Chapters 20
-
1 01 - The Danger Of Lying In Bed 9:08
The Danger of Lying in Bed by Mark Twain.
The man in the ticket office said, Have an accident insurance ticket also? No, I said, after studying the matter over a little. No, I believe not. I'm going to be traveling by rail all day today. However, tomorrow I don't travel. Give me one for tomorrow. The man looked puzzled. He said, But it is for accident insurance, and if you're going to travel by rail—if I'm going to travel by rail, I shan't need it. Lying at home in bed is the thing I'm afraid of. I had been looking into this matter. Last year I traveled 20,000 miles, almost entirely by rail. The year before I traveled over 25,000 miles, half by sea, half by rail. And the year before that I traveled in the neighborhood of 10,000 miles, exclusively by rail.
I suppose if I put in all the little odd journeys here and there, I may say I have traveled... 60,000 miles during the three years I have mentioned, and never had an accident. For a good while I said to myself every morning, Now I have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much increased that I shall catch it this time. I will be shrewd and buy an accident ticket. And to a dead moral certainty I drew a blank, and went to bed that night without a joint started or a bone splintered. I got tired of the sort of daily bother, and fell to buying accident tickets that were good for a month. I said to myself, A man can't buy thirty blanks in one bundle. But I was mistaken. There was never a prize in the lot.
I could read of railway accidents every day. The newspaper atmosphere was foggy with them. But somehow— They never came my way. I found that I had spent a good deal of money in the accident business and had nothing to show for it. My suspicions were aroused, and I began to hunt around for somebody who had won in this lottery. I found plenty of people who had invested, but not an individual that had ever had an accident or made a cent. I stopped buying accident tickets. and went to ciphering. The result was astonishing. The peril lay not in traveling, but in staying at home. I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all the glaring newspaper headlines concerning railroad disasters, less than 300 people had really lost their lives by those disasters in the preceding twelve months.
The Erie Road was set down as the most murderous in the list. It had killed forty-six, or twenty-six. I do not exactly remember which, but I know the number was double that of any other road. But the fact straightway suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road, and did more business than any other line in the country. So the double number of killed ceased to be a matter for surprise. By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester, the Erie ran eight passenger trains each way each day, sixteen altogether, and carried an average of six thousand persons. That is about a million in six months, the population of New York City. Well, the Erie kills from thirteen to twenty-three people of its million in six months, and in the same time Thirteen thousand of New York's million die in their beds.
My flesh crept. My hair stood on end. This is appalling, I said. The danger isn't in traveling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again. I had figured on considerably less than one-half the length of the Erie Road. It was plain that the entire road must transport at least 11 or 12,000 people per day. There are many short roads running out of Boston that do fully half as much, a great many such roads. There are many roads scattered around the Union that do prodigious passenger business. Therefore, it is fair to presume that an average of 2,500 passengers a day for each road in the country would be almost correct. There are 846 rail lines in our country, and 846 times 2,500 are 2,115,000.
So the railways of America move more than two millions of people each day, 650 millions of people a year, without counting the Sundays. They do that too. There is no question about it, though where they get the raw materials is clear beyond the jurisdiction of my arithmetic, for I have hunted the census through and through, and I find that there is not that many people in the United States, by a matter of six hundred and ten millions, at the very least. They must use some of the same people over again. Likely. San Francisco is one-eighth as populous as New York. There are 60 deaths a week in the former, and 500 a week in the latter, if they have luck. That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many in New York, say about 25,000 or 26,000.
The health of the two places is the same, so we will let it stand as a fair presumption. That this will hold good all over the country, and that consequently 25,000 out of every million of people we have must die each year. That amounts to one fourteenth of our total population. One million of us, then, die annually. Out of this million, ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similar violent death In some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene lamp or hoop skirt conflagrations, getting buried in coal mines, falling off housetops, breaking through church or lecture room floors, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The Erie Railroad kills 23 to 46.
And the other eight hundred and forty-five railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each, and the rest of that million amounting in an aggregate to that appalling figure of nine hundred and eighty-seven thousand, six hundred and thirty-one corpses, die naturally in their beds. You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me. And my advice to all people is, don't stay at home any more than you can help, but when you have got to stay at home a while, buy a package of those insurance tickets, and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious. One can see now why I answered that ticket agent in the manner recorded at the top of this sketch.
The moral of this composition is... That thoughtless people grumble more than is fair about railroad management in the United States. When we consider that every day and night of the year full 14,000 railway trains of various kinds, freighted with life and armed with death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is not that they kill 300 human beings in a 12 month, but that they do not kill 300 times 300. The End of The Danger of Lying in Bed by Mark Twain
-
2 02 - Europe in the Middle of the 17th Century, Part 1 1:04:03
From The History of All Nations, From Earliest Times, Volume Thirteen, The Age of Louis, The Fourteenth, Translated under the supervision of John Henry Wright. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Peter Natter. To its great loss, Germany had for thirty years been the centre of the political and military activity of Europe. Seldom has a people been stricken with such a calamity as were the Germans through the ruinous war for religion. That the country not only survived, but gradually elevated itself from its wretched state, is a proof of its indestructible vitality and essential soundness.
The numerical strength of the armies was not such as utterly to ruin, even by their long-continued presence, a country so rich as the Germany of the beginning of the seventeenth century. The actual armies did not average in number more than thirty thousand to forty thousand men, but camp-followers hung about the combatants, and they, too, had to be fed. At the end of the war, the United Imperial Bavarian Army comprised 40,000 soldiers who drew Russians, and 1,400,000 camp-followers who got nothing. All these had to live at the cost of the peaceful, industrious population. As the pay was much higher then than it is now in the German armies, it was invariably in arrears, and the soldiers had to resort to plundering to maintain themselves.
When they had once entered on the path of violence, there was no means of checking them in their wild career. In their depredations they halted at nothing. Rank, sex, place were not sacred to them. Violence was done to churches, altars, and even to graves. Robbery, burning, torture, and murder were perpetrated from sheer delight therein on friend and foe alike. From all over Germany, from Pomerania to Swabia, From East Friesland to Austria arose, with terrible uniformity, the same wail of despair. Imperialists, legists, Swedes, Hessians, Bavarians alike, fell upon the peaceful homesteads, took all that was of worth to them, destroyed and devastated the rest, wantonly slaughtered the cattle, wasted the fields and orchards, Tortured the inhabitants to extort from them a disclosure of their hidden valuables, outraged women, and dragged the most beautiful away with them and sold them like cattle.
On their departure, they not seldom set fire to the villages and towns. Even the forests were burned down, and the fishpans drained out of mere wantonness. When a place defended itself, all the inhabitants were ruthlessly murdered, except the few rich, from whom they sought to secure ransoms. By the most fiendish tortures of all kinds. It was a favourite amusement of these monsters to impale helpless infants, dash them against walls, or roast them in stoves. In short, the soldier's motto was, Whoever owns anything is our foe. Nor were the leaders more forbearing than their men. Count Königsmark, once a poor German page, carried off enough to Sweden to leave his family a yearly income of one hundred and thirty thousand thalers.
The thaler was a silver coin, having an intrinsic value of seventy-two cents, but it must be remembered that the purchasing power of money was three times as great at the period of the Thirty Years' War as at present.
To these devastations by the soldiery and the heavy taxes imposed for the maintenance of the troops, there were added the exorbitant war contributions levied by the generals from hostile towns and districts. In one small section of Hanover, Tilly, within three years, exacted two million thalers. In one single year, the little town of Goslar had to contribute five hundred and forty-four thousand thalers. Brandenburg was laid under contribution by Wallenstein and Mantecuccioli to the amount of twenty million talers, and so on through a long list. The distress was universal. Business and exchange of every kind were further harmed by the debasement of the coinage, which was practised by all the German princes, especially in the years 1621 to 1623, Brunswick having set the example.
In place of standard metal, the coins were composed of copper, or simply of sheet-iron, lightly silvered over. No one would accept them at their normal value, and the uncertainty and confusion became so great that dealers and innkeepers took down their signs. So-called money was in abundance, but no one could get anything like its face value for it. A good thaler sold for eight, fifteen, and at last twenty thalers of the debased coinage. A bushel of corn brought forty thalers of such money, a pitcher of wine, one hundred and thirty. At last, the taxes were paid in the debased money, and the gain slipped through the fingers of the princes. Then they remedied matters by calling in the new coinage at its real worth, and issuing coins of full value.
But they had defrauded their poor subjects to the extent of the difference in value between the debased and the genuine money, and had done irretrievable injury to business. All industries were at standstill, even the busy hands of the husband's men was addressed. Whole villages died out, multitudes concealed themselves in forests, caves, and ravines. Hunger gnawed the vitals of the people, who in their anguish ate human flesh, and even broke into graves. ascended the gallows and rubbed the wheel to prey on the corpses there. Men fought over horse-flesh and slew one another. More terrible still, men slaughtered human beings, especially defenseless children, that they might devour them. These horrors are not fables, but facts reported by eye-witnesses hundreds of times.
In consequence of famine and unwholesome food, typhus fever and other contagious diseases broke out, and carried off what the sword had spared. During the siege of Augsburg by the imperialists in 1634, 60,000 citizens and country people who had taken refuge within the walls died. In Munich alone, then a town of only moderate size, 15,000 people perished within a year. The fever penetrated the remotest districts and most secluded mountain valleys. On all roads were to be seen pest-chapels erected to deliver the land from the terrible scourge. It was at this time that the natives of Ober-Amergau in Upper Bavaria with the same object instituted the passion-play. No wonder that the result was an enormous decrease in the population in all parts of Germany, the effects of which continue to this day.
It has been estimated that the population of the empire in 1648 was only a third of what it was in 1618. In Brandenburg, by 1630, many cities were so nearly desolate that half of the houses were uninhabited, and the severest devastations were yet to come. Berlin, which suffered comparatively little from the war, numbered at its close not more than 300 burghers. In Saxony, the wolves multiplied to such an extent that they entered the villages, and even the smaller towns, in bands. In Dresden, the entire suburbs were torn down or burned. The city itself contained only the fifteenth part of its former population. In Thuringia, whole districts lay in ashes. The younger men had been drafted off to the war, In which most of them had perished, while the older people had either fled or succumbed to pestilence and the hardships of war.
In the county of Henebel, for example, the population had sunk from 61,000 to 16,000, and even at the present day many towns have not recovered the population which they had in 1618. In Nassau, the villages dwindled away to a few houses, and were often entirely deserted. In Wiesbaden, the market-place, and many streets were overgrown with thorns and brush, so that hares and partridges bred among them. Other streets had disappeared entirely, and become merged in the forest. In Franconia, the depopulation was so great that every man was allowed to take two wives, and no man under sixty could enter a monastery. In Württemberg, three hundred and twelve clergymen died in one year. And at Christmas, 1635, over 100 churches were without priests.
Many other cases could be cited to illustrate the universal desolation at the end of the Thirty Years' War. A contemporaneous work, Exsidium Germaniae, depicts the condition of the country as follows. One may travel 40 miles without seeing man or beast. Except that in a village here and there you find an old man and a child, or two old women. In all the villages the houses are filled with the stench of carcasses—men, wife, children, servants, horses, swine, cows, and oxen lying intermingled, slain by pest and hunger, and knotted by wolves, dogs, and carrion-crows, because there is no one left to bury them.
How had the German cities, formerly the main seats of German culture, degenerated? Though since the time of the Reformation they had lost much of their earlier political importance through the continually increasing power of the territorial princes, they had remained comfortable and industrious, and at the beginning of the war were the seats of a pleasant social life. Their edifices rose stately and strong within their tower-crowned walls, Their streets were well paved, and their water supply and drainage carefully provided for. They were still, in 1618, the guardians of German civilisation. But the cities were both morally and materially injured by the debasement of the coinage even at the beginning of the war.
Then the armies began to roll past them, putting a stop to business and industry. Next, these demanded admission within the walls, and quarters, maintenance, and contributions, the soldiers perpetrating all possible excesses. Finally came the storming and capture of numerous cities, which all but annihilated them for a time. Pestilence and hunger did their fatal work. Nor did the three imperial cities fare better than the provincial towns. The Hanseatic League also came to an end. King Christian, the fourth, annulling its last privileges in Denmark and Norway. In 1628, it held its last diet, only to announce the breaking up of the ancient Union with the humiliating declaration that, quote, the Northern Kings are the rulers appointed by God over the seas, washing the German coast, and, quote, Three cities, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, which still continued the name of the Hansa, maintained a carrying trade on a small scale, but even of this the lion's share fell to the foreigners, the traffic being chiefly carried on in English and Dutch ships.
Instead of exporting wares, the ships left the harbours of Germany in ballast, and each year fifty or sixty millions of thalers went in this way over the sea, never to be seen again. Individual princes, after the restoration of peace, sought to better the economical condition of their lands, but they did this in accordance with the false views of the mercantile system then prevailing, that is, with one-sided patronage and artificial promotion of the weaker industries to the prejudice of that great branch, which was then by far the most natural and the most profitable for Germany, namely agriculture. The national welfare was checked by unwise restrictions on intercourse and traffic in the interior.
Navigation on the rivers was burdened by endless tolls, and was thus rendered impossible for remote distances. Every one of the innumerable little German principalities was hemmed in by almost prohibitive import and export duties. These exactions and impediments to interstate commerce worked all the more harmfully because the empire, split up into so many petty principalities, could not, as against the foreigner, carry out a united commercial policy, nor indeed afford its inhabitants any effective protection against foreign corporations and private merchants. The infinite variety of money, too, and the want of a strict statutory supervision of the various mints threw further obstacles in the way.
The consequence was that foreign products had everywhere the advantage over the native. The state of the rural districts was even worse than that of the cities. In spite of all restrictions and obligations, the peasants, before the outbreak of the war, were, especially in West and South Germany, in a condition of material prosperity and comfort. Their houses, though simple in construction, were well provided with furniture and conveniences. They possessed many cattle, and horse-breeding was carried on on a more extensive scale than at present. The sheep yielded a fine, universally-priced wool, which, when converted into cloths, formed a favourite article of export. The culture of the vine, too, was then common in many districts, where it is no longer followed.
But after sixteen, eighteen, all this changed. The peasant was first defrauded by the debasement of the currency, then came the burdensome taxes for war purposes, and finally the armies, as previously described, devastated and desolated everywhere. How, after the return of peace, were the wretched conditions to be even mitigated? The peasants' dwellings were in ruins, their cattle slaughtered or driven off, their orchards cut down, Their furniture destroyed, their money gone. Many discharged soldiers did indeed again lay hold of the axe and plough, but they were often possessed by the wild, unruly spirit engendered by war, and could not easily reconcile themselves to Hamdram everyday village life.
With the purpose of taming these turbulent elements, the greater landowners drew the bonds of vassalage even tighter, And the social relations of the peasants became more and more oppressive. The peasant vegetated, pent in like his cattle, kept in awe by his parson through the dread of hell-fire, regularly shorn by his landlord and sovereign, or led off to the battlefield in his own or a foreign country. Nor did the landowners lie on beds of roses. They lived under impoverished and wasted possessions, for the most part crushed down by debts and lawsuits. Loans by which to repair the ravages of war were difficult to obtain, and then only at exorbitant interest. Many nobles had to leave home and court, and attach themselves as satellites to their more fortunate brethren.
Terrible as was Germany's material suffering from this cruel war, the intellectual and moral degeneracy was still worse. Pecuniary losses would have been made good with time had the people's spiritual nature been left uncorrupted. But this was not so, and even at the present day, the wounds that the Thirty Years' War inflicted on German character are scarcely healed. A turbulent, gross, lawless temper, averse to work of any kind, took possession of all classes in the empire. The life of a highwayman or a vagrant beggar was more congenial to many than the hard constraints of honest labour. In Bavaria, and many other places, gipsies, swindlers, and vagabonds of all sorts swarmed in bands over the country.
If the elector determined to go on a pilgrimage, he had first— For his own safety, to send out scouring parties to clear the roads. Since no one was sure of the future, the rule was to make the most of the present. How could noble conceptions, refinement of manners, regard for what is sacred, and a taste for higher enjoyments, develop in a period of such vicissitude and barbarism? Nor did the wild manner of living disappear immediately after 1648. "'The misery of the times,' says one, Instead of bettering the people made them worse. Profligacy, impunity, and kindred vices became daily more rampant, and all efforts to check them were in vain. This is most clearly proved by the frequent and repeated ordinances against the desecration of Sunday and Saints'-days, dancing, drunken carousels, night brawls and clamour, cursing, fornication and adultery, excesses at marriages and feasts, etc.
How universally did superstition and fanaticism gain the upper hand, while young and old showed the greatest indifference to religion? Such was the condition of Germany at the close of the Thirty Years' War. The prevalent degeneracy was aggravated by the fact that the clergy suffered more than almost any other class through the war. On the ministers of an alien faith, the soldiers fell with especial fury, and care for the souls of the sick carried off numbers during the pestilence. The devastation of many universities, combined with the poverty of most congregations, checked the supply of new candidates. Education, too, suffered scarcely less severely. How wretched the condition of the teachers was, is shown by ordinances issued in more places than one, interdicting the clergy from employing schoolmasters too often in their domestic service as in sowing wood and threshing wheat.
A seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of the times was boundless extravagance in dress and ornaments, and glutinous excess in eating and drinking. Innumerable sumptuary laws show the prevalence of the evil. Though they appear to have been without effect. In Leipzig, the maidservants were summoned before the city council for wearing trains and laces, forbidden to people of their class, and the gigos were torn from them. But such attempts to prevent extravagance were unsuccessful. People thought it better to squander what they possessed in luxury and riotous living than to let it fall into the hands of those who spared nothing. Even the priesthood shared this feeling, and promoted it by encouraging lavish display on high festivals.
The higher classes set an example of prodigality and frivolity, which found ready imitation among those beneath them. The workman's ancient pride in honest work vanished. The decadence of German manufacturers, which had been wrongly ascribed to the modern system of economical freedom, took its origin in the Third Years' War. The coarse scepticism and the struggle after merely material interests, characteristic of the epoch, were perfectly compatible with the densest superstition. The terrors amid which everyone lived beclouded the moral nature of even the best disposed, and delivered them over to the gloomy frenzy of delusion. Soldiers believed that they could fortify themselves by charms against the enemy's weapons.
A whole literature gathered round this black art which was, however, recognized as coming from the devil, and as ultimately fatal to those who practiced it. In no other age and country did the belief in witchcraft prevail so generally as in Germany at this time. As if the sword, fire, famine, and pestilence had not claimed victims enough, innumerable persons, especially women, fell victims to the popular delusion about witchcraft. The witch-commissioners gained renown in proportion to the number of unfortunates whom they caused to be seized and burned. In every village, a committee was appointed to bring new delinquents to trial. In three years, from 1627 to 1629, the Bishop of Wiltzburg caused nine hundred witches to be executed.
Nor are we to believe that all these victims were convicted through confessions forced from them by torture. Probably the darkest feature in the whole matter was that many regarded themselves as actually guilty. The horrors of the time, and the universal belief in this direful superstition, produced hallucinations that convinced many women, young as well as old, that they really had dealings with the evil one, and had attended the witch's sabbath. Even the Swedes, who came to Germany, untainted by this superstition, became infected by the delusion, and returned to kindle the fires of torture in their own land. It was only natural that the protracted civil war should destroy the last relics of national feeling still lingering in the hearts of the German people.
These men, who, with the help of foreigners, had for thirty years been slaughtering one another, no longer had a common fatherland. Was it possible for the Protestants to honour, as their Emperor and Leish Lord, that puppet of the Jesuits in Vienna, who was the cause of so much of their sufferings? Even the Catholics saw that these Habsburgs cared only for the power of their house, and not at all for the welfare or greatness of Germany. The feeling of national unity and loyalty for a national Emperor was dead. Catholicism was popular, at most, only in Bavaria and some of the ecclesiastical principalities. On the other hand, the meanness, cowardice, and selfishness of the Protestant princes took from their fellow-protestants all confidence in them, or pride in their cause.
Ultimately, the religious character of the war was thrust into the background, and the contest became entirely one of political selfishness. How could any feeling of nationality, or even of local patriotism, arise? Little could Germany do to withstand the influence of the foreign soldiers and foreign officers, with their male and female hangers-on, who during the whole course of the war overflowed the land. The German does not have that hard, reserved nature which enables other nationalities to resist the effects of the introduction of foreign elements. Even in the Middle Ages the German nation had opened itself especially to French influences. How much more easy for such to find admission now that all national life, all community of feeling, all pride in country were dead among the Germans.
The manner of the foreigners was so confident and imposing, and they appeared so much gayer, richer, and happier, that the poor Germans readily believed that everything was better which came from them, and eagerly imitated them in their manners, speech, and fashions. The special assumption of French modes dates from 1626. Men then began to make themselves ridiculous by imitating the giant perruques of the French court. The beard that the beaux up to this time had cultivated and cared for with extraordinary anxiety was now shaved off. The monster peruque hung like a cloud over the beardless face. In like manner, the warm mantle gave way to the overcoat, while the jerkin gradually shrank up into the vest.
Naturally, the modifications in the female attire were not behind those in the male. The most noticeable being the very low cut of the dresses so as to expose the neck and bust. Unfortunately, this spirit of mimicry prevailed not only in regards to the foreigner, but also in the relations between the different ranks. Every one cringed before his superiors, to lord it more arrogantly over his inferiors. The princes themselves saw in their subjects only flocks to be shorn to the uttermost, As if in contempt of the reputation of being good house-fathers, so much coveted by their ancestors, they gave themselves up to revels and extravagances of all kinds. At the same time, they endeavoured to appear as mighty monarchs, surrounded themselves with armies, made up perhaps only of a few parade soldiers, with regular courts, composed of a host of ministers, privy-councillors, and diplomats.
For the welfare of his subjects, For a rational financial and civil administration, or for watchfulness over public or private morality, the prince now cared nothing. The nobility flocked to his court, and crowded in devotion around the ruler, that they might share in his brilliant and delightful existence, and be remembered with some portion of the spoil torn from the hapless subjects. Counting the collateral lines of the great princely houses, there were, then, in Germany, at least five hundred to six hundred courtly households, and one thousand five hundred castles, where were found at least six thousand court offices and charges. Every one of them fell to the nobles. With smiles of devotion, these unworthy flatterers bore the humours and insults of the despot and his favourites of either sex, or deliberately placed their wives and daughters as mistresses in his arms.
Such men did not trouble themselves about their peasants. The collector of rent and the overseer of labour were all that these saw to remind them of their lord. If the latter chanced to return to his estate, his delight was to pose there as a little sovereign to surround himself with stringent ceremonials, and to squander his means in splendid buildings and in personal indulgence. The burgher stood in silent awe, not only before the prince, but before his functionaries and officers. He knew no higher ambition than to be admitted into the latter class, and possibly to be dignified with a title. The mania for ennoblement dates entirely from this period. The imperial court took advantage of it, to fill its empty coffers by the sale of titles at a fixed tariff.
As early as 1654, the Diet complained of this vicious practice. No wonder that all interest in municipal or communal affairs died out, and that Moll administration prevailed. The wretched conditions of Germany were not without recognition at the time. This found expression in numberless pamphlets, which, as well as newspapers, were eagerly read. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, newspapers had regularly increased in number in all parts of Germany and Austria. What they lacked in spirit And interest was abundantly supplied by the pamphlets, which exposed and criticized abuses and grievances, boldly and incisively, but unfortunately did not have any remedies to propose. However, even during the dreary times of the war, and in the following years, efforts at reform were not entirely lacking.
There were a few able, conscientious princes, such as Frederick William of Brandenburg, Charles Louis of the Palatinate, and Eberhard of Württemberg, and some honest officials who thought more of the welfare of the people than of their own personal interests, or the smile of the ruler, minister, or favourite. Many of the clergy, too, Catholic as well as Protestant, by their piety and devoted self-sacrifice, made up, in some measure, for the evils that their mutual hatred had brought on the land. No department suffered more through the disorders of the war than that of learning. Professors and students vanished before the clash of arms, or became soldiers. Helmstadt, in 1624, numbered 400 students.
Two years later, its lecture-rooms were empty, and its professors, with one solitary exception, had fled. In Heidelberg, in 1626, there were but two students. In Jena, the number of new-comers was reduced to two-thirds. The universal poverty deprived the university teachers of their bread. Many betook themselves to foreign lands, others perished in penury. Even among the youths who continued to study, an incredible grossness and brutality prevailed, the result of intercourse with the soldiery. The worst scholastic outrage was the pendalism, that is, the systematic abuse of the newcomers, Pennells, by the older students, Skoristen. These inhuman practices finally became so outrageous that the diet felt compelled to intervene and enact severe penalties.
The teaching itself was lifeless and pedantic, encumbered by the bonds of rigid orthodoxy and servile adherence to precedent, The professors were the first to introduce among their students the unworthy distinction of nobles and civilians. In the domains of secondary education, John Amos Comenius, a Protestant preacher and teacher of Moravia, made an earnest attempt at reform. Driven from his native land by the Counter-Reformation, he led a wandering life in Germany, England, Sweden, Hungary, and Holland, His educational writings gained him great fame, but little gold. Unweariedly, he preached a natural and God-fearing system of education as the best cure for the moral disease of the time. Up to this time, and later also, eloquence had formed the main subject of study.
His foundation principle was that a knowledge of things should precede the study of works, therefore an acquaintance with actual objects, as those of nature, science, and art, should precede the study of dialectics and rhetoric, so that these might not be a mere word-play without substance and meaning. It is to be regretted that the French fashion of the times, and the incapacity of the teachers suffered the seeds shown by Comenius to die without bearing fruit. Nor was the German love for investigation and practical invention entirely quenched by the Third Year's War. In 1650, Otto von Gericke invented the air-pump, and four years later he demonstrated its efficiency before the Diet of Ratisbonne, by the experiment of the Magdeburg hemispheres, so called from Göricke being mayor of Magdeburg.
Besides this, he constructed the first manometer and electrical machine. Even the princes occupied themselves much with such experiments, often, however, not so much from an interest in science as from their bent toward alchemy and similar kabbalistic studies. But on the whole, Germany could not keep pace with Italy, France, the United Provinces, and England in their extraordinary advances in the sciences. German students in these branches had to seek instruction in foreign universities or from the writings of foreigners. Intellectual efforts found there neither the sympathy of large classes of the community, as in England, Italy, and Holland, nor the steadfast support of a powerful sovereign, as in France.
Practical inventions were not encouraged and fostered by a wealthy and enterprising commercial class so that the main incentive to making them was wanting. Nor were the consequences of the protracted war less disastrous to the religious life. The scant germs of improvement, which had shown themselves toward the end of the period immediately preceding it, were choked. In the Protestant lands nothing prevailed but a lifeless adherence to the latter, and the Catholic, the Jesuits, with their rigid formalism and tyranny over the intellect, had all power in their hands, while the learned, as we have seen, were either pedants or sought stimulation in foreign lands. With delight, men gave themselves up to the seductive charm of France, particularly in the Protestant territories which were more closely associated with their Western neighbours.
The German Calvinists maintained a lively intercourse with their French brethren, who, being discountenanced, and sometimes even persecuted at home, settled in considerable numbers in the congenial German lands. The Catholic districts, on the other hand, found themselves once more in connection with Italy and Spain, and accepted their fashions, customs, and speech. French, Italian, and Spanish expressions made their way into the German language in such profusion that it was soon saturated with Latin elements. The result was that it lost much of its native character, and especially in the eagerly read newspapers became a confused medley of tongues. In vain the writers of the better sort bewailed the evil, and satirists derided.
Even special societies were instituted for the maintenance of the purity of the language, but the intellectual poverty and want of literary endowments on the part of most of the members made it impossible for them to exercise any effective influence. That poetry kept itself pure from this confusion of tongues and other affectations, was due chiefly to the fact that the national New High German poetry had its origin at this time under the auspices of so clear-sighted and patriotic a man as Martin Opitz. This poet, born in 1597 at Bundslau in Silesia, was a man who had educated himself not only by a thorough study of the classics in the schools and universities, but also by intercourse with highly gifted associates, and a long sojourn in the Free Netherlands.
A journey to Paris also contributed to liberalise his mind and polish his taste. He early became famous, and was crowned as poet laureate by Emperor Ferdinand II. Chosen to be secretary and court historiographer by the king of Poland, he died in 1639 of the plague. With justice he bears the name of father of new high German poetry. His earlier poems show a freshness and an originality of genius, which he later sacrificed too much to smoothness of form and a slavish imitation of foreign models. His didactic poems we admire chiefly for their occasional descriptions of nature and the power of observation they show. His tragedies, pastoral plays, and operas, are long since forgotten, but they had a stimulating effect on his own and the immediately succeeding age.
It is noteworthy that, at the same time with Opis, An eminent catholic author, Friedrich von Spee, in the introduction to his book of songs, the Trutznachtigall was contending for the essential principles of Opitz, especially for the avoidance of every foreign or even affected expression. More than opids he shunned all leaning toward foreigners, and his songs, glowing with a fervid but mystical piety, show more true feeling and strike a more popular note than those of his cooler and more restrained contemporary. Himself a noble and lovable Jesuit father, he exhibits the beautiful and attractive side of the life of the Catholic orders. He was the first in Europe to protest in his book, Cautio Criminalis, In accordance with the religious disposition of the time, the Protestant hymnology made itself rather more widely acceptable than the Catholic, and there is a most interesting development in that direction.
John Herrmann, with his beautiful hymns, was a great comforter of poor and afflicted people. More profound, and yet more popular than Herrmann, was Paul Gerhardt, Never were the relations of the individual to his creator more fervently and more effectively depicted than in his sacred songs, several of which have become German classics. Secular poetry found a worthy representative in the greatest poet of the time, Paul Fleming. Born in 1609, in a parsonage among the mountains which separate Saxony from Bohemia, Fleming attained in his youth a position in the diplomatic service of the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and took part in an embassy to Moscow. He then studied medicine in Leipzig, and settled as a physician in Hamburg, where he died in 1640.
Fleming came into personal contact with Opitz, and all his life regarded him as his master, But surpassed him in genuine feeling. How sincere and warm an interest he took in the sad faith of his countrymen, and how deeply he deplored their degeneracy are shown in his lamentation over the changing and timidity of the present Germans. How keenly he felt for their literary fame in his poem, Against the Contaminers of German Poetry. If Fleming was the greatest German poetical genius of his time, Andreas Griffius was the most versatile. Like Opitz, he was a Cilesian, born in 1616, and, like him, made several tours abroad. Alternately, a teacher and an executive officer of the respectable class, he died in his native city in 1664.
A sad personal life, and the afflictions of his fatherland have given a melancholy character to most of Griffius's creations. In contrast with Opitz, Griffius's lyrical pieces express his feelings with great truth and directness, but often with rudeness and in violation of the rules of poetical expression. His comedies are based on actual conditions and express the views of the people, but are often characterized by a rude comic power and unvarnished naturalness. Till Lessing, nothing so good as Griffius's Comedies, appeared in this branch of literature. The popular bent that shows itself in Griffius's Comedies is obvious also in the Satyrists. The Silesian, Frederick von Logau, is without doubt the leading epigrammatic poet of Germany.
Power and pungency of expression, coupled with a light, airy grace, are finely and wittily united in him. As in the case of many patriotic writers of the period, a frequent subject for his scorn is the predominance of foreign, especially of French, influence. Though poetry, thanks to the efforts of Opitz and Spee, had well maintained itself, prose had fallen to such a low level as to threaten the very existence of the language. But two prose authors kept it alive by avoiding the general bubble-like corruption, Moscheros and Grimelschhausen. Mosheros, an able Alsatian administrative officer and statesman, following the example of the Spanish Quevedo, lashed the errors and vices of his time in his wonderful and true visions of Philander of Zittewald.
His wit, scathing as it is, always echoes the sorrows of his soul. His works were, unfortunately, too little adapted for the general public to become the common property of the whole nation, And this was also the case with the popular romances of Christopher von Grimmelschhausen, especially his renowned Simplicissimus, the truest, most comprehensive, and at the same time the most captivating picture of contemporaneous conditions existing in German literature. To this day they are read with the same interest with which they were read two centuries ago, and probably with much more instruction. We do not hesitate to pronounce the adventuresome simplicissimus, the greatest and most enduring production of the German intellect in the seventeenth century.
Art, during the period of storm and stress, perished utterly. Every condition essential to its existence was lacking—security, wealth, national aspirations, and common traditions. And this at a period when, in the Netherlands, painting had developed on so magnificent a scale, and so distinctively, that Brabant and Holland almost took their place by the side of Italy. The Brabant school recognised as its founder and greatest master, Peter Paul Rubens. This illustrious and many-sided genius had freed himself from the fetters of the mannerists that were predominant at home, by a personal study of the great Italian artists of the fifteenth century, and especially of the Venetians. The Venetian gorgeousness of colouring and skill in drawing are employed by him to express exuberant strength and joy of life.
Delicate natures may be repelled by an occasional obtrusive sensuousness, but his much less massing of figures and his masterly drawing are overpowering. His works are the most beautiful embodiment of the nature of the low countries, with all its excellencies as well as its defects. Ecclesiastical and profane history, animals and portraits, children and landscapes, all formed subjects for his pencil and brush. Rubens's greatest disciple, Anthony van Dyck, was of an entirely different nature. He had nothing of the master's superabundance of power. Nor of his glowing genius, but was refined, sensitive, and without great inward force or self-reliance. At first he was a close imitator of Rubens. Then, on his visit to Italy, the Venetian masters had such an influence upon him that his productions are scarcely to be distinguished from theirs.
Finally, as court painter to Charles I of England, He exhibits, in his portraits of the aristocratic court circle, wonderful delicacy of conception, touch, and color. In descriptive pictures, he shows a preference for subjects from the New Testament, which he treated with great feeling. No one among the great braband painters gives less expression to the sturdy character of the low countries than this delineator of the English nobility. To the brilliancy and richness of colouring, and the aristocratic joy in pomp and splendour of the Braban school, the masters of homely Republican Holland were strangers. But in common with it, they had a keen feeling for what is real. They identified themselves affectionately with nature.
