Chapters 20
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1 01 - The Altruist in Politics (1889) 15:23
The Altruist in Politics by Benjamin Cardozo.
There comes not seldom a crisis in the life of men, of nations, and of worlds, when the old forms seem ready to decay, And the old rules of action have lost their binding force. The evils of existing systems obscure the blessings that attend them, and where reform is needed, the cry is raised for subversion. The cause of such phenomena is not far to seek. It used to appear to me, writes Count Tolstoy in a significant passage, It used to appear to me that the small number of cultivated, rich, and idle men, of whom I was one, composed the whole of humanity, and that the millions and millions of other men who had lived and are still living were not in reality men at all."
It is this spirit The spirit that sees the whole of humanity in the few and throws into the background the millions and millions of other men? It is this spirit that has aroused the antagonism of reformers and made the decay of the old forms, the rupture of the old restrictions, the ideal of them and of their followers. When wealth and poverty meet each other face to face, the one the master, the other the dependent, the one exalted, and the other debased, it is perhaps hardly matter for surprise that the dependent and debased and powerless faction, in envy of their opponent's supremacy, should demand not simple reform, but absolute community and equality of wealth. That cry for communism is no new one in the history of mankind.
Thousands of years ago it was heard and acted on, and in the lapse of centuries its reverberations have been swelled in volume. Again and again the altruist has arisen in politics. has bidden us share with others the product of our toil, and has proclaimed the communistic dogma as the panacea for our social ills. So today, amid the buried hopes and buried projects of the past, the doctrine of communism still lives in the minds of men. Under stress of misfortune or in dread of tyranny, It is still preached in modern times as Plato preached it in the world of the Greeks. Yet it is indeed doubtful whether, in the history of mankind, a doctrine was ever taught more impracticable or more false to the principle it professes than this very doctrine of communism.
In a world where self-interest is avowedly the ruling motive, it seeks to establish at once an all-reaching and all-controlling altruism. In a world where every man is pushing and fighting to outstrip his fellows, it would make him toil with like-figure for their common welfare. In a world where a man's activity is measured by the nearness of reward, It would hold up a prospective recompense as an equal stimulant to labor. The more bitterly we feel, writes George Eliot, the more bitterly we feel the folly, ignorance, neglect, or self-seeking of those who at different times have wielded power, the stronger is the obligation we lay on ourselves to beware lest we also By a too hasty resting of measures which seem to promise immediate relief, make a worse time of it for our own generation, and leave a bad inheritance for our children."
In the future, when the remoteness of this reward shall have weakened the laborer's zeal, we shall be able to judge more fairly of the blessings that the Communist offers. Instead of the present world, where some at least are well-to-do and happy, the Communist holds before us a world where all alike are poor. For the activity, the push, the vigor of our modern life, his substitute is a life aimless and unbroken. And so we have to say to Communists what George Eliot might have said. Be not blinded by the passions of the moment. But when you prayed about your own wrongs and the sufferings of your offspring, take heed lest in the long run you make a worse time of it for your own generation and leave a bad inheritance for your children.
Little thought has been taken by these altruistic reformers for the application of the doctrines they uphold. To the question how one kind of labor can be measured against another, How the labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor of the artist, how the labor of the strong can be measured against the labor of the weak, the Communists can give no answer. Absorbed as they are in the principle of equality, they have still forgotten the equality of work in the equality of pay. They have forgotten that reward, to be really equal, must be proportionate to the effort. And they, and all socialists, have forgotten that we cannot make an arithmetic of human thought and feeling, and that for all our crude attempts to balance recompense against toil, for all our crude attempts to determine the relative severity of different kinds of toil, For all our crude attempts to determine the relative strain on different persons of the same kind of toil, yet not only will the ratio dealing as it does with our subjective feeling be a blundering one, but a system based upon it will involve inequalities greater, because more insidious, than those of the present system it would discard.
Instances, indeed, are not wanting to substantiate the claim that communism, by unduly exalting our altruistic impulses, proceeds upon a false psychological basis. Yet, if an instance is to be chosen, it would be hard to find one more suggestive than that afforded by the efforts of Robert Owen. The year 1824 saw the rise of Owen's little community of New Harmony, and the year of 1828 saw the community's final disruption. Individuals had appropriated to themselves the property designed for all, and even Owen, who had given to the enterprise his money and his life, was obliged to admit that men were not yet fitted for the communistic stage. And that the moment of transition from individualism to communism had not yet arrived.
Men trained under the old system, with its eager rivalry, its selfish interests, could not quite yet enter into the spirit of self-renunciation that communism demands. And Owen, therefore, was led to put his trust in education as the great molder of the minds of men. Through this agency, he hoped, the eager rivalry, the selfish interests, the sordid love of gain, might be lost in higher, purer, more disinterested ends. And animated by that hope, the hope that in the fullness of time another new harmony, free from contention and the disappointments of the Old One, might serve to immortalize his name, Animated by that hope, Owen passed the last thirty years of his life, and with that hope still before his eyes he died.
But years have now passed since Owen lived. The second new harmony has not yet been seen. The so-called rational system of education has not yet transformed the impulses or the aims of men. And the communist of today, with a history of two thousand years of failure behind him, in the same pathetic confidence, still looks for the realization of his dreams to the communism of the future. And yet, granting that communism were practicable, granting that Owen's hopes had some prospect of fulfillment, The doctrine still embodies evils that must make it forever inexpedient. The readers of Mr. Matthew Arnold's works must have noticed the emphasis with which he dwells on the instinct of expansion as a factor in human progress.
It is a refutation alike of communism and socialism that they thwart the instinct of expansion. That they substitute for individual energy the energy of the government. That they substitute for human personality the blind mechanical power of the state. The one system, as the other, marks the end of individualism. The one system, as the other, would make each man the image of his neighbor, The one system as the other would hold back the progressive and, by uniformity of reward, gain uniformity of type. I can look forward to no blissful prospect for a race of men that, under the dominion of the states, at the cost of all freedom of action, at the cost indeed of their own true selves, shall enjoy, if one will, a fair abundance of the material blessings of life.
Some Matthew Arnold of the future would inevitably say of them, in phrase like that applied to the Puritans of old, They entered the prison of socialism and had the key turned upon their spirit there for hundreds of years.
Into that prison of socialism, with broken enterprise and broken energy, as serfs under the mastery of the state, while human personality is preferred to unreasoning mechanism, mankind must hesitate to step. When they shall once have entered within it, when the key shall have been turned upon their spirit, and have confined them in narrower straits than even puritanism could have done, it will be left for them to find, in their blind obedience and passive submission, the recompense for the singleness of character, the foresight, and the energy that they have left behind them. In almost every phase of life, this doctrine of political altruists is equally impracticable and pernicious. In its social results, it involves the substitution of the community in the family's present position.
In its political aspects, it involves the absolute dominion of the state over the actions and property of its subjects. Thus, though claiming to be an exaltation of the so-called natural rights of liberty and equality, it is in reality their emphatic debasement. It teaches that thoughtless docility is a recompense for stunted enterprise. It magnifies material good at the cost of every rational endowment. It inculcates a self-denial that must result in dwarfing the individual to a mere instrument in the hands of the State for the benefit of his fellows. No such organization of society, no organization that fails to take note of the fact that man must have scope for the exercise and development of his faculties, no such organization of society can ever reach a permanent success.
However beneficent its motives, the hypothesis with which it starts can never be realized. The aphorism of Emerson, churches have been built not upon principles but upon tropes, is as true in the field of politics as it is in the field of religion. In a like figurative spirit, the followers of communism have reared their edifice. And, looking back upon the finished structure, seeking to discern the base on which it rests, the critic finds not principles but tropes. The builders have appealed to a future that has no warrant in the past, and, fixing their gaze upon the distant dreamland, captivated by the vision there beheld, entranced by its ideal effulgence, Their eyes were blinded to the real conditions of the human problem they had set before them.
