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      by the transcriber.




LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

February, 1876.

Vol. XVII, No. 98.




TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
    II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.

  UP THE THAMES.
    CONCLUDING PAPER, by EDWARD C. BRUCE.

  THE POET'S PEN, by F.A. HILLARD.

  SKETCHES OF INDIA.
    II.

  FRA ALOYSIUS, by EMMA LAZARUS.

  A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.

  PROFESSOR AND TEACHER, by JAMES MORGAN HART.

  CONTRASTED MOODS, by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.

  THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, by MRS. E. LYNN LINTON
    CHAPTER XXI. CHANGES.
    CHAPTER XXII. EDGAR HARROWBY.
    CHAPTER XXIII. ON THE MOOR.
    CHAPTER XXIV. THE CHILD FINA.

  LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA, by LADY BARKER.

  ON SANKOTA HEAD, by ETHEL C. GALE.

  AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
    TWO PAPERS.--II, by ROBERT WILSON.

  OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
    A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.
    A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.
    MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES, by R.A.F. PENROSE.

  OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.

  LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
    _Books Received._




ILLUSTRATIONS

  POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.
  THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE THE FIRST
    COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.
  HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000 DOUBLE
    IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.
  THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN AMERICA, AND
    FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.
  THE COTTON GIN.
  GRAIN ELEVATOR.
  INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR.
  PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.
  THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
  WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON.
  MORTON CHURCH.
  MILTON'S PEAR TREE.
  GRAY.
  BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.
  TOMB OF BURKE.
  HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES.
  ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL.
  ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.
  STAINES CHURCH.
  NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.
  HERNE'S OAK.
  EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE.
  QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.
  EARL OF SURREY.
  WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.
  LOCK AT WINDSOR.
  THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.
  ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY.
  HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA.
  GONDS.
  CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.
  THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON.
  BANJARIS.



LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.

FEBRUARY, 1876.





THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.

II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.

[Illustration: POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.]

From showing the world's right to the epoch of '76, and sketching the
progress of the century in its wider aspect, a natural transition is
to the part played in illustrating the period by the people from whose
political birth it dates, and who have made the task of honoring it
their own. They have reached their first resting-place, and pardonably
enjoy the opportunity of looking back at the road they have traversed.
They pause to contemplate its gloomy beginning, the perilous
precipices along which it wound, and the sudden quagmires that often
interrupted it, all now softened by distance and by the consciousness
of success. Opening with a forest-path, it has broadened and
brightened into a highway of nations.

So numerous and various were the influences, formative and impellent,
which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point
of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its
proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp
and clear, and the conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event
should have come when it did, and not before or after, is as obvious
as any of history's predictions after the fact. Looking through the
glasses of to-day, we find it hard to realize that the Continental
Congress renewed its expressions of loyalty to the king three weeks
after the battle of Bunker Hill, so distinct before us rises the
completed and symmetrical edifice of separation ready for its
capstone, from its foundations growing steadily through the past.

Thirteen years--one for each State--were occupied in the topping-off.
The Seven Years' War, that created the new central power of modern
Europe, had a great deal to do with creating the new American power.
It taught the colonies their strength, gave them several thousand
native soldiers, and sent them from over the water the material,
some of it completely wrought, for more in the German immigration
consequent upon it. Out of it grew the obnoxious enactments that
brought on the end. So closely simultaneous were these with the king's
proclamation of October 7, 1763, prohibiting all his subjects "from
making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession of
any of the lands, beyond the sources of any of the rivers which fall
into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or north-west," as to support
the suspicion that the British ministry had a premonitory sense of the
coming struggle, and meant to prepare for it by checking the expansion
of the colonies. The pressure applied to front and rear was part of
one and the same movement; and is incompatible with the accepted
view that neither cabinet nor Parliament anticipated, in the first
instance, any American opposition to the Stamp Act and the system of
legislation to which it was the opening wedge. The England of that day
proposed to rule America after much the same fashion with Ireland,
the Alleghanies presenting themselves very conveniently for an
Indian Pale. This line of policy was in harmony with the ideas then
predominant in England, and was fully understood by the colonists.
They could not possibly have been blind to it, in view of the
continuous and repeated claims of absolute legislative supremacy
formally put forth, from the bill to that effect passed coincidently
with the repeal of the Stamp Act down to the alterations made in the
Massachusetts charter in 1774; the latter proceeding being in close
harmony, both in time and motive, with the extension of the province
of Quebec to the Ohio--one of the very rare evidences of sagacity and
foresight discernible in the course of the ministry; for, while it did
not avail to dam the westward flood, it certainly contributed, with
other concessions made at the same time to the Canadians, to save the
St. Lawrence to the Crown.