They possessed a faculty for vigorous execution and accurate study of details. In these Protestant lands, which broke with church traditions, Art began with simple portraiture and landscapes. In these two branches, van der Helst and especially Frank Hals distinguished themselves by likenesses characterized by breadth and boldness of touch. Franz Snyder's, with power and talent, depicts hunting and battle scenes. John van Huyen founded, in a simple and pleasing way, the landscape school. Where the favourite scenes are the wide-spreading, well-watered plains of his fatherland, in these subjects he was followed by his scholars. And then came the master, Rembrandt, Van Rijn, who combined in himself all the tendencies of his predecessors, and carried them higher and farther.
Rembrandt began by slavishly copying his models, without advancing from them to nobler and more beautiful forms. But his genius soon asserted itself, and while he always took nature as his teacher, he strove to idealize her, and to bring out the living principle concealed in her. Wonderful are his light effects, sometimes clear and dazzling, sometimes in soft chiaroscuro. The great painter knew how to inspire even the most trifling objects with life. Like Rubens, he was many-sided in the subjects of his art, But he had no taste for mythology, and treated it only from a coarse, comic point of view. Rembrandt belonged to that class of geniuses who are so supremely original that they leave no disciples.
But the Dutch school continued to develop independently, particularly in landscape painting. In this the tone was given by Jacob Luysdale, an artist of the first rank. Nature worked on his spirit with a deep and often passionate effect, and yet his creations show a subtle knowledge of the laws of perspective and correct and delicate drawing. A spirit of melancholy seems to pervade the unique creations of this great painter-poet who writes elegies upon canvas. A pure creation of the Netherlands is the modern school of genre painting, which has never been equalled, Either in freshness and originality of conception, or in delicacy of execution. The founder of this school was Peter Bruegel, who lived at the end of the 16th century.
In the hands of the younger Bruegel and the elder David Teniers, it threatened to take a fantastic and extravagant turn, often verging on the absurd. The younger David Teniers, 1610 to 1690, restored it to its proper domain. He is, indeed, the true creator of the low-life genre-painting of the Dutch school. He elevates the most vulgar subjects by his fine sense of humour, his masterly colouring, and dexterous light effects, and infuses a spirit of poetry into the most ordinary events of everyday life. Herard Terburgh. 1608, to 1681, was the gifted painter of the life of the higher classes, whom he shows in older splendour and dignity, the stately, richly bedecked gentlemen, and the dames rustling in white silken robes and flushing with costly jewellery.
Terburg, the first of this school, was also the best. Next to him ranks the somewhat younger, Herard Dau, And the two were the predecessors of a long series of workers in the same field. What a wonderful race was this little people of the Netherlands. The same generation that produced numerous painters of the first and second rank brought Dutch literature to its highest stage of perfection, a stage never again to be reached. Amsterdam was at this time the literary centre, where Hoft, Wondel, and Huygens worked together. Peter Hooft, a scion of an illustrious patrician family, had cultivated his taste by many long foreign tours. His object was to combine the charm of Italian expression with the northern richness of thought.
Thus he was the father of Dutch prose and poetry. It must, however, be acknowledged that in the latter field he showed less originality than he did as historian of his country. Joost van den Vondel, In fact, he justly enjoys the fame of being the first lyric poet of Holland, while as a dramatist he became a mere imitator of French models. Finally, Constantine Huygens, father of the renewed physicist, distinguished himself as an historian, but his poems have sunk into oblivion. More popular was Jakob Katz. A Zealander who plays an important part in the public affairs of the United Netherlands. His writings, spoken of as the Book of Father Katz, held their place, along with the Bible, for centuries in the Dutch and Flemish homes.
Holland's renown for classical philology was maintained by such men as Hensius, Hugo Grotius, Rutgers, and Vosius. This country was, indeed, at that time, regarded. as the true fatherland of learning. Meursius founded the study of Greek antiquities, Erpenius of Gorkum, and Holius raised the study of Arabic to the rank of science. On the original and suggestive discoveries of Kepler in regard to the eye, the Dutch based others of a practical nature. Jens Lippershey, a spectacle-maker of Middelburg, devised the telescope in 1608. Cornelius van The microscope. About 1620, Villebrord Snail discovered the law of the refraction of light. The great jurist, Hugo Hrottius, Hugo de Hrott, the father of international law, was born at Delft in 1583.
As a child, he attracted the notice of his country and of foreign potentates, and at the age of fifteen received a golden chain from Henry IV of France. His sympathy for the Armenians brought him into prison. But his self-sacrificing wife was successful in bringing about his escape. He fled first to France, then to Sweden, whence he weighed as Swedish ambassador to Paris. On his return toward Sweden, he was overtaken by death at Rostock. In 1645, he was a many-sided man, thoroughly versed in classical lore. His literary labours were by no means confined to jurisprudence. He composed also theological, historical, and philosophical treaties, as well as poetry. His book, The Veritate Religionis Christiane, concerning the truth of the Christian religion, is regarded as the best of the later defences of Christianity.
But his greatest work, and that by which he has won undying fame, is his Three Books Concerning the Law of War and Peace, Dei Rebelli et Passis Libri Tres. This great work marked a new epoch in international relations, one might say in politics, because it sets forth for the first time the system of international law. It is characterized not only by a truly philosophical spirit and a humanity rarely found in those days, but also by the strictest scientific treatment, absolute freedom from party spirit, and a dignified and judicial calmness elevated above all the influences of the time. It at once claimed and received the most marked attention, and even today it is by no means obsolete. The life of Holland in the seventeenth century, civic, religious, and artistic, was sound and vigorous, and in melancholy contrast to that of the kindred race in Germany during and after the Thirty Years' War.
Spain, also the adversary of Holland, was in a state of rapid and constant decay. As early as the beginning of the reign of Philip, the fourth, a member of the Cortes had presented a memorial to him which summarized the sad condition of the country as follows. Many places are depopulated and forsaken, the churches dilapidated, the houses in ruins, estates lost, the fields uncultivated, the inhabitants with wives and children on the highways wandering from place to place in search of work, Nourishing themselves with the grasses and roots of the fields. Others immigrate to lands where the subjects are not crushed down by taxes.
The well-meant attempts at reform by the Count-Duke Olivares were effectually frustrated by the many constant wars, which the king believed himself compelled to undertake for the maintenance of religion and the glory of the illustrious house of Austria. Herein, the nation and the nobles were of the one mind with their ruler. They still looked upon Spain as the first country of the world. Wars were waged in Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Catalonia, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, and Franche-Comté. The burdens of war were all the more intolerable in that, since the expulsion of the Moors, industry and commerce had been half-paralysed. Furthermore, trade with all the lands with which Spain was at war, that is, with half of Europe, was forbidden for her people.
At the same time, the wars emptied the public coffers and necessitated continual loans. The revenue, which in 1634 amounted to 18 million ducats, of which only seven million had to be expended to pay the interest on the national debt, was now almost entirely swallowed up in paying the interest on and redeeming the national loans. If Olivares, to raise money, suddenly doubled the nominal value of the metallic currency, or to make handiwork cheaper made the sale of grain compulsory at prices fixed by authority, his measures only increased the evil. As the land became poorer, the imposts rose higher. For the war swallowed incredible sums. Already Olivares, in despair at the drying up of the regular sources of revenue, had appealed to the magnanimity of private persons.
While the minister was scarcely able to bear up longer under the burden of affairs, the king's mind was occupied with amusements of all sorts—festivals, ballads, bullfights, theatrical performances. The authority of the cortes, like that of the monarch, was only nominal. For Philip always signed whatever olivares laid before him. One thing is certain. The minister thought only of the real good of the state, and neither enriched himself nor allowed those around him to enrich themselves. With a firm hand he held the grandees in check, and permitted them neither to plunder nor defraud the country. On the other hand, they were free to indulge in enjoyments of all kinds, for which the king set the example.
Sexual immorality was almost universal in Spain. From it resulted brawls, abductions, and assassinations without number. In Madrid alone, one hundred and ten murders occurred within one week. For two decades, Olivares maintained himself as uncontrolled master of Spain. Then, when his overstrained system of rule broke down, when Portugal and Catalonia rose in revolt, When France was winning victory after victory in the Netherlands and in Italy, and when state bankruptcy became inevitable, the blame for all these misfortunes was heaped on his head. The queen, Isabella of Bourbon, whose private life was not above suspicion, placed herself at the head of the enemies of Olivares, and at length, in January, Just a month after Richelieu's death prevailed upon the weak and irresolute monarch to banish his favourite to his estates.
The joy at Olivadres's overthrow was universal. A placard was found attached to the gate of the royal palace, saying, Now thou wilt be Philip the Great, indeed, for the Count-Duke will no longer make thee little. The short-sighted multitude always believes that a change will bring a better state of affairs. It was probably fortunate for Olivares that, a year and a half later, death removed him beyond the power of his enemies. His best vindication is that matters became worse in Spain after his fall. At first, the king, to the joy of his loyal subjects, declared his purpose of conducting the government himself. But as he had little success, and through the death of his queen, and of the heir-apparent, Balthazar Charles, was left without family life, He fell back into his former wasteful and dissolute habits.
His increasing sickliness, aggravated, as in the case of most of the members of the House of Austria, by immoderate eating, decided him to give up the conduct of public affairs and entrust them to Don Luis de Arro, a well-meaning but only moderately gifted minister. Friendly and complacent to everyone, he was, above all, a man of peace, but in spite of his good will he had little practical ability, and was little acquainted with foreign affairs. In the deplorable condition of Spain, even a great genius could scarcely have changed matters for the better. A navy was no longer maintained, for it would have become merely a spoil for her enemies. Her merchant marine, on account of the prohibition of intercourse with England, France, Venice, and Portugal, had practically ceased to exist.
The incessant changes in the value of money, the wretched condition of the highways, and the exorbitant taxes destroyed whatever was left of the domestic trade of Spain. Her moral degeneration more than kept pace with her material decadence. All was corrupt, From the minister and viceroy down to the village bailiff, and from the general to the sergeant. No wonder that the unpaid soldiery renounced their service, that every man regarded the state, that made such inordinate demands as his enemy, for which he ought to do nothing voluntarily, but which he was justified in defrauding to the utmost of his ability. Literature and art alone were not affected by the general spirit of decay. One of the favourite amusements of the court was dramatic representations, in which the queen herself and the princesses took part.
Indeed, the dramatic instinct was deep-rooted among the people. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, Lope de Vega stood on the pinnacle of his fame, but was shortly displaced by Pedro Calderon, de la Barca. Calderon wrote comedies, dramas, tragedies, and sacred plays. Autos, all with the same richness of thought, fertility of imagination, and ease of versification. Calderon's forte does not lie in subtle delineation of individual character, but he knows how to let the voice of nature speak out clear and true, even in its deepest, most exciting, and most affecting tones. The Spain of his time, especially that of the higher orders, with their sensitive feeling of honour, their reckless courage, Their pomp of speech, their love for gallant adventures, and their unbounded devotion to the churches, lives, acts, and speaks before us in the works of this poet.
But there was not only dramatic poetry. The brothers Argenzola were eminently happy in their imitations of Horace, showing taste, clearness, and a feeling for pictorial beauty. Queredo wrote his satirical visions, and comic romances such as the history and life of the great Sharper. Villegas' love-songs are not destitute of charm, but they are marred by exaggerated and forced expressions and figures. Luis de Gongora sedulously developed this far-fetched, affected manner, the cultivated style, and thus became the founder of a formal school known as Gongorists. No word preserved its natural sense, no sentence its natural structure, no thought received natural expression. All was novel, inverted, forced into unusual forms, mixed up with foreign-like elements, and embellished with monstrous metaphors.
Thus, the inauguration of the rapid decadence of Spanish literature falls immediately after the period of its proudest bloom, in the time of Philip, the fourth, who himself took a lively interest in the poetry of the culturists. The king interested himself also in painting, and was a frequent visitor in the studios of the great artists who then raised Spanish painting to its height. Their art was characterized by an ardent religious feeling. Full surrender of self to the divine, monkish asthetism, consuming zeal for the faith. Such are the favourite subjects of the Spanish artists, whose work is marked by strong colouring and skill in gradation of shades. They stand upon the shoulders of the Venetians, whose types they modify in a way to make them national.
De las Roelas and Francisco Herrera were the first to implant these tendencies in the school of Seville. Francisco Surbaran, the first to give them full expression. From the same school came Diego Velazquez de Silva, a sevillan, though his exact study of the Netherlanders and his long sojourn in Italy enabled him to break the bonds in which his fellow-artists lay, and gave him a wider range. The Silvery, Airy colouring, peculiar to him, diffuses a charm of sentiment over his pictures. Landscapes, genre pieces, as well as religious subjects occupied his brush, till his career was ultimately determined by Philip, the fourth, appointing him his court painter. After this, he devoted himself to painting the portraits of persons of eminence, and this work In his hands acquired a more dignified, imposing, and noble character than in those of the Netherlanders.
In colouring, Velázquez combined the excellencies of the Venetian and Netherland schools. He and Murillo, who was born two decades later, constitute the most brilliant double star in the artistic firmament of Spain. Sculpture, too, was transplanted to Spain by the admirable Berruguete, in the first half of the sixteenth century, and found there, especially in the south, a race of zelus devotees, reaching down to the present day. The chief names are those of Montaignez, died, 1649, an artist of the first rung, and his more famous pupil, Alonso Cano of Granada, who, like Michelangelo, was sculptor, architect, and painter, having studied painting in Seville. Philip, the fourth brought him, while still a young man, to court, appointing him superintendent of the royal edifices and court painter.
He was especially eminent as a carver of captivatingly beautiful statuettes in painted wood. Thus literature and art gilded the waning greatness of Spain, and lent to its death-throes something grand and attractive. Spanish science had long since died in the stifling embrace of the Inquisition.
-
3 03 - Europe in the Middle of the 17th Century, Part 2 1:10:37
From the History of all Nations from Earliest Times, Volume 13, The Age of Louis XIV, Translated under the supervision of John Henry Wright. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Piotr Natter. Italy was, in many respects, in political dependence on Spain, and yet the two countries were very different from each other in their intellectual and social development. The victory of the exclusive and persecuting party in the Catholic Church had indeed impeded the intellectual advance of Italy, but had not fully checked it. For this, the country was mainly indebted to the growing mildness of disposition, especially among the better orders, which imperceptibly removed their weapons from the hands of the inquisitors.
After a moment of grim and bloody reaction, the whole nation, even the priesthood, gave itself up too completely to the soft charms of art and poetry to think any longer of heresy-hunts and autos da fe. The fact, too, that the petty tyrants gradually disappeared, and made room for an ampler national life, in which truer ideas of statesmanship were comprehended and realised, Contributed still further to humanize popular manners. Though criticism of religion and the state was severely punished, intellectual and spiritual development was not systematically restricted as in Spain, but was instead fostered under the sure but mild guardianship of laws, impartially dispensed and observed by absolute but not despotic rulers.
The whole people, even the very poorest and most ignorant, were carried away with enthusiasm over the productions of the great poets and artists of the sixteenth century, and promised their successors honor and wealth. When the dread of a great Franco-Spanish war vanished, on the death of Henry IV of France, and the peace-loving Philip III ruled in Spain, a period of quiet and happy development seemed to dawn for Italy. Even the Spanish administration in Naples under Lemos and Osuna encouraged study. The university of that city, enlarged and improved by accession of professors from all the rest of Italy, once more acquired an authoritative place in the domain of learning. The hope of such a period of peaceful prosperity was not fully realized.
The restless ambitions of Charles Emanuel of Savoy, the long-protracted Valtellina affair, and later the war for the Mantuan succession, disturbed the repulse of North Italy, but Central and Lower Italy enjoyed nearly a half-century of peace, which was rarely broken. The only person who occasionally interrupted this condition was Urban, the eighth, who seemed to desire to revive the papal policy of the first half of the sixteenth century. He combated the German and Spanish Habsburgs, though they were the champions of Catholicism against heresy. An open rapture occurred on this point in the College of Cardinals, and amid the applause of the gathering, a Borgia was bold enough to charge the Pope with religious indifference, a charge echoed by the outer world.
His nepotism, too, was notorious. Many bulls of his predecessors forbade the endowment of relatives of the Pope with principalities, and other high offices at the cost of the church. Nevertheless, the Barberini were now laden with such dignities and with unmeasured wealth. With their greatly swollen revenues, the relatives of Urban, the eighth, were able to purchase the ancient thieves of the Colonna, Orsini, Sforza, and other illustrious families. With a view to prolonging the influence of his kin beyond his own life, Urban conferred on them forty-two cardinalets. Finally, That nothing might be wanting to recall conditions so little in accord with the age, Urban, the eighth, like an Alexander, the sixth, or a Julius, the second, again took up the plan of conquering the world.
Of all the principalities that had been carved out of the states of the church, everyone had been reabsorbed, save only Urbino, of which the della Rovere, the family of Julius, the second, were rulers. Their sway was mild and favourable to art. Here Raphael had been born, and received his initiation into art, Bembo had taken up his abode here, and on the little Umbrian state there still lingered, as it were, the afterglow of the sixteenth century. Duke Francis Maria, the second, now old and childless, could no longer offer effectual resistance to Urban when he demanded the admission of papal troops into his fortresses. When the prince died in 1631, the church forthwith took possession of the land, much to the sorrow of its inhabitants.
This success emboldened Urban to proceed with open violence against another family, which owed its position to papal nepotism, the Farnese. This race, descended from Pope Paul III, ruled over not a papal but an imperial thief, namely Parma. Duke Odoardo, a coarse, passionate and unpopular man, Held also the Duchy of Castro in the states of the Church. The Barberini craved it, while the Pope hoped to unite Parma and Piacenza with the states of the Church. Under entirely frivolous pretexts, his soldiers in 1641 occupied Castro, and in 1642 Urban put the Duke under the ban of the Church. But Odoardo Farnese found support in the other Italian princes, who for a long time had been incensed over the grasping policy of the Holy See.
There was scarcely a state that Urban had not in his arrogance insulted, but a short time before he had laid the senators of the peaceful little Republic of Lucca under excommunication, because it had dared to punish with imprisonment the robber brother of a cardinal. The Republic had turned for protection to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. This prince, Cosmo, the second, was resolved to endure no further act of violence on the part of the Pontiff, and organized an alliance for the protection of the Farnese, of which the Este of Modena, as well as Venice, were members. War broke out between these secular powers and the head of the Church. Urban, the eighth, however, in the spring of 1644, was ready to sign a disadvantageous peace, which set Odoardo free from excommunication, and replaced him in Castro.
This humiliating defeat showed the weakness of the power of the Pope, who soon afterward, in July 1644, died. The situation was but little improved. Under his successor, Innocent X, the Barberini, notwithstanding the number of their creatures, were unable to procure the choice of one of their own family by the conclave, and had therefore consented to the election of Giovanni Battista Panfili, which, from the slight importance of his family, and from his age, seventy-two years, seemed to imply no menace. But the family of the new pope, precisely on the account of their lowly condition, were determined to enrich themselves as quickly as possible, and this could best be effected at the cost of the universally hated Barberini, who therefore had to leave Rome, their offices, palaces, and wealth as a prey to the new house.
As they had favoured France, the new government took the side of Spain, and a complete change of policy was the consequence. A reconciliation was effected with the Italian states, especially with Venice and the Medici, but the internal misrule remained unchanged. Personally, innocent X was honorable, well-meaning, and industrious, and earnestly sought to restore order and justice in his dominions. But he was weak with age, and so completely subservient to his relatives, that nepotism under him was as scandalous as under his predecessor. Only one ray of fortune gilded his rule. Odoardo Farnese so misused his success in regard to Castro, and made himself so universally hated, that Innocent was able to take forcible possession of the contested thief without the new duke, Ranuncio, the second, finding any support in the other Italian princes.
Otherwise, the grey-haired pontiff was so afflicted and perpetually irritated by the turmoils and unseemly dealings of his family as to become a burden both to himself and to others. Innocent died in 1655, to his own relief, and that of all the world. Under such popes, the high office conferred little authority, whether ecclesiastical or political. The great religious wars had been decided without the co-operation of the popes, Nay, almost contrary to their wishes. The papal administration was wretched. Debts were so enormous that the interest upon them swallowed up the whole income of the papal states, so that the cost of the court, the executive, and the army had to be met by the pope's ecclesiastical income and constant new loans.
The nobles, once warlike and fired with the spirit of enterprise, were now utterly effeminates, and cared only for pomp, Titles, magnificent palaces, and multitudes of idle servants. Such extravagances had lessened power and multiplied debts. The old medieval families were thrust more and more into the background before the papal families of plebeian origin. The Borghese, Chigi, Amphili, and Barberini. These led a brilliant life in the capital, constituted a formal court, Set the fashion for Rome, and exercised the most important influence in the election of new popes. The government of the church was, in consequence, more uniform, milder, weaker, and more inclined to peace. Of the other Italian states, Tuscany, in its peaceful and uneventful quietude, comes scarcely at all into notice.
Genoa but little, Venice somewhat more, Savoy most of all. The Republic of Genoa. had, through the reform measures of 1575 and 1576, acquired a degree of freedom such as was scarcely to be found elsewhere in Europe. The privileged classes had become so comprehensive as to include every well-to-do citizen. The power of the different magistracies was accurately defined. Personal freedom and liberty of speech were practically unlimited. But the Genoese government seemed to have abrogated tyranny and exclusive privileges only to fall into lethargy and weakness. A revolt of the Popolani, the democracy, was planned in 1628 with the conivance of, and with promises of help from Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, their aim being the murder of the Senate and nobles, and the establishment of a thoroughly democratic regime.
But the conspiracy was discovered shortly before the contemplated outbreak, and punished by the execution of the ringleaders. One can still see, running in a wide curve along the heights which enclosed the city, the powerful forts then erected for the defence against the Savoyard. Shortly afterward, peace was restored, and for half a century Genoa was at liberty to engage in commerce and financial transactions in perfect peace. Venice had so far as possible maintained its policy of peace, but was always opposed to its three ancient adversaries—the church, the house of Habsburg, and the Turks. The papacy, by repeated illegal demands, caused constant friction with the Venetian authorities. The chief sensation was caused by the murderous assaults made on Fra Paolo Sarpi, the undaunted Servite monk, who had fearlessly come forward as the champion of national independence against papal aggrandizement, and had been the ecclesiastical counselor of the Senate in its strife in the years, in October, 16, and 16, and 7.
In October, 16, and 7, the daggers of the assassins actually struck him, but he did not receive a mortal wound. As the assassins escaped the states of the church, and there went about, not only unmolested, but boasting of their deed, People agreed with Sarpi himself in thinking that this was perpetrated still Romane Curie, with the stylus, dagger of the Roman Curia. The Venetian Senate protected and honoured its theologian after his recovery, a course of action which again gave great offence in Rome. Sarpi died in 1623. Venice seemed to be still more seriously threatened by the machinations of Spain. The House of Habsburg had good ground for being displeased with the Republic, which had for years carried on war with the rulers of Austria on account of the frontier district, and had besides made it possible, through subsidies, for the Duke of Savoy to defend himself against the assaults of Spain in 1616 and 1617.
In September of the latter year, a general peace had been concluded. A Spanish dignitary soon appeared, however, who endeavoured to nullify the effects of the treaty. This was Duke of Osuna, Viceroy of Naples, who was assured of the protection of the then all-powerful minister Uceda. He maintained, at the expense of the poor neapolitans, a considerable force, and built in hot haste a large fleet. From all sides, Venice had warning that Osuna had designs upon her. One of Osuna's officials had repeatedly exclaimed, "'This year the Venetians will receive the finest drubbing.'" At length Osuna sent a number of warships under his own flag into the Adriatic, a sea that the Venetians had been wont to regard as a part of their dominions.
It was maintained that he would have landed troops in the city had not the premature disclosure of his plan prevented its accomplishment. Meanwhile, a pirate from Normandy by the name of Jacob Pierre had gone over from the Neapolitan service to the Venetian, and had, by pretending to reveal Osuna's secret plans, endeavoured to secure an important position for himself. But he was suspected of being in collusion with Osuna, and his communication was regarded as designed to deceive the signory. The suspicion was well founded, For Pierre had recruited numerous mercenaries who were to rise as soon as the fleet appeared at the mouth of the lagoon. The whole scheme was completely foiled. First, Osuna's fleet, which attacked the Venetian fleet in time of peace, was utterly defeated near Santa Croce.
Then, some of the parties to the plot disclosed it to the Venetian authorities. The ringleaders were arrested, May, 16, 18, whereupon hundreds of their accomplices fled to Naples. The Spanish government desired to disavow Osuna's schemes, now that they had failed, and he was recalled. Deeply moved at seeing his hopes thus shattered, the duke resolved on resistance, and on making himself independent in Naples. With a view to gaining support, he attempted, in 1620, to form an alliance with the Republic whose ruin he had vowed. Venice would have nothing to do with his intrigues, And Osuna, deserted by his soldiers, had to take ship for Spain, where he was cast into prison, and where he died four years later.
In Venice, no one believed in the non-complicity of Spain, and the Republic opposed both the Spaniards and the Emperor in the Mantuan War of Succession in 1628, but very ineffectively. Gustavus Adolphus received from her a subsidy against the emperor, but in the following Franco-Spanish contest she deemed it more prudent to maintain a discreet neutrality. The circumstances prompted this policy. First, the Turkish war. Next, the ever-increasing disintegration in the Venetian state. The reciprocal plunderings and conflicts of the ships of the Barbary powers on the one hand, and those of Malta and Leghorn on the other, were constantly producing complications from which Venice, on account of her possessions and garrisons in Crete, and the archipelago could not keep herself free.
In the spring of 1645, over 50,000 Turks landed in Crete and began the conquest of the rich island. The fleets, which the Italian state sent to its relief, showed themselves as unwarlike and cowardly as the Italian armies of the period. The mercenaries of the Republic, on the other hand, mostly Germans and French, fought with determined courage, and delayed for twenty-two years the surrender of the besieged capital, Candia. The long and embittered struggle scarcely did more to weaken the Republic than the corruption which ate deeper and deeper into its heart. Failing means, with growing luxury, increasing effeminacy, and the spread of unmanly and unpatriotic sentiments combined to introduce a spirit of venality, treachery, and mistrust among the leading nobles themselves, which threatened the very existence of the state founded on this aristocracy.
Elections were now determined not by merit but by bribery, so that the public offices fell more and more exclusively into the hands of a few rich families. Several of the highest officials of the state were convicted of participation in Osuna's plot, and executed or sent to prolonged imprisonment. Besides well-grounded accusations, denunciations of innocent people from hate or avidity were frequent, and often led to their unjust condemnation. Under these conditions, the prestige of the Republic necessarily waned, and its administration became more and more corrupt. The most famous among these false accusations was that which caused the death of Antonio Foscarini. This man, descended from one of the most respected patrician families of the city, after completing an excellent course of study, served his country in several important offices.
While ambassador to England, he fell into strife with his secretary, Muscorno, a vain ambitious man who wished to be ambassador himself. Since Foscarini would not give way to him, Muscorno went to Venice and accused the ambassador of dishonourable and treacherous conduct. Foscarini was recalled, put to trial, but after three years was acquitted. His calumniator was condemned to two years' confinement in a fortress. Foscarini seemed fully cleared of suspicion. He became a senator, and was again entrusted with important political negotiations. But scarcely was Muscorno at liberty, When, with a hatred quickened by the thirst of revenge, he began again to labour for the ruin of his enemy, and this time with success.
He made use of Foscherini's intimate relations with an English woman of high rank, the Countess of Arundel, whose house was a rendezvous for diplomatists, to accuse him of entering into traitorous correspondence with foreign powers through intermediaries. Since Foscherini would not acknowledge any intimate relations with the countess, he would not satisfactorily account for his frequent secret visits to her house, and he was condemned and hanged. Four months later his innocence was proved. His main accuser, a certain Vanno, with one of his accomplices, suffered death, and the memory of Foscherini was, with much formal ceremony, pronounced unsullied. This melancholy event diminished the prestige of the ruling families, and made evident the necessity of radical reforms.
But when it came to the inauguration of real reforms, and more particularly to the limitation of the power of the Council of Ten, the influence of the great families was ultimately strong enough to frustrate any attempts at a change for the better. Discontent and a spirit of rebellion were the unavoidable consequences. Much sadder was the fate of Savoy, torn by internal and by foreign war. Under Charles Emanuel I, this duchy had played an important part, and just for this reason both France and Spain were eager to make themselves masters of the land that commanded the Alpine passes between France and Italy. With this aim, they availed themselves of the strife over the Regency, which broke out in 1637 on the death of Charles Emanuel's son and successor, Victor Amadeus I, who had left only a minor son.
According to the Duke's will, the Regency was to be conducted by his widow, Christine, sister of Louis, the Thirteenth. But as she, a foreigner and a French woman, was unpopular, her brother-in-law, Cardinal Maurice, and Prince Thomas sought to exclude her from the government. If the princess held the office, Richelieu would be master of Savoy and Piedmont. If, however, the two princes, both of whom were in Spanish pay, obtained it, Olivares would gain these provinces for his country. Prince Thomas, with Spanish help, took possession of the capital, Turin. The cardinal occupied the country of Nice, while Christine, along with the young duke, Charles Emmanuel, the second, held court in Chambury.
Christine then went to Grenoble, to meet Louis and Richelieu, and entreat them for help. They sent Count Arcour to Piedmont. Meanwhile, Leganes, the Spanish governor of Milan, entered the unfortunate land and wasted and plundered it. Arcour defeated his enemy at Casale, and undertook the siege of Turin, whose inhabitants bitterly hated the French, and defended themselves gallantly. At length Leganes came to their aid, But all his attempts to storm Arcud's camp failed. Famine finally compelled the surrender of the city, after a memorable defence of sixteen months. September 1640. Christine returned to Turin, where the French at once inaugurated a reign of terror for all their adversaries. Meanwhile, the war continued for several years, and with great injury to the country.
The two princes saw this with sorrow, and were forced to recognise that Savoy was treated only as a tool by the rival contestants, whose sole aim was their own interests. In 1642, therefore, they submitted to their sister-in-law, who granted them their positions as governors, as well as a certain degree of co-operation in public affairs. The Spaniards were driven from one after another of the fortresses which they held in Piedmont. The land was left in the most wretched condition, and, what its people felt most keenly of all, in complete dependence on France. Thus did Italy become more and more the battlefield and the spoil of the Habsburgs and Bourbons. The political and military decadence of Italy in the first half of the seventeenth century was reflected in its literature.
The authors of this period are far from possessing the power and dignity of their predecessors. Their type was a Neapolitan. Only a few years before his death, he published his great work, Adonis, a needlessly long, amatory poem of 45,000 verses. As the subject matter is effeminate, so the treatment is characterized by a mawkish sweetness and a straining after effect by means of florid hyperbole and overstrained imagery. That, in spite of the beauty of isolated passages, make it intolerable to the modern reader. Mariniism had been charged with being the cause of similar sins in non-Italian authors, but without foundation. The degeneracy and departure from nature, characteristic of the seventeenth century everywhere, produced the same results in foreign lands as in Italy.
Among his compatriots, Marini's poetry met with enthusiastic acceptance, as evidence of how exactly it was in harmony with the tastes of the time. The old heroic poems, the poetical romances of chivalry, on the other hand, had lost favour with the public. This perversion of taste Alessandro Tassoni lashes with pungent satire in his Rape of the Bucket, a comic epic of inexhaustible and unoffensive wit. He gives us a caricature of the wars that the Italian states so often carried on with one another, furnishing, as it were, a prototype of the War of Castro. Gabriel Cabrera, of Savona, of the 1552 to 1637, belongs, both in point of time and in the bent of his genius, to the 16th century. A profound scholar and an ardent admirer of the antique, he knew how to transform the old in accordance with modern Italian ideas.
He shows to best advantage in his lyrics, in which he frees himself from the hitherto exclusively dominant Petrarchian type, and is, in a truly original manner, both novel and sublime. In boldness of imaginative power, in lofty flights of genius, in freedom and diversity of form, he has had no equal in his native land until the nineteenth century. But he had no imitators in his own age. The fashion favoured Marini. The style of elegant prose literature was equally affected by the depraved taste of the times. It would indeed be difficult to name here a single original book of permanent value. Letters, however, on the most varied political, social, and intellectual questions were then much in favour, and the collections of those of Cardinal Bentivoglio, a distinguished statesman and historian, and of the renowned Galileo are worthy of mention.
Bocchallini's satire, Miscellanus from Parnassus, is a racy booklet that in its day enjoyed great popularity. Highly characteristic of the humane but effeminate Italian of his epoch is his outburst against the military spirit and the usages of war. War, he says, is sometimes necessary, but it is yet a condition so inhuman and barbarous that there are no fine words that can make it tolerable. Boccalini was an enthusiastic republican, and therefore lords Venice, while he scourges with bitter irony the petty princely tyrants of his time. In his touchstone he develops his political sentiments still more trenchantly, and in doing so sheds a clear light on contemporaneous public opinion in Italy. He gives undisguised and wrathful expression to the hatred of all Italians for Spanish domination, For the court of the Catholic king, and for his subjects' arrogant lust for conquest and ascendancy.
The Italy of our epoch boasts of two admirable historical works, Bentivoglio's History of the War in the Netherlands, and Davila's Civil War in France. Both writers show the same sobriety of judgment and appropriate style and method that distinguished the great Italian historians of the 16th century. Both were intimately acquainted with the lands of which they wrote. Bentivoglio had resided as Papal Nuncio in Brussels and Paris. Davila had held important military and political posts in France and Venice. Passing from practical to theoretical politicians, we come to the name of Tomas Campanella. This philosophical Dominican monk, persecuted both by the Spanish government and the Inquisition, wrote a treatise on the state, which, along with much eulogy of the papal and French courts, contains many sound observations.
His City of the Sun is a fantastic sort of political and social utopia, based in many parts on the Platonic model, but permeated with his own chimerical and mystical philosophy. Hunted incessantly by his numerous foes, this gifted monk died in 1639, in the retirement of the monastery. Much more practical than Campanella was Antonio Serra, whose work on the causes of wealth in gold and silver is a work of political economy of high value for the history of this science. It comprises a complete exposition of the so-called mercantile system, which later, through Colbert's example, prevailed throughout Europe for more than a century. This system lays the main stress on manufacturers and commerce, which it holds to be much more susceptible of development than agriculture, and which therefore ought to be fostered at the expense of the latter.