Their enemies have not been slow to note such weakness and mistake. And perhaps it may serve to clear up misconceptions. Perhaps it may serve to lessen Kant and open the way for fresh and vigorous thought. If we shall once convince ourselves that altruism cannot be the rule of life, that its logical result is the dwarfing of the individual man, and that not by death of human personality can we hope to banish the evils of our day, and to realize the ideal of all existence, a nobler or purer life.
End of the Altruist and Politics by Benjamin Cardozo
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2 02 - The Atomic Bomb vs. Civilization (1945) 19:58
The Atomic Bomb vs. Civilization by Robert M. Hutchins, December 1945. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. There is only one subject of really fundamental importance at the present moment, and that is the atomic bomb. Although it is not a cheerful subject, we must consider it, for the issue is that of survival. The atomic bomb dropped at Hiroshima was carried there in an airplane and destroyed everything within a radius of one mile. We know that the progress of research will result in cheaper processes, using more abundant materials and less conspicuous installations, producing more powerful explosions and more deadly rays.
by carriers which are, for all practical purposes, invisible. Some idea of the rate of increasing destructiveness to which we may look forward may be gathered from the statement that the improvement, if the word may be used in this connection, from the Hiroshima bomb to atomic explosions that would devastate the entire United States, is a much smaller improvement than that made this year in the development of nuclear explosions. In fifty years, we shall probably be able to start a chain reaction that will blow up the globe. We Americans cannot delude ourselves by thinking that we have any scientific or mechanical secrets that can protect us. Such secrets as we possess are radioactive, with very short half-lives.
If there was a secret, it was abolished when the first bomb was dropped. The War Department, by releasing the Smith Report for publication, has given away all we knew up to 1942, and shown other nations the path which they must follow to reach the point at which we arrived in 1945. The secrets remaining will affect the work that is done from now on, but will not prevent other nations from building bombs as good as those we have now, and those are quite good enough to destroy the cities of the United States. Secrecy at this stage is against our interests. Our secrets do not amount to much. We need access to the work of scientists everywhere in order to make further progress in the development of atomic energy.
As we never would have had the bomb if the work of scientists everywhere, including those in enemy countries, had not been available to us, so we shall not be able to take the next steps that will be required, either in the peaceful or the military use of atomic energy, unless there is a free flow of scientific information throughout the world. We, of all nations, have the least to fear and the most to gain from the free flow of information, for we have the industrial power to make the most of any scientific ideas that appear. The discussion of whether other nations will be able to make atomic bombs, and whether we can prevent them from doing so by keeping our secrets, has bordered on the absurd.
It makes no difference from the standpoint of survival whether another country can make bombs in 18 months or 8 years. The point is that it will be able to make bombs in a very short time. When that happens, the cities of the United States will be open to the same destruction that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We cannot rely on the assumption that, because most of us have never seen uranium, it must be a very rare metal and accessible to many countries and expensive to all. It seems unlikely that in the near future, other metals than uranium can be used to make atomic bombs. But there is enough uranium to blow up all the cities of the world. The prospectors will now redouble their efforts, and it is worthwhile to remember that the two largest uranium deposits, those in Canada and the Congo, were discovered accidentally in the last twenty years.
Nor can we suppose that we are the only country which has the financial resources to make atomic bombs. The official cost of our bombs was two billion dollars. But as pioneers in destruction, We were naturally called upon to make many false starts and to follow many blind alleys. We have saved other nations much of this expense. Future research, here and elsewhere, will save them more. And $2 billion is a low price to pay for the destruction of the cities of an enemy. There is no defense against the atomic bomb. There is no method of detecting storehouses of bombs or factories which are making them. There is a defense against the carrier. If it is an airplane, but a carrier, in the ordinary sense, is not needed for atomic bombs.
Missiles can now be guided to their targets by radio, and rockets can be fired from airplanes which are beyond the range of defensive instruments. But the cheapest and surest way of blowing up an enemy's cities is to send agents into them in peacetime to plant bombs at leisure in strategic locations. These bombs can then be detonated when war is decided on. Since, as General Groves has said, the only defense against the atomic bomb is not to be there when it goes off, the idea of dispersing cities looks attractive as a defensive measure. The difficulty here is that to disperse the cities of America would be a task consuming many years, and that meanwhile, smaller, cheaper, and deadlier bombs will be developed, which can be used economically to destroy smaller, dispersed communities.
It is ironical that the only potential world power which can rapidly disperse its cities and make the most of this method of defense is Germany. Its cities have been dispersed. The same answer must be given to the suggestion that we go underground. At the present time, we would have to go down about half a mile to be safe from the explosion and the rays, and would have to go deeper and deeper as more powerful bombs developed. And when we had gone underground, we should run the risk of starvation and suffocation through the destruction of our systems of communication and ventilation. We cannot guarantee the future by increasing our scientific and industrial strength. We might make better bombs than other countries, but since some other countries will soon be able to make bombs as good as those which we dropped on Japan, we should, with better bombs than theirs, Only be able to console ourselves by destroying their cities after they had destroyed ours.
Whether we won or lost the war, our cities would be destroyed. The conventional reliances of the past, a large army, navy, and air force, are, of course, obsolete. They find favor only in the nostalgic dreams of obsolescent generals and admirals. If one country wishes to occupy another after destroying it, an army of occupation will be sent in. It will have to use a navy and air force, not for combat but to transport its troops. The war will be won by atomic bombs planted by agents or sent in by rockets, and the victory will go to the country which lands the most destructive bombs first. We may find some hope in the fact that in atomic warfare it will be very difficult to tell who has won the war, an issue which has sometimes been difficult to decide even in the pre-atomic age.
The aggressor nation will, at a given signal and without a declaration of war, blow up the cities of the enemy simultaneously. The country attacked, which will have planted bombs in the territory of the aggressor nation, or which will have put its own atomic weapons in the country, out of reach of arriving bombs, will at once retaliate by blowing up the cities of the aggressor nation. Within a few minutes, the cities of both nations will have been destroyed. No country, therefore, can start a war unless it is prepared to have its cities destroyed, and this is a high price to pay for the pleasures of aggression. It is a high price, but it is not prohibitive. The price that will be paid for a victorious war depends on what the stakes are.
Some nations may be willing to sacrifice their cities to obtain world domination, some to get rid of the intolerable threats of a neighbor. The price of war has been steadily rising. Yet wars have been bigger and better. The hope which rests on the price of war is like the hope some people find in the horror of war. After each war, it is said that the next one will be so horrible that nobody will ever start it. Atomic war will be the most horrible we have known, and both the victor and the vanquished will lose it. But, since men have been willing to involve themselves in conflicts in which five million human beings were killed in four years, It seems unlikely that they will abstain in the future merely because 40 million human beings may be killed in half an hour.
The moral inhibitions of mankind can certainly not be relied on to prevent or curtail atomic warfare. It is true that gases of the deadliest types were developed during this war and were not used. Various methods of so-called biological warfare, destroying the food of a nation and spreading disease throughout its borders, are now available.
We proved it. So we, at least, shall never be able to appeal to the moral sense of mankind to protect us against the bomb, because we used it. And we used it when we did not need to do so. By using the atomic bomb, we have introduced a new military and political era, the characteristics of which are not difficult to foresee. The new weapon puts a premium on military surprise, on attack without a declaration of war. It puts a premium on sabotage and fifth column work, on hostile operations within a country with which you are nominally at peace. It gives a great advantage to a totalitarian government, which can go to war without talking about it, and which can operate whole armies of fifth columnists in other countries, without accounting to public opinion at home.
