the, 407 
 
 Twiggs, General, 254 
 
 U 
 
 Union Club of Sacramento, Cal., re- 
 marks before, 36-40 
 
 United States, the, claims to honor 
 and regard of, 90 seq. ; funded debt 
 of, in 1873, 103 ; funded debt of 
 railroads in 1873, 103 ; opportunities 
 for education in, 224 ; circulating 
 medium of, 275 ; debt of, 287 
 
 United States Bank bill in 1832, veto 
 of by General Jackson, 188 
 
 United States Bank, capital stock of, 
 in 1832, 188 
 
 United States government, amount of 
 annual payment by, on the bonds 
 of the Central Pacific Railroad 
 Company, 170 ; not self-supporting, 
 but dependent upon taxation, 192, 
 193 ; financial responsibility of, 228 
 
 United States revenue system, speech 
 upon, 189-99 I artificial and com- 
 plicated character of, 193 
 
 United States Senate, Newton 
 Booth's services in, 134 seq. 
 
 V 
 
 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 185, 204 
 Virginia (Nev.) Enterprise, the, its 
 work in behalf of the Union, 3 
 
INDEX. 
 
 521 
 
 W 
 
 Walpole, Horace, 424 
 
 War, Debit and Credit of the, speech 
 upon, delivered at Sacramento, 53- 
 66 
 
 War as a factor in the centralization 
 of power, 156 
 
 War of 1812, the, 273 
 
 War of the Rebellion, 253-58 ; work 
 of the Republican party in connec- 
 tion with, 247 
 
 Washington, George, 407 
 
 Water, 356 
 
 Watson, H. C, 497-507 
 
 Watt, James, 346 
 
 Wealth, the true wealth of a nation, 407 
 
 Wealth of corporations a source of 
 danger to the country, 157 
 
 Webster, Daniel, 361 
 
 Weight of gold and silver dollars, 281 
 
 Welsh, John, 16 
 
 Wesley, John, 263 
 
 Western Pacific Railroad, division of 
 the Central Pacific, 195 ; enormous 
 grants of land to, 196 
 
 Wigginton, Mr., 217 
 
 Wildey, Thomas, 16 
 
 Wilkes, Commodore, 272 
 
 Wilkes, Mr., 425, 426 
 
 Williams, William, Governor Booth's 
 reasons for commuting death sen- 
 tence of, 132 
 
 Wood, Fernando, 227 
 
 Wool, duty on, 264 
 
 Worcester, Edward Somerset, Marquis 
 of, 346