Serra's book, had great influence on the economical and financial opinions of the day. His ideal was the state of Venice, wealthy because it was an exclusively commercial city, as contrasted with poor agricultural Naples. In the exact sciences, Italy contended for the foremost place with Germany, which could boast of her Copernicus and Kepler. Cavalieri, professor of mathematics in Bologna, carried the mathematical ideas suggested by the latter great scholar still farther, and through his work on the geometry of the Indivisibles, became the father of modern geometry. By this method he attained much more precise determinations and measurements than had been possible before. Aldrovandi summed up the whole zoological knowledge of his time in comprehensive handbooks.
Caspar Aselli, professor of anatomy in Pavia, discovered the lacteals of the mesentery that convey the chyli to the blood, and thus play an important part in the alimentation of the animal body. But the most eminent, most gifted, and most renowned figure in Italian science was Galileo Galilei. Born at Pisa in 1564, the son of an able mathematician, he studied medicine in his native city, but soon turned to mathematical and physical studies, seeking for these a firm and reliable foundation in mathematics. A remarkable faculty of observation, an acute judgment, And an intellect at once profound and clear united to qualify him for making his amazing discoveries. The oscillations of a lamp suspended from the dome of the cathedral at Pisa led to the discovery of the equal duration of the oscillations of a pendulum, and with this he associated the most interesting investigations concerning the centre of gravity of bodies.
One of the first fruits of his labours was the invention of the hydrostatic balance, by which he determined the specific gravity of bodies. His most important discoveries were made after he had exchanged the mathematical chair of Pisa for that of Padua. Here, his contributions to science were the thermometer, a proportional compass or sector, and the refracting telescope for astronomical investigations. Imperfect as was Galileo's telescope, chiefly from the limited extent of its field, the great man was yet able to make the most astonishing observations with it. He recognized the inequalities on the moon's surface, and rightly attributed these to mountains. He even made approximate calculations of their height.
Further, he resolved the Milky Way and certain other nebulae into multitudes of suns, massed in special points of the firmament. He detected four little stars in the neighborhood of Jupiter, and rightly determined them to be satellites of the great planet. These surprising discoveries he announced in a book which justly bore the title of Nuncius Siderus, the Starry Messenger. Men at this time took the liveliest interest in astronomy, partly because the theories and writings of Copernicus and Kepler had aroused their curiosity, but probably more because the science was so intimately associated with astrology. The Nuncius Siderus attracted universal attention, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, By rewarding its author with the richly endowed sinecure of court mathematician made it possible for Galileo to devote himself in Florence exclusively to his studies.
His astronomical discoveries now followed in rapid succession, one of the principle being the earth-like character of the planets as opposed to the solar nature of the fixed stars. Galileo's telescopic observations had fully convinced him of the absolute correctness of the Copernican theory of the universe. His advocacy of this brought the wrath of the church upon his head, for it had denounced the Copernican system as heretical. Galileo offered to prove that this system was in perfect harmony with Orthodoxy, but this attempt to compel the church to submission in her own domain only served to embitter her more. Through personal exertions in Rome, Galileo had no difficulty in securing his own safety.
But he could not prevent the index officers from stigmatising Copernicus's doctrine as absurd and infidel, and placing his book, with several of Galileo's own treatises relative thereto, in the index prohibitorum. The philosopher submitted to the ecclesiastical dictum, but in his heart he rebelled against the judgment, when, seven years later, his friend and patron, Cardinal Barberini, Ascended the papal throne as Urban, the eighth, he again ventured in a dialogue of the two chief systems of the universe on a comprehensive demonstration of the truth of the Copernican views. Scarcely was the work published, when the Jesuits persuaded the Pope that the astronomer had held him up to ridicule. Galileo had to appear before the Inquisition in 1633.
In spite of the contemporaneous and subsequent falsifications in the records of the process, it is now proved that Galileo was really subjected to torture in accordance with the terms of sentence pronounced on him. The permission to print, formerly granted to him, was declared to have been obtained under false pretences, and the philosopher, then in his seventieth year, was compelled on bended knee to abjure the Copernican doctrine. His dialogue was suppressed, And he himself was condemned to imprisonment for an indefinite time. His sentence was indeed commuted to enforce retirement at his own villa at Florence, and he never again regained full liberty. A victim to manifold bodily sufferings, he survived his trial eight years, and died in 1642.
He had become blind, yet had occupied himself unremittingly with scientific work, and with the compilation and arrangement of the results of his earlier investigations. In Italy these could not be published, but this was accomplished abroad, especially in Germany. Like Italian poetry, architecture fell into decay. True beauty, nobility of form, and symmetry of proportions were sacrificed to violent and tasteless effects. The aim now was massiveness in proportions, Extravagant richness of ornamentation, and pictorial perspective not at all in harmony with the essential nature of this art. Nothing kept its natural character. The straight lines of the walls were converted into advancing and retiring curves with bulky projections.
Architrathes were sinews, the gables of open work without purpose, the pillars unreasonably serpentine. Everywhere there was an ostentatious profusion of interlaced foliage, Fruit pieces, figures, shells, and emblems of all kinds. Lorenzo Bernini, is the most prominent representative of this baroque style. His disciple and rival, Francesco Borromini, sought to surpass him through the exaggeration of tasteless ornamentation and a preposterous medley of all the constructive elements. His example was unfortunately too much followed north of the Alps. In the art of sculpture also Bernini was the despot of his age, and here too all canons of art and good taste were outraged. Extravagant emotions, sensual treatment of the nude, coarse strength in the male figures, coquettish attitudes in those of the females were too much in keeping with the effeminate life of the Italy of his period.
A host of subordinate masters imitated his vicious example. Neither could Italian painting remain entirely unaffected by the prevailing tendency, but here this was by no means so incongruous as in the case of sculpture. There were, at this period, highly gifted artists, who knew how to elevate it from its eccentricities, and how to purify and ennoble it. In the beginning of our epoch, the Carracci sought to bring painting back to the study of nature and of the great artists of the sixteenth century, And they attained the happiest results. But their disciples, Domenico Zampieri, commonly called Domenichino, and Guidoreni, were able to follow this tendency only in their earlier pictures, and soon began to prefer showy ornamentation and a somewhat excessive sweetness of expression.
Carlo Dolci is the characteristic representative of this school. Yet these artists, among whom Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino, takes a high prize, knew how to lend a high and enduring value to their works, and to elevate them above the commonplace of mere sensuous effects, by the marvelous blending and power of their colors, by their sense for the beautiful, and by their truth of feeling. In politics, Italy and Spain retired more and more into the background to make room for the predominating influence of France. A great revolution, too, was preparing in the east of Europe, which was to elevate Russia at the expense of Poland and Turkey. On the destiny of Poland, the twenty-five years reign of the fanatical disciple of Jesuitism, Sigismund, the third, exercised the most baneful influence, In this time all the germs of corruption were developed, which the predominance of a selfish petty nobility and the brutal violence of the Counter-Reformation had introduced into the state.
For a time, indeed, the valour of her nobles and her abundant population maintained the prestige of Poland abroad. Her intervention in Russian affairs gained for her at the peace of Devulino, Smoleńsk, Severa, and Chernigov. Important provinces which introduced her sway into the very heart of Russia. But this success was much more than counterbalanced by the rise of a powerful and popular dynasty in Russia, endowed with all the freshness and vigour of youth. The decline of the welfare of the Polish people became more and more rapid. Wild revolts of the refractory nobles shook the fabric of the state. The great rebellion of the voivode, Nikolas Notwithstanding occasional successes of the royal troops, was brought to an end only by inglorious concessions on the part of the crown.
A war with Turkey, provoked by a contest over the election of a prince in Moldavia, ended with the peace of Hottin, in 1621, which conceded to the Turks this fortress, commanding the most important passage of the Dniester, as well as the sole right of nominating the Moldavian princes. Scarcely was this war closed when Sigismund involved himself in the great German religious war by taking the side of Catholicism and Austria. This act he expiated by the cession to Gustavus Adolphus of a part of Prussia and of Livonia. After Sigismund's death, although no rival appeared to contest the crown with his son Władysław, it pleased the nobility to institute an interregnum for six months, During which the turbulent elements were free to indulge unchecked in violence, plundering, and personal feuds.
Finally, Władysław, the fourth was elected, a man by no means wanting in courage and military ability. When the Russian Tsar, Michael Romanov, attempted to take advantage of the change in Polish rulers to recover the provinces which he had lost by the peace of Devulino, Vladislav completely hemmed in his army and forced it to capitulate. A peace concluded at Vyasma confirmed Poland in her possession. Furthermore, the peace of Stumsdorf with Sweden, 1635, gave back to the king, if not Livonia, at least that portion of Prussia, lost by his father. But the process of internal decay had made rapid strides from two causes—the predominance of the clergy and the growing usurpations of the nobility. Władysław was an obedient disciple of the church.
The Jesuits had already the higher education in their hands, the king made over to them the middle and lower schools as well. Henceforth, in Poland, teaching had to be in strictest accordance with the dicta of the church. The nobles, on their part, broke down the military strength of the kingdom through a law that the standing army should consist only of a guard of twelve hundred men, the object being to make the ruler wholly subsurient to them. The punishment for this selfish and unwise procedure of the nobles was not long in coming. We have already spoken of the constitution of the Cossack state proper. On the Middle and Lower Dnieper, which developed by Russian and Lithuanian fugitives had received from King Stephen Bathory a firm organization under Polish suzerainty, yet resting on entirely independent military institutions.
It soon acquired considerable power, and its undaunted warriors, not content with combating the Turks and Crim-Tartars by land, took with equal skill and courage to the sea. And in their light boats plundered without cessation the shores of Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula, spreading terror into the very harbour of Constantinople. The port had often complained at Warsaw. This gave the Poles a pretext for attempting to exterminate not only the political freedom, but also the Greek religion of the Cossacks. First, these were compelled to renounce the election of their hetman, and to submit to the leadership of the Polish commander-in-chief. Then the Jesuits came into the land and shut up their churches, permitting only the worship of the so-called Greek Unionists, who acknowledged the authority of Rome.
Ultimately, Polish nobles settled in the Ukraine and transformed the hitherto free Cossacks into serfs. As these repeatedly rose in revolt, the Poles, in their Diet of 1638, took advantage of their rebellion to take from them all personal and political rights. The Cossacks found a leader in Bogdan Chmielnicki, whom a Polish noble had depraved of his land. As Chmielnicki could obtain no justice in Warsaw, he raised the banner of revolt in 1648. Forthwith, the whole Ukraine was under arms. The people of Little Russia, embittered by the Jesuits' zeal for conversion, streamed into the camp of the new Hetman. Even their former foes, the Tatars, greedy for Polish spoil, sent help. In the midst of these disorders, King Władysław, the fourth died in 1648, the nobles wrangled for five weeks over the election of a king, to Zamosch, with destruction in his train.
At length, the exertions and the gold of the queen-widow secured the election of John Casimir, brother of the deceased. The last of the house of Vaza, he had been, up to this time, a Jesuit and a cardinal. But the Pope, Freely released him from the priestly order. He proved, however, by no means equal to the situation. He first sought to win over Chmielnicki, but the Polish nobles would hear nothing of dealings with the despised peasants, and under the leadership of Jeremia Viśniowiecki fell suddenly on the unsuspecting Cossacks, massacring them mercilessly. This scandalous outrage fired the Cossacks with the wildest passion for revenge. Bogdan, in alliance with the tartar Khan, Islam Gerai, vanquished the king and his array of nobles in various battles on the plain of Zborov, and so hemmed him in that he was forced to come to terms with the Cossacks.
He had to grant to them their former practical independence, and to pay a yearly tribute to the tartars. The grieco-catholic metropolis of Kyiv received a seat and a vote in the Polish Senate. From these experiences, the Polish aristocracy might have drawn the conclusion that the welfare of their fatherland demanded a more centralized government. But in the Diet of 1652, the infamous Liberum veto was declared a perpetual law. There had never really been any systematic voting in the Diet. The majority had been in the habit of simply shouting down the minority, Or, if the latter did not acquiesce gracefully, of compelling them to submission by violence, and occasionally by murder. On one occasion, when the most important measures in regard to the defence of the kingdom against the Cossacks and Tartars were under consideration, one insignificant Lithuanian country member shouted into the hall, "'I dissent!' and forthwith fled that he might not be compelled to change his vote."
His friends and party maintained that, except by unanimous consent, the Diet could arrive at no valid decision, and this view, absurd as it is, they were able to enforce. The Diet separated without result. Thenceforth any member had the power to nullify the proceedings of the Diet by the use of the liberum veto. Never has the passion for personal liberty carried a ruling class to so pernicious an extreme. To the caprice of the individual were sacrificed the peace, the greatness, nay, the very existence of the fatherland. While the nobles in this way doomed the kingdom to weakness and internal dissolution, they revoked the compact entered into with the Cossacks. Above all, the Jesuit party in the Senate would hear nothing of the admission of the schismatic metropolis, Kyiv, into the Diet.
Provoked by the constant insults and encroachments of the Poles, Bogdan Chmielnitski once more took up arms. The Cossacks soon found a mightier ally than the Tatars. In 1654 they finally renounced Polish rule and placed themselves under the protection of their coreligionists, the Russians. The Tsar, Alexis Mihailovich, gladly agreed to all their conditions. They were to be ruled by their own elected chiefs in accordance with their own laws, and were to pay no tribute. Sixty thousand of them were to be enrolled for war service, and receive regular pay from the Tsar. Henceforth, this martial people, instead of being a bulwark of Poland against Russia, became the frontier guard of Russia against Poland.
With overpowering strength, In which religious zeal played no small part, the Russians and Cossacks repelled the attacks of the Poles, conquered White Russia and Lithuania, and even took the fortress of Lublin in Poland proper. With the political decline of Poland was associated her intellectual decadence. The preceding epoch of the Reformation is regarded as the golden age of Polish literature. Nicolás Rey, 1507, to 1568, celebrated sometimes the views of the reformers, sometimes the joys of love, and gave his robust humor expression in strongly spiced satire. Of much higher and finer endowments than this gifted country gentleman was John Kohanowski, the foremost of Poland's older poets. In him profound knowledge of classical antiquity was associated with deep political feeling and the happiest mastery of expression.
As a lyric poet, he was never equalled in Poland. Side by side with these noble authors stand the low-born Sebastian Klonowicz. His revolutionary temper found voice in powerful and racy but bitter verses. Prose was written almost exclusively in Latin. All the more credit, therefore, belongs to Lukas Gurnicki's Courtier, which was written in Polish, and is an admirable mirror of the usages of the higher society of his time. The exciting political and religious life of the period exerted a stimulating influence on Polish oratory, of which some masterpieces remain. Under the direful rule of Sigismund, the third, the luster of Polish literature began to grow dim. The burghers were shut out not only from all participation in public life, but also from the higher education.
Even the nobles ceased to resort to foreign universities, so perilous as they believed, for their faith. The University of Krakow rapidly retrograded. The authority of a tutelary and exclusive church interdicted all free investigation and independent thought. The political disorganisation and the self-seeking of the ruling caste enfeebled every higher national aspiration. Soon, Latin became the dominant literary language. Little except translations from the French appeared in the native tongue. After long-continued disorder, Russia had received a firm organisation through the installation of the new dynasty of the House of Romanov. The Tsar, Michael Fedorovich, was a well-meaning but weak prince, who all his life was subservient to foreign influences.
The boyars availed themselves of this weakness to exert a considerable influence on the government. But the situation was changed when, after the peace of Devulino, the Tsar's father, the monk Filaretus, returned from a Polish prison and was nominated by his son to the Patriarchate of Moscow. This energetic man became joint ruler. And caused the year of his rule as spiritual primate to appear on the public documents side by side with that of the temporal potentate, a custom continued by his successors in the patriarchal chair of Moscow. The boyars were once more deprived of all influence and reduced to their former state of vassalage. The Council of State was still called together on occasion of high importance And certain of its members were bold enough to express their views on the questions submitted.
But the decision of the Tsar was final. Michael and his successor, Alexis, assembled on several occasions a general council consisting of two nobles and two burghers from each city. But even here the members were only asked to express their opinions without the Tsar being in any way bound by them. This was hardly a representative parliament, as some Slavophiles would have us believe. On the death of Tsar Michael, his son Alexis, a lad of sixteen, ascended the throne. At first, the youthful prince was completely dependent on his tutor, the boyar, Boris Morozov, who, misusing his power, espoused his pupil to the daughter of a petty noble. whose sister he himself had married, and heaped offices and pensions upon his own and the Zarina's relatives.
Plundering of the people and scandalous misgovernment through Boris's protgees was now the rule in Russia. Commercial monopolies in the hands of the dominant families hampered traffic and increased the cost of the necessaries of life. At length, the long-suffering populace of Moscow rose in wild revolt, and Not against the Tsar, but against his officials, and struck down a number of them. Alexei rescued Moscow with difficulty, and had to banish him from his presence, and exclude him from all public offices. Alexei thereupon appointed a commission of nobles and ecclesiastics to compile a new code of laws, July 1648, based on the rights of the church, former edicts of the Tsar, and decisions of the boyars.
A national convention, in October 1648, recognized the new code, which was then promulgated in all lands under the sceptre of the Tsar. Yet, notwithstanding this wise and popular measure, the land did not attain peace. Official dishonesty provoked new risings in Novgorod and Pskov in 1650, some of which had to be suppressed by armed force. To cut off the source of such outbreaks, the Tsar constituted a new board, which, under various names, had continued to the present day, being now known as the Chamber of Secret Affairs. To it was intrusted the unconditional execution of the Tsar's decrees. Only insignificant persons were called to it, for they would be blind tools of the sovereign authority, and thus pave the way for unconditional and unlimited absolutism.
This strengthening of the power of the Tsar, was of all the more importance because Russia was soon involved in a long and decisive conflict with Poland. The Cossack War sounded the signal. Among the results were the lasting subjugation of Poland and the ultimate elevation of Russia to be the foremost eastern power. This change was made possible by the decadence of the Ottoman Empire, which showed itself in all departments of government, and first of that in finance. In the time of Sultan Soliman the Great, a million ducats, about $9,000,000,000, could be deposited a year in the treasury as surplus. Under his successor, conditions were reversed. The expenditure soon exceeded the income by as much as one-fourth.
Thefts and embezzlements in all branches co-operated with the cupidity of the sultans, who needed large sums for their pleasures to empty the treasury. Peculation was organized into the system. The highest offices, even the governorships of whole provinces, the princely dignity in Moldovia and in Wallachia, were sold at auction to the highest bidders. No wonder that the purchasers sought to make up for this outlay by exactions from the miserable subjects, who, with no one beneath them to be preyed upon, had to bear the whole intolerable burden. The oppressive burden of the taxes, the ignorance and indifference of the ephemeral officials produced widespread poverty, misery, and depopulation. The husbandman cultivated only as many acres as would meet his barest needs, for he knew that any surplus would be taken from him by violence.
In all quarters were to be seen deserted homesteads and houses falling to ruin. The enormous extent of the Ottoman Empire, the length of whose frontier was estimated at about 15,000 miles, was an element of weakness rather than strength. In Asia, the empire comprehended Anatolia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Arabia. In Africa, Egypt, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers. In Europe, Thrace, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania, the greater part of Hungary, Bosnia, Serbia, Dalmatia, Albania, Macedonia, and Greece with the archipelago. The fairest and most fertile districts of three continents, from the Tigris to the Middle Danube, and almost to the pillars of Hercules, were subject to the sultans, who, instead of using their unbounded resources to make themselves masters of the world, merely spread death and ruin over one's blooming and vigorous empires.
In the families of the sultans, constant strifes and bloody conflicts arose among the wives, or among their sons, or between the sons and their father. Even under the great Solyman such conflicts had taken place. The grand viziers began to have weightier influence in state affairs than the sultans themselves, who succumbed more and more to the intrigues of the harem. The personal counsel of the vizier constituted the sublime port, the highest political authority. The most illustrious of the viziers were Mohamed Socolli, who through the Christian origin rose under Soleyman to this foremost position, and under Selim, the second, became all-powerful. It was due to him that Turkey, under the weak Selim, continued on the whole to maintain its position.
Socolli's ability, uprightness, and toleration for his former fellow-believers, the Christians, were commended by all his well-informed contemporaries. After ruling for fourteen years, he fell, in 1579, by the dagger of a dervish to whom he did not appear sufficiently fanatical. Under the Grand Vizier, and in conjunction with him, ruled the Divan, A body composed of the highest officials of the empire, and meeting regularly four times a week for the consideration of matters of policy, administration, and justice. To it everyone could submit his case. Its decisions required confirmation by the sultan, but this was seldom withheld. The military power of Turkey rested on its feudal cavalry, every warrior being hereditary possessor of a fifth, larger or smaller.
The number of these Sipahi, Spahis amounted to at least two hundred thousand, organized by districts, Sanjaks, under Sanjak bays. These again were organized into provinces, Eyalets, under Bayler bays, or governors, the military leaders being also the civil administrators of their respective districts. The Spahis laid the foundation of Turkey's greatness, but with increasing riches and effeminacy, they lost their warlike spirit. Recourse was now had to paid spahis, at first merely a sort of bodyguard, but latterly increased in number to 40,000 heavy-armed horsemen. To this must be added the irregular cavalry, who, instead of receiving pay, remunerated themselves by pillaging, and the tartar, Moldavo-Walachian, Georgian, and other auxiliaries.
The total number of these horsemen was, in the seventeenth century, more than two hundred and twenty thousand, and before firearms were perfected, they were the main support of Turkish military supremacy. Meanwhile, a reliable infantry was needed. This was by preference composed of Christian boys who had been carried off from their parents, and who, after being trained in Islamism and subjected to discipline, were drafted into the corps of Janiseries. In 1638, under Murad, the fourth, this compulsory enlistment was abolished, and even after, the corps consisted exclusively of volunteers. The service was severe and for life, but the position was held in honour and was well paid. Originally, the corps had been distinguished for its brotherly spirit, order, morality, and devoted heroism.
But deterioration came with the admission of young turks to whom the privilege of marriage could not be denied as it had been to the stolen offspring of Christians. Thus the military power of Turkey degenerated rapidly. The more disorganised the state of the exchequer, and the more irregularly the soldiers were paid, the more frequent were the revolts that sometimes led to bloody catastrophes. After the Battle of Lepanto, matters went even worse. with the Turkish navy. The fleets lost confidence, and no longer ventured out of the harbours. The Turks, brave and enterprising by land, had ever felt themselves awkward and timid at sea. The poverty of the government also wrought evil. In the first half of the 17th century, the Turkish navy was reduced to fifty ships, which were fit only for the pettiest services.
It must be admitted that the Osmanlis did not understand how to take advantage of their triumphs on European soil so as to evolve an enduring national organisation. Rigid and severe in its forms, the government was always alien and hostile to its subject races. Culture remained the property of the few. Individual sultans favoured learning, but irrespective of some historical works, this was altogether of a religious character. There is a striking contrast between the literary barrenness of Turkey and the brilliant intellectual development that once distinguished their Arabian and Persian fellow-believers. In the domain of politics, the condition of affairs was similar. Legislation was stationary, for it could not deviate anyota from the principles laid down in the Koran.
The Christian subjects of the Turks were treated as mere cattle. No effects were made to convert them, Although this would have greatly strengthened Turkey in the Balkan peninsula and along the Danube. Nay, from pure selfishness some sultans forbade conversions in large numbers to Islam. This would have involved the loss of the poll-tax imposed on Christians and the conscription of their children. Revolts among the Christians were frequent, and were crushed only by the most brutal violence. The most striking proof of the Turks' incapacity for rule is the fact that they could dispense with the despised unbelievers neither in the administration nor in the army. Their hosts were mainly recruited from captive Christian children, and the higher administrative offices were almost exclusively occupied by Christians.
Only by virtue of this peculiar system was Turkey able to maintain her integrity till toward the end of the 17th century. On the death of the debauchee Selim, the second, in 1574, Mohamed Sokoly was successful in placing Selim's eldest son, Murad III, on the throne. He inaugurated his reign, in accordance with the ghastly ottoman custom, by slaying his younger brothers. He soon plunged into the enervating excesses of the harem, and showed zeal for nothing save the scandalous plunderings of his subjects. By this plundering he obtained the means for the constant largesse by which the fidelity of his troops was secured. Yet in spite of the deplorable conduct of the administration, his adventurous provincial governors were able to extend his domains in Hungary at the cost of Austria.
Meanwhile another war broke out, and this time with the oriental rival of the Ottoman Empire, Persia.
This state was hostile to Turkey, not only on political grounds, but also on religious ones. The Persian sect of Shiites and the Turkish sect of Sunnites hated each other. After a war of twelve years, peace was concluded in 1590 on terms highly honorable for the Osmanlis. Persia ceded to them the whole of Georgia, as well as the provinces on the southwest coast of the Caspian. Yet, notwithstanding this brilliant result, the Persian campaigns were disastrous for the Turks. Their best armies, to the number, it is said, of six hundred thousand men, were destroyed, and their finances reduced to a state of hopeless disorder. The ill effects appeared prominently when the war against Emperor Rudolf II broke out anew in In this campaign, the Turks suffered numerous defeats, and had it not been for the Emperor's frenzied passion for persecution and the risings of the Hungarians and Transylvanians under Bochkai, the port would have suffered heavy losses in the peace of Jitfa-Torok.
In 16, o'clock, in 16, o'clock. Meantime, Murad, the third, had been replaced by his son, Mohamed, the third, and he by his brother, Ahmet, the first. But these insignificant princes exerted no material influence upon the course of political and military events. Ahmet soon found a formidable foe in the energetic and gifted Shah of Persia, Abbas the Great. This prince undertook to wrest from the Turks their conquests in the last war, and the real weakness of the Ottoman Empire was revealed. In the campaign from 1604 to 1619, All that the Turks had acquired since 1590 was lost. The Persian Wars had exhausted the best strength of the state. The extent to which the decadence of the Turkish government had gone is shown by the fact that, on the death of Ahmet, in 1617, the Divan, that it might order matters at its own discretion, elevated his imbecile brother, Mustafa, to the throne.
In three months he was deposed in favour of Osman, the eldest son of Ahmed I. The new sultan was a high-spirited, chivalric youth, inspired above all with the ambition to restore the empire and his race to their ancient glory. But his warlike projects were not favoured by the indolent spahis and janizaries. The failure of a campaign against Poland heightened the discontent. The grand vizier, the minister of war, and other high functionaries and officers were massacred by the maddened soldiery. Finally, Osman himself shared their fate, the first case of regicide in Turkish history. The imbecile Mustafa was replaced on the throne, where he conducted himself in the most insane manner. At length, the Divan and the army alike recognized that an end must be put to such a deplorable condition of affairs.
In 1623, Mustafa was relegated to the harem where he lived in obscurity for 16 years, and Osman's brother, Murad IV, was set in his place. Murad, though like his murdered brother, a youth of energy and enterprise, gave way without restraint to his sensual passions, and thus ultimately wrecked himself. He humbled the insolent arrogance of the janizaries by terrible and repeated executions. External affairs soon demanded his active intervention. Several Asiatic pashas rose in revolt, and Shah Abbas the Great of Persia was ready to take advantage of these turmoils to extend his own dominions. In 1623, he made himself master of Baghdad, the capital of Mesopotamia, and the ancient residence of the Caliphs, and forthwith proceeded to further conquests.
In 1628, luckily for the Osmanlis, he died, and his son, Sefi, was of far inferior capacity. Sultan Murad now undertook war in person against Persia, and conducted it with the fierce energy characteristic of his nature. He retook Erivan, Tabriz, and Van, and finally, in 1638, stormed Baghdad, which was now little more than a heap of ruins. In the next year, the long protracted Persian War was brought to a close by a peace that left affairs very much as they were before it broke out. Murad now thought of turning his victorious arms against Christian Europe, which was rent by numberless conflicts. Christendom trembled at the threatening danger when, in 1640, the sultan died, worn out prematurely by his debaucheries and passions.
He had restored discipline and confidence to his army, and order to his finances, but these reforms were based merely on fear, and everything depended on the character of those who should hereafter hold the reins of government. Ibrahim, Murad's youngest brother, who succeeded to the throne, was an enervated weakling. He had, however, able ministers who maintained the prestige of Turkey abroad, reorganized the fleet, and began in 1645 a war with Venice for the possession of Crete. In 1648, Ibrahim was murdered by the Janizares, who thereupon placed his youthful son, Mohammed IV, upon the throne. The real masters of the empire were now the Janizares, like the Praetorian guards in ancient Rome, and before their power Both the sovereign and his ministers trembled.
The destruction of the state seemed imminent, but it was averted by a race of hereditary grand-visiers who, beginning with Mohamed Koprili, in 1656, and holding office for a quarter of a century, secured for the Ottoman Empire a new lease of life. The alliance with France under Louis XIV, effected at this time, Lends a fictitious importance to the position of Turkey in European affairs in the middle of the seventeenth century.
End of Europe in the Middle Ages in the Seventeenth Century, Part Two by Martin Philipson.
-
4 04 - Jesse James' Career in Texas 3:53
Jesse James's Career in Texas by J.W. Buell. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Read by Chad Horner, located in Ballyclare, County Hunter, Northern Ireland. As previously stated, Jesse James left Missouri in company with George Shepard and 40 or 50 Gorillas for Texas. where they spent the winter of 1864 to 1865 without special activity, and in the spring it was decided to return to Missouri, although such a decision was pregnant with a renewal of all the dangers from which they had just escaped. Upon reaching Benton, County Jesse James, Arch Clements, and another comrade proceeded to the farmhouse of James Harkness, who was known as an uncompromising union man.
They decoyed him a short distance from his house by requesting him to direct them to a spring which they knew was in the neighborhood. When out of sight of the house, Jesse James and his comrade caught Harkness by the arms and held him firmly, while Arch Clements drew a large bowie-knife, with which he cut the throat of the defenseless farmer, almost severing his head. Fresh blood being upon their hands, they rode into Johnson County to the house of Alan Duncan, another Union man, and finding him chopping wood in his yard, Jesse James first accosted him and then sent a bullet into his brain. The guerrilla band, now numbering scarce a score, before getting out of Johnson County were surprised by a company of federal volunteers and almost annihilated.
Jesse James had his horse shot under him, and a musket ball went crashing through his lungs. Supposing him dead, the Federals gave pursuit to the fleeing gorillas and chased the remaining few for nearly fifty miles. The wounded gorilla lay for two days where he fell in terrible agony and would have died except for the kindly ministrations of a farmer who chanced to find him. The care he received after weeks of suffering enabled him again to resume the saddle, and he went to Nebraska, where his mother was temporarily living and where he remained until the return of Frank James from Kentucky late in the following summer. Before Frank left Brandensburg, however, he met with an adventure which nearly cost his life.
The vicinity of Brandensburg was infested with horse thieves, and suspicion was directed against Frank as one of the guilty band. It was determined to arrest him, and for this purpose a posse of six men went to the house, where he was stopping, and after charging him with horse-stealing, demanded his arms. The response was most unexpected, for with an oath he drew his pistol and shot three of the party, and in return was badly wounded in the thigh. The other three fled, but a large crowd soon collected to intimidate which Frank backed up against the house and threatened to shoot anyone who made the least motion to harm him. A horse was standing hitched conveniently near, and compelling the crowd to fall back.
He drew his suffering body up into the saddle and made his escape. The wound proved a very serious one, and kept him confined to his bed at the house of a friend, where he found refuge. Nearly 75 miles from Brandensburg for several months. End of Jesse James's Career in Texas by J. W. Buell
-
5 05 - John Quincy Adams and The Right of Petition 10:22
John Quincy Adams and the Right of Petition by Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Wayne Cook. He rests with the immortals. His journey has been long. For him no wail of sorrow, but pain full and strong. So well and bravely has he done the work be found to do, to justice, freedom, duty, God, and man forever true. Whittier. The lot of ex-presidents of the United States, as a rule, has been a life of extreme retirement. But to this rule there is one marked exception. When John Quincy Adams left the White House in March, 1829, it must have seemed as if public life could hold nothing more for him.
He had had everything, apparently, that an American statesman could hope for. He had been minister to Holland and Prussia, to Russia and England. He had been a senator of the United States, Secretary of State for eight years, and finally President. Yet, notwithstanding all this, The greatest part of his career and his noblest service to his country were still before him when he gave up the presidency. In the following year, 1830, he was told that he might be elected to the House of Representatives, and the gentleman who made the proposition ventured to say that he thought an ex-president, by taking such a position, instead of degrading the individual, would elevate the representative character.
Mr. Adams replied that he had, quote, in that respect, no scruples whatever. No person can be degraded by serving the people as representative in Congress, nor, in my opinion, would an ex-president of the United States be degraded as serving as a selectman of his town, if elected thereto by the people, end quote. A few weeks later, he was chosen to the House. And the district continued to send him every two years from that time until his death. He did much excellent work in the house, and was conspicuous in more than one memorable scene. But here it is possible to touch on only a single point, for he came forward as the champion of a great principle, and fought a battle for the right which will always be remembered among the great deeds of American public men.
Soon after Mr. Adams took his seat in Congress, the movement for the abolition of slavery was begun by a few obscure agitators. It did not at first attract much attention, but as it went on, it gradually exasperated the overbearing temper of the Southern slaveholders. One fruit of this agitation was the appearance of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the House of Representatives. A few were presented by Mr. Adams without attracting much notice. But as the petitions multiplied, the Southern representatives became aroused. They assailed Mr. Adams for presenting them, and finally passed what was known as the gag rule, which prevented the reception of these petitions by the House. Against this rule Mr.
Adams protested, in the midst of the loud shouts of the Southerners, as a violation of his constitutional rights. But the tyranny of slavery at that time was so complete that the rule was adopted and enforced, and the slaveholders undertook in this way to suppress free speech in the House, just as they also undertook to prevent the transmission through the mails of any writings adverse to slavery. With the wisdom of a statesman and a man of affairs, Mr. Adams addressed himself to the one practical point of the contest. He did not enter upon a discussion of slavery as abolition, but turned his whole force toward the vindication of the right of petition. On every petition day he would offer, in constantly increasing numbers, petitions which came to him from all parts of the country for the abolition of slavery, in this way driving the Southern representatives almost to madness, despite the rule which prevented the reception of such documents then offered.
