T. De Witt Talmage Part 11

The new confidence that this wonderful Cedar of Lebanon put into the work of contemporary Christian labourers in the vineyard of sacred meaning is our eternal inheritance of his spirit. He left us his confidence.

When you destroy the confidence of man in man, you destroy society. The prevailing idea in American life was of a different character. National and civic affairs were full of plans to pull down, to make room for new builders. That was the trouble. There were more builders than there was s.p.a.ce or need to build. A little repairing of old standards would have been better than tearing those we still remembered to pieces, merely to give others something to do.

All this led to the betrayal of man by man--to bribery. It was not of much use for the pulpit to point it out. Men adopted bribery as a means to business activity. It was of no use to recall the brilliant moments of character in history, men would not read them. Their ancestry was a back number, the deeds of their ancestors mere old-fas.h.i.+oned narrowness of business. What if a member of the American Congress, Joseph Reed, during the American Revolution did refuse the 10,000 guineas offered by the foreign commissioners to betray the colonies? What if he did say "Gentlemen, I am a very poor man, but tell your King he is not rich enough to buy me"? The more fool he, not to appreciate his opportunities, not to take advantage of the momentary enterprise of his betters! A bribe offered became a compliment, and a bribe negotiated was a good day's work. I had not much faith in the people who went about bragging how much they could get if they sold out. I refused to believe the sentiment of men who declared that every man had his price.

Old-fas.h.i.+oned honesty was not the cure either, because old-fas.h.i.+oned honesty, according to history, was not wholly disinterested. There never was a monopoly of righteousness in the world, though there was a coin of fair exchange between men who were intelligent enough to perceive its values, in which there was no alloy of bribery. Bribery was written, however, all over the first chapters of English, Irish, French, German, and American politics; but it was high time that, in America, we had a Court House or a City Hall, or a jail, or a post office, or a railroad, that did not involve a political job. At some time in their lives, every man and woman may be tempted to do wrong for compensation. It may be a bribe of position that is offered instead of money; but it was easy to foresee, in 1886, that there was a time coming when the most secret transaction of private and public life would come up for public scrutiny. Those of us who gave this warning were under suspicion of being harmless lunatics.

Necessarily, the dishonest transactions of the bosses led to discontent among the labouring cla.s.ses, and a railroad strike came, and went, in the winter of 1886. Its successful adjustment was a credit to capital and labour, to our police competency, and to general munic.i.p.al common-sense. In Chicago and St. Louis, this strike lasted several days; in Brooklyn, it was settled in a few hours. The deliverance left us facing the problem whether the differences between capital and labour in America would ever be settled. I was convinced that it could never be accomplished by the law of supply and demand, although we were constantly told so. It was a law that had done nothing to settle the feuds of past ages. The fact was that supply and demand had gone into partners.h.i.+p, proposing to swindle the earth. It is a diabolic law which will have to stand aside for a greater law of love, of co-operation, and of kindness. The establishment of a labour exchange, in Brooklyn in 1886, where labourers and capitalists could meet and prepare their plans, was a step in that direction.

I said to a very wealthy man, who employed thousands of men in his establishments in different cities:

"Have you had many strikes?"

"Never had a strike; I never will have one," he said.

"How do you avoid them?" I asked.

"When prices go up or down, I call my men together in all my establishments. In ease of increased prosperity I range them around me in the warehouses at the noon hour, and I say, 'Boys, I am making money, more than usual, and I feel that you ought to share my success; I shall add five, or ten, or twenty per cent. to your wages.' Times change. I must sell my goods at a low price, or not sell them at all. Then I say to them, 'Boys, I am losing money, and I must either stop altogether or run on half-time, or do with less hands. I thought I would call you together and ask your advice.' There may be a halt for a minute or two, and then one of the men will step up and say, 'Boss, you have been good to us; we have got to sympathise with you. I don't know how the others feel, but I propose we take off 20 per cent. from our wages, and when times get better, you can raise us,' and the rest agree."

That was the law of kindness.

Many of the best friends I had were American capitalists, and I said to them always, "You share with your employees in your prosperity, and they will share with you in your adversity."

The rich man of America was not in need of conversion, for, in 1886, he had not become a monopolist as yet. He had acc.u.mulated fortunes by industry and hard work, and he was an energetic builder of national enterprise and civic pride, but his coffers were being drained by an increasing social extravagance that was beyond the requirements of happiness of home.