It produces a world which must live in perpetual fear. And this world is particularly explosive, because it seems destined to be a bipolar world. Only the United States and Russia will be major powers. The others will be satellites grouped around them. The irritations and frictions among nations will be irritations and frictions between the American group and the Russian group. If there are enmities, there will be no question about who is the enemy of whom. This fact limits the possibility of a world government, which would require both these powers to sink their individual urge toward dominance and their individual sovereignty in a world state. In a world in which many competitive aspirants for power are required to give up something for the good of all, each may sacrifice its chance, a chance which may seem slight in view of the competition, for the good of all.
In a world in which there are only two competitors, each with an excellent chance, the sacrifice demanded may seem too great, and too directly advantageous to the other competitor, to induce either competitor to make it. In any event, states do not make communities. Communities make states. A state requires authority, as well as power, and the authority of a government rests on the common respect and the common conviction of its people. A world state can arise and endure only on the solid foundations of a world community. No such community exists, and at the present rate of moral progress, none can be created before the world is full of atomic bombs. Is the situation, then, altogether hopeless?
I think not. But the only hope is to increase the rate of moral progress tremendously, to increase it beyond anything we have ever dreamed of, to increase it to an extent which itself, at first glance, may seem hopeless. We know that we have a certain amount of time before the world is full of atomic bombs. We probably have not more than five years before some other country has them. We know that the next five years will be used to make more and more deadly atomic explosives. We must see to it, if we can, that our social and cultural advances for once exceed the advances in the technology of destruction. The survival of mankind demands a world community, a world government, and a world state.
But first, let us ask what the tone and content of international negotiation should be in the five years we have before us. They should be such as to allay mistrust. Everything should be done to remove or diminish fear among nations, and nothing should be done to cause or increase it. We should not begin to swagger because we have the bomb. Others will have it soon. We should not use our temporary strength to bargain on minor points or push other countries around. We may create animosities for which we shall pay dearly in the atomic age. We should take any measures that will reveal our goodwill and our eagerness to cooperate with other nations. We should take no measures which will promote friction or distrust.
We should do everything we can to strengthen the United Nations, making clear that we have accepted the obligation, by joining this organization, not to use the atomic bomb without the consent of other nations. Since the United Nations is an organization of sovereign states, with the power in the hands of a few large ones, We should recognize that it cannot prevent the next war, that it cannot be the world state which the survival of mankind demands, and that drastic constitutional revisions will be required before the new organization can even be regarded as a serious step forward. Nevertheless, it is all we have. It is the germ of an international organization, and it must be carefully tended until its constitution is revised or until a new and better organization can be created.
One of the measures best calculated to allay mistrust would be to disclose the so-called secret of the atomic bomb. This would show that we have no intention of using it. In view of the head start which we have, in view of the time which would be required for other nations to produce atomic bombs, even if they knew all that we know about them, the period in which they would be ready to fire them at us would not be materially shortened. We should then seek to enter We must admit that these agreements are ineffectual in a world full of fear and mistrust. If the world is determined to have a war, these agreements will be violated and the system of inspection evaded. If the world is determined not to have a war, these agreements are unnecessary.
Agreements are of value, therefore, Only as evidences of good will and good fate, and for bringing the nations together to consider a danger which threatens them all. The nature of these agreements, the tone of the negotiations leading up to them, and the arrangements for inspection under them must be such as to achieve these results and not to increase mutual suspicion. But our major task is to accelerate and strengthen all those efforts which can create a world community. These range from those which seem trivial, like promoting the free exchange of information, including scientific information, travel, and the exchange of students and professors on the largest possible international scale, to the colossal task of revitalizing and expanding education throughout the world.
And though we know that states do not make communities, we should not forget that there is an interaction between political organization and political ideals. The Constitution of the United States has educated our people to believe in the Constitution of the United States. We had a community, when the Constitution was adopted, far more homogeneous and unified than the world today. Even then, it took a bloody civil war to make the country finally won. But since there is an interaction between political institutions and political ideals, we should seek to frame and to get adopted the Constitution of a world state, in the hope that the discussion leading to its institution and its existence thereafter will promote the formation of the community which can be its only durable foundation.
Civil war may come within the world state if it is organized before there is a world community to support it. But such a war cannot be worse than the international war we shall have if we do not organize a world state. And the United States will suffer no more in one than in the other. Far from being able to survive alone, as it could once have hoped to do, the United States, as the strongest and richest power in the world, has the most to lose from the atomic bombs which will explode in the next war. The United States, by producing the atomic bomb, has surrendered its impregnable position and made itself vulnerable from every quarter of the globe. The United States has the greatest stake in a world state and a world community.
Since the great aim is a world community, the great task is education. A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive shortwave facilities scattered around the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals. The American educator, who sees how ineffectual American education has been in producing these results in the American community after almost two centuries, must despair of obtaining them on a world scale in a few years. But American education has not tried to produce these results, or, where it has tried, has not tried hard enough. American education has been dedicated to the ideal of getting ahead.
Since there was no obvious connection between the education actually obtained and the distance the graduate got ahead, the way in which the student spent his time during his education was immaterial. He could spend it in athletics, social activities, or sleep, picking up a course here and there in any field that happened to appeal to him at the moment, until he had added up enough to reach the number required for a degree. Neither the frivolity of liberal arts colleges Nor the single-minded materialism of vocational training could help to form an American community. And the education of adults, where it received attention at all, seemed to combine the worst features of the liberal and vocational training of adolescents.
We do not know what education could do for us because we have never tried it. We must try it now. We must expand it and intensify it until education and understanding becomes the major occupation of all our youth. and the major activity of all adults in their steadily increasing leisure time. Every school, college, and university, every library, community building, and hall must become a center of the education of Americans of all ages. We must take the chance or die. End of the Atomic Bomb vs. Civilization by Robert M. Hutchins. Recorded by Verla Vieira.
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3 03 - Christ Remembered at His Table 19:12
Christ Remembered at His Table by John Alexander. An Address to the Churches of the Nottinghamshire Association. Assembled at the Lord's Supper in Friar Lane Chapel, Nottingham. On Monday evening, March 20th, 1854, by John Alexander, Minister of Princess Street Chapel, Norwich. We have come together in this one place, Christian Brethren, for the purpose of celebrating a very simple, yet instructive and impressive ceremony, which has been appointed to us by Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. This do, said he, in remembrance of me. To eat of this bread, and to drink of this cup, is that which he requires us to do. But we are directed to do it, not as if it were a common meal, nor to satisfy hunger and thirst, For we have houses in which to eat and to drink, but as a memorial of him by whom it was ordained, this do in remembrance of me.
What is it then that we are now to remember respecting Christ? We are no doubt to remember what he is personally as possessing in himself a divine and human nature, as being at once the Son of God and the Son of Man, the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ. But in connection with this sacred supper, we are more especially to remember his death. That one event is selected out of the many and marvelous circumstances which distinguished his wonderful history as the only event which is to be celebrated by a religious ceremony. Though he triumphed over Satan when he was tempted in the wilderness, though he wrought superhuman and divine miracles by which he healed the sick and raised the dead, And though he was transfigured on the holy mount, when his face shone as the sun, and his raiment became white and glistening, and Moses and Elias appeared to him in glory, yet none of these circumstances, splendid and important as they were, are selected for commemoration at this supper.
It is his death, his death by the shedding of his blood, which he has required his church perpetually to celebrate. This bread denotes his body, which was broken, and this wine denotes his blood, which was shed. There must therefore be a peculiar degree of importance connected with his death, which does not belong to any event of his previous life. And this importance is attached by the scriptures not merely to the mode of his death, or to the degree of suffering which he endured in dying, agonizing and mysterious as his sufferings were, But more especially to the state of mind with which he suffered, and to the moral purpose which his sufferings were intended to accomplish. His body was broken, but it was broken for you.