Their hatred of Mr. Adams is something difficult to conceive. And they were burning to break him down, and, if possible, drive him from the house. On February 6th, 1837, after presenting the usual petitions, Mr. Adams offered one upon which he said he should like the judgment of the speaker as to his propriety, inasmuch as it was a petition from slaves. In a moment the house was in tumult, and loud cries of, Expel him! Expel him! Rose in all directions. One resolution after another was offered, looking toward his expulsion or censure, and it was not until February 9th, three days later, that he was able to take the floor in his own defense. His speech was a masterpiece of argument, invective, and sarcasm.
He showed, among other things, that he had not offered the petition, but had only asked the opinion of the Speaker upon it, and that the petition itself Prayed that slavery should not be abolished. When he closed a speech, which was quite as savage as any made against him, and infinitely abler, no one dared to reply, and the idea of censuring him was dropped. The greatest struggle, however, came five years later, when, on January 21st, 1842, Mr. Adams presented the petition of certain citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, Praying for the dissolution of the Union on account of slavery. His enemies felt that now, at last, he had delivered himself into their hands. Again arose the cry for his expulsion.
And again vituperation was poured out upon him, and resolutions to expel him freely introduced. When he got to the floor to speak in his own defense, he faced an excited house almost unanimously hostile to him. and possessing, as he well knew, both the will and the power to drive him from its walls. But there was no wavering in Mr. Adams. If they say they will try me, he said, they must try me. If they say they will punish me, they must punish me. But if they say that in peace and mercy they will spare me expulsion, I disdain and cast away their mercy, and I ask if they will come to such a trial and expel me. I defy them. I have constituents to go to, and they will have something to say if this house expels me, nor will it be long before the gentlemen will see me here again."
The fight went on for nearly a fortnight, and on February 7th the whole subject was finally laid on the table. The sturdy, dogged fighter, single-handed and alone, had beaten all the forces of the South. and of slavery. No more memorable fight has ever been made by one man in a parliamentary body, and after this decisive struggle, the tide began to turn. Every year, Mr. Adams renewed his motion to strike out the gang rule, and force it to a vote. Gradually, the majority against it dwindled, until at last, on December 3rd, 1844, his motion prevailed. Freedom of speech had been vindicated in the American House of Representatives, the right of petition had been won, and the first great blow against a slave power had been struck.
Four years later Mr. Adams fell, stricken with paralysis, at his place in the house, and a few hours afterward, with the words, This is the last of earth. I am content upon his lips. He sank into unconsciousness. and died. It was a fit end to a great public career. His fight for the right of petition is one to be studied and remembered, and Mr. Adams made it practically alone. The slaveholders of the South and the representatives of the North were alike against him. Against him, too, as his biographer Mr. Morse says, was the class in Boston, to which he naturally belonged by birth and education. He had to encounter the bitter resistance of his own set of the consciousness respectability of wealth.
But the great body of the New England people were with him, as were the voters of his own district. He was an old man, with the physical infirmities of age. His eyes were weak and streaming, his hands were trembling, his voice cracked in moments of excitement. Yet in the age of oratory, in the days of Webster and Clay, He was known as the old man eloquent. It was what he said, more than the way he said it, which told. His vigorous mind never worked more surely and clearly than when he stood alone in the midst of an angry house, the target of their hatred and abuse. His arguments were strong, and his large knowledge and wide experience supplied him with every weapon for defense and attack. Beneath the lash of his invective and his sarcasm, the hottest of the slaveholders cowered away.
He set his back against a great principle. He never retreated an inch. He never yielded. He never conciliated. He was always an assailant, and no man and no body of man had the power to turn him. He had his dark hours. He felt bitterly the isolation of his position, but he never swerved. He had good right to sit down in his diary when the gag rule was repealed. Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God. End of John Quincy Adams and the Right of Petition by Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt
-
6 06 - The History of British India, Chapter 1 50:17
The History of British India by James Mill, 1773-1836, published in 1817. The History of British India. Chapter One. From the commencement of the efforts to begin a trade with India, till the change of the company from a regulated to a joint-stock company. The Portuguese had formed important establishments in India before the British offered themselves as competitors for the riches of the East. From the time when Vasco da Gama distinguished his nation by discovering the passage round the Cape of Good Hope, and first reached the coast of Hindustan, a whole century had elapsed, during which, without a rival, they had enjoyed and abused the advantages of superior knowledge and art amid a feeble and half-civilized race.
They had explored the Indian Ocean as far as Japan, had discovered its islands, rich with some of the most favorite productions of nature, had achieved the most brilliant conquests, and by their commerce poured into Europe, in unexampled profusion, those commodities of the East on which the nations at that time set an extraordinary value. The circumstances of this splendid fortune had violently attracted the attention of Europe. The commerce of India, even when confined to those narrow limits which a carriage by land had prescribed, was supposed to have elevated feeble states into great ones, and to have constituted an enviable part in the fortune even of the most opulent and powerful. To have contributed largely to support the Grecian monarchies both in Syria and Egypt, To have retarded the downfall of Constantinople, and to have raised the small and obscure Republic of Venice to the rank and influence of the most potent kingdoms.
The discovery, therefore, of a new channel for this opulent traffic, and the happy experience of the Portuguese inflamed the cupidity of all the maritime nations of Europe, and set before them the most tempting prospects. An active spirit of commerce had already begun to display itself in England. The nation had happily obtained a full share of the improvement which had dawned in Europe, and the tranquil and economic reign of Elizabeth had been favorable both to the accumulation of capital and to those projects of private emoluments on which the spirit of commerce depends. A brisk trade, and of considerable extent, had been carried on during the greater part of the sixteenth century with the Netherlands, at that time the most improved and commercial part of Europe.
The merchants of Bristol had opened a traffic with the Canary Islands, those of Plymouth with the coasts of Guinea and Brazil. The English now fished on the banks of Newfoundland, and explored the Sea of Spitsbergen for the sovereign of the waters. They engrossed by an exclusive privilege the commerce of Russia. They took an active part in the trade of the Mediterranean. The company of merchant adventurers pushed so vigorously the traffic with Germany and the central parts of Europe as highly to excite the jealousy of the Hans towns. And the Protestant inhabitants of the Netherlands and France, flying from the persecutions of their own oppressive and bigoted governments, augmented the commercial resources of England by the capital and skill of a large importation of the most ingenious and industrious people in Europe.
In these circumstances the lustre of the Portuguese transactions in the East peculiarly attracted the admiration of the English. Already a most adventurous spirit of navigation was roused in the nation. The English were the first who had imitated the example of the Spaniards in visiting the New World. In 1497, Cabot, with a small squadron, explored the coast of America from Labrador to Virginia, and discovered the islands of Newfoundland and St. John. An English merchant named Robert Thorne, who had been stationed for many years at Seville in Spain, and had acquired particular knowledge of the intercourse which the Portuguese had opened with the East, Presented a project to Henry VIII, about the year 1527, the accomplishment of which he imagined would place his country in a situation no less enviable than that of the Portuguese.
As that nation had obtained a passage to India by a course to the southeast, and pretended a right which they defended by force to its exclusive occupation, He supposed that his countrymen might reach the same part of the globe by sailing to the north-west, and thus obtain a passage at once, expeditious and undisputed. What effect this representation produced on the mind of Henry is not accurately known. But two voyages in the course of his reign were undertaken for the discovery of a north-west passage, one about this period and another ten years later. Nothing can more clearly prove to us the ardour with which the English coveted a share in the riches supposed to be drawn by the Portuguese from the East than the persevering efforts which they made to discover a channel from which the Portuguese would have no pretence to exclude them.
Two attempts in the reign of Henry to obtain a passage by the North West had failed. Their exploring fancy anticipated a happier issue from a voyage to the northeast. A small squadron, accordingly under the direction of Sir Hugh Willoughby, was fitted out in the reign of Edward, the sixth, and sailing along the coast of Norway doubled the North Cape, where it was encountered by a storm. The ship of Sir Hugh was driven to an obscure spot in Russia-Lapland, where he and his crew perished miserably by the climate. The other principal vessel found shelter in the harbor of Archangel, and was the first foreign ship by which it was entered. So well did Chancellor, the captain of the vessel, improve this incident that he opened a commercial intercourse with the natives, visited the monarch in his capital, Stipulated important privileges for his countrymen, and laid the foundation of a trade which was immediately prosecuted to no inconsiderable extent.
This voyage but little damped the hopes of obtaining a north-east passage to the riches of India. Some vigorous attempts were made by the company in whose hands the commerce of Russia was placed, the last of them in 1580, When two ships were sent out to explore the passage through the Straits of Way Gods, after struggling with many perils and difficulties from the ice and the cold, one of the vessels returned unsuccessful, the other was never heard of more. Before this hope was regarded as desperate, the project of obtaining the passage by the northwest was resumed with ardor. No fewer than six voyages were made in the course of a few years. Two barks of twenty-five tons each, and a panace of ten sailed under Martin Frobisher in the year 1567, and entered Hudson's Bay, which at first they imagined was the inlet about to conduct them to the Golden Shore.
The same navigator was encouraged to make a second attempt in the same direction in 1576. As he brought home in these voyages some minerals which were supposed to be impregnated with gold, the attention of the government was excited, and two years afterwards Frobisher was sent out with fifteen of the Queen's ships, carrying miners for the supposed ore, and a hundred and twenty persons as the rudiments of a colony. Having spent his provisions and lost one of his ships, but not found the expected passage nor left his settlers, he returned with three hundred tons of the supposed treasure, which proved to be only a glittering sand. The nation persevered in its hopes and enterprises. A few years afterwards, Captain John Davis sailed as far as sixty-six degrees, forty minutes north, and discovered the Straits distinguished by his name.
In a second voyage undertaken in 1586, he explored in vain the inlet which he had thus discovered. After a few years he was enabled to proceed in a third expedition, but had no better success than the preceding two. After so many efforts to discover a new passage to India, the English resolved to be no longer deterred by the pretensions of the Portuguese. A voyage to China by the Cape of Good Hope was undertaken in 1582. Four ships proceeded to the coast of Brazil, fought with some Spanish men-of-war, and were obliged to return for want of provisions. Another expedition consisting of three ships was fitted out in 1596, the commander of which was furnished with Queen Elizabeth's letter to the Emperor of China.
This voyage proved eminently unfortunate. The ships were driven upon the coast of Spanish America, where only four men were preserved alive from the effects of storms, famine, and disease.
Amid these unsuccessful endeavors, two voyages were accomplished, which animated the hopes of the nation, and pointed out the way to more fortunate enterprises. Francis Drake, the son of a clergyman in Kent, who at a tender age had been put an apprentice to the master of a slender bark training to the coast of Holland and France, had early evinced that passionate ardor in his profession which is the usual forerunner, of signal success. He gained the affections of his master, who left him his bark at his death. At the age of eighteen he was purser of a ship, which sailed to the Bay of Biscay. At twenty he made a voyage to the coast of Guinea. In 1565 he ventured all he possessed in a voyage to the West Indies, which had no success.
And in 1567, He served under his kinsman, Sir John Hawkins, in his unprosperous expedition to the Bay of Mexico. In these different services his nautical skills, his courage and sagacity had been conspicuously displayed. In 1570 his reputation enabled him to proceed to the West Indies with two vessels under his command. So bent was he on executing some great design that he renewed his visit the next year, for the sole purpose of obtaining information. He had no sooner returned than he planned an expedition against the Spaniards, executed it with two ships and seventy-three men, sacked the town of Nombre de Dios, and returned with great treasure. It is said that in this voyage he saw from the top of a high tree I.E.
fancied, he saw, across the American Isthmus, the Southern Ocean, and became inflamed with the desire of sailing to it in a ship of England. For this expedition he prepared on a great scale, obtaining the commission of the Queen, and five vessels, one of one hundred tons, another of eighty, one of fifty, another of thirty, and a panace of fifteen. manned with one hundred and sixty-four select sailors. The historians of this voyage were anxious to display the taste and magnificence, as well as judgment, of his preparations—expert musicians, rich furniture, utensils of the most curious workmanship, all the vessels of his table silver, and many of those of his cook-room. The expedition sailed from Plymouth, On the 13th of December, 1577.
Having passed the Straits of Magellan, and ravaged the western coast of Spanish America, Drake feared the encounter of a Spanish fleet should he attempt to return in the same direction, and formed the bold design of crossing the Pacific Ocean to India, and regaining England by the Cape of Good Hope. With one ship in only part of the fleet which remained, he steered along the coast of America to the latitude of thirty-eight degrees north, and then entered upon that immense navigation in which Magellan, the only circumnavigator who preceded him, had suffered so much. No memorable occurrence attended the voyage. Of the islands which have been discovered in the Pacific Ocean, none were observed till he approached the Asiatic coast.
Fixing his attention on the Moluccas, of which the fame had been circulated in Europe by the rich spices thence imported by the Portuguese, he passed with little observation the more eastern part of the numerous islands which stud the Indian Sea, and held his course for Tidore. From intelligence received on the passage, he waived his intention of landing on that island, and steered for Tinnat. The sovereign of which he understood to be at enmity with the Portuguese. The intercourse which he there commenced forms a remarkable epoch in the history of the British in India, as it was the beginning of those commercial transactions which have led to such important results. The king, having received assurances that his new visitants came with no other intention than that of trading with his country, gave them a very favorable reception.
This monarch possessed considerable power, since the English navigators were informed that he ruled over seventy islands, besides Trenat. The most valuable of all the Moluccas, and in the visits which they paid to his court, they were eyewitnesses that he could display no contemptible share of magnificence. They exchanged presents with him, received him on board, and traded with his subjects, laid in a cargo of valuable spices, and acquainted themselves with the nature and facilities of a commerce which was so much the object of admiration in Europe. Not satisfied with the information or the commodities which they received on one island, they visited several, being always amazed at their prodigious fertility, and in general delighted with the manners of the inhabitants.
Among other places they landed in the great island of Java, famous afterwards as the seat of the Dutch government in India. They held some friendly intercourse with the natives, and departed with a tolerable knowledge both of the character of the people and the productions of the country. They now spread their sails for that navigation between Europe and India, to which the Portuguese claimed an exclusive right, and by which they monopolized the traffic with India. Those discoverers had craftily disseminated in Europe terrific accounts of dangers and horrors, attending the navigation round the Cape of Good Hope. As the voyage of the English proved remarkably prosperous, they were surprised and delighted with the safety and ease which seemed to them to distinguish this envied passage, and conceived a still more lofty opinion of the advantages enjoyed by the nation that engrossed it.
After leaving Java, the first land which they touched was the Cape of Good Hope. They landed once more at Sierra Leone, on the African coast, where they received such supplies as sufficed for the remainder of the voyage. They arrived at Plymouth on Monday, the 26th of September, 1580, after a voyage of two years, ten months, and a few days, exhibiting to the wondering eyes of the spectators The first ship in England, and the second in the world, which had circumnavigated the globe. The news quickly spread over the whole kingdom, which resounded with the applause of the man who had performed so daring and singular an enterprise. Whoever wished to be distinguished as a patron of merit hastened to confer some mark of his admiration on Captain Drake.
The songs, epigrams, poems, and other pieces, which were composed in celebration of his exploits, amounted to several collections. The queen, after some delay necessary to save appearances with the Spanish court, which loudly complained of the depredations of Drake, though as reprisals perhaps they were not undeserved, paid a visit in person to the wonderful ship of Dept Ford, Accepted of an entertainment on board, and conferred the honor of knighthood on its captain, observing at the same time that his actions did him more honor than his title. We may form some conception of the ardor which at that time prevailed in England for maritime exploits. By the number of men of rank and fortune who chose to forego the indulgences of wealth, and to embark their persons and properties in laborious, painful, and dangerous expeditions.
Among them we find such names as those of the Earls of Cumberland and Essex, of Sir Richard Greenville, of Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Robert Dudley, who prepared squadrons at their own expense, and sailed to various parts of the world. No undertaking of this description was attended with more important circumstances than that of Thomas Cavendish. This gentleman, descended from a family of distinction, and inheriting a large estate in the county of Suffolk, had been early fired with a passion for maritime adventure in a vessel of his own. He had accompanied Sir Richard Greenville in his unsuccessful voyage to Virginia, and now sold or mortgaged his estate to equip a squadron with which he might rival the glory of Drake.
It consisted of three ships, the largest of a hundred and forty tons, one of sixty, and a barque of about forty, supplied with two years provisions, and manned with one hundred and twenty-six officers and sailors, of whom several had served in the celebrated expedition of Drake. They sailed from Plymouth on the 21st of July, 1586. Their voyage through the Straits of Magellan and the depredations which they proceeded to commit along the western coast of the American continent, not only in the spirit of avarice, but even of wanton devastation, formed no part of our present subject, and may without regret be left to other inquirers. They had reached the coast of California, and nearly twenty-four degrees of northern latitude, when, having taken a very rich Spanish ship and completed their schemes of plunder, they commenced their voyages across the Pacific Ocean.
They left the coast of America on the 19th of November and came in sight of Guam, one of the Ladron Islands, on the third of January. From this island they were visited by sixty or seventy canoes full of the inhabitants, who brought provisions to exchange for commodities, and so crowded about the ship that the English, when they had finished their traffic, discharged some of their firearms to drive them away. With the Philippines to which they next proceeded, they opened a more protracted intercourse. They cast anchor at one of the islands, and lay there for nine days. During which they carried on an active trade with the inhabitants. The cluster of islands to which the Europeans have given the name of the Philippines was discovered by Magellan.
Philip, the second, shortly after his ascension to the Spanish throne, planted there a colony of Spaniards by an expedition from New Spain, and a curious commerce had from that time been carried on across the great Pacific Between this settlement and the dominions of Spain in the New World. To Manila, the capital of the Philippine colony, the Chinese, who resorted thither in great numbers, brought all the precious commodities of India, and two ships were sent annually from New Spain, which carried to the Philippines the silver of the American mines, and returned with the fine productions of the East. The impatience, however, of the natives under the Spanish yoke was easily perceived. When they discovered that the new visitors were not Spaniards, but the enemies of that people, they eagerly testified their friendship, and the princes of the island where Cavendish landed engaged to assist him with the whole of their forces if he would return and make war upon the common adversary.
This adventurous discoverer extensively explored the intricate navigation of the Indian archipelago, and observed the circumstances of the new and extraordinary scene with a quick and intelligent eye. He visited the Ladrones, pursued a roving course among the Philippines, which brought most of them within his view. He passed through the Moluccas, sailed along that important chain of islands which, extending from the Strait of Malacca, bounds the Indian archipelago to the extremity of Timor, and, passing the Strait of Bali between the two Javas, cast anchor on the southwest side of the great island of that name. He traded here with the natives for provisions, and formed with them a sort of treaty, stipulating a favorable reception whenever his visit should be renewed.
He sailed for the Cape of Good Hope on the 16th of March, careful to treasure up information respecting a voyage which was now the channel of so important an intercourse. He made astronomical observations. He studied the weather, the winds, and the tides. He noted the bearing and position of lands, and omitted nothing which might facilitate a repetition of the voyage to himself or any of his countrymen. He passed the Cape with prosperous navigation about the middle of May, and, having touched at St. Helena to recruit his stores, he landed at Plymouth on the 9th of September, 1588. In a letter which, on the very day of his arrival, he wrote to Lord Hunson, then Chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth, he says, I navigated to the islands of the Philippines, hard upon the coast of China.
Of which country I have brought such intelligence as hath not been heard of in these parts, a country, the stateliness and riches, of which I fear to make report of, lest I should not be credited. I sailed along the islands of Moluccas, where among some of the heathen people I was well entreated, and where our countrymen may have trade as freely as the Portugals, if they themselves will.
The tide of maritime adventure which these splendid voyages were calculated to increase flowed naturally towards India by reason of the fancied opulence of the East and the passion for Indian commodities which prevailed at that time in Europe. The impatience of our countrymen had already engaged them in a circuitous traffic with that part of the globe. They sailed to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, where they found cargoes of Indian goods conveyed over land, and a mercantile company denominated the Levant Company was instituted, according to the policy of the age, to secure to the nation the advantages of so important a commerce. The company, too, which, after the discovery of the port of Archangel, had been formed to carry on the trade with Russia, had opened a communication with Persia, Whence they imported Indian goods to satisfy the demand of the English.
Mr. Anthony Jenkinson, an active and enterprising agent of the Russia Company, sailed down the Volga in to the Caspian Sea, which he crossed into Persia, and at Bogar, a city of some importance, found merchants from various parts of the Persian Empire, from Russia, from India and China. This voyage he performed seven times, and opened a considerable trade for raw and wrought silk, for carpets, spices, precious stones, and other Asiatic productions. In 1563 there was business enough to require the presence of three agents at Khosbin, the seat of the Persian court, and the traffic flourished for several years.
Accidental circumstances contributed to enliven the admiration excited by the Indian trade. During that expedition to the coast of Spain, on which Sir Francis Drake was sent by Queen Elizabeth to harass the Spanish shipping, and prevent as far as possible the preparations for the invincible Armada, he took one of the Portuguese ships from India, known at that time by the name of Carricks. The value of her cargo inflamed the imagination of the merchants, and the papers which she carried afforded information respecting the traffic in which she was engaged. A still more important capture of the same sort was made in 1593. An expedition fitted out for the West Indies by Sir Walter Raleigh and commanded by Sir John Borrows encountered near the Azores the greatest of all the Portuguese carracks, A vessel of sixteen hundred tons, carrying seven hundred men, and thirty-six brass cannon, and, after an obstinate contest, carried her into Dartmouth.
She was the largest vessel ever seen in England, laden with spices, calicles, silk, gold, pearls, drugs, porcelain, ebony, etc., and by her riches inflamed the impatience of the English to be engaged in so opulent and brilliant a commerce.
Some members of the Turquoise or Levant Company finished about the same time an expedition into India. They had carried some cloth, tin, and other goods from Aleppo to Baghdad, which they next conveyed down the Tigris to Ormuz in the Persian Gulf, and thence transported to Goa, the great mart between the Portuguese and Indians on the coast of Malabar. From this place they commenced an extensive survey of the adjoining countries. Repaired to Agra, at that time the capital and residents of the Mughal Emperor visited Lahore, traversed Bengal, traveled to Pegu and Malacca, and returning by sea to Ormuz, retraced their steps to Aleppo. Whence they sailed for England, bearing with them important and extensive information respecting the countries they had explored.
Intelligence now poured itself upon the nation by a variety of channels. An Englishman of the name of Stevens had sailed with the Portuguese from Lisbon to Goa by the Cape of Good Hope, and wrote an account of his voyage, which was read with avidity, and contributed to swell the general current of enterprise which now ran so vehemently toward India. The first application which was made to government was by a memorial in the name of Diverse Merchants, addressed to the Lords of Council in 1589, for the royal permission to send three ships and as many pinnaces on a voyage to India. They enumerated the different places at which the Portuguese had already effected settlements, on the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, in Malacca, and in the Bonta and Molucca Islands, places from which it seemed to be tacitly understood that other nations were bound to abstain.
But they added that the islands and shores of the Indian Ocean presented many other places which were open to the enterprise of the English merchants, and from an intercourse with which the nation might reap the greatest advantage.
What reception this application received is little known. But the unfortunate expedition of Captain Raymond, remarkable as being the first of which India was the immediate destination, though its object was not so much trade as plunder, by cruising against the Portuguese, was fitted out in 1591. Disease had made such ravages among the crews before they reached the Cape of Good Hope, that one of the vessels was obliged to be sent home with the sick. And the rest, two in number, had not long doubled the cape when the principal ship was lost in a storm. Captain James Lancaster, in the remaining vessel, after a disastrous voyage to the east, sailed to the West Indies, where he lost the ship, and with great difficulty found means to return in a French privateer.
But while the English fluctuated between desire and execution in this important project, the Dutch, in 1595, boldly sent four ships to trade with India by the Cape of Good Hope. This expedition added fuel at once to the jealousy and ambition of the English. In 1599, an association was formed, and a fund subscribed, which amounted to 30,000, 133 pounds, 6 shillings, 8 pennies, and consisted of 100,000 shares, the subscription of individuals varying from 100 pounds to 3,000 pounds. It was agreed to petition the Queen for a warrant to fit out three ships and export buoyant, and also for a charter of privileges. A committee of fifteen, the origin and foundation of the Court of Directors, were chosen to manage.
The approbation of the government was readily signified, but as a treaty was then pending with Spain, policy counseled delay. The subscribers, known by the name of the adventurers, were impatient, and presented a memorial, setting forth the places with which the Spaniards and Portugies had established an intercourse, and pointed out other parts to which, without any ground of complaint on the part of those nations, the English might with unspeakable advantage resort. The council replied that, It was more beneficial for the general state of merchandise to entertain a piece than that the same should be hindered by the standing with ye Spanish commissions for the maintaining of this trade to forego the opportunity of the concluding of the piece.
The memorial was referred to Sir Folk Greville, who made a favorable report. And in the course of the same year, the Queen sent John Mildenhall overland by Constantinople on an embassy to the Mogul. It was attended with little success. The Portuguese and Venetian agents exerted themselves to raise suspicions against the designs of the English, and effectually obstructed the endeavors of the ambassador. Towards the end of the year sixteen hundred the efforts of the adventurers were renewed. The consent of government to proceed in preparation for an Indian voyage was obtained, while the patent of incorporation was still under consideration. Meanwhile an application was made from government with what view does not appear for the employment of Sir Edward Michael Bourne in the expedition.
The answer of the committee, whose situation, That of petitioner for a favor not yet conceded might have counseled complaisance, affords a curious specimen of their independence and of the mode of thinking of the times. They stated it as their resolution not to employ any gentlemen in any place of charge, and requested that they may be allowed to sort their business with men of their own quality, Lest the suspicion of the employment of gentlemen being taken hold upon by the generalities do drive a greater number of the adventurers to withdraw their contributions. The adventure was prosecuted with ardor. On the eighth of October, the five following ships were already provided the malice scourge of two hundred men and six hundred tons burden.
The Hector of One Hundred Men and Three Hundred Tons. The Ascension of Eighty Men and Two Hundred and Sixty Tons. The Susan of Eighty Men and Two Hundred and Forty Tons. A Penas of Forty Men and One Hundred Tons. To provision these ships for twenty months the cost was computed at Six Thousand Six Hundred Pounds Four Shillings Ten Pennies. And the cargo, consisting of iron and tin, wrought and unwrought, of lead, cloths, and some smaller articles, chiefly intended as presents for the persons in power in the different places at which the ships might touch, was estimated exclusive of bullion at four thousand five hundred and forty-five pounds. It was determined that thirty-six factors or supercargoes should be appointed for the voyage, divided into separate classes, rising above one another in trust and emoluments.
Captain James Lancaster, whose difficult return from a predatory expedition to the Indian seas has already been mentioned, was chosen to command the fleet. And on the thirty-first of December the Charter of Privileges was obtained. This charter, the origin of a power so anomalous and important as that which was afterwards accumulated in the hands of the East India Company, contained nothing which remarkably distinguished it from the other Charters of Incorporation so commonly in that age bestowed upon trading associations. It constituted the adventures of a body politic and corporate by the name of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading to the East Indies, and vested them with the usual privileges and powers.
The plan which they had already adopted for the management of their affairs by a committee of twenty-four and a chairman, Both to be chosen annually was confirmed and rendered obligatory. With a reservation in favor of the rights granted to other associations, and with prohibition extending to all such places as might be already occupied by the subjects of states in amity with their majesty, and whose objection to rivals should be declared, the privilege of trading to the East Indies, that is, To all places beyond the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan was bestowed upon the company, with the power to export in every voyage thirty thousand pounds in gold and silver, to export English goods for the first four voyages exempt from duties, and to re-export Indian goods into English ships under the same privilege to the end of the charter.
According to the principle of the Times, the charter was exclusive, prohibiting the rest of the community from trading within the limits, but granting to the company the power, whenever they pleased, of bestowing licenses for that purpose. It was granted for a period of fifteen years, but under condition that, if not found to be advantageous to the country, it might be annulled at any time after a notice of two years. If advantageous to the country, it might, if desired by the company, be renewed for fifteen years. The ardor of individuals, where anything is to be risked, is more easily excited than upheld. Though the list of subscribers, while the scheme of Indian adventure was yet only in contemplation, had been readily filled up, The calls of the committees for the payment for the instalments were very imperfectly obeyed.
Even when the charter was obtained, it was either understood to confer no power of compelling payment, or the directors were afraid to make use of that power. Instead of extracting the stipulated sums, and trading upon the terms of the joint-stock company, the subscribers who were disposed to adventure, were invited to take upon themselves the expense of the voyage, and as they sustained the whole of the risk, to reap the whole of the profit. The sums which were thus advanced amounted to 68,373 pounds, which greatly exceeded the capital originally subscribed. Of this Thirty-nine thousand, seven hundred and seventy-one pounds was expended in the purchase and equipment of ships. The four excluding the pinnace, which were taken up by the Committee of Original Adventurers.
Twenty-eight thousand, seven hundred and forty-two pounds was expended in buoyant, and six thousand, eight hundred and sixty pounds in goods, consisting partly of British commodities, cloth, lead, tin, cutlery, Glass, etc., partly of foreign, as Quicksilver, Muscovy Hides, etc. The choice of Captain Lancaster to command the fleet was renewed, and it sailed from Torbay on the 2nd of May, 1601, carrying letters of recommendations from the Queen to the sovereigns of the different ports to which it might resort. A first and experimental attempt was naturally unproductive of any remarkable result, but the first voyage of the East Indian Company was not discouraging. The first place to India to which the fleet repaired was Akeen, a principal city in the island of Sumatra, at which they were favorably received.
They formed a treaty of commerce with the chief or sovereign of the place, Obtained permission to erect a factory, and having taken on board a quantity of pepper, set sail for the Moluccas. In the Straits of Malacca, they captured a Portuguese vessel of nine hundred tons burthen, carrying calicoes and spices, which sufficed to lay them. They diverted their course, therefore, to Bantam, in the island of Java, Where the captain delivering his letters and presents, and meeting with the favorable reception, left some agents, the first rudiments of the company's factories, and returned to England, where he arrived in September 16, 100, and 3, with a handsome profit to his owners on the capital of the voyage.
In the course of the years from 16,000 and 3 to 16,13, eight other voyages were fitted out on similar terms. The first in 16,000 and 3, under the command of Captain Middleton, consisted of the ships which had but just returned from the preceding voyage, and the capital subscribed with 60,000, 400, and 50 pounds, Of which 48,140 pounds was laid out in the preparation and provision of the ships, 11,160 pounds in bullion, and 1,142 pounds in goods. The second, in 16,000 and 6,000 consisted of three ships commanded by Captain Keeling, capital 53,500 pounds, of which 28,620 pounds It was for the equipment of the fleet, 17,600 pounds, and 7,280 pounds goods. The third, in 1607, consisted of two ships, 33,000 pounds capital, 14,600 pounds, of which for the ships, 15,000 pounds, and 3,400 pounds in goods.
The Fourth Voyage in 1608 had but one ship, 13,700 pounds. Subscription. Expense of equipment, 6,000 pounds. Bullion, 6,000 pounds. Goods, 1,700 pounds. The Fifth, in 1609, had three ships, larger than any other former voyage. Capital subscribed, 82,000 pounds. Cost of shipping, 32,000 pounds, the investment, 28,500 pounds, bullion, and 21,300 pounds, goods. The Sixth Voyage in 1610 had four ships, and subscription, 71,581 pounds, divided into 42,500 pounds, for shipping, 19,200 pounds, bullion, Ten thousand, eighty one pounds, goods. The seventh in 1611 of four vessels had 76,000, 355 pounds, subscription, expended 8,700 pounds on the fleet, 17,675 pounds in bullion, and 10,000 pounds in goods.
The eighth in 1612 had one ship, and subscription, and subscription, and divided by the vessel, and the goods. All these voyages, with one exception, that in 1607, of which both the vessels were lost, were prosperous, the clear profits, hardly ever below 100 per cent, Being, in general, more than two hundred on the capital of the voyage. The years in which these voyages were performed were not without other incidents of considerable importance. In 1610, and four, the company were alarmed by a license in violation of their charter, granted to Sir Edward Michael Bourne and others to trade to Cathay, China, Japan, Korea, and Kambaya, etc., This injury was compensated in 1609, when the facility and indiscretion of James encouraged the company to aim at a removal of those restrictions which the more cautious policy of Elizabeth had imposed.
They obtained a renewal of their charter, confirming all their preceding privileges, and constituting them a body corporate, not for fifteen years, or any other limited time, but forever still. However, providing that on experience of prejudice to the nation, their exclusive privileges should, after three years' notice, cease and expire. The earliest of the company's voyages were exclusively directed to the islands in the Indian Ocean, as Sumatra, Java, and Abouina, the returns being raw silk, Fine calicoes, indigo, cloves, and mace. In 1608, the factories at Bantam and in the Molokas reported that the cloths and calicoes imported from the continent of India were in great request in the islands, and recommended the opening of a trade at Surat and Cumbaya.
To supply them with those commodities which might be exchanged with extraordinary profit for the spice and other productions of the islands. To profit by these advantages, the fleet, which sailed under the orders of Sir Henry Middleton in 16, and 9, was directed to steer to the western coast of the Asiatic continent, where they made several attempts to establish a commercial intercourse, At Adon and Mokah they were opposed by the Turks, who surprised one of the ships, and made the captain and seventy men prisoners. On the coast of India, their endeavors were frustrated by the influence of the Portuguese. A fleet, which sailed in 1611, had better success, though attacked at Swali, a place at no great distance from Surat, by a large Portuguese armament.
It made a successful defense, and, notwithstanding the intrigues and efforts of the Portuguese, obtained a favorable reception at Surratt. The English now succeeded in forming a commercial arrangement. They obtained permission to establish factories at Surratt, Amidabab, Combaya, and Goga, which were pointed out by the agents of the company, as the best situations. Agreeing to a duty of three and a half per cent, they stipulated that this should be the only exaction to which their merchandise should be exposed, that protection should be afforded to their factories and their property, even in the case of the death of their agents, secured till the arrival of the following fleet. The permun, or decree of the emperor conferring these privileges, was received on the Eleventh of January, sixteen hundred and twelve.