THE TENTH MILESTONE

1886

Society life in the big cities of America in 1886 had become a strange nightmare of extravagance and late hours. It was developing a queer race of people. Temporarily, the Lenten season stopped the rustle and flash of toilettes, chained the dancers, and put away the tempting chalice of social excitement. When Lent came in the society of the big cities of America was an exhausted mult.i.tude. It seemed to me as though two or three winters of germans and cotillions would be enough to ruin the best of health. The victims of these strange exhaustions were countless. No man or woman could endure the wear and tear of social life in America without sickness and depletion of health. The demands were at war with the natural laws of the human race.

Even the hour set for the average a.s.sembling of a "society event" in 1886 was an outrage. Once it was eight o'clock at night, soon it was adjourned to nine-thirty, and then to ten, and there were threats that it would soon be eleven. A gentleman wrote me this way for advice about his social burden:

"What shall I do? We have many friends, and I am invited out perpetually. I am on a salary in a large business house in New York. I am obliged to arise in the morning at seven o'clock, but I cannot get home from those parties till one in the morning. The late supper and the excitement leave me sleepless. I must either give up society or give up business, which is my living. My wife is not willing that I should give up society, because she is very popular. My health is breaking down.

What shall I do?"

It was not the idle cla.s.s that wasted their nights at these parties; it was the business men dragged into the fas.h.i.+ons and foibles of the idle, which made that strange and unique thing we call society in America.

I should have replied to that man that his wife was a fool. If she were willing to sacrifice his health, and with it her support, for the greeting and applause of these midnight functions, I pitied him. Let him lose his health, his business, and his home, and no one would want to invite him anywhere. All the diamond-backed terrapins at fifty dollars a dozen which he might be invited to enjoy after that would do him no harm. Society would drop him so suddenly that it would knock the breath out of him. The recipe for a man in this predicament, a man tired of life, and who desired to get out of it without the reputation of a suicide, was very simple. He only had to take chicken salad regularly at midnight, in large quant.i.ties, and to wash it down with b.u.mpers of wine, reaching his pillow about 2 a.m. If the third winter of this did not bring his obituary, it would be because that man was proof against that which had slain a host larger than any other that fell on any battle-field of the ages. The Scandinavian warriors believed that in the next world they would sit in the Hall of Odin, and drink wine from the skulls of their enemies. But society, by its requirements of late hours and conviviality, demanded that a man should drink out of his own skull, having rendered it brainless first. I had great admiration for the suavities and graces of life, but it is beyond any human capacity to endure what society imposes upon many in America. Drinking other people's health to the disadvantage of one's own health is a poor courtesy at best. Our entertainments grew more and more extravagant, more and more demoralising. I wondered if our society was not swinging around to become akin to the worst days of Roman society. The princely banquet-rooms of the Romans had revolving ceilings representing the firmament; fict.i.tious clouds rained perfumed essences upon the guests, who were seated on gold benches, at tables made of ivory and tortoise-sh.e.l.l. Each course of food, as it was brought into the banquet room, was preceded by flutes and trumpets. There was no wise man or woman to stand up from the elaborate banquet tables of American society at this time and cry "Halt!" It might have been done in Was.h.i.+ngton, or in New York, or in Brooklyn, but it was not.

The way American society was moving in 1886 was the way to death. The great majority, the major key in the weird symphony of American life, was not of society.

We had no ma.s.ses really, although we borrowed the term from Europe and used it busily to describe our working people, who were ma.s.sive enough as a body of men, but they were not the ma.s.ses. Neither were they the mob, which was a term some were fond of using in describing the destruction of property on railroads in the spring of 1886. The labouring men had nothing to do with these injuries. They were done by the desperadoes who lurked in all big cities. I made a Western trip during this strike, and I found the labouring men quiet, peaceful, but idle. The depots were filled with them, the streets were filled with them, but they were in suspense, and it lasted twenty-five days. Then followed the darkness and squalor--less bread, less comfort, less civilisation of heart and mind. It was hard on the women and children.

Senator Manderson, the son of my old friend in Philadelphia, introduced a bill into the United States Senate for the arbitration of strikes. It proposed a national board of mediation between capital and labour.