As apropos to this point, we transcribe from the original
manuscript, written in the round, clear, unhesitating but steady hand
characteristic of all Washington's letters, the following to James
Wood of Winchester, afterward governor of Virginia, but then little
more than a stripling:

    "MOUNT VERNON, Feb'y 20th, 1774.

    "DEAR SIR: I have to thank you, for your obliging acc't of
    your trip down the Mississippi, contained in a Letter of the
    18th of Octob'r from Winchester--the other Letter, therein
    refer'd to, I have never yet receiv'd, nor did this come
    to hand till some time in November, as I was returning from
    Williamsburg.

    "The contradictory acc'ts given of the Lands upon the
    Mississippi are really astonishing--some speak of the Country
    as a terrestrial Paradise, whilst others represent it as
    scarce fit for anything but Slaves and Brutes. I am well
    satisfied, however, from your description of it, that I have
    no cause to regret my disappointment:--The acc't of Lord
    Hillsborough's sentiments of the Proclamation of 1763, I can
    view in no other light than as one, among many other proofs,
    of his Lordship's malignant disposition towards us poor
    Americans, formed equally in malice, absurdity, and error; as
    it would have puzzled this noble Peer, I am persuaded, to have
    assigned any plausible reason in support of this opinion.

    "As I do not know but I may shortly see you in Frederick, and
    assuredly shall before the Assembly, I shall add no more than
    that, it will always give me pleasure to see you at this place
    whenever it is convenient to you, and that with compliments
    to your good Mother I remain, D'r Sir, Y'r most Obed't H'ble
    Serv't,

    "G'o WASHINGTON."

[Illustration: THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE
THE FIRST COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.]

This private note, discussing casually and curtly the great river
of the West, and the minister who endeavored to make it a _flumen
clausum_ to the colonists, nearly equidistant in date between the
Boston Tea-party and the meeting of the Assembly which called the
first Continental Congress, has some public interest. The West
always possessed a peculiar attraction for Washington. He explored
it personally and through others, and lost no occasion of procuring
detailed information in regard to its capabilities. He acquired large
bodies of land along the Ohio at different points, from its affluents
at the foot of the Alleghany to the Great Kanawha and below. Now we
see him gazing farther, over the yet unreddened battle-grounds of
Boone and Lewis, to the magnificent province France and Spain were
carefully holding in joint trusteeship for the infant state he was to
nurse. The representative in the provincial legislature of a frontier
county stretching from the Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him
inspired, as he looked around from his post on the vertebral range of
the continent, with "something of prophetic strain." If so, he was
not long to have leisure for indulging it. Within eighteen months his
life's work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore. The Dark and
Bloody Ground must wait. For its tillage other guess implements than
the plough were preparing--the same that beckoned him to Cambridge and
the new century.

The slender driblet of population which at this juncture flowed
toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of Spain to get a
home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like indispensables of temperate
extraction for her broad tropical empire. A newspaper of August 20,
1773 gives news from New York of the arrival at that port of "the
sloop Mississippi, Capt. Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military
Adventurers from the Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th
inst." They had "laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez,"
where lands were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals
numbering "above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio
from Virginia and the Carolinas." The Connecticut men doubtless came
back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial cognomen;
and to aid them in that they were met by Transatlantic recruits in
unusual force. The same journal mentions the arrival at Philadelphia
of 1050 passengers in two ships from Londonderry; this valuable
infusion of Scotch-Irish brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being
farther supplemented by three hundred passengers and servants in the
ship Walworth from the same port for South Carolina. The cash value to
the country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less circuitous
computation then than now; many of them being indentured for a term
of years at an annual rate that left a very fair sum for interest and
sinking fund on the one thousand dollars it is the practice of our
political economist of to-day to clap on each head that files
into Castle Garden. The German came with the Celt in almost equal
force--enough to more than balance their countrymen under Donop,
Riedesel and Knyphausen. The attention drawn to the colonies by the
ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for the
contest.