His blood was shed, but it was the blood of the new covenant, the blood that was shed for many for the remission of sins. His death is to be remembered, therefore, not only as a fact, but as a doctrine founded on the fact. He died, But he died for our sins. He died the just for the unjust, that he might bring us unto God. And in thus remembering his death, we are to connect it with his divine as well as with his human nature. The scriptures describe the sacrificial and saving efficacy of his death principally to the peculiar dignity of his person. And the language in which they teach this doctrine is remarkably emphatic. It is the blood of Jesus Christ his Son that cleanseth us from all sin, who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, by himself purged our sins, and who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree.
Now while these and similar passages by no means teach that the divine nature of Christ suffered and died, A doctrine is contrary to Scripture as it is to reason. Yet they do teach that he was competent to be a Savior because he was the Son of God, and that because such a person as he gave himself for us, his sacrificial blood is an availing propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. These, brethren, are some of the particulars respecting Christ which we are to remember while we eat of this bread and drink of this cup. It is therefore service intended for both bodily and mental exercise, because both the body and the soul are interested in the redemption which it celebrates.
As, however, it is especially intended for the mind, while we are doing this, The thoughts of our hearts should be actively and devoutly directed to Christ, that we may discern the Lord's body, and that we may contemplate the things signified, as well as the signs. But as our minds are naturally affected in accordance with the objects which are perceived by our senses, and contemplated by our thoughts, we should now remember Christ, in order to excite and strengthen in our hearts those emotions and principles which a devout consideration of his sacrificial death is calculated to produce. Mine eye, says Jeremiah, affecteth my heart. Attention to an object awakens corresponding feelings. Minding the things of the spirit is, by the agency of that spirit, productive of spiritual mindedness.
And in harmony with the same divine rule, a thoughtful and believing remembrance of Christ is rendered by the Spirit of God, productive of such sentiments and feelings as His person, and grace, and dying love, are intended and adapted to awaken, and which are so peculiarly appropriate to this solemnity. These remarks may therefore be illustrated by the following particulars, for the purpose of showing the influence which may be produced by an attentive and devout remembrance of Christ. I. In the first place, such a remembrance of Christ will encourage our approach to Him as sinners. This, indeed, is the only character in which we can approach Him. We cannot go with any degree of previous preparation or of personal merit.
If we go to Him at all, We must carry with us our burden of sin and unworthiness. Now the remembrance of Christ who died for sinners will greatly encourage us to do this, for we are told that the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost. That he approved the prayer of the publican, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. That he promptly received the weeping penitent, whom the self-righteous Pharisee rejected, and said to her, Go in peace. Thy sins are forgiven thee. That he threw his arms around the neck of the returning prodigal, and said, This my son was dead, and is alive again, he was lost and is found. And that his constant and constraining invitation is, Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Now this invitation, combined with these remembrances, is a special and powerful encouragement to go to Christ, because it gives us authority and right to go. It is not a sense of need, nor an earnest desire, nor hungering and thirsting for the righteousness which the gospel feast provides, that gives us primary authority to sit down with the guests, however much these feelings may dispose us to go. But it is his own invitation which, as master of the feast, he addresses to the perishing and the lost. That is our authority, and with that in our hand we may go, boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Two. Remembrance of Christ will excite and strengthen our penitential feelings.
Remembrance and reflection are the means of producing conviction and contrition, especially if we remember Christ as well as our own sins. David says, I thought on my ways, and turned my feet to thy commandments. And reflection produced a similar effect upon Peter after his denial of the Lord. For when he thought thereupon, he wept. On this same principle it is written, They shall look on Him whom they have pierced and mourn. So that repentance, evangelical repentance, the repentance which includes a change of heart and conduct, is derived not so much from looking at the broken tables of the law, important as it is to remember them, but from looking at the broken body of the Lord. We must remember the groans and agonies of Gethsemane, rather than the thunder and earthquake of the mount that might be touched.
We must look at Jesus rather than to Moses, and our sorrow and mourning for sin must be produced on Calvary rather than on Sinai. Law and terrors do but harden all the while they work alone, but a sense of blood-bought pardon can dissolve a heart of stone. Three. Grateful love to Christ will also be produced by this remembrance. Love to Christ is a principle essential to personal religion, and without it we are nothing. But our hearts are so constituted that love cannot be excited in them by any commands, however authoritative, or by any threatenings, however terrible. We cannot love an object unless we perceive that it is lovely, nor can we love Christ unless we perceive the loveliness of His person and character.
And this perception is derived from reflection and remembrance. While we are musing, the fire begins to burn. And when we remember the great love with which He loved us, when He gave Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God, that love excites and constrains our own, and we love Him because He first loved us. When we thus begin by loving Him for what He has done for us, we go on to perfection by loving Him for what He is, The noblest and the purest love our hearts can cherish. And as love always assimilates to its object and blesses the heart which it inspires, so love to Christ conforms us to His character, and becomes a fruitful source of joy and peace. The Spirit takes of the things which are Christ's, and shows them to us with increased clearness and impressiveness, so that beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, We are changed into the same image from glory to glory.
4. Nor can we thus remember Christ, and thereby feel the constraining influences of His love, without manifesting devout subjection to His authority, and practical conformity to His example. The great and pervading principle of his mind was evidently a spirit of obedience and submission to his Father's will. "'I am come,' said he. Not to do my own will, but the will of Him that sent me. My meat is to do His will. Father, not my will, but Thine be done. How perfectly and perseveringly were these sayings exhibited in His daily life! And how precious and powerful does His example become to those who endeavor to have these things always in remembrance! And shall it not be so with us? Shall we, his disciples, pursue any course but that which is marked by his footsteps?
Shall we remember Christ and love the world, and comply with temptation and neglect watchfulness in prayer, and carefully avoid self-denial, and follow our own inclinations rather than his commands, and feel ashamed of making a public profession of his gospel? Oh, no! Holy Jesus, no! We would ardently cling to Thy cross, but we would also humbly bow beneath Thy sceptre. And while we do this in remembrance of Thee, we would thankfully acknowledge that we are not our own, that we have been bought with the price of Thy precious blood, and that we are under infinite obligations to glorify Thee in our body and our spirit, which are Thine.
V. This remembrance of Christ will also promote our love to the brethren. How affecting and constraining were the manifestations of Christ's love to His disciples! He lived for them. He died for them. He bore with their infirmities. He prayed for them that their faith might not fail. He washed their feet, to teach them to wash one another's feet. And when his soul had begun to be exceeding sorrowful, even unto death, and they were striving which of them should be greatest in that earthly kingdom which they expected him to establish, he looked mildly on and said, Whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? Is not he that sitteth at meat? But I am among you as one that serveth.
While you sit and strive and aspire to lofty stations, I am content to stand and wait. I am come not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give my life a ransom for many. Brethren, was this in any degree the spirit of the world? Was not this love that passeth the knowledge? And can we do this in remembrance of such a meek and lowly Jesus, and yet cherish towards any of His disciples a spirit of cold-hearted selfishness and proud sectarianism, which would refuse to recognize them as brethren, or to co-operate with them in promoting the cause of Christ? O no, let us rather sit at the feet of Jesus and learn of Him. Let us love mankind at large, even our enemies, with a benevolent desire to do them good.
But let us love the brethren because they are brethren, and because Christ hath loved them and given Himself for them. And let our love to them include forbearance and longsuffering, in reference to their infirmities. A cordial recognition of their, as well as our, spiritual relationship to Christ, an affectionate sympathy with them in all their difficulties and tribulations, and a fraternal communion and cooperation with them in all their works of faith and labors of love. VI. Such remembrance of Christ will bring us even now into a state of harmony with heaven. Heaven is that upper room in the New Jerusalem where Christ sits down at His table with His disciples, where He partakes with them of the new wine of His kingdom, and where all that is signified and shadowed by this earthly supper is fulfilled.