This was the first establishment of the English on the continent of India, at that time the seat of one of the most extensive and splendid monarchies on the surface of the globe.
End of The History of British India, Chapter One by James Mill 1773 to 1836. Published in 1817.
-
7 07 - How to Listen to Music 17:25
How to Listen to Music by Aubertyne Woodward Moore. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. How to Listen to Music. Listening is an art. It requires close and accurate attention, sympathy, imagination, and genuine culture. Listening to music is an art of high degree. Many derive exquisite enjoyment from it, for music is potent and universal in its appeal. To listen intelligently to music is an accomplishment few have acquired. A great painting presents itself as a completed whole before the observer's eye. It holds on the canvas the fixed place given it by the master from whose genius it proceeded.
No intermediary force is needed to come between it and the impression it makes on the beholder. Music, on the contrary, must be aroused from the written or printed page to living tone by the hand or voice of the interpreter, and but a fragment at a time can be made perceptible to the listener's ear. Like a panorama, it comes and goes before the imagination, its kaleidoscopic tints and forms now sharply contrasted, now almost imperceptibly graduated one into the other, but all shaping themselves into a logical union, stamped with the design of a creative mind. Properly to inspect the successive musical images and grasp their significance, in parts and as a whole, demands keen mental alertness.
Many are content to listen to music for the mere sensuous impression it creates as it wraps itself about the inner being, lulling a perturbed spirit to rest or awakening longing and aspiration, joy and sadness, according to the nature of the music and the hearer's mood. Some even take pleasure in formulating into words the sensations evoked by the ebb and flow of the tonal waves, and fancy they are thus deriving intellectual profit from music. From both ways of listening, helpful results may accrue, but by no means the greatest. Music is far beyond words, and in attempting to translate it into these, we miss its musical meaning, the best that is in it. As listeners, we derive our highest aesthetic and intellectual satisfaction from the ability to follow.
Even anticipate the composer's intention, now finding our expectations fulfilled, now being agreeably disappointed. Failure to catch the opening phrase and preliminary rhythms of the composition make it impossible to appreciate the tonal forms into which they develop. Nor may the mind linger over any one part, if we would grasp the work as an unbroken whole. That musical creation alone can afford the noblest delights that prompts and rewards the act of thus closely following the composer's thought. An instance of absolute knowledge of music appears in an anecdote told of Johann Sebastian Bach. When he was present at the performance of a fugue and one of his two most musical sons was with him, he would, as soon as the theme was heard, Whisper what devices and developments he thought should be introduced.
If the composer had conformed to his idea of construction, he would jog his son to call his attention to the fact. Otherwise, his exceeding modesty and reverent comprehension of the difficulties of the art made him the most lenient of critics. Few have reached the luminous heights this master of masters trod. Even a well-cultivated ear and taste may often be baffled by the intricacies of a fugue, symphony, or other great work of musical art heard for the first time. The best listener beyond the pale of genius will at times feel as one astray in a labyrinth of beauty to which, for the moment, no clue appears. A single representation will rarely suffice to reveal the full worth of a masterpiece of music.
By hearing it often, by admitting it, or some reproduction of it, to our own fireside, we will become familiar with its contents and learn truly to know it. Those who are fortunate enough to have been surrounded from childhood up by the choicest gems of the tonal language, and whose minds are of the deceptive order, will insensibly attain a refinement of taste and delicacy of perception no learned dissertation on music could afford. At the same time, an acquaintance with the materials and elements of which the art is composed, and with the laws that govern them, is essential to enable even one who has heard much to gain the complete enjoyment that comes from understanding. Confident as we are that Prometheus captured his fire from heaven, We ought to learn something of its attributes before we accept it at his hands, that we may be able to distinguish a true spark of the divine flame from the phosphorescent Will-o'-the-Wisp.
The idea is so largely accepted that music is an unfathomable mystery, like all half-truth, has wrought much mischief and has greatly retarded musical progress in social life. Behind the divine art, as behind religion, lies the inscrutable mysteries of life. And in both there is a Holy of Holies only the consecrated may enter. Before the portals of this are reached, there is a broad, fertile field for intellectual activity that all may work to advantage, preparing the way to the inner sanctuary. The musician is continually confronted with fresh evidence of the popular ignorance, even among students of music. In regard to the outward form and inner grace of what is conceded to be the most popular of all arts, in a room full of professed music lovers, a definition of counterpoint was recently called for, and no one present could give an intelligent answer.
This led to a discussion of musical questions which resulted in the disclosure that not one of the company could define melody, harmony, or harmony. or rhythm, or had the slightest conception of the meaning of the simplest component parts of the art in whose service they were making plentiful sacrifices. Some knowledge of these things is absolutely Sound and motion constitute the essence of music. Its raw materials are An infinitely rich mass of musical sounds that bear within themselves the possibility of being moulded into form. By the musical builders of the past, they have been carefully considered, mathematically calculated, and have finally resolved themselves into a recognised scale, composed of tones and half-tones.
These are the composer's plastic resources. He shapes them precisely as the sculptor fashions the pliable clay with which he strives to bring his ideal to realisation. All sounds are the result of atmospheric vibrations affecting the ear. Musical sound, or tone, is produced by regular vibrations and differs from mere noise whose vibrations are irregular and confused. The pitch of a musical tone rises in proportion with the rapidity of the vibrations that produce it. Tones may be perceived by the human ear ranging from about 16 vibrations in a second to nearly 40,000. More than eleven octaves. Only about seven octaves are used in music. The science of acoustics is full of interesting facts of this kind, and is of a profound value to anyone who would gain an insight into the structure of music.
It is unfortunately much neglected. The prime elements of music are melody, harmony and rhythm. They are perhaps as little realized as its raw materials. Melody is a well-ordered succession of musical sounds heard one at a time and selected from a defined, accepted series, not taken at random from a heterogeneous store. Harmony is a combination of well-ordered sounds heard simultaneously and with suitable concord or agreement. Rhythm is measured movement or the periodical recurrence of accent and signifies symmetry and proportion. Melody, unexhausted and inexhaustible, is the initial force, or, as Dr. Marx has called it, the lifeblood of music. Within itself it bears the germ of harmony and rhythm.
A succession of tones without harmonious and rhythmic regulation would be felt to lack something. Melody has been designated the golden thread running through the maze of tone, by which the ear is guided and the heart reached. Helmholtz styled it the essential basis of music. In a special sense, it is artistically constructed song. The creation of an expressive melody is a sure mark of genius. Harmony arranges musical sounds with reference to their union and is regulated by artistic and aesthetic rules and requirements. It has endless modes of transforming, inverting and intensifying its materials, thus continually affording new means of development. All the intervals and chords used in music had to be discovered one by one.
It often took more than a century to bring into a general use a chord effect introduced by some Adventuresome spirit. Our scale intervals are the slowly gained triumphs of the human mind. Modern music did not emerge from the darkness of the past until harmony, as we know it, came into active being. Both melody and harmony are controlled by rhythm. It is the master force of the musical organism. Before man was, the ebb and flow of nature had its rhythm. On this elementary rhythm, The one model of music finds in nature. The inventive mind of man has builded the wonderfully impressive art rhythms existing in the masterpieces of music. Melodies are made up of smaller fragments known as motifs, phrases and periods or sentences, all of which are judiciously repeated and varied, and derive their individuality from the characteristics of their intervals and rhythms.
A motive is the text of a musical composition, the theme of its discourse. The most simple motive, with proper handling, may grow into a majestic structure. In Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, three G flats in eighth notes, followed by an E flat in a half note, form a text as a fate knocking at the door, which, when developed, leads to tremendous conflict ending in victory. Those notes that repeat and modify the motive and are combined under one slur, constitute the phrase, which is similar to a clause in a sentence of words. A period or sentence in music comprises a musical idea, complete in itself, though of a nature to produce, when united with other harmonious ideas, a perfect whole. A simple melody is usually composed of eight measures, or some number divisible by four.
There are exceptions, as in God Save the King, or America, of which the first part contains six measures, the second part eight. Habit and instinct show us that no melody can end satisfactorily without some cadence leading to a note belonging to the tonic or key chord. Very often the first part of a melody will end on a note of the dominant chord, from which a progression will arise in the second part that leads satisfactorily to a concluding note in the tonic chord. Counterpoint, literally point against point, is the art of so composing music in parts that several parts move simultaneously, making harmony by their combination. During the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the masters of counterpoint shaped the musical materials in use today.
So anxious were they to attain perfection of form, they often lost sight of the spirit which alone can give vitality to musical utterances. The great Bach infused this into his fugues, the highest manifestation of the contrapuntal or polyphonic music of old. Meanwhile, the growth of the individual led to the growth of monophony in music, in which one voice stands out prominently, with an accompaniment of other voices. Its instrumental flower was reached in the symphony. Melody reigns supreme in monophonic music. Both the canon and the fugue form a commonwealth in which all voices are rated alike. Viewed rightly, this suits the modern democratic instinct. And there is today a tendency to return to polyphonic writing.
It is individuality in union. In the hands of genius, it affords the most refined kind of harmony. A thorough knowledge of counterpoint shows the mistake of regarding it merely as a dull relic of a dead past. It is a living reality that, if correctly studied, leads to a solid, dignified, flowing style, rich in design, and independent in its individuality. Counterpoint, said a critic in the London Musical News, shows the student how to make a harmonic phrase like a well-shaped tree, of which every bough, twig and leaf secures for itself the greatest independence, the fullest measure of light and air. Composer, interpreter and listener may all profit by the comprehension of Counterpoint. From its infancy, modern music has been affected by two perpetually warring factors, the classical and the romantic.
The first demands reverence for established ideals of formal beauty. The second, striking a note of revolt, compels recognition of new ideals. As in all other departments of art and life, progress in music comes through the continual conflict between the conservative and the radical forces. A position viewed as hazardous and unsuitable in one age becomes the accepted position of the next, and those who have been denounced as musical heretics come to be regarded as musical heroes. Very often the untutored public, trusting to natural instincts, will be in advance of the learned critic in accepting some startling innovation. Old laws may pass away, new laws may come, but the eternal verities on which all manifestations of truth and beauty are based can never cease to be.
The scientific laws of music are transitory because they have been tentatively constructed during the gradual development of the musical faculty, says W. H. Haddo in his valuable studies in modern music. No power in man is born at full growth. It begins in germ and progresses according to the particular laws that condition its nature. Hence it requires one kind of treatment at one stage, another at another, both being perfectly right and true in relation to their proper period. But there are behind these special rules certain psychological laws which seem, so far as we can understand them, to be coeval with humanity itself. And these form the permanent code by which music is to be judged. The reason why, in past ages, the critics have been so often and so disastrously at fault is that they have mistaken the transitory for the permanent, the rules of musical science for the laws of musical philosophy.
An acquaintance with form as the manifestation of law is essential to an intelligent hearing of music. The listener should have at least a rudimentary knowledge of musical construction from the simplest ballad To the most complex symphony. Having this knowledge, it will be possible to receive undisturbed the impressions music has to give, and to distinguish the trivial and commonplace from the noble and beautiful. The oftener good music is heard, the more completely it will be appreciated. Therefore, they listen best to music who hear the best continually. The assertion is often heard that a person must be educated up to an enjoyment of high-class music. Certainly one who has heard nothing else must be educated down to an enjoyment of ragtime with its crude rhythms.
We know a true poem to the extent to which our spirits respond to the spiritual appeal it makes, says Dr. Hiram Corson. It is the same with a true musical composition. We must take something to it in order to receive something from it. Beyond knowledge comes the intuitive feeling which is enriched by knowledge. Through it we may feel the breath of life, the spiritual appeal which belongs to every great work of art and which must forever remain inexplicable. End of How to Listen to Music By Albertine Woodward-Moore.
-
8 08 - Letter from William Blake to Mr. Butts, 16th August, 1803 11:29
Letter from William Blake to Mr. Butz. Sixteenth August, Eighteen O Three from the letters of William Blake, edited from the original manuscripts with an introduction and notes by Archibald, G.
B. Russell.
To Mr. Butz, Feltham, 16th August, 1803. Dear Sir, I send seven drawings, which I hope will please you. This, I believe, about balances our account. Our return to London draws on apace. Our expectation of meeting again with you is one of our greatest pleasures. Pray, tell me how your eyes do. I never sit down to work, but I think of you. and feel anxious for the sight of that friend whose eyes have done me so much good. I omitted very unaccountably to copy out in my last letter that passage in my rough sketch, which related to your kindness in offering to exhibit my two last pictures in the gallery in Berner Street. It was in these words, I sincerely thank you for your kind offer of exhibiting my two pictures.
The trouble you take on my account, I trust, will be recompensed to you by him who seeth in secret. If you should find it convenient to do so, it will be gratefully remembered by me, among the other numerous kindnesses I have received from you. I go on with the remaining subjects which you gave me commission to execute for you, but I shall not be able to send any more before my return. Though perhaps I may bring some with me finished. I am, at present, in a bustle, to defend myself against a very unwarrantable warrant from a justice of peace in Chichester, which was taken out against me by a private in Captain Leith's troop of First or Royal Dragoons. For an assault and seditious words, The wretched man has terribly perjured himself, as has his comrade, for as to sedition, not one word relating to the king or government was spoken by either him or me.
His enmity arises from my having turned him out of my garden, into which he was invited as an assistant by a gardener at work therein, without my knowledge that he was so invited. I desired him, as politely as possible, to go out of the garden. He made me an impertinent answer. I insisted on his leaving the garden. He refused. I still persisted in desiring his departure. He then threatened to knock out my eyes with many abominable imprecations and with some contempt for my person. It affronted my foolish pride. I therefore took him by the elbows, and pushed him before me till I had got him out. There I intended to have left him, but he, turning about, put himself into a posture of defiance, threatening and swearing at me.
I, perhaps foolishly, and perhaps not, stepped out at the gate, and putting aside his blows, took him again by the elbows, and, keeping his back to me, pushed him forward down the road, about fifty yards, he all the while endeavoring to turn round and strike me, and raging and cursing, which drew out several neighbors. At length, when I had got him to where he was quartered, which was very quickly done, we were met at the gate by the master of the house, the Fox Inn, who is the proprietor of my cottage, and his wife and daughter, and the man's comrade and several other people. My landlord compelled the soldiers to go indoors, after many abusive threats against me and my wife from the two soldiers.
But not one word of threat on account of sedition was uttered at that time. This method of revenge was planned between them after they got together into the stable. This is the whole outline. I have for witnesses the gardener who is hostler at the Fox, and who evidences that, to his knowledge, no word of the remotest tendency to government or sedition was uttered. Our next-door neighbor, a miller's wife, who saw me turn him before me down the road, and saw and heard all that happened at the gate of the inn, who evidences that no expression of threatening on account of sedition was uttered in the heat of their fury by either of the dragoons. This was the woman's own remark, and does high honor to her good sense, as she observes that whenever a quarrel happens, the offense is always repeated.
The landlord of the inn and his wife and daughter will evidence the same, and will evidently prove the comrade perjured. who swore that he heard me, while at the gate, utter seditious words, and D, the K, without which perjury I could not have been committed, and I had no witnesses with me before the justices who could combat his assertion, as the gardener remained in my garden all the while, and he was the only person I thought necessary to take with me. I have been before a bench of justices at Chichester this morning, but they, as the lawyer who wrote down the accusation told me in private, are compelled by the military to suffer a prosecution to be entered into, although they must know, and it is manifest, that the whole is a fabricated perjury.
I have been forced to find bail. Mr. Haley was kind enough to come forward, and Mr. Seagrave, printer at Chichester, Mr. H. in 50 pounds, and Mr. S. in 50 pounds, and myself and bound in 100 pounds for my appearance at the Quarter Sessions, which is after Michaelmas. So I shall have the satisfaction to see my friends in town before this contemptible business comes on. I say contemptible, for it must be manifest to everyone that the whole accusation is a willful perjury. Thus you see, my dear friend, that I cannot leave this place without some adventure. It has struck a consternation through all the villages round. Every man is now afraid of speaking to or looking at a soldier, for the peaceable villagers have always been forward in expressing their kindness for us, and they express their sorrow at our departure as soon as they hear of it.
Everyone here is my evidence for peace and good neighborhood. And yet, such is the present state of things. This foolish accusation must be tried in public. Well, I am content. I murmur not, and doubt not that I shall receive justice, and am only sorry for the trouble and expense. I have heard that my accuser is a disgraced sergeant. His name is John Shofield. Perhaps it will be in your power to learn somewhat about the man. I am very ignorant of what I am requesting of you. I only suggest what I know you will be kind enough to excuse if you can learn nothing about him, and what, I as well know, if it is possible, you will be kind enough to do in this matter. Dear Sir, This perhaps was suffered to clear up some doubts, and to give opportunity to those whom I doubted to clear themselves of all imputation.
If a man offends me ignorantly, and not designedly, surely I ought to consider him with favor and affection. Perhaps the simplicity of myself is the origin of all offenses committed against me. If I have found this, I shall have learned a most valuable thing, well worth three years' perseverance. I have found it. It is certain that a too passive manner, inconsistent with my active physiognomy, had done me much mischief. I must now express to you my conviction that all is come from the spiritual world for good and not for evil. Give me your advice in my perilous adventure. Burn what I have peevishly written about any friend. I have been very much degraded and injuriously treated. But if it all arise from my own fault, I ought to blame myself.
Oh, why was I born with a different face? Why was I not born like the rest of my race? When I look, each one starts, when I speak, I offend. Then I'm silent and passive, and lose every friend. Then my verse I dishonor, my pictures despise, my person degrade, and my temper chastise. And the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame, all my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. I am either too low or too highly prized, When elate, I am envied. When meek, I'm despised. This is but too just a picture of my present state. I pray God to keep you and all men from it, and to deliver me in his own good time. Pray, write to me, and tell me how you and your family enjoy health. My much-terrified wife joins me in love to you and Mrs.
Butts, and all your family. I again take the liberty to beg of you to cause the enclosed letter to be delivered to my brother, and remain sincerely and affectionately yours, William Blake.
Letter from William Blake to Mr. Butz, Sixteenth August, Eighteen O Three From the Letters of William Blake, edited from the original manuscripts with an introduction and notes by Archibald. G. B. Russell.
-
9 09 - The Life of Moses Maimonides 42:39
The Life of Moses Maimonides by Michael Friedlinde in his 1904 translation of The Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides. Read by Daniel Davison. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Before the Son of Eli had set, the Son of Samuel had risen. Before the voice of the prophets had ceased to guide the people, the interpreters of the law, the doctors of the Talmud, had commenced their labors, and before the academies of Surah and of Pumbadita were closed, centers of Jewish thought and learning were already flourishing in the far west. The circumstances which led to the transference of the headquarters of Jewish learning from the east to the west in the tenth century are thus narrated in the Sefer HaKabalah of Rabbi Abraham ben David.
After the death of Hezekiah, the head of the academy and prince of the exile, The academies were closed, and no new geonim were appointed, but long before that time heaven had willed that there should be a discontinuance of the pecuniary gifts which used to be sent from Palestine, North Africa, and Europe. Heaven had also decreed that a ship sailing from Bari should be captured by Ibn Rumahis, commander of the naval forces of Abd al-Rahman al-Nasar. Four distinguished rabbis were thus made prisoners, Rabbi Choshiel, father of Rabbi Hananayel, Rabbi Moses, father of Rabbi Chanuk, Rabbi Shehmeryahu, son of Rabbi El-Khanan, and a fourth whose name has not been recorded. They were engaged in a mission to collect subsidies in aid of the academy in Surah.
The captor sold them as slaves. Rabbi Hoshiel was carried to Kerouan, Rabbi Shemariahu was left in Alexandria, and Rabbi Moses was brought to Cordova. These slaves were ransomed by their brethren and were soon placed in important positions. When Rabbi Moses was brought to Cordova, it was supposed that he was uneducated. In that city there was a synagogue known at that time by the name of Knesset HaMidrash, and Rabbi Nathan, renowned for his great piety, was the head of the congregation. The members of the community used to hold meetings at which the Talmud was read and discussed. One day, when Rabbi Nathan was expounding the Talmud and was unable to give a satisfactory explanation of the passage under consideration, Rabbi Moses promptly removed the difficulty and at the same time answered several questions which were submitted to him.
Thereupon, Rabbi Nathan thus addressed the assembly. I am no longer your leader. That stranger in sackcloth shall henceforth be my teacher, and you shall appoint him to be your chief. The admiral, on hearing of the high attainments of his prisoner, desired to revoke the sale, but the king would not permit this retraction, being pleased to learn that his Jewish subjects were no longer dependent for their religious instruction on the schools in the East. Henceforth, the schools in the West asserted their independence and even surpassed the parent institutions. The Caliphs, mostly opulent, gave every encouragement to philosophy and poetry, and being generally liberal in sentiment, they entertained kindly feelings towards their Jewish subjects.
These were allowed to compete for the acquisition of wealth and honor on equal terms with their Mohammedan fellow-citizens. Philosophy and poetry were consequently cultivated by the Jews with the same zest as by the Arabs. Ibn Gavarol, Ibn Khasadai, Yudah HaLevi, Hananael, El-Fazi, the Ibn Ezras, and others who flourished in that period were the ornament of their age and the pride of the Jews at all times. The same favorable condition was maintained during the reign of the Omeyads. But when the Moravids and the Almuwahids came to power, the horizon darkened once more, and misfortunes threatened to destroy the fruit of several centuries. Amidst this gloom there appeared a brilliant luminary, which sent forth rays of light and comfort.
This was Moses Maimonides. Moses, the son of Maimon, was born at Cordova on the 14th of Nisan, 4895, March 30, 1135. Although the date of his birth has been recorded with the utmost accuracy, no trustworthy notice has been preserved concerning the early period of his life. But this entire career is a proof that he did not pass his youth in idleness. His education must have been in harmony with the hope of his parents that one day he would, like his father and forefathers, hold the honorable office of Deyyan or Rabbi and distinguish himself in theological learning. It is probable that the Bible and the Talmud form the chief subjects of his study. But he unquestionably made the best use of the opportunities which Mohammedan Spain, and especially Cordova, afforded him for the acquisition of general knowledge.
It is not mentioned in any of his writings who were his teachers. His father, as it seems, was his principal guide and instructor in many branches of knowledge. David Conforte, in his historical work, Kore Ha' Dorot, states that Maimonides was the pupil of two eminent men, namely Rabbi Yusuf ibn Megash and ibn Rushd of Eroes, that by the former he was instructed in the Talmud and by the latter in philosophy. This statement seems to be erroneous, as Maimonides was only a child at the time when Rabbi Yusuf died, and already far advanced in years when he became acquainted with the writings of ibn Rushd. The origin of this mistake, as regards Rabbi Yosef, can easily be traced. Maimonides, in his Mishnah Torah, employs in reference to Rabbi Isaac al-Fasi and Rabbi Yosef the expression, my teachers, Rabota'i, and this expression, by which he merely describes his indebtedness to their writings, has been taken in its literal meaning.
Whoever his teachers may have been, it is evident that he was well prepared by them for his future mission. At the age of 23, he entered upon his literary career with a treatise on the Jewish calendar. It is unknown where this work was composed, whether in Spain or in Africa. The author merely states that he wrote it at the request of a friend, whom he, however, leaves unnamed. The subject was generally considered to be very abstruse and to involve a thorough knowledge of mathematics. Maimonides must, therefore, even at this early period, have been regarded as a profound scholar by those who knew him. The treatise is of an elementary character. It was probably about the same time that he wrote in Arabic an explanation of logical terms.
which Moses ibn Tebon translated into Hebrew. The earlier period of his life does not seem to have been marked by any incident worth noticing. It may, however, be easily conceived that the later period in his life, which was replete with interesting incidents, engaged the exclusive attention of his biographers. So much is certain that his youth was beset with trouble and anxiety. The peaceful development of science and philosophy was disturbed by wars raging between Mohammedans and Christians, and also between the several Mohammedan sects. The Moravids, who had succeeded the Umayyads, were opposed to liberality and toleration, but they were surpassed in cruelty and fanaticism by their successors.
Cordova was taken by the Al-Muwahids in the year 1148, when Maimonides was about 13 years old. The victories of the Al-Muwahids, first under the leadership of the Mahdi ibn Tamurt, and then under Abd al-Mu'min, Were, according to all testimonies, attended by acts of excessive intolerance. Abdul Mu'min would not suffer in his dominions any other faith but the one which he himself confessed. Jews and The Safar Ha-Kabalah contains the following description of one of the persecutions which then occurred. After the death of Rabbi Yosef Harlevi, the study of the Torah was interrupted, although he left a son and a nephew, both of whom had under his tuition become profound scholars. The righteous man, Rabbi Yosef, was taken away on account of the approaching evils.
After the death of Rabbi Yosef, there came for the Jews a time of oppression and distress. They quitted their homes, such as were for death to death. And such as were for the sword to the sword, and such as were for the famine to the famine, and such as were for the captivity to the captivity. And it might be added, the words of Jeremiah 15.2, such as were for apostasy to apostasy. All this happened through the sword of Ibn Tamurt. who in 4902 determined to blot out the name of Israel and actually left no trace of the Jews in any part of his empire. Ibn Verger in his work on Jewish martyrdom in Shebet Yehuda gives the following account of events then happening. In the year 4902, the armies of Ibn Tamurd made their appearance.
A proclamation was issued that anyone who refused to adopt Islam would be put to death, and his property would be confiscated. Thereupon the Jews assembled at the gate of the royal palace and implored the king for mercy. He answered, It is because I have compassion on you that I command you to become Muslimim, for I desire to save you from his death. The Jews replied, And to whom they will return. Whatever be our future fate, you, O king, will not be held responsible for it. I do not desire to argue with you, said the king, for I know you will argue according to your own religion. It is my absolute will that you either adopt my religion or be put to death. The Jews then proposed to emigrate, but the king would not allow his subjects to serve another king.
In vain did the Jews implore the nobles to intercede in their behalf. The king remained inexorable. Thus many congregations forsook their religion, but within a month the king came to a sudden death. The son, believing that his father had met with an untimely end as a punishment for his cruelty to the Jews, assured the involuntary converts that it would be indifferent to him what religion they professed. Hence many Jews returned at once to the religion of their fathers, while others hesitated for some time from fear that the king meant to entrap. From such records, it appears that during these calamities some of the Jews fled to foreign countries, some died as martyrs, and many others submitted for a time to outward conversion.
Which course was followed by the family of Maimon? Did they sacrifice personal comfort and safety to their religious conviction? Or did they, on the contrary, for the sake of mere worldly considerations, dissemble their faith and pretend that they completely submitted to the dictates of the tyrant? An answer to this question presents itself in the following note which Maimonides has appended to his commentary on the Mishnah. I have now finished this work in accordance with my promise, and I fervently beseech the Almighty to save us from error. If there be one who shall discover an inaccuracy in this commentary, or shall have a better explanation to offer, let my attention be directed unto it, and let me be exonerated by the fact that I have worked with far greater application than anyone who writes for the sake of pay and profit, and that I have worked under the most trying circumstances.
For heaven has... I had ordained that we be exiled, and we were therefore driven about from place to place. I was thus compelled to work at the commentary while traveling by land or crossing the sea. It might have sufficed to mention that during that time I, in addition, was engaged in other studies, but I preferred to give the above explanation in order to encourage those who wished to criticize or annotate the commentary, and at the same time to account for the slow progress of the work. I, Moses, the son of Maimon, commenced it when I was twenty-three years old, and finished it in Egypt at the age of thirty-three years in the year 1479, Sel. 1168. The Sefer Kharadim of Rabbi Aliatzeh Askeri of Safad contains the following statement of Maimonides.
On Sabbath evening, the 4th of Iyar, 4925, 1165, I went on board. On the following Sabbath, the waves threatened to destroy our lives. On the 3rd of Shiv'an, I arrived safely at Akko, and was thus rescued from apostasy. On Tuesday, the 4th of Marcha Shvan, 49-26, I left Akko, arrived at Jerusalem after a journey beset with difficulties and with dangers, and prayed on the spot of the Great and Holy House on the 4th, 5th, and 6th of Marcha Shvan. On Sunday, the 9th of that month, I left Jerusalem and visited the cave of Mechpelah in Hebron. From these two statements, it may be inferred that in times of persecution, Maimonides and his family did not seek to protect their lives and property by dissimulation.
They submitted to the troubles of exile in order that they might remain faithful to their religion. Carmele, Geiger, Munch, and others are of opinion that the treatise of Maimonides on involuntary apostasy, as well as the accounts of some Mohammedan authors, contain strong evidence to show that there was a time when the family of Maimon publicly professed their belief in Mohammed. A critical examination of these documents compels us to reject their evidence as inadmissible. After a long period of trouble and anxiety, the family of Maimon arrived at Fostat in Egypt and settled there. David, the brother of Moses Maimonides, carried on a trade in precious stones, while Moses occupied himself with his studies and interested himself in the communal affairs of the Jews.
It appears that for some time Moses was supported by his brother, and when his brother died, he earned a living by practicing as a physician. But he never sought or derived any benefit from his service to his community or from his correspondence or from the works he wrote for the instruction of his brethren. The satisfaction of being of service to his fellow creatures was for him a sufficient reward. The first public act in which Maimonides appears to have taken the leading part was a decree promulgated by the rabbinical authorities in Cairo in the year 1167. The decree begins as follows. In times gone by, when storms and tempests threatened us, we used to wander about from place to place, but by the mercy of the Almighty we have now been enabled to find here a resting place.
On our arrival, we noticed to our great dismay that the learned were disunited, that none of them turned his attention to the needs of the congregation. We therefore felt it our duty to undertake the task of guiding the holy flock, of inquiring into the condition of the community, of reconciling the hearts of the fathers to their children, and of correcting the corrupt ways. The injuries are great, but we may succeed in effecting a cure, and in accordance with the words of the prophet, I will seek the lost one, and that which has been cast out I will bring back, and the broken one I will cure. Micah 4.6 When we therefore resolved to take the management of the communal affairs into our hands, we discovered the existence of a serious evil in the midst of the community, etc.
It was probably about that time that Maimon died. Letters of condolence were sent to his son Moses from all sides, both from Mohammedan and from Christian countries. In some instances, the letters were several months on their way before they reached their destination. The interest which Maimonides now took in communal affairs did not prevent him from completing the great and arduous work, the Commentary on the Mishnah, which he had begun in Spain and continued during his wanderings in Africa. In his commentary he proposed to give the quintessence of the Gemara, to expound the meaning of each dictum in the Mishnah, and to state which of the several opinions had received the sanction of the Talmudic authorities.
His object in writing this work was to enable those who are not disposed to study the Gemara to understand the Mishnah and to facilitate the study of the Gemara for those who are willing to engage in it. The commentator generally adheres to the explanations given in the Gemara. And it is only in cases where the halaqa, or practical law, is not affected that he ventures to dissent. He acknowledges the benefit he derived from such works of his predecessors as the halaqot of al-Fasi and the writings of the geyonim, but afterwards he asserted that errors which were discovered in his works arose from his implicit reliance on those authorities. His originality is conspicuous in the introduction and in the treatment of the general principles which in some instances precedes the exposition of an entire section or chapter, in others that of a single rule.
The commentator is generally concise, except when occasion is afforded to treat of ethical and theological principles, or of a scientific subject such as weights and measures, or mathematical and astronomical problems. Although exhortations to virtue and warnings against vice are found in all parts of his work, they are especially abundant in the Commentary on Abbott, which is prefaced by a separate psychological treatise called The Eight Chapters. The dictum, He who speaketh much commits a sin, elicited a lesson on the economy of speech. The explanation of the Ulam HaBa in the treatise Senhedrin 11.1 led him to discuss the principles of faith and to lay down the 13 articles of the Jewish creed.
The commentary was written in Arabic and was subsequently translated into Hebrew and into other languages. The estimation in which the commentary was held may be inferred from the following fact. When the Jews in Italy became acquainted with its method and spirit through a Hebrew translation of one of its parts, they sent to Spain in search of a complete Hebrew version of the commentary. Rabbi Shimcha, who had been entrusted with the mission, found no copy extant, but he succeeded through the influence of Rabbi Shlomo ben Adaret in causing a Hebrew translation of this important work to be prepared. In the introduction, the author states that he has written a commentary on the Babylonian Talmud treatise, Chulin, and on the nearly three entire sections, Videlichet, Moed, Neshim, and Nezikin.
Of all these commentaries, only the one on Rosh Hashanah is known. In the year 1172, Maimonides wrote the Igaret Taman or the Petah Tikva, letters to the Jews in Yemen, or Opening of Hope, in response to a letter addressed to him by Rabbi Ya'aqob al-Fayoumi on the critical condition of the Jews in Yemen. Some of these Jews had been forced into apostasy. Others were made to believe that certain passages in the Bible alluded to the mission of Muhammad. Others again had been misled by an imposter who pretended to be the Messiah. The character and style of Maimonides' reply appeared to have been adapted to the intellectual condition of the Jews in Yemen for whom it was written. These probably read the Bible with midrashic commentaries, and preferred the easy and attractive Agadah to the more earnest study of the halaqa.
It is therefore not surprising that the letter contains remarks and interpretations which cannot be reconciled with the philosophical and logical method by which all the other works of Maimonides are distinguished. After a few complimentary words in which the author modestly disputes the justice of the praises lavished upon him, he attempts to prove that the present sufferings of the Jews, together with the numerous instances of apostasy, were foretold by the prophets, especially by Daniel, and must not perplex the faithful. It must be borne in mind, he continues, that the attempts made in past times to do away with the Jewish religion had invariably failed. The same would be the fate of the present attempts, for religious persecutions are of but short duration.
The arguments which profess to demonstrate that in certain biblical passages allusion is made to Muhammad are based on interpretations which are totally opposed to common sense. He urges that the Jews, faithfully adhering to their religion, They also should remain firm in the belief that God will send the Messiah to deliver their nation, but they must abandon futile calculations of the Messianic period and beware of impostors. Although there be signs which indicate the approach of the promised deliverance, and the times seem to be the period of the last and most cruel persecution mentioned in the visions of Daniel 11 and 12, the person in Yemen who pretends to be the Messiah is an imposter, and if care be not taken, he is sure to do mischief.