But with all these accessions in the nick of time, two millions and
a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for stocking a virgin farm of
fifteen hundred miles square, to say nothing of its future police and
external defence against the wolves of the deep. It barely equaled the
original population, between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, who
were, by general consent, too few to be counted or treated as owners
of the land. It fell far short of the numbers that had constituted,
two centuries earlier, the European republic from which our federation
borrowed its name. The task, too, of the occidental United States
was double. Instead of being condensed into a small, wealthy and
defensible territory, they had at once to win their independence
from a maritime power stronger than Spain, and to redeem from utter
crudeness and turn into food, clothing and the then recognized
appliances of civilized life the wilderness thus secured. The result
could not vary nor be doubted; but that the struggle, in war and in
peace, must be slow and wearing, was quite as certain. It is dreary to
look back upon its commencement now, and upon the earlier decades
of its progress; and we cannot wonder that those who had it to look
forward to half shrank from it. Among them there may have been a
handful who could scan the unshaped wilderness as the sculptor does
his block, and body forth in imagination the glory hidden within. That
which these may have faintly imagined stands before us palpable if not
yet perfected, the amorphous veil of the shapely figure hewn away,
and the long toil of drill and chisel only in too much danger of being
forgotten.

Population, the most convenient gauge of national strength and
progress, is far from being a universally reliable one. We shall find
sometimes as wide a difference between two given millions as between
two given individuals. Either may grow without doing much else. They
may direct their energies to different fields. Compared with the
United States, France and Germany, for example, have advanced but
little in population. They have, however, done wonders for themselves
and the world by activities which we have, in comparison, neglected.
The old city of London gains in wealth as it loses in inhabitants.

[Illustration: HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000
DOUBLE IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.]

Yet success in the multiplication of souls within their own
borders--depopulate as they may elsewhere--is eagerly coveted and
regularly measured by all the nations. Since 1790, when we set them
the example, they have one by one adopted the rule of numbering heads
every five, six or ten years, recognizing latterly as well, more and
more, the importance of numbering other things, until men, women and
children have come to be embedded in a medley of steam-engines,
pigs, newspapers, schools, churches and bolts of calico. For twenty
centuries this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete
practice, until revived by the framers of the American Constitution
and made a vital part of that instrument. The right of the most--and
not of the richest, the best, the bravest, the cleverest, or the
oldest in blood--to rule being formally recognized and set down on
paper, it became necessary to ascertain at stated intervals who were
the most. The lords of the soil, instead of being inducted into power
on the death of their parents with great pother of ointment, Te Deum,
heraldry, drum and trumpet, were chosen every ten years by a corps of
humble knights of the pencil and schedule.

To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and complication of
whose toil has been a labor of love with each decennial Congress, we
owe the knowledge that eighty years, out of the hundred, brought the
people of the Union up from a tally of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371
in 1870, and that down to the beginning of the last decade the rate of
increment adhered closely to 35 per cent. On that basis of growth the
latest return falls nearly four millions short. One of the causes of
this is "too obvious" (and too disagreeable) "to mention;" but it
is inadequate. The sharp demarcation of the western frontier by the
grasshopper and the hygrometer is another, which will continue to
operate until, by irrigation, tree-planting or some other device, a
new climate can be manufactured for the Plains. The teeming West, that
of old needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh with a harvest,
has disappeared. At least what is left of it has lost the power of
suction that was wont to reach across the ocean, pull Ballys and Dorfs
up by the roots and transplant them bodily to the Muskingum and
the Des Moines. A third cause, operating more especially within
the current decade, is attributable to another mode in which that
attractive power has been exerted--the absorption from the European
purse for the construction of railways of seven or eight times as much
as the thirty-five millions in specie it took to fight through the
Revolutionary war. For a while, Hans came with his thalers, but they
outfooted him--"fast and faster" behind came "unmerciful disaster,"
and he was fain to turn his back on the land of promise and promises.
Similar set-backs, however, are interspersed through our previous
history, and the influence of the last one may be over-rated.

In truth, the Old World's fund of humanity is not sufficiently ample
to keep up the pace; and the rate of natural increase is no longer
what it was when the country was all new, and cornfield and nursery
vied in fecundity. That the former source of augmentation is gaining
in proportion upon the latter is apparent from the last three returns.
The ratio of foreign-born inhabitants to the aggregate in 1850 was
9.68 per cent. in 1860, 13.16, and in 1870, 14.44. In the last-named
year, moreover, 10,892,015, or 28 per cent. of the entire population,
white and black, are credited with foreign parentage on one or both
sides. Excluding the  element, ranked as all native, this
proportion rises to 32 per cent.