When, therefore, we thus come together in this one place to remember Christ, by eating of this bread and drinking of this cup, we come also to the heavenly Jerusalem. to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn which are enrolled in heaven, to the spirits of just men made perfect, and even to Jesus himself, the mediator of the new covenant. Our spiritual circumstances, though in many respects very inferior to theirs, are nevertheless the same in kind. As is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. All things which are in heaven and which are on earth are gathered together in one by Christ, even in Him. We and they, therefore, are one Church, one whole family in heaven and earth, one communion of saints, partakers of the same blessed privileges, and cherishing a devout remembrance of the same Lord.
Our justification is as complete as theirs. Our holiness is derived from the same source, and assimilates to the same image. Our joy, as well as theirs, is unspeakable and full of glory. Thus the pure river of water of life, which flows from the throne of God and the Lamb, pours down its clear and crystal streams to make glad this earthly city of our God. Thus the tree of life, which grows in the midst of the paradise of God, bends its fruitful branches down to earth, That we may sit under its shadow with great delight, and find its fruit sweet unto our taste. And thus the men of grace have found glory begun below, Celestial fruits on earthly ground, from faith and hope may grow. Finally, our remembrance of Christ will be the means of preparing us for His coming.
We are directed to do this till He come. He has been once, and His first advent is the pledge of a second. He will come to all mankind at the last day. Until that day arrives, His Church is continually to show forth His death. The Lord's Supper is therefore designed to be prospective as well as retrospective. It is a chain which connects together the two advents and requires us to remember not only the cross on which He suffered, but also the throne which He will occupy when He comes, the second time, without sin unto salvation. He will also come to us individually at death. "'I go,' said he, "'to prepare a place for you, and I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there ye may be also.
He will not send for us. He will come himself, and when he appears his presence will deprive death of its darkness. Only a faint shadow will be thrown across the valley through which we shall have to walk. Only a shadow.' The shadow of a sword which cannot pierce, and the shadow of a serpent which cannot sting, and a shadow through which we shall walk till we reach the sunshine of everlasting light. The brightest object amidst the light is Christ, and when we behold him, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. His presence is heaven, the highest, the holiest, and the happiest heaven that we can desire or enjoy. Then shall we be satisfied when we awake in his likeness, for in his presence is fullness of joy, and at his right hand are pleasures for evermore.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
End of Christ Remembered at His Table by John Alexander.
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4 04 - The Fate of the Old Clipper Ships 17:26
The Clipper Ship Era, an epitome of famous American and British clipper ships, their owners, builders, commanders, and crews, 1843-1869, by Arthur H. Clarke.
Chapter 22 The Fate of the Clipper Ships We have already seen how, about the year 1855, the extreme clippers were succeeded in the United States by a class of vessels known as medium clippers. These vessels were not so sharp and did not carry as heavy spars or so much canvas as the old clippers, but they could carry more cargo and could be handled with fewer men. This made them more profitable when the demand for speed and the rates of freight had declined, and the extreme clippers were unable to command any higher rate than the medium clippers. After the Civil War shipbuilding for oversea-carrying trade steadily declined, though it was not until 1893 that the last American wooden sailing ship, the Aryan, was launched.
During these thirty-eight years, a good many ships were built, and by degrees, a new type of vessel designed to carry large cargoes at moderate speed was developed, which enterprising agents advertised as clippers. But those who had known the real clippers were not deceived. Many of the old names survived. Thus there were a second, Mimnon, another Rainbow, Sea Witch, Oriental, Eclipse, Comet, Northern Light, Ringleader, Invincible, Witch of the Wave, Blue Jacket, Charmer, Sovereign of the Seas, Lightning, and Andrew Jackson, which should not be mistaken for the famous clippers after which they were named. One may well ask what became of all the splendid clipper ships. The fate of some of them has already been told in these pages.
Others have disappeared from one cause or another as time went on, until now scarcely one has left. During the Civil War, many of them were sold and sailed under foreign flags. Their names were changed, and their identity all but lost. Of the more famous early clippers, the Haukwa, founded in a typhoon in the China Seas in 1865. While under the command of Captain McKenzie, the Sea Witch made her last voyage to San Francisco in 1852, then returned to the China trade for which she had been built. On her voyage to China in 1855, Captain Frazier was murdered at sea by his chief mate, and the vessel put into Rio Janeiro, where Captain Lang took command. On the homeward voyage from Amoy to Havana with a cargo of coolies, the Sea Witch was wrecked and became a total loss on the eastern coast of Cuba, March 26, 1856.
The Samuel Russell was wrecked in the Gaspar Straits in 1870 under command of Captain Frederick Lucas. The Staghound was burnt off the coast of Brazil. In 1863, her United States Ensign, which the captain brought off and returned to the owners in Boston, being the sole relic. The surprise, under command of Captain Charles Ranlett, struck a sunken rock while beating into Yokohama Bay and became a total wreck. February 4, 1876. The Gamecock was condemned at the Cape of Good Hope in 1880. The Staffordshire was lost off Cape Sable while bound from Liverpool for Boston in December 1854. She struck on a ledge during a thick fog and foundered in deep water. Two days before her wreck, Captain Richardson had fallen on deck and fractured his spine, and while he lay helpless in his berth, Joseph Alden, chief mate, reported that the ship was sinking.
Captain Richardson gave directions to the mate for saving the women and children passengers, but declined assistance for himself. His last words were, God's will be done, and as the vessel settled deeper and deeper in the water and the waves closed in upon her deck, the brave spirit of her captain returned to God, who gave it, to join the innumerable hosts of heroes and martyrs of the sea. The Flying Cloud was sold to James Baines in 1863 and was destroyed by fire at St. John, New Brunswick, in 1874. The Flying Fish was wrecked in November 1858 while coming out of Fuchao, bound for New York with a cargo of tea, and was abandoned to the underwriters who sold her to a Spanish merchant of Manila.
She was subsequently floated and rebuilt at Wampoa, her name being changed to El Bueno Suceso. She sailed for some years between Manila and Cadez, and finally foundered in the China Sea. The typhoon was sold to the United States government during the Civil War, and was finally broken up. The Northern Light was abandoned at sea, December 25, 1861, After being in a collusion while bound from Haveri for New York. The comet was sold under the British flag and renamed the Fiery Star. She sailed between England and Australia for several years and was finally burned at sea in 1865 while on a voyage from Moreton Bay, Queensland, for London. She'd been on fire for 21 days when the crew were rescued by the ship Dauntless.
The Tradewind, while bound from Mobile to Liverpool in 1854, was in collision with the ship Olympus from Liverpool for New York. Both vessels foundered, 44 of the 64 passengers and the crew of the Tradewind, and 52 of the 58 on board of the Olympus, being rescued by the Belgian Barque Statt & Torpen, Captain Widerhoven, and landed The Nightingale was sold to a firm in Salem in Sanctuario, where she was bought and sailed in the African slave trade under the Brazilian flag. About the year 1860, she was captured by a United States war vessel and sent home as a prize. She was subsequently fitted out by the government as an armed cruiser during the Civil War. She was sold and sailed in the California and China trade.
Later, she sailed for many years under the flag of Norway. The Shooting Star was sold to a merchant of Siam in 1862 and was wrecked off the coast of Formosa in 1867. Captain Lowe remained in command of the N.B. Palmer until she was sold abroad in 1872. The Tornado, Whirlwind, and Neptune's car were sold in England and disappeared from the shipping lists many years ago. The Golden Light, under command of Captain C. F. Windsor, sailed from Boston on her first voyage bound for San Francisco, February 12, 1853, and, ten days out, was struck by lightning Which set fire to cargo in the forehold. After every exertion had been made to save the vessel, Captain Windsor gave orders to abandon ship, and at 6 p.m., February 23rd, her people She had eleven passengers.