Similar impostors in Cordova, France, and Africa have deceived the multitude and brought great troubles upon the Jews. Yet inconsistently with this sound advice the author gives a positive date of the Mechanic time on the basis of an old tradition. The inconsistency is so obvious that it is impossible to attribute this passage to Maimonides himself. It is probably spurious and has perhaps been added by the translator. With the exception of the rhymed introduction, the letter was written in Arabic, in order that all should be able to read and understand it. For that purpose, the author desires that copies should be made of it and circulated among the Jews. Rabbi Nahum of the Maghreb translated the letter into Hebrew.
The success in the first great undertaking of explaining the Mishnah encouraged Maimonides to propose to himself another task of a still more ambitious character. In the commentary on the Mishnah, it was his object that those who were unable to read the Gemara should be made acquainted with the results obtained by the Amorain in the course of their discussions on the Mishnah. But the Mishnah, with the commentary, was not such a code of laws as might easily be consulted in cases of emergency. Only the initiated would be able to find the section, the chapter, and the paragraph in which the desired information could be found. The Halakha had besides been further developed since the time when the Talmud was compiled.
The changed state of things had suggested new questions. These were discussed and settled by the Geonim, whose decisions, being contained in special letters or treatises, were not generally accessible. Maimonides therefore undertook to compile a complete code which would contain in the language and style of the Mishnah and without discussion the whole of the written and the oral law, all the precepts recorded in the Talmud, Sifra, Sifre, and the Tosefta, and the decisions of the Geonim. According to the plan of the author, this work was to present a solution of every question touching the religious, moral, or social duties of the Jews. It was not in any way his object to discourage the study of the Talmud and the Midrash.
He only sought to diffuse a knowledge of the law amongst those who, through incapacity or other circumstances, were precluded from that study. In order to ensure the completeness of the code, the author drew up a list of the 613 precepts of the Pentateuch, divided them into fourteen groups, these again he subdivided, and thus showed how many positive and negative precepts were contained in each section of the Mishneh Torah. The principles by which he was guided in this arrangement were laid down in a separate treatise called Sefer HaMitzvot. Works of a similar kind, written by his predecessors as the Halakot Gedolot of Rabbi Shimon Kahirah and the several Azharot, were, according to Maimonides, full of errors because their authors had not adopted any proper method.
But an examination of the rules laid down by Maimonides and of their application leads to the conclusion that his results were not less arbitrary, as has been shown by the criticisms of Nachmanides. The Sefer HaMitzvot was written in Arabic and thrice translated into Hebrew, namely by Rabbi Abraham ben Chesday, Rabbi Shlomo ben Yosef ben Yob, and Rabbi Moses ibn Tebon. Maimonides himself desired to translate the book into Hebrew, but to his disappointment he found no time. This Sefer HaMitzvot was executed as a preparation for his principal work, the Mishneh Torah, or Yed HaKhazakah, which consists of an introduction and fourteen books. In the introduction, the author first describes the chain of tradition from Moses to the close of the Talmud, and then he explains his method in compiling the work.
He distinguishes between the dicta found in the Talmud, Sifrei, Sifra, or Tosefta on the one hand, and the dicta of the Geonim on the other. The former were binding on all Jews. The latter only as far as their necessity and their utility or the authority of their propounders was recognized. Having once for all stated the sources from which he compiled his work, he did not deem it necessary to name in each case the authority for his opinion or the particular passage from which he derived his dictum. Any addition of references to each paragraph he probably considered useless to the uninformed and superfluous to the learned. At a later time he discovered his error, he being himself unable to find again the sources of some of his decisions.
Rabbi Yusuf Karo, in his commentary on the Mishneh Torah, termed Keshif Mishneh, remedied this deficiency. The introduction is followed by the enumeration of the 613 precepts and a description of the plan of the work, its division into fourteen books, and the division of the latter into sections, chapters, and paragraphs. According to the author, the Mishneh Torah is a mere compendium of the Talmud. But he found sufficient opportunities to display his real genius, his philosophical mind, and his ethical doctrines. For in stating what the traditional law enjoined, he had to exercise his own judgment, and to decide whether a certain dictum was meant to be taken literally or figuratively, whether it was the final decision of a majority or the rejected opinion of a minority, whether it was part of the oral law or precept founded on the scientific The first book, Safar HaMada'a, is the embodiment of his own ethical and theological theories, although he frequently refers to the sayings of our sages and employs the phraseology of the Talmud.
Similarly, the section on the Jewish calendar, Hilqot Ha'ibur, may be considered as his original work. In each group of the Halakot, its source, a certain passage of the Pentateuch, is first quoted, with its traditional interpretation, and then the detailed rules follow in systematic order. The Mishneh Torah was written by the author in pure Hebrew. When subsequently a friend asked him to translate it into Arabic, he said he would prefer to have his Arabic writings translated into Hebrew instead of the reverse. The style is an imitation of the Mishnah. He did not choose, the author says, the philosophical style, because that would be unintelligible to the common reader, nor did he select the prophetic style, because that would not harmonize with the subject.
Ten years of hard work by day and by night were spent in the compilation of this code, which had originally been undertaken for his own benefit to save him in his advanced age the trouble and the necessity of consulting the Talmud on every occasion. Maimonides knew very well that his work would meet with the opposition of those whose ignorance it would expose, also of those who were incapable of comprehending it, and of those who were inclined to condemn every deviation from their own preconceived notions. But he had the satisfaction to learn that it was well received in most of the congregations of Israel, and that there was a general desire to possess and study it. This success confirmed him in his hope that at a later time, when all cause for jealousy would have disappeared, the Mishneh Torah would be received by all Jews as an authoritative code.
This hope has not been realized. The genius, earnestness, and zeal of Maimonides are generally recognized, but there is no absolute acceptance of his dicta. The more he insisted on his infallibility, the more did the rabbinical authorities examine his words and point out errors wherever they believed that they could discover any. It was not always from base motives, as contended by Maimonides and his followers, that his opinions were criticized and rejected. The language used by Rabbi Eberham ben David in his notes on the Mishnah Torah appears harsh and disrespectful if read together with the text of the critical passage, but it seems tame and mild if compared with expressions used now and then by Maimonides about men who happened to hold opinions differing from his own.
Maimonides received many complimentary letters congratulating him upon his success. But likewise letters with criticisms and questions respecting individual halaqot. In most cases he had no difficulty in defending his position. From the replies it must, however, be inferred that Maimonides made some corrections and additions which were subsequently embodied in his work. The letters addressed to him on the Mishneh Torah and on other subjects were so numerous that he frequently complained of the time he had to spend in their perusal and of the annoyance they caused him. But he bore all this patiently, as he had learned in his youth to bear the yoke. He was not surprised that many misunderstood his words, for even the simple words of the Pentateuch, the Lord is one, had met with the same fate.
Some inferred from the fact that he treated fully the Ulam Ha'bat, the future state of the soul, and neglected to expatiate on the resurrection of the dead, that he altogether rejected that principle of faith. They therefore asked Rabbi Samuel HaLevi of Baghdad to state his opinion. The rabbi accordingly decided, The latter thereupon likewise wrote a treatise on the resurrection of the... He repeated the opinion he had stated in the commentary on the Mishnah and in the Mishneh Torah, but in more words. The same idea being reiterated in various forms, as the treatise was only intended for women and for the common multitude. These theological studies engrossed his attention to a great extent, but it did not occupy him exclusively.
In a letter addressed to Rabbi Jonathan of Lunel, he says, Although from my birth the Torah was betrothed to me, and continues to be loved by me as the wife of my youth, in whose love I find a constant delight, strange women, whom I at first took into my house as her handmaids, have become her rivals, and absorb a portion of my time. He devoted himself especially to the study of medicine, in which he distinguished himself to such a degree, according to Al-Kifti, that the king of the Franks in Ascalon wanted to appoint him as his physician. Maimonides declined the honor. Al-Favl, the vizier of Saladin, king of Egypt, admired the genius of Maimonides and bestowed upon him many distinctions. The name of Maimonides was entered on the role of physicians.
He received a pension and was introduced to the court of Saladin. The method adopted in his professional practice he describes in a letter to his pupil, Ibn Aqnin, as follows. You know how difficult this profession is for a conscientious and exact person who only states what he can support by argument or authority. This method is more fully described in a treatise on hygiene composed for Al-Fadl, the son of Saladin, who was suffering from a severe illness and had applied to Maimonides for advice. In a letter to Rabbi Samuel ibn Tabon, he alludes to the amount of time spent in his medical practice, and says, I reside in Egypt, or Fustat. The king resides in Cairo, which lies about two Sabbath day journeys from the first-named place.
My duties to the king are very heavy. I am obliged to visit him every day early in the morning, and when he or any of his children or the inmates of his harem are indisposed, I dare not quit Cairo, but must stay during the greater part of the day in the palace. It also frequently happens that one or two other royal officers fall sick, and then I have to attend them. As a rule, I go to Cairo very early in the day, and even if nothing unusual happens, I do not return before the afternoon, when I am almost dying with hunger, but I find the antechambers filled with Jews and Gentiles, with nobles and common people awaiting my return, etc. Notwithstanding these heavy professional duties of court physician, Maimonides continued his theological studies.
After having compiled a religious guide, Mishneh Torah, based on revelation and tradition, he found it necessary to prove that the principles there set forth were confirmed by philosophy. This task he accomplished in his Dalalat Al-Hiyyareen, the guide for the perplexed, of which an analysis will be given below. It was composed in Arabic and written in Hebrew characters. Subsequently, it was translated into Hebrew by Rabbi Samuel ibn Tebon in the lifetime of Maimonides, who was consulted by the translator on all difficult passages. The congregation in Lunel, ignorant of Ibn Tabon's undertaking, or desirous to possess the most correct translation of the guide, addressed a very flattering letter to Maimonides requesting him to translate the work into Hebrew.
Maimonides replied that he could not do so, as he had not sufficient leisure for even more pressing work, and that a translation was being prepared by the ablest and fittest man, Rabbi Samuel Ibn Tabon. A second translation was made later on by Yehuda al-Kharizi. The guide delighted many. But it also met with much adverse criticism on account of the peculiar views held by Maimonides concerning angels, prophecy, and miracles, especially on account of his assertion that if the Aristotelian proof for the eternity of the universe had satisfied him, he would have found no difficulty in reconciling the biblical account of the creation with that doctrine. The controversy on the guide continued long after the death of Maimonides to divide the community, and it is difficult to say how far the author's hope to effect a reconciliation between reason and revelation was realized.
His disciple, Yosef ibn Aqnin, to whom the work was dedicated, and who was expected to derive from it the greatest benefit, appears to have been disappointed. His inability to reconcile the two antagonistic elements of faith and science he describes allegorically in the form of a letter addressed to Maimonides in which the following passage occurs. Speak, for I desire that you be justified. If you can, answer me. Some time ago your beloved daughter, the beautiful and charming Kimma, obtained grace and favor in my sight, and I betrothed her unto me in faithfulness, and married her in accordance with the law, in the presence of two trustworthy witnesses, Vide Lichet our master, Abdallah and Ibn Rushd.
But she soon became faithless to me. She could not have found fault with me, yet she left me and departed from my tent. She does no longer let me behold her pleasant countenance, or hear her melodious voice. You have not rebuked or punished her, and perhaps you are the cause of this misconduct. Now send the wife back to the man, for he is, or might become, a prophet. He will pray for you, that you may live, and also for her, that she may be firm and steadfast. If, however, you do not send her back, the Lord will punish you. Therefore seek peace and pursue it. Listen to what our sages said. Blessed be he who restores to the owner his lost property. For this blessing applies in a higher degree to him who restores to a man his virtuous wife, the crown of her husband.
Maimonides replied in the same strain, and reproached his son-in-law that he falsely accused his wife of faithlessness after he had neglected her, but he restored him his wife with the advice to be more cautious in the future. In another letter, Maimonides exhorts Ibn Aqnin to study his works, adding, Apply yourself to the study of the law of Moses. Do not neglect it, but on the contrary, devote to it the best and the most of your time. And if you tell me that you do so, I am satisfied that you are on the right way to eternal bliss. Of the letters written after the completion of the guide, the one addressed to the wise men of Marseilles, 1194, is especially noteworthy. Maimonides was asked to give his opinion on astrology.
He regretted in his reply that they were not yet in the possession of his Mishneh Torah. They would have found in it the answer to their question. According to his opinion, man should only believe what he can grasp with his intellectual faculties, or perceive by his senses, or what he can accept on trustworthy authority. Beyond this, nothing should be believed. Astrological statements not being founded on any of these three sources of knowledge must be rejected. He had himself studied astrology and was convinced that it was no science at all. If some dicta be found in the Talmud, which appear to represent astrology as a true source of knowledge, these may either be referred to the rejected opinion of a small minority, or may have an allegorical meaning.
But they are by no means forcible enough to set aside principles based on logical proof. The debility of which Maimonides so frequently complained in his correspondence gradually increased, and he died in his 70th year on the 20th of Tebeth, 4965, 1204. His death was the cause of great mourning to all Jews. In Fostat a mourning of three days was kept. In Jerusalem a fast was appointed. A portion of the Tochachah, Leviticus 26 or Deuteronomy 29, was read, and also the history of the capture of the Ark by the Philistines, 1 Samuel 4. His remains were brought to Tiberias. The general regard in which Maimonides was held, both by his contemporaries and by succeeding generations, has been expressed in the popular saying, From Moses to Moses, there was none like Moses.
End of the Life of Moses Maimonides by Michael Friedlinde.
-
10 10 - Of The Effects of Opium in Lowness of Spirits 7:15
Of the Effects of Opium in Lowness of Spirits by George Young, 1692-1757, from A Treatise on Opium, founded upon Practical Observations, published in 1753. Section 22, of the effects of opium in lowness of spirits.
To some, opium gives a flow of spirits after once they are accustomed to it, and they find them proportionally depressed after its influence is over. I saw one physical patient who, by the exhilarating quality of opium, would sing songs and despise death. But ere twenty-four hours were elapsed, he would behave more like a true penitent. He fancied he was dying, and wanted the assistance of a clergyman. These two opposite characters he often alternately assumed, and when a clergyman could not be got, he was so miserable from excessive languor that he repeated his dose of opium before the usual time, which set his mind at ease before the other consolation could arrive. Mrs. C. D. Died of a consumption after fifteen months' illness.
She used no opium till within three weeks of her death. Her diet had been cool and abstemious from the beginning, which probably preserved her so long, for she had been of a weakly disposition and a bad habit of body a great while. I found her pulse was slow and languid. and she complained of great lassitude so that life became a burden to her. A dose of opium relieved her so much that she regretted she had not begun taking it sooner. She said it was a blessed medicine for the present relief it gave, though it should do no more good. When the effects of opium ceased, her languor returned, and the dose was renewed. Some advised her not to indulge herself in the use of opium, She answered that she would take it, though she was certain it would hasten her death, for it was better to have one easy death, if it could be had, than suffer an hundred of the miserable kind, for such she reckoned every fit of languor.
Here I had a most evident instance of the power of opium in giving a flow of spirits when they were reduced to the lowest ebb. It was in the incurable stage of the disease when advanced beyond all hopes, and when the cough seemed abated merely through a defect of the vice-vit. No wine or cordial would serve the purpose in the present case, because they disagreed with her stomach. Mrs. R. had been long accustomed to liquid laudanum, and took betwixt three and four hundred drops a day. Without it she was greatly depressed with a kind of melancholy, and with it behaved like one in liquor, being very loquacious and apparently very happy. But the best proof we have of this property of opium is the effect it produces among the Turks.
There a whole nation, or a great part of them, are accustomed to take opium freely. And when the practice is become habitual, it loses its soporific quality, and is used to give courage in the day of battle. If a long and confirmed habit of taking opium can divest it of its narcotic quality, it will probably be found a valuable drug, in some cases wherein it is often dangerous by being too apt to cause sleep. A certain surgeon always took some opium, and gave it likewise to his patient when he had any considerable operation to perform. But I must own that a glass of generous wine had always a better effect upon me when I wanted to excite courage. The reason why it might not succeed with me might be that I had not been accustomed to take it except when indisposed, and, as I hinted before, it is the habitual use of it that renders it ineffectual in promoting sleep.
At least I can be positive that it does not give a flow of spirits to everyone alike. And yet we are told that the Turks doubt no more of its power to exhilarate and give courage than we do of its soporific quality. I have at present one patient who has used it for twelve years. He never finds that it disposes him to sleep at all, though he takes four teaspoonfuls every day of the liquid laudanum. Some years ago, a sailor came from the East Indies with a very ill habit of body after drinking rack punch for some years. He had a large abscess in his thigh, which I was in hopes would have cured him. But after it broke, and had almost suffocated all in the room with the smell, he found his spirits in two days so depressed that he despaired of recovery.
He told me that he perceived nature gradually sinking since the opening of the abscess, for which I gave him twenty-five drops of liquid laudanum. The next morning he told me he was in heaven, and indeed the change which that single dose had made upon him in one night was astonishing, for his lips and cheeks recovered their red color, his eyes, which before were sunk and lifeless, were now sparkling and brisk. This was a remarkable instance of the effect of opium in giving courage and curing a languor, or excessive weariness. He perfectly recovered without any other medicine, and became so much prejudiced in its favor that he swore it should go through the world with him, and not but death should part them.
Had he taken the opium while the separation was advancing, The inflammation and opium would have counteracted each other, the one tending to hinder, the other to promote sleep. The opium would have closed his eyes. Then immediately the inflammation would have made him moan, till he awakened with a violent start out of a terrible dream. Thus he would have continued restless betwixt sleeping and waking. So different are the effects of opium in the same person.
End of the effects of opium in The Lowness of Spirits by George Young, 1692-1757
-
11 11 - On the Federal Constitution 5:26
On the Federal Constitution by Benjamin Franklin. I confess that I do not entirely approve of this constitution at present. But, sir, I am not sure I shall never approve of it, for, having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which once I thought right but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment of others. Most men, indeed, as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that, wherever others differ from them, it is so far error. Steele, a Protestant, in a dedication, tells the Pope that the only difference between our two churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrine is, The Romish Church is infallible, and the Church of England, is never in the wrong.
But, though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who, in a little dispute with her sister, said, But I meet with nobody but myself that is always in the right. In these sentiments, sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults. If they are such, because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered. And I believe further that it is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people become so corrupt as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
I doubt, too, whether any other convention we may obtain may be able to make a better constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does. And I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the builders of Babel, and that our states are on the point of separation, only to meet thereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats.
Thus I consent, sir, I have not been to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors I sacrifice to the public good. I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If every one of us, in returning to our constituents, were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects and great advantages resulting naturally in our favor among foreign nations, as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. Much of the strength and efficiency of any government in procuring and securing happiness to the people depends on opinion, on the general opinion of the goodness of that government, as well as the wisdom and integrity of its governors.
I hope, therefore, for our own sakes, as a part of the people, and for the sake of our posterity, that we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution wherever our influence may extend. and turn our future thoughts and endeavors to the means of having it well administered. On the whole, sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention, who may still have objections to it, would, with me on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put his name on this instrument.
The End of On the Federal Constitution, by Benjamin Franklin.
-
12 12 - The Original Hudson Tunnel 7:08
The Original Hudson Tunnel. In 1871, D. C. Haskins conceived the idea of building a tunnel under the Hudson River. In making a trip from the Pacific coast via Omaha, He had been struck with the system of building piers for a railway bridge over the Missouri River. This system was the forming of a caissons made up of a number of iron rings bolted together and constituting a cylinder which could be lengthened by the addition of rings as the caisson descended. Airlocks and compressed air were used, the material within the caisson being excavated by hand till a bedrock foundation was reached. From a study of this work, Mr. Haskins conceived the idea that iron cylinders fitted with airlocks could be placed horizontally, and tubular tunnels under the Hudson River could be started from the bottom of a shaft by using compressed air to prevent the inflow of earthen water.
As the material was excavated in front of the tunnel, the latter was to be advanced by the addition of rings of the diameter of the finished tube. Work on such a tunnel under the Hudson River to connect New Jersey and New York was commenced on the New Jersey side in November 1874. The bed of the Hudson is a silt deposit, which, when dry, is an impalpable powder, but when saturated with water is as fluid as quicksand. When a certain degree of moisture is carried by this material, it has a consistency approximating that of clay. This latter characteristic was taken advantage of by maintaining an air pressure in the heading equal to the hydrostatic head outside, when the material to be excavated formed a barrier against the entrance of water, thus permitting the heading to be advanced.
The work began with sinking a shaft 38 feet in outside diameter lined with 4 feet of brickwork to a depth of 54 feet below mean high water. On opposite sides of the shaft, in the direction of the length of the tunnel, false pieces of elliptical form, 26 feet high and 24 feet wide, were built. These were to be removed to permit the passage of the tunnel. An airlock, 6 feet in diameter by 15 feet long, was attached to the shaft cylinder above the false piece on the east side. A temporary working entrance to the tunnel was formed of 11 rings, each 2 feet wide, But of different diameters. The tops of these rings were in the same horizontal line, forming a cone-shaped chamber with steps of 18 inches leading to the airlock.
From the base of this cone, which was 20 feet in diameter, two parallel single-track tunnels were started. As the largest ring was not large enough to take in both tunnels, a ring of a diameter equal to the exterior of the north tunnel was built and lined with two feet of brickwork. Regular tunnel work was then commenced, so it was excavated till the top center plate of a new ring could be placed and bolted to the one behind. Then plates were bolted to either side of this top plate until the ring was completed. When four rings of plate equal to ten feet of section had been placed and the heading cleared out, the masonry was laid. The plates were of quarter-inch iron. Two and one half feet in width by three and one half feet in length, flanged on all four sides with angle iron.
The tunnels were 18 feet high by 16 feet wide, inside dimensions. The air pressure was kept about equal to the hydrostatic head, amounting to 18 pounds at the shaft and increasing to 36 pounds at a distance of 1,600 feet. No fixed rule could be given to govern the air pressure. But it was found generally that a little less than the hydrostatic pressure at the axis of the tunnel gave the best results under ordinary conditions. The excavated chamber was 23 feet in diameter, so that the difference of water pressure between the top and bottom of the chamber was about 11 pounds per square inch. Under these conditions, some air escaped through the roof, and some water entered through the bottom. Excessive pressure resulted in an increased discharge of air through the roof, Causing the silt to dry out and drop into the tunnel.
If this mass was sufficient, a blowout and consequent flooding resulted. When the North Tunnel had been advanced over a quarter of a mile, the South Tunnel was started, and when this had been carried forward some distance, both tunnels were bulkheaded, and work on the removal of the temporary entrance was commenced. A serious blowout occurred in July, 1880. The doors of the airlocks had become wedged by falling earth and plates, cutting off the escape of the men, twenty of whom were drowned. This accident had an unfavorable effect upon the financial aspect of the undertaking. The New York end was started by sinking a timber caisson, 48 by 29 and 1 half feet, to a depth of 56 feet below high water, where it was fully embedded in sand.
Through the west side of this caisson, on the line of the tunnel, an opening was cut and roof plates of the tunnel put in and braced. Plates were added till a section 12 feet long had been built when an iron bulkhead was constructed. In building additional sections, the same system was adopted. As each section of the iron tube was completed, it was cleaned out and the brick lining laid. This was the first and only instance of building a sub-aqueous tunnel in sand without the aid of a shield. S. Pearson and Son of England assumed the contract in 1888. Sir John Fowler and Sir Benjamin Baker acted as consulting engineers. The shield method of driving was adopted and heavy iron plates were substituted for masonry.
The light boiler plate lining was no longer required. The work was stopped. Through lack of capital, and unsuccessful attempts were made at various times to resume the operations until the early part of 1902. In that year, the franchise and property of the Tunnel Company were acquired by the New York and New Jersey Railroad Company, and operations were again started. In 1905, the New York and New Jersey Railroad Company disposed of their interests in the Hudson Company, who have since completed the tunnels. The completion of this work, which is now known as the McAdoo system, is described in another chapter. End of The Subways and Tunnels of New York, Methods and Cost by Gilbert H. Gilbert.
-
13 13 - The Peruvian Earthquake of 1868 41:18
The Peruvian Earthquake of 1868, a selection from an article in Harper's Monthly, April 1869, titled The Great South American Earthquakes of 1868, by F.
Ephraim George Squire. The twelve months embraced between the first of October 1867 and the first of October 1868 were distinguished by a series of physical phenomena more remarkable than is known to have occurred during any equal period of time in history. The series was grandly initiated and typified by the startling atmospheric and terrestrial convulsions that afflicted the windward islands in the autumn of the first-named year, and which were fast followed by fearful hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions in almost every quarter and country of the globe, culminating with the great South American earthquakes of the 13th and 16th of August, 1868. These earthquakes, for their extent, Violence and widespread devastation will probably be regarded as the most terrible on record.
They were felt more or less severely over an extent from north to south of more than sixty degrees of latitude, all the way from the Isthmus to the Cape. Yet their lateral action seems to have been checked on the east, certainly by the chain of the Cordillera, and effectually stopped by the Andes. What tremendous force they exerted beneath the vast waste of waters extending from Peru to Cathay, we can only infer from those tidal waves which broke equally on the shores of the Pacific Islands and on those of distant New Zealand, Japan, and California. The Peruvian earthquake was felt from the equator to latitude forty-three degrees in Chile over a coastline of upward of three thousand miles. It was also felt inland, although but lightly beyond the cordillera of the coast, past the great despoblado or uninhabited region at Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca.
In Cusco, the old Inca capital, and at La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. In fact, over an area of not far from four hundred and fifty thousand square miles. Its effects, or those of concurrent phenomena in the Pacific, seem to have been limited only by the shores of that vast ocean, since nearly synchronous tidal disturbances were felt on the shores of Australia, of China and Japan, at the sandwich islands, and on the coasts of California and Alaska. Its devastating force, however, was chiefly expended in Peru, and here its most conspicuous incidents were to the south of Lima, and consisted in the destruction of the city of Arequipa and the port of Arica, Moquegua, and a few other interior towns including the great mining town of Cerro de Pasco suffered heavily and directly by the earthquake, but Arica, Iquique, Chala, and the other seaports were exposed to double disaster, for all along the coast the implacable sea completed the destruction the earthquake had begun.
The greatest loss of life and property at any one place in Peru was at Arequipa, the second city in size, population, wealth, social and political importance in the republic. In short, the rival of Lima, and often politically its master. It stands in latitude twelve degrees two minutes south and longitude seventy seven degrees eight minutes west at the foot of the great symmetrical volcanic cone of Nisthi, twenty thousand three hundred feet high, On a beautiful plain, one of the interior oases that occur at the foot of the cordillera, which I have already described, this plain, elevated seven thousand eight hundred and fifty feet above the sea, is watered by the river Chilli, and between it and the sea at Isle, which is the port of Arequipa, intervenes an unbroken desert, relieved only by medanos or crescent-shaped, Shifting Sand-Hills, and the skeletons of men, mules, and horses that have perished in the transit.
Before the conquest, the Incas had made an establishment here for facilitating communication between their capital and the coast, and called it Arequipay, yes, rest here, from which with slight variation comes the name of the modern city, Founded by the great Pizarro himself in 1540. A late census showed it to contain about 50,000 inhabitants, and as through it most of the trade with those vast interior departments of Peru, Cusco, and Puno was carried on, it had become, together with its local resources, rich and luxurious. Probably no town in South America was so well built, Its houses, if not altogether imposing, were massive and strong, constructed of a light but tough volcanic stone, vaulted and seldom of more than one story.
This style of architecture was adopted in 1821, after the great earthquake of that year, which had laid most of the city in ruins, as a security against a similar catastrophe. And the new buildings successfully resisted all subsequent convulsions, many of them formidable, until the Thirteenth of August, when they were thrown down despite their strength like the card-houses that children build. Its cathedral, a modern building of a rather extraordinary architectural style, was nevertheless a vast and imposing edifice, and believed by most of the self-complacent Arequipans to be among the finest structures in the world. It had a bell cast in Arequipa itself, and one of its lions of greater size than that of St.
Paul's in London. Apart from these more obvious distinctions, the indices of wealth, activity, and enterprise, Arequipa contended that it was the most intelligent and vivacious and in science and art, the most advanced city in Peru. It even ventured on the bold assumption that its women were more beautiful than those of Lima. As impartial writers, we must admit that this self-sufficiency was not wholly unfounded. Most of the distinguished names in modern Peruvian history, whether in government, art, literature, commerce, or war, belonged to Arequipa. Albeit, it is constantly involved in intrigue and revolution, which led to its bombardment by President Prado for three days in December 1867, with a destruction supplemented by that of the earthquake that took place nine months later.
The bombardment, however, was unsuccessful, and its failure cost Prado his place at the head of the government. Notwithstanding its position so much further inland, Arequipa seems to have been, from its foundation, nearly as frequently exposed to earthquakes as Lima itself. Among the most celebrated are those of January Second, Fifteen Eighty Two, February Eighteenth, Sixteen Hundred, November Twenty Third, Sixteen O Four, December Ninth, Sixteen O Nine, Sixteen Thirteen, May 20th, 1666, April 23rd, 1668, October 21st, 1687, August 22nd, 1715, May 13th, 1787, 1884, 1812, July 10, 1821, June 3, 1825, and October 9, 1831. Of these, that of 1582, From all accounts, seems to have been the severest, and, it is said, was so fearful in the interior that the guanacos and vicuñas of the mountains fled to the city and sought refuge in the habitations of men, tame with fright.
The story of the final destruction of this somewhat haughty city is, perhaps, best told in the following concise letter from that place, dated August Sixteen. Three days after the event. This city was completely destroyed by an earthquake on the thirteenth instant. Not a church left standing, not a house habitable. The shock commenced at 20 minutes past 5 p.m., and lasted from six to seven minutes. The houses being solidly built and of one story resisted for about one minute, which gave time for the people to rush into the middle of the streets, So the mortality, though considerable, is not so great as might have been expected. If the earthquake had taken place at night, few indeed would have been left to tell the story.
As it is, the prisoners in the carcel public prison and the sick in the hospital have perished. The earthquake commenced with an undulating movement, and as the shock culminated, no one could keep his feet. The houses rocked as a ship in the trough of the sea and came crumbling down. The shrieks of the women, the crash of falling masonry, the upheaving of the earth, and the clouds of blinding dust made up a scene that cannot be described. We had nineteen minor shocks the same night. Nothing has as yet been done towards disinterring the dead. I do not think any are buried alive, as certain death must have been the fate of all those who were not able to get into the street. The earth has opened in all the plains around, and water has appeared in various places.
Another account from an eyewitness, dated August Sixteen, describes the event as follows. At about four minutes past five p m last Thursday, the thirteenth, a slight movement of the earth was noticeable here by persons who chanced to be seated. There was no rumbling. In about eight to ten seconds more, the movement became strong enough for persons not seated to notice. This movement gradually increased in strength until, after about thirty seconds, Pieces of timber began to fall from the houses. In about a minute, all were satisfied that a great earthquake was at hand. Then began a terrible rumbling, similar to the noise of an avalanche. Everyone ran to the open spaces. It seemed as if the earth was about to open.
The earth shook, and every structure swayed to and fro from north to south. It seemed in my own house as if the walls were about to meet and smother us. In about three minutes the soil shook so that it was almost impossible to hold one's feet. The strongest buildings began then to cast off stones, bricks, pieces of wood, etc., and the weakest began to fall, almost all of them level with the ground. In about five minutes from the first movement, the whole city was enveloped in clouds of dust and darkness, and resounded with the crash of falling buildings. There is not one house left standing in Arequipa. The only church tower left is that of Santa Catalina, but it, like the cathedral, will have to be pulled down.
Santo Domingo Church is down to the ground. The Portal de Flores is all down. as well as all the surrounding blocks. Nearly all the inmates of the prison and hospitals perished. Many persons are known to have been crushed to death in the streets. We are now living in a tent on the river bank. No one dares go to town, as the shocks still continue to bring down what little is left standing. They occur at intervals of half an hour each. This evening some of the shocks have been very violent. So far, there have been about seventy-six shocks, up to eight p.m. The river Pancarpata has changed to three colors, which makes us believe that the volcanoes are at work. Everything is confusion, and the cries and lamentations that we hear are heart-rending.
Thus, the work of the Arequipenos for 300 years has been destroyed in a few minutes. It will take an age to do the same work over. The debris of the Jesuits' church was hurled to a distance of one hundred yards. The picture presented by our desolate city is sad indeed. God grant that our fears be not realized, for Mount Misty is vomiting lava, clouds of smoke, and quantities of mud, and darkness hides its sides from our view. We hear the constant noise of falling rocks and earth, and the river is impassable, owing to its black color and sulfurous odor. As already said, Arequipa stood at the foot of the great volcano Misti, which had not been in eruption during the historical period, but which now burst into activity, in which it still remains.
At the time of the eruption, those who were outside the city saw huge pieces of rock split off from it, and together with heavy avalanches of snow and ice tumbled down to the bottom, making a fearful noise. The river that is fed by the snows of the mountain increased at least one-third inside of six hours. Indeed, the rise in the water was so great and rapid as to inundate several of the towns in the valley of Arequipa, sweeping away the ruins the earthquake had made, together with the dead and the wounded. As to the loss of life and property, the prefect of Arequipa, writing under the deepest impression of horror and in profound affliction, reported officially, All the edifices have been thrown to the ground, and the few walls that remain are so racked that they will require to be demolished.
Another report states the number of buildings absolutely ruined, at between four and five thousand. Besides, twenty-two churches, including the cathedral, the prisoners in the jails and the patients in the hospitals, unable to avail themselves of the warning, which enabled the people generally to save their lives, were all crushed. Thanks to the premonitory shocks, The strength of the edifices and their comparatively small height, which prevented them from covering the streets when their walls fell outward, the number of victims outside the hospitals and jails does not appear to have exceeded three hundred, with from one thousand to twelve hundred severely injured. Still, until the ruins are cleared, it will be impossible to ascertain the number of the dead.