Jay Gould was the most abused of men just then. He was denounced by both contestants in this American conflict most uselessly. The knights of Labour came in for an equal amount of abuse. We were excited and could not reason. The men had just as much right to band together for mutual benefit as Jay Gould had a right to get rich. It was believed by many that Mr. Gould made his fortune out of the labouring cla.s.ses. Mr. Gould made it out of the capitalists. His regular diet was a capitalist per diem, not a poor man--capitalist stewed, broiled, roasted, panned, fricaseed, devilled, on the half sh.e.l.l. He was personally, as I knew him, a man of such kindness that he would not hurt a fly, but he played ten pins on Wall Street. A great many adventurers went there to play with him, and if their ball rolled down the side of the financial alley while he made a ten strike or two or three spares, the fellows who were beaten howled. That was about all there really was in the denunciation of Jay Gould.

I couldn't help thinking sometimes, when the United States seemed to change its smile of prosperity to a sudden smile of anger or petulance, that we were a spoiled nation, too much pampered by divine blessings.

If we had not been our own rulers, but had been ruled--what would America have been then? We were like Ireland crying for liberty and abusing liberty the more we got of it.

Mr. Gladstone's policy of Home Rule for Ireland, announced in April, 1886, proposed an Irish Parliament and the Viceroy. It should remain, however, a part of England. I fully believed then that Ireland would have Home Rule some day, and in another century I believed that Ireland would stand to England as the United States stands to England, a friendly and neighbouring power. I believed that Ireland would some day write her own Declaration of Independence. Liberty, the fundamental instinct of the most primitive living thing, would be the world's everlasting conflict.

Our exclusion of the Chinese, which came up in the spring of 1886, when an Amba.s.sador from China was roughly handled in San Francisco, was a disgrace to our own instincts of liberty. A great many people did not want them because they did not like the way they dressed. They objected to the Chinaman's queue. George Was.h.i.+ngton wore one, so did Benjamin Franklin and John Hanc.o.c.k. The Chinese dress was not worse than some American clothes I have seen. Some may remember the crinoline monstrosities of '65, as I do--the coal-scuttle bonnets, the silver knee-buckles! The headgear of the fair s.e.x has never ceased to be a mystery and a shock during all my lifetime. I remember being asked by a lady-reporter in Brooklyn if I thought ladies should remove their hats in the theatre, and I told her to tell them to keep them on, because in obstructing the stage they were accomplis.h.i.+ng something worth while. Any fine afternoon the spring fas.h.i.+ons of 1886, displayed in Madison Square between two and four o'clock, were absurdities of costume that eclipsed anything then worn by the Chinese.

The Joss House of the Chinese was ent.i.tled to as much respect in the United States, under the const.i.tution, as the Roman Catholic church, or the Quaker Meeting house, or any other religious temple. A new path was made for the Chinese into America via Mexico, when 600,000 were to be imported for work on Mexican territory. In the discussion it aroused it was urged that Mexico ought to be blocked because the Chinese would not spend their money in America. In one year, in San Francisco, the Chinese paid $2,400,000 in rent for residences and warehouses. Our higher civilisation was already threatened with that style of man who spends three times more money than he makes, and yet we did not want the thrifty una.s.suming religious Chinaman to counteract our mania for extravagance. This entire agitation emanated from corrupt politics. The Republican and Democratic parties both wanted the electoral votes of California in the forthcoming Presidential election, and, in order to get that vote, it was necessary to oppose the Chinese. Whenever these Asiatic men obtain equal suffrage in America the Republican party will fondle them, and the Democrats will try to prove that they always had a deep affection for them, and some of the political bosses will go around with an opium pipe sticking out of their pockets and their hair coiled into a suggestion of a queue.

The s.h.i.+p of state was in an awful mess. No sooner was the good man in power than politics struggled to pull him down to make room for the knaves. When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, the _Sentinel_ of Boston wrote the obituary of the American nation. I quote it as a literary sc.r.a.p of the past:

"MONUMENTAL INSCRIPTION--expired yesterday, regretted by all good men, THE FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES, aged 12 years. This Monumental Inscription to the virtues and the services of the deceased is raised by the Sentinel of Boston."

It might have been a recent editorial. Van Buren was always cartooned as a fox or a rat. Horace Greeley told me once that he had not had a sound sleep for fifteen years, and he was finally put to death by American politics. The cartoons of Mr. Blaine and Mr. Cleveland during their election battle, as compared to those of fifty years before, were seraphic as the themes of Raphael. It was not necessary to go so far back for precedent. The game had not changed. The building of our new Raymond Street jail in Brooklyn, in 1886, was a game which the politicians played, called "money, money, who has got the money?"