Including three ladies who were in the long-boat with the captain. There were five boats in all, four of which, after being adrift eight days, were picked up by the British ship, Shand, from Calcutta bound for Boston. The other boat, in charge of the mate, reached Barbados in safety so that all hands were saved. The sovereign of the seas was sold to a Hamburg firm and was wrecked on the pyramid shoal, In the Straits of Malacca, August 6, 1859, becoming a total loss, the contest and winged racer were destroyed by the Alabama off the coast of Java in 1863 and the Jacob Bell by the Florida during the same year. The Harvey Birch was destroyed by the Nashville in 1861. The Flying Dutchman went ashore on Brigadine Shoal off the coast of New Jersey during a thick snowstorm in February 1858 and became a total loss.
The High Flyer, under command of Captain Gordon B. Waterman, sailed from San Francisco October 24, 1856, bound for Hong Kong, and was never heard from. The John Gilpin struck an iceberg off Cape Horn and foundered January 29, 1858, while bound from Honolulu from New Bedford under command of Captain John F. Ropes, all hands including fifteen passengers being saved by the British ship Hirspert Shire. The Phantom was lost on Praet Shoal, about 200 miles east-southeast of Hong Kong, in 1862. While under command of Captain Henry Sargent, all hands were saved in the boats, which reached Hong Kong safely, and a large amount of treasure that she had on board was also saved. Captain Sargent received great credit for his brave and judicious action at the time of the wreck, for in those days the China Sea was filled with junks.
whose crews required only the sight of a vessel in distress to turn them into most barbarous pirates. Captain Sargent soon after took command of the clipper bark, Emily C. Starr, and sailed from Shanghai for Yokohama. She was never heard from, and it is supposed that she foundered in a typhoon. Captain Sargent belonged to an old Boston family whose home was on Beacon Street. He had sailed with Captain Nichols, The Bald Eagle and Romance of the Seas both sailed from Hong Kong in 1860 and were never heard from. The reporter foundered off Cape Horn in 1863, and in the same year, the Undaunted was condemned at Rio Janeiro. The sweepstakes was condemned in Batavia in 1864. The Great Republic was sold to the Merchants Trading Company of Liverpool in 1869, and her name was changed to the Denmark.
She finally foundered in a hurricane off Bermuda in 1872. The Morning Star was sold to a Liverpool firm who renamed her the Rockingham. She foundered while on voyage from Samarang for Falmouth in 1879. The Ocean Telegraph was sold to an English firm and renamed the Light Brigade and was finally condemned at Gilbertar and converted into a coal hulk. The Margot Polo, Red Jacket, and Donald McKay ended their days in the Quebec lumber trade, and the lightning disappeared from the shipping list. In 1866, the Champion of the Seas foundered while homeward bound around Cape Horn in 1877. The James Baines was burnt at Liverpool in 1858, and her wreck was converted into an old landing stage for Atlantic steamship passengers, few of whom probably realized that they were walking over the remains of one of the grandest ships that ever sailed the sea.
Of the British-built clippers, the first Lord of the Isles, built in 1854, was burnt in 1862. The second of the name, built in 1864 by Robert Steele of Greenock, was sold in France and became known as the Paul Albert. The Spindrift and Serica were both wrecked in 1869. The forward hoe was lost in 1881. The Sir Lancelot was sold to a merchant of Bombay, and sailed for many years between that port and the Meritus, and was finally wrecked in 1895. The Cuddy Sark was sold to a merchant in Lisbon in 1895. The Chinaman was sunk by a steamer on the coast of China in 1880. The Windhover The Falcon was sold in Australia, her name being changed to the Sophia Brunilla. She was wrecked on the coast of Java in 1871.
Thermapile is now a school ship at the mouth of the Tagus. The Yangtze was lost in 1872, the first Guinevere built by Robert Steele. The Titanium in 1862 was lost in 1866, while the second Guinevere, built by Randolph Elder & Company in 1868, was sold in Norway. The aerials sailed for Melbourne and was never heard from. The Taitsing was wrecked on the coast of Zanzibar in 1883. The Titania is the only one of all the old clipper ships. She is owned by Madame Maresca of Castlemere, and sails under the flag of Italy, usually between European and South American ports. A few years ago she arrived at New York, and I was much interested in going aboard of her, as I had known the ship and her captain many years before in China.
She appeared so little changed that it was difficult to realize That nearly forty years had passed since I had stood upon her deck one bright June morning at the pagoda anchorage bidding Captain Burgoyne goodbye as he was getting underway bound for London with new tees. Her spars had been somewhat reduced, and her rig changed to a bark, but the beautiful India teak used in the construction of her hull, decks, bulk worths, With the polished brasswork of her rails, skylights, bells, and capstans, blinking cheerfully in the autumn sunshine, seemed to have paid little heed to the flight and ravages of time. And so I have endeavored to record the leading events of an era in maritime history, long ago departed, and however much the remarkable development of steam navigation may have contributed to the welfare of mankind, I think that the memory of the clipper ships and the men who built and commanded them will always find a welcome in the hearts of those who know and love the sea.
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5 05 - General Hazard Stevens, A Brief Sketch of His Life 38:29
Brief sketch of the life of General Hazard Stevens by Unknown Author.
To the electors of the 10th Congressional District. The undersigned recommend the voters of the 10th Congressional District, irrespective of party, to elect General Hazard Stevens, our representative in Congress, as a protest against the burden of the tariff and as the most effective movement for removing that burden yet offered. The platforms of the political parties on this, the most important issue before the country, are vague generalities. He alone declares a specific measure of relief, a measure so reasonable and moderate that probably nine-tenths of the people approve it, namely, the abolition of duties on food, raw materials, and goods the like of which are made in this country and sold abroad cheaper than at home, and the reduction of duties by one-half on other goods.
If a Massachusetts district ratifies this measure by sending him to Congress to demand it, the moral effect upon that body and the country will be great, and will exert a marked influence towards securing a substantial reform of the tariff, for even inveterate protectionists would realize that the people were becoming aroused. General Stevens' wide knowledge of the whole country and of public questions, his ripe experience, ability, and force of character, eminently fit him to represent the district in Congress. During his long and varied career, he has always proved himself able, efficient, patriotic, and brave, a man of honor and integrity, and true to every duty entrusted to him, as the story of his life amply proves.
Signed, William H. Turner, 1 Everton Street, Dorchester. William Bellamy, Bowdoin Avenue, Dorchester. William J. Ladd, Adams Street, Milton. John Lindsley, Adams Street, Milton. Samuel Brazier, 127 P Street, South Boston. Calvin G. Hutchinson, 14 Whale Street, Dorchester. A. C. Kendall, Bowdoin Avenue, Dorchester. Nathaniel S. Hunting, Quincy. A brief sketch of the life of General Hazard Stevens. He was born in Newport, Rhode Island, June 9, 1842, the son of the late Major General Isaac I. Stevens and his wife, born Margaret Hazard, the daughter of an eminent lawyer of that city and the granddaughter of Colonel Daniel Lyman of the Revolution. In his native town and on his uncle's farm in Narragansett, the old homestead of the Hazards, He early learned to swim, sail a boat, drive oxen, and do the chores on the farm, but the most exciting and beneficial experiences of his boyhood in developing self-reliance and hardyhood were when he accompanied his father, then Governor of Washington Territory, upon his expeditions to hold councils and make treaties with the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
On one of these trips, the party of only twenty-five white men, on horseback and with pack-mules, traversed the wild, unsettled Indian country from Puget Sound to the Missouri River, held six councils with many thousands of Indians, at times in imminent peril of massacre, Crossed the Rocky Mountains twice, the last time in midwinter, forced their way through hostile tribes, rescued a party of miners, and reached the border settlement on the Columbia in safety after an absence of nine months and a journey of two thousand miles. On this trip, on one occasion, the lad, only 13 years old, rode 150 measured miles in 30 hours to carry an important dispatch to the Grosventris Indians. He spent three weeks hunting the buffalo with a small party, accompanied by friendly Blackfeet Indians, in order to procure meat for the main party, which was almost destitute of provisions.