About ninety miles to the southeast of Arequipa, in another fertile oasis situated sixty miles back from the sea, in the center of a considerable wine-producing district is the large town of Moquegua, from which the southern department of Peru takes its name. Immediately behind it, forming part of the chain of the Cordillera, are three great volcanoes, that of Umate, called by the indians Juanaputina, Ubinas, and Tutupaca. The first named broke out in a fearful eruption in 16,000. The latter seems to have done so simultaneously with the occurrence of the earthquake under notice, and throughout Peru is believed to have been its center of action. At any rate, the convulsion was as severe in Moquegua as in Arequipa, and from all reports attended with as heavy loss of life.
The following account of the catastrophe here is from a letter of a resident dated August. The movement of the shocks was from east to west, alternating with vertical vibrations. I noticed this especially, and the earth seemed as if about to open under my feet and leave me in the air. The shocks lasted From five to six minutes. When the buildings had tumbled, we were almost choked with dust, but a western breeze soon dispelled the clouds. The earth did not cease shaking until Sunday, the 22nd of August. The shocks were more or less violent, but were always preceded by heavy discharges of electricity louder than the heaviest cannonading. In about five minutes, every structure in the valley was in literally complete dilapidation, not a stone left on another.
In the limestone lands, all the hills were split, and the rocks were rent into small pieces. Along the river and in the lowlands of the vineyards, large openings were made, whence issued streams of blackish and pestiferous water. I assure you that I have seen as vivid a picture of Judgment Day as is possible in this world. The damage done to our crops will amount to about twenty-five per cent. The inhabitants of this city and valley are encamped in the parks and fields. Some are in groups with their friends, others in tents or huts, and some in the open air. Ninety miles from Moquegua, still to the southwest, is the city of Tacna, capital of the department, and one of the most important and active towns in Peru.
I have described this town, which I visited in 1864, in this magazine for April 1868, and hence only need to say here, in explanation of the fact of its suffering very little in the great earthquake, that it is a modern town, built chiefly of wooden houses of one story, which may be racked, but which could hardly be thrown down by any convulsion of the earth. Nevertheless, forty buildings were destroyed, probably some of the few built of stone or adobes, and a few lives were lost. While, however, Tacna escaped thus lightly, Arika, its port, forty miles to the southwest, was absolutely destroyed by the earthquake, and its attendant phenomena. Our accounts of the catastrophe at this point are much more full and accurate than from any other, and probably the event will be best remembered from its devastations here.
Although next to Callao, the most important port of Peru, it was not that rich and populous place that many accounts of the earthquake have represented, Instead of having, as some of these state, a population of from thirty to forty thousand souls, it probably had less than six thousand, and although rather picturesque and showy from the water, was meanly built. The mole, custom-house, the warehouses, and some of the residences and offices of foreigners were large and substantial modern structures. But the remaining buildings were either of adobes or canes plastered over, yet well adapted to resist earthquakes. The great shock of the earthquake of August, Thirteenth, took place here a few minutes earlier than it did in Arequipa, showing that Arica was nearer the center of action than the latter town.
As there, it was also preceded by premonitory shocks, which had the effect of alarming the inhabitants and driving them into the streets or open squares, and to the sand-hills back of the town where they were in comparative safety. An eye-witness says, The hour was that when, by custom, most of the inhabitants had just closed their daily labors and were at their homes. The instant the startling indications of an earthquake were felt, There was a general rush for uncovered spaces, which were reached by many uninjured, but not by all. The streets became a scene of terror. All the houses in the city trembled as if affected with the ague. Then they surged, and some of them fell to pieces with crash after crash.
At this juncture, when the undulations were most active, the earth opened in several places in long and almost regular lines. The fissures were from one to three inches in width. The sensation was as though something was rolling underneath. From every fissure, there rushed forth dry earth like dust, which was followed by a stifling gas. Owing to the demolition of buildings and the general destruction of all kinds of property and the dust that was raised, as well as that set in motion by the general tumult, a dense cloud formed over the city and obscured the light. Beneath the cloud, the gas severely oppressed every living creature and would have suffocated all if it had lingered longer than it did, which was only about ninety seconds.
The undulations were three in number. Each succeeding one was of greater magnitude than the previous one. When the undulations ceased, the cloud of dust ascended and dispersed, and light was restored. Then shocks at short intervals succeeded as though subterranean explosions or collisions were taking place. At this time people from all parts of the city fled to the hills, amidst falling bricks and timbers, which fell from swaying walls and broadly rent buildings just on the eve of crumbling into perfect ruin. Some were struck dead by the falling materials, and others were maimed, while all were made to stagger from side to side like people in a state of intoxication. Many of both sexes carried children in their arms, and those who had not these conveyed articles of value.
The avarice of many was stronger than fear even amidst this terrible confusion. And hence there were those who dallied to collect valuables, many of whom suffered for their temerity, either by the sacrifice of their lives or otherwise. As the rush for the hills continued, and stones and materials of all kinds were falling, and houses and parts of them were crashing, numerous people were struck down, and either killed or dangerously hurt. Another eye-witness, a Peruvian, writing the following day, relates. The main shock lasted from seven to ten minutes. Beasts and birds were wild with a fright, and as buildings rocked and fell with deafening crashes, the earth rose and sank like the waves of the troubled sea.
The people who could not keep their feet uttered frightful shrieks at the continued commotion, which went on increasing, and seemed to announce the end of the world. The very mountains seemed to rise and totter and fall, The whole surface of the level land moved and broke like a disturbed pool of water, and it was impossible to stand, except as one ran with headlong violence. I have never witnessed anything so appalling and terrible, and I have to stop writing now in consequence of the renewed shaking. At this time, there lay in the harbor of Rica the United States double-ender, twelve-gun warship, Watery, the United States store-ship, Fredonia, towed down in July to escape the yellow fever prevailing in Callao, the Peruvian iron-clad America of fourteen guns, the English brig Chanarcillo, the Chilean schooners Rosa Rivera and Regalon, The British ship Kamahamah.
These data are important, for almost simultaneously with the earthquake on land occurred such disturbances of the sea as never before had a parallel on the coast after the Callao catastrophe of 1746. An officer of the Wateree describes the scene on shore and what happened on the sea in these graphic words. On the afternoon of August, as we were finishing our dinner on board the Watery at about twenty minutes past five o'clock, immense clouds of dust were seen at a distance of some ten miles south of Arica. This, of course, attracted attention as a matter of unusual occurrence. The volume of clouded dust came nearer and nearer, and it was observed from the deck of the vessel, that the peaks of mountains in the chain of the cordilleras began to wave to and fro like reeds in a storm.
There could have been no optical delusion about it, for the sea was calm and the vessel was perfectly quiet. A few minutes after, it was observed that from mountains nearer to Arica, whole piles of rock rent themselves loose, and large mounds of earth and stone rolled down the sides. Very soon it was noticed that the whole earth was shaking, and that an earthquake was in progress. By comparing distances of ports reached by the earthquake successively, and computing the time by exact measurement, it was ascertained that the volcanic element under the surface of the globe at that particular spot traveled at the rate of between six hundred and seven hundred miles an hour. When the convulsion reached the Moro, a rocky precipice lining one side of the harbor, it also began to move.
Pieces of from ten to twenty-five tons in weight began to move from their base and fall, altering the whole front view of that part of the coast. At the same moment, the town commenced to crumble into ruins. The noise, the rumbling like the echoes of thunder, the explosive sounds like that of firing a heavy battery were terrific and deafening, and the whole soil of the country as far as it could be seen was moving, first like a wave and in the direction from south to north. Then it trembled, and at last it shook heavily, throwing into a heap of ruins two-thirds of all the houses of Arika. Men, women, and children ran into any open space near at hand, and their shrieks and screams could be heard distinctly on board the shipping.
Even the custom-house, built of iron, stone, and adobe, received a wide crack at the first shock. Shock after shock followed. On several places, openings were becoming visible in the ground, and sulfurous vapor issued from them. At this juncture, a crowd of people flocked to the mole, seeking boats to take refuge on the vessels in the harbor. As yet, the shipping in the harbor felt not the least commotion from the disturbances on land. After the first shock, there was a rest. No breeze could be felt. No ripple was seen on the waters. The wateree and the Fredonia sent their surgeons ashore to assist the wounded. Between fifty and sixty of the people of the town had reached the Mole by this time to take to the boats.
But the surgeons had hardly landed, and but few of the others had entered the boats when the sea quietly receded from the shore, leaving the boats high and dry on the beach. The water had not receded further than the distance of extremely low tide, when, all at once, on the whole levee of the harbour, it commenced to rise. It appeared at first as if the ground of the shore was sinking, but the mole being carried away, the people on the mole were seen floating. The little pagoda used as an office for the captain of the port was also floating, and the water still rose. until it reached a height of thirty-four feet above the high-water mark, and overflowed the town, and rushed through the streets, and threw down by the force of its weight what the earthquake had left, and all this rise and overflow of the waters took only about five minutes.
The water rushed back into the ocean more suddenly than it had advanced upon the land, and carried with it the custom-house, and the residents of the English consul. This awful spectacle of destruction by the receding flood had hardly been realized when the sea rose again, and now the vessels in port began dragging. The water rose to the same height as before, and on rushing back it brought not only the debris of the ruined city with it, but even a locomotive and tender and a train of four cars. were seen carried away by the fearful force of the waves. During this advance of the sea inland, another terrific shock, lasting about eight minutes, was felt. The thunders of the earth and the storm of the waves surpassing all conception of human endurance.
At this time, all around the city, the dust formed into clouds, and obscuring the sky made things on land quite invisible. It was then that the thundering approach of a heavy sea wave was noticed, and a minute afterwards, a sea wall of perpendicular height to the extent of from 42 to 45 feet, capped with a fringe of bright glistening foam, swept over the land, stranding far inshore the United States steamer-watery, the America, a Peruvian frigate, and the Chanyarcillo, an English merchant vessel. The commander of the Peruvian ironclad America, after describing the fate of that vessel, says, The American man-of-war watery is about a mile further up the beach than we are. Of the Fredonia, not a plank is left.
The English vessel Chanyarcillo and the Chilean ones Rosa Rivera and Regalon are lost. Not a single boat is left in this bay, and scarcely a single person of those that were aboard the lost vessels is known to have been saved. In these are moments of supreme distress. We find our salvation in the officers and crew of the United States Man-of-War watery. Their whole cargo is safe and sound, and they have therefore clothed and fed us, and offered every comfort that we need. It is my pleasant duty to make this fact known to your Excellency, as well as the noble conduct of Drs. Winslow and Du Bois, the former of the Watery and the latter of the Fredonia. Both have with the utmost zeal attended to our wounds.
In the midst of such distress, I had the satisfaction of witnessing the rare gallantry of my men. The sailors were unwilling to leave the ship, although ordered to do so, until they were allowed to carry us off on their shoulders, as we could scarcely walk from wounds. The watery to which complimentary reference is here made was a compact and trustworthy vessel. Her commander, impelled by motives of humanity, went on shore immediately after the shock that had prostrated the town, in the hope of rescuing some of the officers of the Fredonia and their wives, who were there. The officer left in charge of the vessel seems to have been equal to the emergency that followed. The guns were lashed, life-lines were rigged, and her most powerful anchors thrown out.
Eleven tidal waves struck her. and she was several times swept up and down the coast by irregular currents before she was thrown on shore, with the loss of but a single man, and standing as erect in her sandy bed as she did in the docks where she was built. The single person connected with the wateree who was lost was a man named Tate, bosun of the captain's gig. With the submergence of the mole, where he was waiting the orders of his superior officer, he was carried out to sea by the recession of the wave, and as rapidly driven back on the shore. Recognizing at once his doom, and the futility of any effort to avert it, he seized his country's ensign, and with it waved a last adieu to his comrades on the watery, surging unmanageably under the terrible sea-bore.
Captain J. H. Gillis of the Watery, addressed to Admiral Turner, then Commander of the United States Squadron in the South Pacific, a report in which he says, The Watery lies about three miles to the northwest of the city and about four hundred and fifty yards inland. Although her hull has suffered much, still she appears to be in perfect condition. Not a plank has been started. and she stands upright as though in a dry dock. Considering her position and its slight elevation above the sea, we do not think it possible to float her again. It would be impossible to dig under her, as the means are not at hand, and it would cost more than what the vessel is worth. My crew remain aboard by day, but as the rumbling of earthquakes still continues, and the Peruvian sloop of War America is ashore below us in a direct line with broadside on us, I have deemed it advisable to remove them.
Another seabor would smash both vessels. I lent what aid in the way of provisions that I could to the inhabitants of Arica, but have been forced to suspend it, as I have scarcely what will suffice for my men. I shall remain by my vessel until further instructions from you. We have lost all our anchors, and if we have another rush of the sea that will turn the ship on beam ends, she will become a worthless hulk. The Fredonia, United States storeship of 800 tons and six guns with a crew of 30 persons, seems to have become unmanageable from the first. and was dashed to pieces on the black and sinister reefs that lie in front of the rocky headland called El Morro de Arica. All on board were lost.
The captain and four others who were on shore were saved, as was the surgeon of the wateree, whose wife, however, was killed in his arms by falling timbers as he was carrying her to a place of safety. The number killed in Arika was estimated at about four hundred, mostly by the great wave that swept over the town. The larger part of these were plunderers who thronged to the ruins after the first shock was passed, or avaricious persons returning to look after their valuables. And it is worthy of note that in every place in Peru and Ecuador, the earthquake, instead of overawing criminals, pilferers, and thieves, seems to have given them new audacity and activity. The crash and ruin excited open and developed latent crime, and rapine and murder held high carnival among the wrecks of cities and over the mangled bodies of the dead.
The viceroy of Peru had good reason to rear his gibbets in Lima and Callao in 1746, yet it is a strange reflection that the symbol of man's vengeance should have a restraining effect on human conduct beyond the most impressive manifestations of divine power. The loss of property in a rica is described as amounting to several millions of dollars. As it was not only the seaport of Tacna, but in fact of a large part of Bolivia, the amount of foreign merchandise stored there, including quantities of alpaca wool, ores, and Chinchona bark coming down from the interior, was very large. All this was lost. The proprietor of the largest warehouse, connected with which was a distillery, returning to the place after the catastrophe, was unable to point out the site of his establishment.
The destruction was so complete. The desert hills around Arika are stuffed with desiccated bodies of the ancient Aymaras, who seem to have had here an important fishing station. To these hills, the terrified inhabitants of the town fled on the first warnings of danger. There to be met with the appalling spectacle of the grave literally giving up its dead, the convulsed and writhing earth through to the surface hundreds of the grim, dried bodies of the Indians who had lived here centuries before, still wrapped in the coarse cerements that the dry and nitrous soil had preserved from decay. End of The Peruvian Earthquake of 1868, a selection from an article in Harper's Monthly, April 1869, titled The Great South American Earthquakes of 1868 by Ephraim George Squire.
-
14 14 - The Pleasures of Friendship 5:40
The Pleasures of Friendship by Samuel Johnson.
Life has no pleasure higher or nobler than that of friendship. It is painful to consider that this sublime enjoyment may be impaired or destroyed by innumerable causes, and that there is no human possession of which the duration is less certain. Many have talked, in very exalted language, of the perpetuity of friendship, of invincible constancy, and unalienable kindness, and some examples have been seen of men who have continued faithful to their earliest choice, and whose affection has predominated over changes of fortune and contrariety of opinion. But these instances are memorable because they are rare. The friendship which is practiced or expected by common mortals must take its rise from mutual pleasure and must end when the power ceases of delighting each other.
Many accidents therefore may happen by which the ardor of kindness will be abated, without criminal baseness or contemptible inconstancy on either part. To give pleasure is not always in our power, and little does he know himself who believes that he can be always able to receive it. Those who would gladly pass their days together may be separated by the different course of their affairs, and friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions. What we have missed long enough to want it we value more when it is regained. But that which has been lost till it is forgotten will be found at last with little gladness, and with still less if a substitute has supplied the place.
A man deprived of the companion to whom he used to open his bosom And with whom he shared the hours of leisure and merriment, feels the day at first hanging heavy upon him. His difficulties oppress, and his doubts distract him. He sees time come and go without his wanted gratification, and all is sadness within, and solitude about him. But this uneasiness never lasts long. Necessity produces expedience, new amusements are discovered, and new conversation is admitted. No expectation is more frequently disappointed than that which naturally arises in the mind from the prospect of meeting an old friend after long separation. We expect the attraction to be revived and the coalition to be renewed.
No man considers how much alteration time has made in himself, and very few inquire what effect it has had upon others. The first hour convinces them that the pleasure which they had formerly enjoyed is forever at an end. The opinions of both are changed, and the similitude of manners and sentiment is lost which confirmed them both in the approbation of themselves. Friendship is often destroyed by opposition of interest, not only by the ponderous and visible interest which the desire of wealth and greatness forms and maintains, but by a thousand secret and slight competitions, scarcely known to the mind upon which they operate. There is scarcely any man without some favorite trifle which he values above greater attainments, some desire of petty praise which he cannot patiently suffer to be frustrated.
This minute ambition is sometimes crossed before it is known, and sometimes defeated by wanton petulance. But such attacks are seldom made without the loss of friendship. For whoever has found the vulnerable part will be always feared, and the resentment will burn on in secret. Of which shame hinders the discovery. This, however, is a slow malignity, which a wise man will obviate as inconsistent with quiet, and a good man will repress as contrary to virtue. But human happiness is sometimes violated by some more sudden strokes. A dispute begun in jest upon a subject, which a moment before was on both parts regarded with careless indifference, is continued by the desire of conquest till vanity kindles into rage.
And opposition rankles into enmity. Against this hasty mischief I know not what security can be obtained. Men will sometimes be surprised into quarrels, and though they might both hasten to reconciliation as soon as their tumult has subsided, yet two minds will seldom be found together which can at once subdue their discontent or immediately enjoy the sweets of peace without remembering the wounds of the conflict. Friendship has other enemies. Suspicion is always hardening the cautious, and disgust repelling the delicate. Very slender differences will sometimes part those whom long reciprocation of civility or beneficence has united. Lone Love and Ranger retired into the country to enjoy the company of each other, and returned in six weeks cold and petulant.
Ranger's pleasure was to walk in the fields, and Lone Love's to sit in a bower. Each had complied with the other in his turn. The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint and too numerous for removal. Those who are angry may be reconciled. Those who have been injured may receive a recompense. But when the decay of pleasing and willingness to be pleased is silently diminished, the renovation of friendship is hopeless, as when the vital powers sink into languor. There is no longer any use of the physician.
-
15 15 - Poets 7:19
Poets, by Frederick Nietzsche. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox. Since I have known the body better, said Zarathustra to one of his disciples, the spirit hath only been to me symbolically spirit, and all the imperishable. That is also but a simile. So have I heard thee say once before, answered the disciple. And then thou addest, but the poets lie too much. Why didst thou say that the poets lie too much? Why, said Zarathustra, thou askest why. I do not belong to those who may be asked after their why. Is my experience but of yesterday? It is long ago that I experienced the reasons for mine opinions.
Should I not have to be a cask of memory, if I also wanted to have my reasons with me? It is already too much for me even to retain mine opinions, and many a bird flieth away. And sometimes also do I find a fugitive creature in my dove-cot, which is alien to me, and trembleth when I lay my hand upon it. But what did Zarathustra once say unto thee, that the poets lie too much? But Sarathustra also is a poet. Believest thou that he there spake the truth? Why dost thou believe it? The disciple answered, I believe in Sarathustra. But Sarathustra shook his head and smiled. Belief doth not sanctify me, said he, least of all, the belief in myself. But granting that some one did say in all seriousness that the poets lie too much, he was right, we do lie too much.
We also know too little, and are bad learners, so we are obliged to lie. And which of us poets hath not adulterated his wine? Many a poisonous hotchpotch hath evolved in our cellars. Many a indescribable thing hath there been done. And because we know little, therefore, are we pleased from the heart with the purr in spirit, especially when they are young women. And even of those things are we desirous, which old women tell one another in the evening. This do we call the eternally feminine in us. And as if there were a special secret access to knowledge, which choketh up for those who learn anything, so do we believe in the people and in their wisdom. This, however, do all poets believe, that whoever pricketh up his ears when lying in the grass or on lonely slopes Learneth something of the things that are betwixt heaven and earth, and if there come unto them tender emotions, then do the poets always think that nature herself is in love with them, and that she stealeth to their ear to whisper secrets into it, and amorous flatteries, and of this they do plumb and pride themselves before all mortals.
Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed. And especially above the heavens, for all gods are poet symbolizations, poet sophistications. Verily, ever are we drawn aloft, that is, to the realm of the clouds. On these do we set our gaudy puppets, and then call them gods and supermen. Are not they light enough for those chairs, all these gods and supermen? Ah, how I am weary. Of all the inadequate that is insisted on as actual. Ah, how I am weary of the poets. When Zarathustra so spake, his disciple resented it, but was silent. And Zarathustra also was silent, and his eye directed itself inwardly, as if it gazed into the far distance. At last he sighed in true breath.
I am of to-day, and heretofore, said he thereupon. But something is in me that is of the morrow and the day following and hereafter. I became wary of the poets, of the old and of the new. Superficial are they all unto me on shallow seas. They do not think sufficiently into the depth, therefore their feeling did not reach to the bottom. Some sensation of voluptuousness and some sensation of These have as yet been their best contemplation. Ghost-breathing and ghost-whisking seemeth to me all the jingle-jangle of their harps. What have they known hitherto of the fervour of tones? They are also not pure enough for me. They all muddle their water, that it may seem deep. And vain would they thereby prove themselves reconcilers, But mediaries and mixers are they unto me, and half and half an impure.
Ah, I cast indeed my net into the sea, and meant to catch good fish. But always I did draw up the head of some ancient god. Thus did the sea give a stone to the hungry one, and they themselves may well originate from the sea. Certainly one findeth pearls in them. Thereby they are the more like hard Mollusks, and instead of a soul, I have often found in them salt-slime, and they have learned from the sea also its vanity. Is not the sea the peacock of peacocks? Even before the ugliest of all buffaloes doth it spread out its tail? Never doth it tire of its lace-fan of silver and silk. Disdainfully doth the buffalo glance thereat, nigh to the sand with its sole. Nigher still to the thicket, nighest, however, to the swamp.
What is beauty and sea and peacock splendor to it? This parable I speak unto the poets, verily their spirit itself is the peacock of peacocks, and a sea of vanity. Spectators seeketh the spirit of the poet, should they even be buffaloes? But of this spirit became I weary, and I see the time coming. When it will become weary of itself. Yea, changed have I seen the poets, and their glance turned towards themselves. Penitence of the spirit have I seen appearing. They grew out of the poets. Thus spake Sarathistra. End of Poets by Frederick Meatsy.
-
16 16 - Prohibition 20:15
Prohibition, by Robert G. Ingersoll, first published in the New York World, October 21st, 1888, and then in the collected works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume 8, Interviews. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording by Michelle Fry, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in May 2020. Prohibition. It has been decided by many courts in various states that the traffic in liquor can be regulated, that it is a police question. It has been decided by the courts in Iowa that its manufacture and sale can be prohibited, and not only so, but that a distillery or a brewery may be declared a nuisance and may legally be abated, and these decisions have been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Consequently, it has been settled by the highest tribunal that states have the power either to regulate or to prohibit the sale of intoxicating liquors, and not only so, but that states have the power to do it. So it has always been considered within the power of the state to license the selling of intoxicating liquors. In other words, this question is one that the states can decide for themselves. It is not, and should not be, in my judgment, a federal question. It is something with which the United States has nothing to do. It belongs to the States, and where a majority of the people are in favor of prohibition and pass laws to that effect, there is nothing in the Constitution of the United States that interferes with such action.
The remaining question, then, is not a question of power, but a question of policy, and at the threshold of this question is another. Can prohibitory laws be enforced? There are today in Kansas, a prohibition state, more saloons, that is to say, more places in which liquor is sold, than there are in Georgia, a state without prohibition legislation. There are more in Nebraska, according to the population, more in Iowa, according to the population, than in many of the states in which there is the old license system. You will find that the United States has granted more licenses to wholesale and retail dealers in these prohibition states, according to the population, than in many others in which prohibition has not been adopted.
These facts tend to show that it is not enough for the legislature to say, be it enacted. Behind every law, there must be an intelligent and powerful public opinion. A law, to be enforced, must be the expression of such powerful and intelligent opinion. Otherwise, it becomes a dead letter. It is avoided. Judges continue the cases, juries refuse to convict, and witnesses are not particular about telling the truth. Such laws demoralize the community, or, to put it another way, demoralized communities pass such laws. Question to Mr. Ingersoll. What do you think of the prohibitory movement on general principles? Answer. The trouble is that when a few zealous men, intending to reform the world, endeavor to enforce unpopular laws, they are compelled to resort to detectives to a system of espionage.
For the purpose of preventing the sale of liquors, somebody has to watch. Eyes and ears must become acquainted with keyholes. Every neighbor suspects every other. A man with a bottle or a demijohn is followed. Those who drink get behind doors in cellars and garrets. Hypocrisy becomes substantially universal. Hundreds of people become suddenly afflicted with a variety of diseases, for the cure of which alcohol, in some form, is supposed to be indispensable. Malaria becomes general, and it is perfectly astonishing how long a few pieces of Peruvian bark will last, and how often the liquor can be renewed without absorbing the medicinal qualities of the bark. The state becomes a paradise for patent medicine, the medicine being poor whiskey with a scientific name.
Physicians become popular in proportion as liquor of some kind figures in their prescriptions. Then, in the towns, clubs are formed, the principal object being to establish a saloon, and in many instances the drug store becomes a favorite resort, especially on Sundays. There is, however, another side to this question. It is this. Nothing in the world is more important than personal liberty. Many people are in favor of blotting out the sun to prevent the growth of weeds. This is the mistake of all prohibitory fanaticism. Question. What is true temperance, Colonel Ingersoll? Answer. Men have used stimulants for many thousand years, and as much is used today in various forms as in any other period of the world's history.
They are used with more prudence now than ever before, for the reason that the average man is more intelligent now than ever before. Intelligence has much to do with temperance. The barbarian rushes to the extreme for the reason that but little, comparatively, depends upon his personal conduct or personal habits. Now the struggle of life is so sharp, competition is so severe, that few men can succeed who carry a useless burden. The business men of our country are compelled to lead temperate lives, otherwise their credit is gone. Men of wealth, men of intelligence, do not wish to employ intemperate physicians. They are not willing to trust their health or their lives with a physician who is under the influence of liquor.
The same is true of business men in regard to their legal interests. They insist upon having sober attorneys. They want the counsel of a sober man. So in every department. On the railways, it is absolutely essential that the engineer, that the conductor, the train dispatcher, and every other employee in whose hands are the lives of men should be temperate. The consequence is that under the law of the survival of the fittest, the intemperate are slowly but surely going to the wall. They are slowly but surely being driven out of employments of trust and importance. As we rise in the scale of civilization, we continually demand better and better service. We are continually insisting upon better habits, upon a higher standard of integrity, of fidelity.
These are the causes, in my judgment, that are working together in the direction of true temperance. Question. Mr. Ingersoll, do you believe the people can be made to do without a stimulant? Answer. The history of the world shows that all men who have advanced one step beyond utter barbarism have used some kind of stimulant. Man has sought for it in every direction. Every savage loves it. Everything has been tried. Opium has been used by many hundreds of millions. Hashish has filled countless brains with chaotic dreams, and everywhere that civilization has gone, the blood of the grape has been used. Nothing is easier now to obtain than liquor. In one bushel of corn there are at least five gallons.
Four can easily be extracted. All starch, all sugars, can be changed almost instantly into alcohol. Every grain that grows has in it the intoxicating principle, and, as a matter of fact, nearly all of the corn, wheat, sugar, and starch that man eats is changed into alcohol in his stomach. Whether man can be compelled to do without a stimulant is a question that I am unable to answer. Of one thing I am certain, he has never yet been compelled to do without one. The tendency, I think, of modern times is toward a milder stimulant than distilled liquors. Whisky and brandies are too strong. Wine and beer occupy the middle ground. Wine is a fireside, whiskey a conflagration. It seems to me that it would be far better if the prohibitionists would turn their attention toward distilled spirits.
If they were willing to compromise, the probability is that they would have public opinion on their side. If you would say, you may have all the beer and all the wine and cider you wish, and you can drink them when and where you desire, but the sale of distilled spirits shall be prohibited. It is possible that this could be carried out in good faith in many, if not in most of the states, possibly in all. We all know the effect of wine, even when taken in excess, is nothing near as disastrous as the effect of distilled spirits. Why not take the middle ground? The wine-drinkers of the old country are not drunkards. They have been drinking wine for generations. It is drunk by men, women, and children.
It adds to the sociability of the family. It does not separate the husband from the rest. It keeps them all together, and in that view is rather a benefit than an injury. Good wine can be raised as cheaply here as in any part of the world. In nearly every part of our country the grape grows, and good wine can be made. If our people had a taste for wine, they would lose the taste for stronger drink, and they would be disgusted with the surroundings of the stronger drink. The same may be said in favor of beer. As long as the prohibitionists make no distinction between wine and whiskey, between beer and brandy, just so long they will be regarded by most people as fanatics. The prohibitionists cannot expect to make this question a federal one.
The United States has no jurisdiction of this subject. Congress can pass no laws affecting this question that could have any force except in such parts of the country as are not within the jurisdiction of states. It is a question for the states, and not for the federal government. The prohibitionists are simply throwing away their votes. Let us suppose that we had a Prohibition Congress and a Prohibition President. What steps could be taken to do away with the drinking in the city of New York? What steps could be taken in any state of this Union? What could, by any possibility, be done? A few years ago, the Prohibitionists demanded, above all things, that the tax be taken from distilled spirits, claiming at that time that such a tax made the government a partner in vice.
Now, when the Republican Party proposes under certain circumstances to remove that tax, the prohibitionists denounce the movement as one in favor of intemperance. We have also been told that the tax on whiskey should be kept for the reason that it increases the price, and that an increased price tends to make a temperate people, that if the tax is taken off, the price will fall, and the whole country start on the downward road to destruction. Is it possible that human nature stands on such slippery ground? Is it possible that our civilization today rests upon the price of alcohol, and that should the price be reduced, we would all go down together? For one, I cannot entertain such a humiliating and disgraceful view of human nature.
I believe that man is destined to grow greater, grander, and nobler. I believe that no matter what the cost of alcohol may be, life will grow too valuable to be thrown away. Men hold life according to its value. Men, as a rule, only throw away their lives when they are not worth keeping. When life becomes worth living, it will be carefully preserved, and will be hoarded to the last grain of sand that falls through the glass of time.
Q. Mr. Ingersoll, what is the reason for so much intemperance? A. When many people are failures, when they are distanced in the race, when they fall behind, when they give up, When they lose ambition, when they finally become convinced that they are worthless, precisely as they are in danger of becoming dishonest. In other words, having failed in the race of life on the highway, they endeavored to reach the goal by going across lots, by crawling through the grass. Disguise this matter as we may. All people are not successes. All people have not the brain or the muscle or the moral stamina necessary to succeed. Some fall in one way, some in another, some in the net of strong drink, some in the web of circumstances, and others in a thousand ways, and the world itself cannot grow better unless the unworthy fail.
The law is the survival of the fittest, that is to say, the destruction of the unfit. There is no scheme of morals, no scheme of government, no scheme of charity that can reverse this law. If it could be reversed, then the result would be the survival of the unfittest, the speedy end of which would be the extinction of the human race. Temperance men say that it is wise, in so far as possible, to remove temptation from our fellow-men. Let us look at this in regard to other matters. How do we do away with larceny? We cannot remove property. We cannot destroy the money of the world to keep people from stealing some of it. In other words, we cannot afford to make the world valueless to prevent larceny.
All strength by which temptation is resisted must come from the inside. Virtue does not depend upon the obstacles to be overcome. Virtue depends upon what is inside of the man. A man is not honest because the safe of the bank is perfectly secure. Upon the honest man the condition of the safe has no effect. We will never succeed in raising great and splendid people by keeping them out of temptation. Great people withstand temptation. Great people have what may be called moral muscle, moral force. They are poised within themselves. They understand their relations to the world. The best possible foundation for honesty is the intellectual perception that dishonesty can, under no circumstances, be a good investment, that larceny is not only wicked but foolish, Not only criminal, but stupid, that crimes are committed only by fools.
On every hand, there is what is called temptation. Every man has the opportunity of doing wrong. Every man in this country has the opportunity of drinking too much, has the opportunity of acquiring the opium habit, has the opportunity of taking morphine every day. In other words, has the opportunity of destroying himself. How are they to be prevented? Most of them are prevented, at least in a reasonable degree, and they are prevented by their intelligence, by their surroundings, by their education, by their objects and aims in life, by the people they love and the people who love them. No one will deny the evils of intemperance, and it is hardly to be wondered at that people who regard only one side, who think of the impoverished and wretched, of wives and children in want, of desolate homes, become the advocates of absolute prohibition.
At the same time, there is the philosophic side, and the question is whether more good cannot be done by moral influence, by example, by education, by the gradual civilization of our fellow men, than in any other possible way. The greatest things are accomplished by indirection. In this way, the idea of force of slavery is avoided. The person influenced does not feel that he has been trampled upon, does not regard himself as a victim. He feels rather as a pupil, as one who receives a benefit, whose mind has been enlarged, whose life has been enriched, whereas the direct way of Thou shalt not produces an antagonism. In other words, it produces the natural result of I will. By removing one temptation, you add strength to others.
By depriving a man of one stimulant, as a rule, you drive him to another, and the other may be far worse than the one from which he has been driven. We have hundreds of laws making certain things misdemeanors which are naturally right. Thousands of people, honest in most directions, delight in outwitting the government, derive absolute pleasure from getting in a few clothes and gloves and shawls without the payment of duty. Thousands of people buy things in Europe, for which they pay more than they would for the same things in America, and then exercise their ingenuity in slipping them through the custom-house. A law to have real force must spring from the nature of things, and the justice of this law must be generally perceived, otherwise it will be evaded.
The temperance people themselves are playing into the hands of the very party that would refuse to count their votes. Allow the Democrats to remain in power, allow the Democrats to be controlled by the South, and a large majority might be in favor of temperance legislation, and yet the votes would remain uncounted. The party of reform has a great interest in honest elections, and honest elections must first be obtained as the foundation of reform. The prohibitionists can take their choice between these parties. Would it not be far better for the prohibitionists to say, We will vote for temperance, men. We will stand with the party that is the nearest in favor of what we deem to be right. They should also take into consideration that other people are as honest as they, that others disbelieve in prohibition as honestly as they believe in it, and that other people cannot leave their principals to vote for prohibition, and they must remember that these other people are in the majority.