Suddenly there was an arraignment in the courts. Mr. Jaehne was incarcerated in Sing Sing for bribery. Twenty-five New York aldermen were accused. Nineteen of them were saloon keepers. There was a fearful indifference to the illiteracy of our leaders in 1886. It threatened the national intelligence of the future.

In the rhapsody of May, however, in the resurrection of the superlative beauties of spring, we forgot our human deficiencies. In the first week of lilacs, the Americanised flower of Persia, we aspired to the breadth and height and the heaven of our gardens. The generous lilac, like a great purple sea of loveliness, swept over us in the full tide of spring. It was the forerunner of joy; joy of fish in the brooks, of insects in the air, of cattle in the fields, of wings to the sky.

Suns.h.i.+ne, shaken from the sacred robes of G.o.d! Spring, the spiritual essence of heaven and physical beauty come to earth in many forms--in the rose, in the hawthorn white and scarlet, in the pa.s.sion flower. In this season of transition we hear the murmurings of heaven. There were spring poets in 1886, as there had been in all ages.

Love and marriage came over the country like a divine opiate, inspired, I believe, by that love story in the White House, which culminated on June 2, 1886, in the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland. Never in my knowledge were there so many weddings all over the United States as during the week when this official wedding took place in the White House. The representatives of the foreign Governments in Was.h.i.+ngton were not invited to Mr. Cleveland's wedding. We all hoped that they would not make such fools of themselves as to protest--but they did. They were displeased at the President's omission to invite them. It was always a wish of Mr. Cleveland's to separate the happiness of his private life from that of his public career, so as to protect Mrs. Cleveland from the glare to which he himself was exposed. His wedding was an intimate, private matter to him, and if there is any time in a man's life when he ought to do as he pleases it is when he gets married. It was a remarkable wedding in some respects, remarkable for its love story, for its distinguished character, its American privacy, its independent spirit. The whole country was rapturously happy over it. The foreign ministers who growled might have benefited by the example of Americanism in the affair. Even the reporters, none of whom were invited, were happy over it, and gave a more vivid account of the joyous scene than they could have given had they been present.

The difference in the ages of the President and his beautiful bride was widely discussed. Into the garland of bridal roses let no one ever twist a sprig of night-shade. If 49 would marry 22, if summer is fascinated with spring, whose business is it but their own? Both May and August are old enough to take care of themselves, and their marriage is the most noteworthy moment of their too short season of life. Some day her voice is silenced, and the end of the world has come for him--the morning dead, the night dead, the air dead, the world dead. For his sake, for her sake, do not spoil their radiance with an impious regret. They will endure the thorns of life when they are stronger in each other's love.

That June wedding at the White House was the nucleus of happiness, from which grew a great wave of matrimony. The speed of G.o.d's will was increasing in America. Most of the things managed by divine instinct are characterised by speed--rapid currents, swift lightnings, swift coming and going of lives. In the old-fas.h.i.+oned days a man got a notion that there was sanct.i.ty in tardiness. It was a great mistake. In America we had arrived at that state of mind when we wanted everything fast--first and fast. Fast horses, fast boats, fast runners are all good things for the human race.

The great yacht races of September 7, 1886, in which the "May Flower"

distanced the "Galatea" by two miles and a half, was a spanking race.

Our sporting blood was roused to fighting pitch, and we became more active in every way of outdoor sports. Lawn tennis tournaments were epidemic all over the country. There were good and bad effects from all of them. Those romping sports developed a much finer physical condition in our American women. Lawn tennis and croquet were hardening and beautifying the race. From the English and German women we adopted athletics for our own women. Our girls began to travel more frequently in Europe. It looked as though many of the young ladies who prided themselves upon their bewitching languors and fas.h.i.+onable dreaminess, would be neglected by young men in favour of the more athletic types. It had been decided, in the social channels of our life, that doll babies were not of much use in the struggle, that women must have the capacity and the strength to sweep out a room without fainting; that to make an eatable loaf of bread was more important than the satin cheek or the colour of hair that one strong fever could uproot. I was accused of being ambitious that Americans should have a race of Amazons. I was not.

I did want them to have bodies to fit their great souls. What I did wish to avoid, in this natural transition, was a misdirected use of its advantages. There is dissipation in outdoor life, as well as indoors, and this was to be deplored. I wanted everything American to come out ahead.