In the Indian War of 1855-6, he bore arms as a volunteer and has been awarded a pension for that service, although he does not draw it. Needless to say, these varied experiences developed his self-reliance, judgment, and courage, and he became a good rider and a good shot. Returning to the East in the winter of 1857, when his father entered Congress, he fitted for college at Chauncey Hall School in Boston and entered Harvard in 1860 in the class of 1864. He left college at the end of the freshman year, at the age of nineteen, to enter the army, like so many brave and patriotic youths all over the land, and help put down the Great Rebellion. His military career. He enlisted in the 79th Highlanders, New York Volunteers, of which his father was Colonel at the time, and carried a musket in his first engagement near Lewinsville, Virginia, and his brave conduct and coolness in the skirmish were praised by his commander, Captain David Ireland.
A few days after, he acted as aide to his father in another engagement at Lewinsville, and was again commended for good conduct. He was appointed adjutant of his regiment, September 26, 1861, and on October 19 was appointed Captain and Assistant Adjutant General of the 1st Brigade, commanded by his father, Of the combined military and naval expedition under General T. W. Sherman and Commodore Samuel F. DuPont, which captured the forts at Port Royal, South Carolina. The brigade erected a long line of works at Hilton Head, and then occupied Port Royal and adjacent islands with headquarters at Beaufort, the chief town. During the winter and spring, General I. I. Stevens put the troops through a stiff course of drill and discipline.
Captain Hazard Stevens proved himself a capable officer. He repeatedly drilled the entire brigade, handling several thousand men of the three arms with success. His father writes, quote, Hazard is very expert both at battalion and brigade drill, and he can drill a brigade much better than any of my colonels. He takes very great interest in everything, is full of life and energy, very industrious, studies carefully his tactics, regulations, etc. He is making a very superior officer, indeed is a very efficient adjutant general."
The enemy having erected batteries on the Coosa River, which separates Port Royal Island from the mainland, General Stevens crossed several miles below the works with his brigade, reinforced by two regiments, defeated a considerable force of the enemy in a sharp action, and took and destroyed the works. The thanks of the government were given in general orders to General Stevens and his command for this victory, styled the Battle of Port Royal Ferry. Captain Stevens's conduct in this engagement was warmly commended. In June 1862, General H. W. Benham, with 12,000 troops in two divisions and an independent brigade, commanded respectively by Generals Isaac I. Stevens, H. G. Wright, and Robert Williams, entered the Stano River and landed on James Island, which borders Charleston Harbor on the south.
The enemy had a strong line of works across the island, which it was necessary to break in order to reach the city. The left flank of this line rested on the harbour, and a strong work, Fort Lamar, was thrown out in advance of this flank and across a narrow neck with deep sloughs on both flanks, so that it could only be attacked in front. Benham, after wasting ten days in vacillation, during which the enemy daily strengthened his lines, at last hastily decided to assault Fort Lamar with General Stevens's division, while Wright and Williams took position to guard against the enemy's sallying from his main line and falling upon the rear of the force attacking the fort. One evening he summoned his generals to the transport in the river, which he made his headquarters, and peremptorily ordered the movement to be made at daylight the next morning, notwithstanding the remonstrances of all three.
It was eleven o'clock at night when General Stevens came ashore and ordered Captain Stevens to issue the necessary orders for the movement. At half-past two a.m., the division was under arms and on the march, and at the first light of dawn it delivered the assault with the greatest gallantry. The work proved too strong. The column hurled itself upon it in vain. In twenty minutes, six hundred brave men lay weltering in their blood upon the fatal plain in front, while the survivors, broken and scattered, sought shelter behind the high cotton ridges with which it was lined. Captain Stevens rode close up to the fort and brought off the troops. Of his gallantry in this action, his father writes, "'Hazard has worked very hard of late.
Did I write you that his conduct on the battlefield was witnessed by the rebels with great admiration? So say the rebel officers, whom my officers met under a recent flag of truce. These officers say a great many shots were fired directly at him. Every one in the division knows the officer they refer to, from the description of the officer and his horse, to be hazard. The boy did most nobly, and every one speaks in the highest terms of his conduct in the field of battle. Was not his life wonderfully preserved?"
Benham was deprived of his command, the troops were withdrawn, and General Stevens and his division sailed to Newport News, Virginia, where they were incorporated with Burnside's troops from North Carolina as the Ninth Corps, forming the First Division. Captain Stevens, as adjutant general of this division, commanded by his father, went through Pope's campaign, the battles of Second Bull Run and Chantilly. In the latter, his father, General Isaac I. Stevens, fell, flag in hand, leading the charge of his troops, which repulsed Jackson's flank movement and saved the Union Army from disaster. Captain Stevens received two severe wounds, one ball passing through the left arm just above the wrist, splintering the bones, and another in the hip.
His wounds were hastily bandaged on the field, and he was carried to a neighboring farmhouse filled with wounded, where he lay until two in the morning, drenched to the skin, for the battle was fought in a tremendous thunderstorm. An officer of the division called at the house as the Union troops were falling back, and recognized Captain Stevens. He hunted up an ambulance. And had him placed in it and brought to Washington, and thus saved him from falling into the hands of the enemy. Under careful nursing in his native air of Newport, Captain Stevens recovered from his severe wounds in about seven weeks, and returned to the Army, then in front of Fredericksburg. He was assigned to the 3rd Division of the 9th Corps, commanded by General George W.
Getty as Inspector General. He took part in the Battle of Fredericksburg, where Getty's Division made the last charge on the stone wall at the foot of Mary's Heights on the fatal 13th of December, and were repulsed like all the rest, and he was again commended for good conduct. In March 1863, Getty's Division was sent to Suffolk, Virginia, to reinforce the garrison there under General John J. Peck. The following month, General James Longstreet, with 30,000 troops, descended on the town, which occupies a neck between the Dismal Swamp and the Nansimonde River, a branch of the James. Longstreet planned to cross the river below the town, take it in the rear, and capture it with the garrison. The town itself was fortified, but there were no defenses along the river.
When the enemy appeared, General Peck ordered the few troops watching the line of the river into the town. General Getty was entrusted with the inner line, which rested on the stream. With Captain Stevens and a single orderly, he went outside the line and reconnoitred along the river, and discovered a force of the enemy erecting batteries and making every preparation to force the passage. Dispatching the orderly to General Peck with urgent request for troops and guns, the general and his staff officer laid out the lines for trenches and batteries. The troops and artillery arrived at dark and worked all night, and at daylight the enemy's works were overwhelmed by the concentrated fire of three batteries opposite, above, and below their position.
For three weeks an incessant contest went on, the enemy erecting batteries at night, Getty erecting counter-batteries and lining the river bank with entrenchments, until he had completely fortified it for some six miles with works garrisoned by 7,000 troops and 50 guns. In these operations, Captain Stevens, as Adjutant General and Chief of Staff, worked night and day. The turning point of the siege was the capture of Fort Huger, planned and carried out by him, and for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor. This exploit is best told in General Getty's own words in his application that the medal be conferred upon Captain Stevens. I respectfully recommend that a Medal of Honor be conferred upon Hazard Stevens for distinguished gallantry in the field during the war, and particularly for the storming of Fort Huger on the Nansemond River, Virginia, April 19, 1863.