Mr. Fiske knows He knows that he cannot be elected president, knows that it is impossible for him to carry any state in the Union. He also knows that in nearly every state in the Union, probably in all, a majority of the people believe in stimulants. Why not work with the great and enlightened majority? Why rush to the extreme for the purpose not only of making yourself useless, but hurtful? No man in the world is more opposed to intemperance than I am. No man in the world feels more keenly the evils and the agony produced by the crime of drunkenness. And yet I would not be willing to sacrifice liberty, individuality, and the glory and greatness of individual freedom to do away with all the evils of intemperance.
In other words, I believe that slavery, oppression, and suppression would crowd humanity into a thousand deformities, the result of which would be a thousand times more disastrous to the well-being of man. I do not believe in the slave virtues, in the monotony of tyranny, in the respectability produced by force. I admire the men who have grown in the atmosphere of liberty, who have the pose of independence, the virtues of strength, of heroism, and in whose hearts is the magnanimity, the tenderness, and the courage born of victory.
End of Prohibition by Robert G. Ingersoll.
-
17 17 - Saving Mr. Lincoln 11:17
Saving Mr. Lincoln by Central Intelligence Agency. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Winston Tharp.
On February 11, 1861, Abraham Lincoln said his farewell to the people of his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, and boarded a train that would take him to Washington for his inauguration on March 4th. As he started out, rumors of assassination plots circulated in several cities along the planned route. In Washington, stories spread that assassins would strike down Lincoln before or during his inauguration. The South Carolina legislature had responded to Lincoln's election by unanimously voting to secede from the Union, leading the march of the southern states toward secession. Civil war, said an Ohio newspaper, is as certain to follow secession as darkness to follow the going down of the sun.
The Union was tearing apart, and so, it seemed, was the nation's capital itself. Rumors of plot swirled around the city. Secessionist congressmen were said to be planning to kidnap lame duck President James Buchanan so that Vice President and future Confederate General John C. Breckinridge, who had run against Lincoln as a pro-slavery candidate, could seize power. Minutemen from Virginia and Maryland were reportedly ready to invade the city. Charles Pomeroy Stone, a West Point graduate who had served in the Mexican War, was in Washington when the secessions began. Concerned about the rumors, he called upon his old commander, now Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, commander-in-chief of the U.S.
Army. Scott made Stone a colonel and named him Inspector General of the District of Columbia Militia. Most of the U.S. Army was an Indian country, far beyond the reach of railroads. Washington's potential defenders included volunteer units of dubious loyalty. These included the National Rifles. Whose captain said his men stood ready to guard the frontier of Maryland and help to keep the Yankees from coming down to coerce the South. Like many other army officers of the time, Stone had to grope for military intelligence, using whatever resources he managed to find. There was no formal military intelligence organization, and counterintelligence was an unknown art. Stone realized that he needed help from civilians with special skills.
Detectives. The U.S. government, lacking any federal investigative agency, often used private detectives to track down counterfeiters and mail thieves. Suspecting that the National Rifles harbored secessionists, Stone planted a detective in the ranks and told him to keep the unit's captain under surveillance. Stone's detective told him that the men of the National Rifles were planning to storm the Treasury Building as part of a plot to take over Washington. Stone also learned that more than 300 other men, known as National Volunteers, were drilling in a hall above a large livery stable. Stone gave the task of penetrating that group to a skillful New York detective who had been loaned to the Army.
Through the detective's undercover work, Stone was able to learn enough to force the disbanding of the National Volunteers. Their captain, Dr. Cornelius Boyle, a prominent Washington physician, left the Capitol and later became a Confederate intelligence officer. Stone's counterintelligence efforts also purged the national rifles of secessionists. The unit became one of 30 companies formed by Washingtonians loyal to the Union and ready to defend both the Capitol and Lincoln. Soon after Lincoln's train left Springfield, Stone began receiving reports of assassination plots. So many clear indications pointed to Baltimore that three good detectives of the New York police force were constantly employed there, Stone recalled.
In a classic example of intelligence analysis, he compared the detectives' reports to the information received from independent sources. Stone did not mention another detective, Alan Pinkerton. Founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Samuel Morse Fenton, president of the Philadelphia Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, had hired Pinkerton after hearing reports that rabid secessionists in Baltimore were planning to cut Baltimore off from Washington by burning bridges and sinking the Susquehanna River train ferry. Pinkerton went to Baltimore with five operatives, including a trusted assistant, Kate Warren, Described by Pinkerton as America's first woman detective. Pinkerton set up an office and posed as a stockbroker named John H.
Hutchison. While investigating the sabotage rumors, Pinkerton heard of a plot to kill Lincoln in Baltimore when his train arrived from Harrisburg on February 23rd. Lincoln was to be taken by carriage to a private home for lunch and then returned to the train. While secessionists, the national volunteers were mentioned, whipped up a riot, a barber who called himself Captain Ferrandini would kill Lincoln, vanish into the mob, and slip away to the south. Baltimore police would have only a small force at the scene under orders from the mayor and chief of police, both southern sympathizers. Pickett had hoped to foil the plot by getting Lincoln to change his schedule. On February 21st, he met with Lincoln in a Chicago hotel room.
Lincoln said he could not believe there was a conspiracy to kill him. Hours later, Frederick Seward, son of Senator William Henry Seward, arrived at Lincoln's room and warned him of the plot, which had been discovered independently by detectives working for Colonel Stone and General Scott. They had sent young Seward to Lincoln, who now was convinced. Next morning, Lincoln left by train for Harrisburg as scheduled, then boarded a special train, accompanied by his bodyguard, Ward H. Lehman, a Burley former law partner. When the train pulled into West Philadelphia, Pinkerton was waiting in a carriage. The telegraph to Baltimore was cut off. Agents were placed in telegraph offices in Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and New York City, where there was a special watch to hold up any messages about Lincoln's travels.
The carriage took Lincoln and Lehman to the yard of the Philadelphia Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad. There, Kate Warren met the carriage with four tickets for sleeping berths. She and Pinkerton, like Lehman, were armed. The train pulled out shortly before 11 p.m. and arrived in Baltimore about 3.30 a.m. on February 23rd. Warren remained in Baltimore as the sleeping cars with Lincoln on board were shifted to another train, which arrived in Washington about 6 a.m. Later, Lincoln would say he regretted slipping into the Capitol like a thief in the night. On March 4th, the morning of the inauguration, Stone stationed riflemen and windows overlooking the broad steps where Lincoln would take the oath of office.
Sharpshooters stood on roofs along the inaugural route to the Capitol as Lincoln rode past in an open carriage. Soldiers lined the streets. Under the platform where Lincoln stood, other soldiers huddled, guarding against bomb planters. Other troops formed a cordon at the foot of the steps. After Lincoln's inauguration, Stone continued to protect the Capitol, taking control of telegraph offices and the railroad station, And seizing boats on the Potomac to keep Confederate agents from using them. On April 12th, Confederate cannons in Charleston began firing on Fort Sumter. The Civil War had begun. Nine days later, Pinkerton wrote to President Lincoln, offering to start obtaining information on the movements of the traitors or safely conveying your letters or dispatches.
Before Lincoln responded, Major General George B. McClellan asked Pinkerton to set up a military intelligence service for McClellan's command, the Army's Division of the Ohio. A former railroad executive, McClellan was Pinkerton's friend and former client. Pinkerton agreed, and with several operatives, headed for McClellan's headquarters in Cincinnati. Like the detectives who had worked for Colonel Stone, Pinkerton would be a civilian. But he assumed a military cover name, Major E.J. Allen. The Eye That Never Sleeps. Allen Pinkerton, born in 1819 in Glasgow, Scotland, was the son of a police sergeant. At the age of 23, he emigrated to the United States. After working for a time as a cooper, he became first a deputy sheriff in Illinois and then a member of Chicago's newly organized police force.
In 1850, he left the force as a detective and founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Pinkerton's code called for his agents to have no addiction to drink, smoking, card playing, low dives, or slang. On the front of his Chicago headquarters, he placed a sign with a huge I bearing the company's slogan, We Never Sleep. That Pinkerton logo was probably the origin of the term Private Eye. Pinkerton's detectives specialized in tracking and capturing gangs that robbed railroads. Through his work, Pinkerton met George B. McClellan, president of the Rock Island and Illinois Central Railroad, and its attorney, Abraham Lincoln. Those connections led to his work during the Civil War. After the war, Pinkerton returned to Chicago.
and basked in the publicity earned by Pinkerton detectives as they pursued such notorious bandits as the James Brothers and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Pinkertons, as they were called, also worked as strikebreakers for the executives of companies battling unions that were organizing rail workers and coal miners. Pinkerton died in 1884 and was buried in a family plot whose graves included that of Timothy Webster, one of his best agents. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency continued as a family enterprise through four generations. Outsiders bought it and kept the Pinkerton name. In 1999, Securitas, an international security firm, acquired the Pinkerton Company.
End of Saving Mr. Lincoln. by Central Intelligence Agency.
-
18 18 - The Story of the Alphabet 24:36
The Story of the Alphabet.
Do you know your ABCs? Each letter character has a history and a reason for its present form. Have you ever questioned the origin and significance of the alphabet? Our transition from barbarism to civilization can be attributed to the alphabet. Those great prehistoric discoveries and inventions such as making of a fire, the use of tools, the wheel and the axle, and even our modern marvelous applications of steam and electricity pale into insignificance when compared with the power of the alphabet. Simple as it now appears after the accustomed use of ages, It can be accounted not only the most difficult, but the most fruitful of all the achievements of the human intellect. Man lived by bread alone, and without the alphabet, untold ages, and with a practical alphabetic system not more than three thousand years.
So important and wonderful was this step deemed by those who lived nearer the time of its inception. In the time before the wonder of its extraordinary powers had been blunted by long possession and common use, that its invention, as well as that of writing, was invariably attributed to divine origin. Modern investigation always seeks sources other than mythological ones, and thus the science of ancient handwriting, paleography, came into existence. In the last hundred and twenty-five years, the writing of the ancient Egyptians, which was a sealed book for nearly twenty centuries, has been deciphered through the efforts of Champillon and Young. The mysterious cuneiform characters of ancient Assyria and Babylon have been interpreted by Grotefend and Rolison, and the missing link to connect our present alphabetic system to these ancient ones is being partly completed by Sir Arthur Evans, who was compiling and analyzing Cretan characters and pre-Phoenician writing.
The story, however, will probably never be told in its entirety. The forms of our letters, with the exception of G, J, U, and W, reached their full development two thousand years ago. The Roman letter was the parent of all the styles, notwithstanding the diversity that has appeared in Europe since the beginning of the Christian era. With a little imagination, it is not difficult to note the resemblance between similar letters of the old Roman capitals and those following which have been designated as script, italic, Old English or Black Letter, Versal, Unical, and an endless list of alphabet families. The desire for speed, and the influence of the tool, pen, reed, chisel, brush, were the determining factors in the change of form.
Curiously enough, instead of being archaic, the Roman alphabet, which is now two thousand years old, is still the most useful because of its legibility, and also the most beautiful. We derived twenty-three of our letters from the Romans. They had taken probably eighteen of these from the Greeks about the fourth century BC, and afterwards borrowed elsewhere or invented seven more. Instead of giving them names, as the Greeks did, they simply called them by the sounds for which they stood. A, A, B, pronounced Bay. They introduced the curve whenever possible, whereas the early Greek letters were all angular. What an interesting analogy is evident in the architecture of these two peoples, the temple pediment and angularity of the Greeks, as contrasted with the dome and arch of the Romans.
The Greeks, in their contact with the great traders and Yankees of ancient time, the Phoenicians, saw the value of their alphabetic writing and inaugurated its use about the time of the first Olympiad. Seven Seventy Six B.C. Three or four centuries before they gave it to the Romans, the ancient Greeks found use for fifteen of the Phoenician letters, and then conceived enough to round out an alphabet of twenty-four characters. The changes that took place in the shape of their letters can be attributed to their sense of order. The letters are balanced better, and the parts better related. The Greeks were interested in the sound value only, not in the picture value of the symbol, and, therefore, they probably did not notice that A, for instance, had ever been a picture of the head of an ox, and that it was now drawn upside down, and that the Phoenician name Alf, meant ox, and that they mispronounced the sound in calling it alpha.
The Romans borrowed from the Greeks, and the Greeks borrowed from the Phoenicians. But where did the Phoenicians obtain their letters? Did they invent them? To what extent were these letters influenced by earlier systems of writing, as those employed by the Cretan, Assyrian, and Egyptian civilizations? These are questions that probably will never be answered satisfactorily. Many arguments and theories are advanced. We can, however, trace back with certainty a number of our letters to the Phoenician alphabet of 1000 B.C. Beyond this all is, at present, a matter of conjecture. The Phoenician alphabet consisted of twenty-two pictures of familiar objects. These pictures were rudely and simply made, for writers and readers soon recognized the fundamental characteristics, and all unnecessary details were eliminated.
The great advance that can be credited to them is that they realized that a small number of sound-expressing characters, if well selected, are sufficient to express any word. Other races at this period had phonetic systems, but they consisted of numerous symbols and cumbersome appendages of non-alphabetic characters—eye pictures, side by side with ear pictures. No doubt, early Phoenician writing Pass through the stages of development traceable in so many countries. One, the pictures or characters suggesting the thing or incident, picture writing. Two, the pictures or characters symbolizing the thing or idea, ideographic or symbolic writing. Three, the pictures or characters representing the sound of the thing or idea, phonograms.
And four, the signs suggesting the various sounds of the language. Alphabetic system. To free this last stage from the others was the great Phoenician contribution. A. Why is A the first letter? It represents one of the commonest vowel sounds in ancient languages. Naturally, the Phoenician alphabet makers selected a familiar object in the name of which this particular vowel sound was emphasized. Since food is of primal importance, It is not surprising to find that he chose the ox, aleph, or rather the head of the ox, for the characteristics of animals are chiefly embodied in the head. Not only was the ox important as food, but also as a beast of burden, for the ox had been harnessed to the plough centuries before the horse was domesticated.
Thus one of the earliest and most important of man's friends among the brute creatures was honored. In making this letter repeatedly and rapidly, they became careless, and instead of crossing the letter V, they tried to make it with one continuous scratching, hence when the Greeks became acquainted with it, three to five centuries after its invention, the picture had deteriorated almost beyond recognition. They introduced balance, and the V was inverted, and the crossbar was retained between the lines. Unknowingly, They were drawing the ox-head upside down, and it remains so with us to this day. The Greeks called the first letter alpha, the Romans called it ah, and we call it a, a sound it never possessed in Latin.
B. The second letter of the alphabet represents a crude house, roughly outlined. After food, shelter is an important consideration, and this fact was expressed by the early alphabet maker. The Greeks, again, were ignorant of the picture, and careless or indifferent as to the exact name of the character, and thus two triangles, instead of the square supporting a triangle, were made, and the name changed from Beth to Beta. We'll bind the Greek names to the first two letters, and we have... Alpha, Beta, Alphabet. The Romans shortened the name Beta, calling it Bay, and introduced the curved loops. The original name is familiar to us through names found in the scriptures, Bethel, House of God, and Bethlehem, House of Bread.
C. N. G. The ship of the desert, the camel, gave its name to the third letter. Our name for this animal is traceable back to the Phoenician, Gemmel or Gamal. The long neck and the peculiar angle of the neck in relation to the head could easily be represented. The Greeks made changes similar to those in other letters. They improved the shape and changed the name to Gamma. The Romans did not forget the curve and gave it both the hard and soft sounds, K and G. Later on, about the third century AD, to distinguish the G sound from the K sound, they added a little bar below the opening. Thus we get both C and G from the picture of the camel. Stephenson said that when he was a child, the capital G always impressed him as a jenny swooping down to drink out of a handsome cup.
Kipling's story of the invention of the alphabet is filled with similar delightful stories of the picture origin of letter forms. D. The next letter, D, came from a representation of a door, Daleth. It probably pictures the door of a tent. A custom that prevails among the Arabs and in a number of countries gave particular importance to the door of a tent. A stranger, or even an enemy, If he entered through the door of a tent, must receive food, drink, and shelter. Daleth became Delta with the Greeks, and De with the Romans, who, of course, rounded the angle. E. The house picture gave us B, the door D, and the window E. Hey meant to look, to see, or window, and one writer asserts our familiar street cry, Hey there!
can be traced to these ancient times. One side-bar of the window was lost early. The Greeks at first used this sound for the long e, but afterwards employed the character h or eta for the long sound. The Romans at first made no change except to call it e. This is the letter that occurs so frequently in English words, and many, no doubt, Recall the interesting use that Poe makes of this fact in his story, The Gold Bug. F. Our letter order does not agree with that of the Phoenicians or the Early Greeks. Our sixth letter, F, is missing in Classical Greek, but it is found in earlier writings. It comes from a Phoenician representation of a hook or nail, vow. The Hebrew form resembles the latter object.
The nail was important in shipbuilding, a common industry of the early traders. When the Greeks used this letter, they called it da gamma, double gamma, and its form represented one gamma, Greek C, superimposed over the other. The Romans called it F, and during the reign of Emperor Claudius, the consonant V was represented by the F inverted. This was done because the Latin alphabet, Had but one character to represent U and V. Octavia became Octavia spelled with inverted F. H. Two fence posts and three horizontal boards gave us our eighth letter, H. The fence was called Haith. The Greeks omitted the upper and lower boards, thus making it like our H, and called it A. The Romans gave it a soft sound, Ha.
just as we do today. I and J. The parts of the human body also played an important part in giving form to the letters of the alphabet. The early peoples recognized the value of the hand and the head, and these members gave rise to the letters I and K and Q and R, respectively. The hand in profile, bent at the knuckles and wrist, gives us the character Yod, the hand, as used by the Phoenicians. The Greeks, who always liked to have their words end in vowels, added a, and called it aota. When the Romans received it, it was simply a vertical stroke, e, which represented the same long e sound as it did with the Greeks, but later they used it both as a consonant and vowel, differentiating the consonant by making the letter i longer, j.
But they did not give a distinct letter form for the capital J until the 16th century. The small j came into being nearly a century later. The dot over the eye was first introduced in the 13th century manuscript. K. The silhouette of the open hand, with its radiating lines, discloses the origin of the letter K, Kaff, which signified hollow or palm. We know that palmistry was practiced by the ancients, and probably the association of reading the hand and writing influenced the inclusion of this character. The Greeks added their favorite vowel sound, ah, again, and thus obtained their kappa. The Romans had no need for this letter at first, as C furnished the same sound. When they did accept it, they made no change.
L. The ox-goat or whiplash, lamed, gave rise to the next letter. Herding, oxen, and sheep was the important occupation of the slaves of the Phoenicians, and hence the last, an object so unfamiliar to us, was easily recognized by them. The Greeks again added an A and call it Lambda, and made it in the form of an inverted V. The Romans, strangely, adhered more closely to the original form than did the Greeks. M and N. The Phoenicians were lovers of the sea, and from this source two letters were derived, M and N. They explored not only all the Mediterranean shore at an early date, but they also sailed boldly through the gates of Gibraltar and beyond the world, where they found Britain. They were the first navigators that sailed by night, and it is said they discovered the North Star.
Therefore it is not surprising that water, Mame, is the source of M, and that fish, noon, the source of N. The letter M has changed but little in form. It is the Greek letter M and the Roman M. The head of the fish, from which the letter N is pictured, was simplified even more than the head of the ox, in A. It no doubt represents the fisherman's viewpoint, not a swimming fish, but a suspended one. The Greeks reversed the stroke and called it new, and the Romans did not change its form, but called it n. O. In Phoenicia, as in Egypt, China, and Mexico, the i is one of the commonest elements found in the writing. It was called aion. The Greeks used it for two sounds, now designated by omicron, little o, and omega, great O.
The letter which, strangely, was placed at the end of the Greek alphabet. We find it in the Bible. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. How many today would think of using the alphabet for such an important illustration? It is easy to trace the Roman O from its Greek parent, Omicron. P. Many letter pictures run in pairs. Finger and hand, water and fish, and now, after eye, we find mouth, pi, which represents the lower lip. The Greeks made little change in the name or shape at first, but later they introduced the angles and made the downward strokes equal. The Romans formed the letter by continuing the curve farther than the Phoenicians and called it Pe.
Q and R. Now we come to Q and R, the letters which were mentioned above as those probably coming from the head. Whether Q, Kof, was derived from the picture of the back view of the head and neck, or whether it represents a knot, which, no doubt, was as important to navigators then as it is now, is a mooted question. The Q sound is guttural, and the tail of the letter is supposed to indicate the throat sound. The Greeks soon discarded Copa, as it was called, and the Romans went back to the original source of their Q.
The back view of the head is the unusual one, for as we look at the drawing of the early races, or memory pictures, or the delineations of a child of seven or eight, we find that there are almost without exception profile pictures. The Phoenician Resch, Represents the profile, and shows very little resemblance to a human being, although at first the features may have been more clearly indicated. The Greeks, as was to be expected, turned the letter around, and later, oddly enough, introduced a curve making it exactly like the Roman letter P. The extra stroke, which we find in the Roman letter, was no doubt due to the carelessness in copying. They pronounced it, Err.
S. There is a common legend explaining S, the letter with the hissing sound. Because of its curved shape and its hissing sound, many people believe it was derived from a snake. Its real history is easily followed from Phoenician shin or sin, meaning teeth, to the present day. Its form closely resembles Rw. The Greeks made a perpendicular for their sigma, and the Romans simplified and curved it, giving S. T. Our twentieth letter, T, is particularly interesting, because it is derived from Tav, a mark or cross made by people who could not write, and no doubt their signature frequently resembled it. We must not forget that even Charlemagne and other kings of the Middle Ages had to make their mark or trace their initials through stencil plates.
The only change of Tav, to Greek Tau and Roman Tey, with the raising of the crossbar. U, V, Y. The letters U, V, and Y were all taken from the letter Epsilon, and it may have been derived from the queer Hebrew form of Ion, which closely resembles Y. The letters U and V were interchangeable. Epsilon, known as the Samian letter, was used by Pythagoras as an emblem to represent the parting of the ways, the young man making a choice in life. W. Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers contributed two letters, W, when, and another often infused with Y, called Thorn. These were introduced during the 13th century. The French always called the former letter W. And in English, it may be said to represent W, as its name indicates.
The letter Thorn had the value of the digraph TH and YE in Old English should be pronounced THE like the definite article. X and Z Although we have no direct need for the letter X, for Z can be substituted for it when it is used as an initial letter, and KS When it is used elsewhere, it has remained in the alphabet since its frequent use by the Greeks. It came from the Roman, ex, which may have been derived from the Greek, kis. The latter resembles the Phoenician character, smosh, meaning a post or support. The dagger, zayin, from which we obtain our z, must have been important in the daily lives of the Greeks, Hebrews and Phoenicians. For it occupies a sixth place, Zeta, and the seventh in the later alphabets.
The Romans did not change its name or shape, but although there has been little change in two thousand years, we see little resemblance to the short sword in the letter the Romans gave us. Many slight changes that have occurred in the formation of the letters of the alphabet may be accounted for. At first, the Greeks wrote from left to right in one line, and from right to left on the next line. A mode of writing which has been termed bo's trophodon, because it runs as an ox-plough does in a field, up one furrow and down another. It is due to this fact that many letters were reversed from the original prototypes. It is interesting to note that recently books for the blind have been embossed in this manner.
The small letters of the alphabet, sometimes called lowercase letters because printers kept them in a case below the capitals, or minuscule letters in contrast with majuscule or capital letters, illustrate further changes due to rapid writing of capitals in a cursive or running hand. The few characters selected by the Phoenicians, the great traders, artificers, and farmers of the ancient world, not only influenced Greek literature in life, Roman and modern nations in Europe, but also spread eastward to the very walls of China. The Hebrews copied them as a whole and retained the original names with only slight variations. They did change the shapes because a different writing instrument was employed.
According to a legend, Jehovah gave the letters to Moses. Hans saw that left curves in Hebrew letter form turn upward, as symbols of a finger pointing heavenward. The Phoenician alphabet is also the parent of Arabic, Indian, Javanese, Korean, Tibetan, Coptic syllabaries, and alphabets. No small country ever gave such a great gift to humanity. No large country could have given a greater gift.
End of the Story of the Alphabet by Otto F. Eggie
-
19 19 - Table of Different Velocities Expressed in Meters Per Second 10:26
Table of different velocities expressed in meters per second by James Jackson. Table of different velocities expressed in meters per second. The following table has been drawn up by Mr. James Jackson, librarian to the Paris Geographical Society.
A man walking 4 km an hour, 1.11 m per second. A man walking 5 km an hour, 1.40 m per second. The comet of Halley in Apeleon, 3.25 m per second. A ship going 9 knots an hour, 9 times 1852 meters, 4.63 meters per second. Ordinary wind, from 5 to 6 meters per second. A ship going 12 knots an hour, 12 times 1852 meters, 6.17 meters per second. A wave 30 meters in magnitude with a depth of 300 meters, 6.81 meters per second. A ship going 17 knots an hour, 17 times 1,852 meters, 8.75 meters per second. A fresh breeze, 10 meters per second. A torpedo boat going 21 knots an hour. 21 x 1852 m. 10.80 m per second. A racehorse trotting an English mile in 2 minutes 14 seconds. 12 m per second. A racehorse galloping 900 m a minute.
15 m per second. An express train running 60 km per hour. 16.67 m per second. Flight of a falcon or a carrier pigeon. 18 m per second. A wave in a tempest at sea. 21.85 m per second. An express train running 60 English miles an hour, 60 x 1,609 meters, 26.81 meters per second. A tempest, from 25 to 30 meters a second. The transmission of sensation by human nerves, 33 meters per second. A hurricane, 40 meters per second. Flight of one of the swiftest birds, 88.90 meters per second. Velocity of a point on the equator of Mercury. 146.87 m per second. Propagation of the tide caused by the earthquake of Africa on August 13, 1868, Africa to Honolulu, according to Hochstetter. 227.38 m per second. Velocity of a point on the equator of Mars.
244 m per second. Velocity of sound in the air at plus 10 degrees Celsius, 337.20 meters per second. Velocity of a point on the equator of the Earth, 463 meters per second. A cannonball, 500 meters per second. Propagation of the movement of tides, North Pacific Ocean, maximum, according to Wewell, 922 m per second. The Moon's revolution round the Earth, 1,012 m per second. Velocity of a point on the equator of Mercury, 1,034 m per second. Revolution of the second satellite of Mars, 1,157 m per second. Concussion of the earthquake of Vierge, July 25, 1855, from Turin to Geneva in 126 seconds, 1,368 m per second. Velocity of sound in water at plus 8.1 degrees Celsius, 1,435 m per second. Revolution of the first satellite of Mars, 1,833 m per second.
Velocity of a point on the equator of the Sun, 2,028 m per second. Revolution of the fourth satellite of Uranus, 3,300 m per second. Revolution of the eighth satellite of Saturn, 3,738 m per second. Revolution of the third satellite of Uranus, 3814 m per second. Velocity of a point on the equator of Uranus, 3904 m per second. Revolution of the satellite of Neptune, 4505 m per second. Revolution of the second satellite of Uranus, 4906 m per second. Revolution of Neptune round the Sun, 5390 m per second. Revolution of the first satellite of Uranus, 5763 m per second. Revolution of the seventh satellite of Saturn, 5794 m per second. Revolution of the sixth satellite of Saturn, 6398 m per second.
Revolution of Uranus round the Sun, 6730 m per second. Proper movement of Vega, 7000 m per second. Displacement of the Sun towards the constellation of Hercules, 7642 m per second. Revolution of the fourth satellite of Jupiter, 8359 m per second. Revolution of Saturn round the Sun, 9584 m per second. Revolution of the fifth satellite of Saturn, 9741 m per second. Velocity of a point on the equator of Saturn, 10,541 m per second. Revolution of the third satellite of Jupiter, 10,869 m per second. Revolution of the fourth satellite of Saturn, 11,516 m per second. Velocity of a point on the equator of Jupiter, 12,491 m per second. Revolution of Jupiter around the Sun, 12,924 m per second. Revolution of the third satellite of Saturn, 13,038 m per second.
Revolution of the second satellite of Jupiter, 13,999 m per second. Revolution of the second satellite of Saturn, 14,568 m per second. Revolution of the first satellite of Saturn, 16,429 m per second. Revolution of the first satellite of Jupiter, 17,667 m per second. Revolution of Mars around the Sun. 23,863 m per second. Revolution of the Earth round the Sun, 29,516 m per second. Revolution of Venus round the Sun, 34,630 m per second. Proper movement of capella. Revolution of Mercury round the Sun.
Proper movement of Sirius, 51,000 m per second. Ordinary movements of the solar atmosphere, from 30,000 to 65,000 m per second. Proper movement of the 61st of Cygnus, Proper movement of Arcturus. The comet of Halley in Perihelion. Tempests of the solar atmosphere, 402,000 m per second. Electricity, a telegraphic submarine wire. Electricity. A telegraphic aerial wire.
Velocity of light. END OF TABLE OF DIFFERENT VELOCITIES EXPRESSED IN METERS PER SECOND BY JAMES JACKSON FROM NATURE October 18, 1883.
-
20 20 - Water Music 7:55
Water Music The house in which I live is haunted by the noise of dripping water. Always day and night, summer and winter, something is dripping somewhere. For many months an unquiet cistern kept up within its iron bosom a long, hollow-toned soliloquy. Now it is mute, but a new and more formidable drip has come into existence. From the very summit of the house a little spout, the overflow, no doubt, of some unknown receptacle under the roof, lets fall a succession of drops that is almost a continuous stream. Down it falls, this all-but stream, a sheer forty or fifty feet onto the stones of the basement steps, thence to dribble ignominiously away into some appointed drain. The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep, but my lesser waterfalls play subtler, I had almost said, a more modern music.
Lying awake at nights, I listen with a mixture of pleasure and irritation to its curious cadences. The musical range of a dripping tap is about half an octave, but within the bounds of this major fourth, drops can play the most surprising and varied melodies. You will hear them climbing laboriously up small degrees of sound, only to descend at a single leap to the bottom. More often they wander unaccountably about in varying intervals, familiar or disconcertingly odd. And with the varying pitch the time also varies, but within narrow limits. For the laws of hydrostatics, or whatever other science claims authority over drops, do not allow the dribblings much license either to pause or to quicken the pace of their falling.
It is an odd sort of music. One listens to it as one lies in bed, slipping gradually into sleep with a curious, uneasy emotion. Drip, drop, drip, drap, drap, drap, drap. So it goes on, this watery melody, forever without an end, inconclusive, inconsistent, formless. It is always on the point of deviating into sense and form. Every now and then you will hear a complete phrase of rounded melody, and then, drip, drop, de-drip, de-drap, the old inconsequence sets in once more. But suppose there was some significance in it. It is that which troubles my drowsy mind as I listen at night. Perhaps for those who have ears to hear this endless dribbling is as pregnant with thought and emotion, as significant as a piece of Bach.
Drip, drop, de-drop, de-drip. So little would suffice to turn the incoherence into meaning. The music of the drops is the symbol and type of the whole universe. It is forever, as it were, asymptotic to sense, infinitely close to significance, but never touching it. Never unless the human mind comes and pulls it forcibly over the dividing space. If I could understand this wandering music. If I could detect in it a sequence, if I could force it to some conclusion, the diapason closing full in God, in mind, I hardly care what, so long as it closes in something definite, then I feel I should understand the whole incomprehensible machine, from the gaps between the stars to the policy of the Allies.
And growing drowsier and drowsier, I listened to the ceaseless tune, the hollow soliloquy in the cistern, the sharp metallic rapping of the drops that fall from the roof upon the stones below. And surely I begin to discover a meaning. Surely I detect a trace of thought. Surely the phrases follow one another with art, leading on inevitably to some prodigious conclusion. Almost I have it. Almost. Almost. Then I suppose I fall definitely to sleep. For the next thing I am aware of is that the sunlight is streaming in. It is morning. The water is still dripping as irritatingly and persistently as ever. Sometimes the incoherence of the drop music is too much to be borne. The listener insists that the asymptote shall somehow touch the line of sense.
He forces the drops to say something. He demands of them that they shall play, shall we say, God Save the Queen, or the Hymn to Joy from the Ninth Symphony, or Voix Cisapete. The drops obey reluctantly. They play what you desire, but with more than the ineptitude of the child at the piano. Still, they play it somehow. But this is an extremely dangerous method of laying the haunting ghost whose voice is the drip of water. For once you have given the drops something to sing or say. They will go on singing and saying it forever. Sleep becomes impossible, and at the two or three hundredth repetition of Madelon, or even of an air from Figaro, the mind begins to totter towards insanity. Drops, ticking clocks.
Machinery, everything that throbs or clicks or hums or hammers can be made with a little perseverance to say something. In my childhood, I remember I was told that trains said, to Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch a pocket hankercher, and a capo ad infinitum. They can also repeat, if desired, that useful piece of information to stop The train pulled down the chain, but it is very hard to persuade them to add the menacing corollary penalty for improper use, five pounds. Still, with careful tutoring, I have succeeded in teaching a train to repeat even that unrhythmical phrase. Dadaist literature always reminds me a little of my falling drops. Confronted by it, I feel the same uncomfortable emotion as is begotten in me by the inconsequent music of water.
Suppose, after all, that this apparently accidental sequence of words should contain the secret of art and life and the universe. It may. Who knows? And here am I, left out in the cold of total incomprehension, and I pore over this literature and regard it upside down in the hope of discovering that secret, but somehow I cannot induce the words to take on any meaning whatever. Drip, drop, dedrap, dedrep. Sara and Pecabia let fall their words, and I am baffled. But I can see that there are great possibilities in this type of literature. For the tired journalist it is ideal, since it is not he, but the reader who has to do all the work. All he need do is to lean back in his chair and allow the words to dribble out through the nozzle of his fountain pen.
Drip. Drop. End of Water Music by Aldous Huxley