In science we were still far behind. The Charleston earthquake in September, 1886, proved this. Our philosophers were disgusted that the ministers and churches down there devoted their time to praying and moralising about the earthquake, when only natural phenomena were the cause. Science had no information or comfort to give, however. The only thing the scientist did was to predict a great tidal wave which would come and destroy all that was left of the previous calamity. Science lied again. The tidal wave did not come; the September rains stopped, and Charleston began to rebuild. That is one of the wonderful things about America; we are not only able to restore our damages, but we have a mania for rebuilding. Our chief fault lies in the fact that we rebuild for profit rather than for beauty of character or moral strength.

There had been a time during my pastorate when Brooklyn promised to be the greatest watering place in America. We were in a fair way of becoming the summer capital of the United States. It was destroyed by the loafers and the dissoluteness of Coney Island. In the autumn of 1886, Brooklyn was more indignant than I had ever seen it before, and I knew it intimately for a quarter of a century. Our trade was damaged, our residences were depreciated, because the gamblers and liquor dealers were in power. Part of the summer people were too busy looking for a sea serpent reported to be in the East River or up the Hudson to observe that a Dragon of Evil was twining about the neck and waist and body of the two great cities by the sea.

In contrast to all this political treachery in the North there developed a peculiar symbol of political sincerity in Tennesee. Two brothers, Robert and Alfred Taylor, were running for Governor of that State--one on the Republican and the other on the Democratic ticket. At night they occupied the same room together. On the same platform they uttered sentiments directly opposite in meaning. And yet, Robert said to a crowd about to hoot his brother Alfred, "When you insult my brother you insult me." This was a symbol of political decency that we needed. One of the great wants of the world, however, was a better example in "high life."

We were shocked by the moral downfall of Sir Charles Dilke in England, by the dissolute conduct of an American official in Mexico, by the dissipations of a Senator who attempted to address the United States Senate in a state of intoxication.

Mr. Cleveland's frequent exercise of the President's right of veto was a hopeful policy in national affairs. The habit of voting away thousands of dollars of other people's money in Congress needed a check. The popular means of accomplis.h.i.+ng this out of the national treasury was in bills introduced by Congressmen for public buildings. Each Congressman wanted to favour the other. The President's veto was the only cure. This prodigality of the National Legislature grew out of an enormous surplus in the Treasury. It was too great a temptation to the law-makers.

$70,000,000 in a pile added to a reserve of $100,000,000 was an infamous lure. I urged that this money should be turned back to the people to whom it belonged. The Government had no more right to it than I had to five dollars of overpay, and yet, by over-taxation, the Government had done the same sort of thing. This money did not belong to the Government, but to the people from whom they had taken it. From private sources in Was.h.i.+ngton I learned that officials were overwhelmed with demands for pensions from first-cla.s.s loafers who had never been of any service to their country before or since the war. They were too lazy or cranky to work for themselves. Grover Cleveland vetoed them by the hundred. We needed the veto power in America as much as the Roman Government had required it in their tribunes. Poland had recognised it.

The Kings of Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands had used it. With the exception of two states in the Union, all the American Governors had the privilege. Because a railroad company buys up a majority of the legislature there is no reason why a Governor should sign the charter.

There was no reason why the President should make appointments upon indiscriminate claims because the ante-room of the White House was filled with applicants, as they were in Cleveland's first administration. My sympathies were with the grand army men against these pretenders.

What a waste of money it seemed to me there was in keeping up useless American emba.s.sies abroad. They had been established when it took six weeks to go to Liverpool and six months to China, so that it was necessary to have representation at the foreign courts. As far back as 1866 it was only half an hour from Was.h.i.+ngton to London, to Berlin, to Madrid. I have seen no crisis in any of these foreign cities which made our amba.s.sadors a necessity there. International business could be managed by the State Department. The foreign emba.s.sy was merely a good excuse to get rid of some competent rival for the Presidency. The cable was enough Minister Plenipotentiary for the United States, and always should be. I regarded it as humiliating to the const.i.tution of the United States that we should be complimenting foreign despotism in this way.

The war rage of Europe was destined to make a market for our bread stuff in 1886, but at the cost of further suffering and disaster. I have no sentimentality about the conflicts of life, because the Bible is a history of battles and hand to hand struggles, but war is no longer needed in the world. War is a system of political greed where men are hired at starvation wages to kill each other. Could there be anything more savage? It is the inoffensive who are killed, while the princ.i.p.als in the quarrel sit snugly at home on throne chairs.

A private letter, I think it was, written during the Crimean war by a sailor to his wife, describing his sensations after having killed a man for the first time, is a unique demonstration of the psychology of the soldier's fate.