Judged by the test of language, three-fifths of those who are of
foreign birth disappear from the roll of foreigners, 3,119,705 out
of 5,567,229 having come from the British Isles and British America.
Germany, including Bohemia, Holland and Switzerland, sums up
1,883,285; Scandinavia, 241,685; and France and Belgium, 128,955. The
Celtic influx from Ireland, and the Teutonic and Norse together, form
two currents of almost identical volume. Compared with either,
the contribution of the Latin or the Romance races sinks into
insignificance--an insignificance, however, that shows itself chiefly
in numbers, the traces of their character and influence being,
relatively to their numerical strength, marked. The immigrants from
Northern and Southern Europe have a disposition, in choosing their
new homes, to follow latitude, or rather the isotherms; the North-men
skirting the Canadian frontier and grouping themselves on the coldest
side of Lake Michigan, while the Italians, Spaniards and French drift
toward the Gulf States. The Irish and Germans are more cosmopolitan,
each in a like degree. They disperse with less regard to climate or
surroundings, and are more rapidly and imperceptibly absorbed and
blended, thus promoting rather than marring the homogeneity of the
American people. The Germans are, however, more prone to colonizing
than the Irish--a circumstance due in great measure to their differing
in language from the mass of their new neighbors. This cause of
isolation is gradually losing its weight, the recognition of the
German tongue by State legislatures, municipalities, etc. being less
common than formerly, notwithstanding the immense immigratior so
calculated to extend it.

While assimilation has been growing more complete, and a fixed
resultant becoming more discernible, the ingredients of this ethnic
medley do not seem to have materially varied in their proportions
since the beginning of the century. They present a tolerably close
parallel to the like process in Northern France, where Celt and Teuton
combined in nearly equal numbers, with, as in our case, a limited
local infusion of the Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical,
the French lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable
traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance between
impulse and conservatism has never been, in this country, long or
seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound now as a hundred
years ago. In the discussions of the twenty years which embrace our
Revolutionary period we find abundance of theory, but they were never
carried by abstractions out of sight of the practical. Our publicists
were not misled by convictions of the "infinite perfectibility of
the human mind," the motive proclaimed by Condorcet, writing in sweet
obliviousness of the guillotine, as explaining "how much more pure,
accurate and profound are the principles upon which the constitution
and laws of France have been formed than those which directed the
Americans." The lack of this equilibrium among the pure, and, as we
may venture to term them, the untrained races, we have occasional
opportunities of noting on our own soil when for a passing cause they
resort to isolated action.

[Illustration: THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN
AMERICA, AND FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.]

A race-question of a character that cannot be supplied by
differentiation within Caucasian limits haunts us as it has done from
the very birth of the colonies. Like the Wild Huntsman, we have had
the sable spectre close beside us through the whole run. But, more
fortunate than he, we see it begin to fade. At least its outlines are
contracting. The ratio of  inhabitants to the aggregate,
in 1790 19.26 per cent., or one-fifth, fell in 1860 to 14.12, or
one-seventh, and in 1870 to 12.65, or an eighth. The next census will
beyond doubt point more strongly in the same direction. If, whilst
dwindling in magnitude, the dusky shape perplex us by assuming
suddenly a novel form, we may yet be assured that it is the same in
substance and in manageability. Its hue is whitening with the fleece
of five millions of cotton bales. The cloud has a silver lining--a
golden one in fact--for ours is pecuniarily a serviceable phantom to
the extent of adding to our annual income a sum equal to eight or ten
times the entire yearly export of the colonies. Should he lead us,
like the Land--und--Wild--Graf, into the pit of ruin, he will have
first bottomed it with an ample and soft cushion of lint whereon to
fall.

Extremes meet, and modern culture, like ancient anarchy, drives its
people into cities. Such is the tendency on both sides of the ocean.
Improvement must result from associated effort, and of that cities are
the last expression. All the European towns are outgrowing the rural
districts. With us the change states itself in an advance, since 1790,
of the city population from 3.4 to 20.9 per cent. of the aggregate.
Broadcloth has gained on homespun in the proportion of six to one,
Giles having thus six mouths to fill where he formerly had but one.
We shall show farther on how gallantly he meets this draft. New York,
with its suburbs, contains more Germans than any German city save
Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than Dublin, and more English-speaking
inhabitants than Liverpool,