The affair to which I allude occurred as follows. The enemy appeared in heavy force upon the line of the Nansimonde River, planting batteries at a number of points, threatening to force a passage, and compelling a few unarmed gunboats which assisted in the defense, improvised from ferryboats and the like, to shift their positions continually to avoid destruction. Some five miles below the town, the river was narrowed by a salient point on the opposite, or enemy's, side, known as Hill's Point. Here was an old earthwork, Fort Huger, erected by them during the first year of the war. They occupied this with a battery of five guns, and all efforts to dislodge or silence them by the fire of the gunboats and artillery from the opposite bank proved abortive.
One gunboat was almost destroyed, being struck over one hundred times by shot and shell, and the others were repulsed. Five small gunboats above the fort were cut off from escape by it, and their destruction became a question of only a few days or even hours. Such was the state of affairs when, accompanied by Captain Stevens of my staff and Lieutenant R. H. Lamson of the Navy, who commanded the gunboats, I rode to that part of my lines opposite Fort Huger in order to observe it more closely. Captain Stevens and Lieutenant Lamson climbed a tree nearby to obtain a better view, but the more closely it was scanned, the more formidable and unapproachable the fort appeared. At length, Captain Stephens declared that the only way to silence the fort was to cross the river and take it.
Lieutenant Lampson responded that he would furnish the boats if General Getty would furnish the troops, whereupon the gallant fellows hastened to lay the suggestion before me. I adopted it at once. As rapidly as possible, detachments of 270 men were embarked on one of the gunboats at a landing two miles above the fort. I also went aboard and accompanied the expedition in person. A canvas screen was drawn up all around the deck, effectually screening the troops. The boat steamed rapidly down the stream. The enemy, observing her, supposed she was about to try to run past the battery, and waited with double-shotted guns until she should come abreast and within fifty yards of the fort as the channel ran, all ready to blow her out of the water.
Just above the work, the vessel was run into the bank. Captain Stevens was the first man to leap off the deck of the vessel and struggle ashore, waist-deep in mud and water. He was immediately followed by the troops. They struggled ashore, climbed the steep bank, led by Captain Stevens, and made for the fort and stormed it on the run, although the enemy opened a hot fire of musketry and reversed and fired one of his guns. The capture of five guns, nine officers and one hundred thirty men, and the rescue of five gunboats, and the occupation of a point of vital importance, were the results of one of the most brilliant achievements of the war, accomplished, too, with a loss of only four killed and ten wounded.
I was an eye-witness to Stevens's courage and daring in every battle in which the divisions I had the honor to command were engaged from Fredericksburg to the closing scene in Appomattox. There is no officer more deserving of a Medal of Honor than he. At the Battle of the Wilderness, I remember he was wounded, but never left the field, and remained with the division, and behaved in his usual gallant manner in all the battles of the Army of the Potomac, from that great battle to Petersburg."
Soon after the loss of this work, General Longstreet raised the siege and retreated. The Union forces then evacuated Suffolk, and General Getty, with his division, fortified a line seven miles in front of Portsmouth, Virginia, running from the James to the Elizabeth River, a distance of four miles. Captain Stevens did most of the engineering in laying out this line, which consisted of a continuous infantry parapet, with stronger works for artillery at intervals, and a corduroy road in rear. In June, an army of 22,000 men under General Dix was sent up the York and Pamunkey rivers and landed at the White House. From this point, General Dix advanced a strong detachment to make a demonstration on Richmond, and sent General Getty, with his division reinforced by two cavalry regiments, up the left bank of the Pamunkey to destroy the railroad bridge across the South Anna River near Hanover Courthouse.
After a slight skirmish, General Getty accomplished his mission and marched back to the White House. Nothing was accomplished by General Dix, and his army was soon withdrawn and distributed at various posts in his department of Eastern Virginia and North Carolina. At this very time, the great and decisive Battle of Gettysburg was fought. Had these troops that General Dix wasted in vain demonstrations been thrown on the line of the Potomac above Harper's Ferry, it is hard to see how Lee could have escaped destruction. General John G. Foster succeeded General Dix. He appointed Captain Stevens, Colonel of the 1st Regiment, Loyal Virginians, with authority to raise the regiment from the Loyal Whites in eastern Virginia.
But after every effort, only two companies could be raised. As he could not be mustered into the United States service without a full regiment, he applied to be relieved from his command and ordered to the Army of the Potomac, where General Getty now had the command of the 2nd Division of the 6th Corps. General Benjamin F. Butler who had succeeded General Foster, granted the application with a kindly letter to the young officer. On reaching the Army of the Potomac, he was assigned to Getty's Second Division, Sixth Corps, as Inspector General and Adjutant General, and took part in the bloody campaign that followed. At the Battle of the Wilderness, he was wounded by a shrapnel ball on the right leg below the knee, but, after his wound was dressed and bandaged, returned to the field.
His horse was also killed under him by a bullet which pierced its heart. He remained on duty with this division until the end of the war, taking part in every campaign and battle in which the VI Corps participated. He was promoted to be Major and Assistant Adjutant General, United States Volunteers, October 13, 1864. Brevet Lieutenant Colonel, August 1, 1864, quote, for gallantry and distinguished services in the present campaign before Richmond, Virginia, end quote. Brevet Colonel, October 19, 1864, "...for gallant and meritorious services in the battles of Winchester, Fishers Hill, and Cedar Creek." This was Sheridan's noted campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. The VI Corps returned to the siege of Petersburg in November, 1864.
It struck the decisive blow which forced the evacuation of Richmond and the retreat of Lee's army, when, at dawn, on April 2, 1865, formed in a solid wedge, it burst through the rebel lines of Petersburg. For his part in this assault, Colonel Stevens was breveted Brigadier General, April 2, 1865, for gallant and meritorious services before Petersburg, Virginia, the youngest general in the war, being not quite twenty-three. He took part in the pursuit, as at the Battle of Sailors Creek and the surrender at Appomattox. Following this campaign, he took part in the march of the VI Corps to Danville, Virginia, the march thence to Washington, the Grand Review of the Corps, and was mustered out September 30, 1865.
At this time, General Rufus Ingalls and Senator Nesmith of Oregon, both influential men and warm friends of Grant, offered to secure his appointment as Major in the regular Army, but he declined it. In Civil Life. Without any profession or business, and his mother and sisters dependent upon him in great measure, General Stevens went out again to Washington Territory. He was employed by the Oregon Steam Navigation Company as their agent at Wallula, a steamboat landing on the Columbia River 350 miles above its mouth, and remained at this place a year and a half. During this time, he took in for the company, for freight and passengers, $150,000, nearly all in gold dust. On leaving its service, he received a warm letter of commendation from Captain John C.
Ainsworth, the President. While at Wallula, he received the appointment of Captain in the 14th Infantry, United States Army, but declined it. His mother and sisters came out from Boston, and he built a house for them in Portland, Oregon. In May 1868, he was appointed collector of internal revenue for Washington Territory and moved to Olympia, where his mother and sisters joined him the following year. He held this position three years, during which he collected for the government $200,000 and returned less than 1% of the taxes entrusted to him to collect as uncollectible. While collector, he read law with Hon. Elwood Evans and was admitted to the bar. In 1870, he was appointed attorney for the Northern Pacific Railroad Company and served in that capacity four years.
He purchased the right-of-way for the railroad from Calama on the Columbia to Tacoma on Puget Sound, purchased land for and laid out town sites along the road, and assisted in securing the site for the terminus at Tacoma. The most important service he rendered the company was the suppression of timber-stealing on the public land, which had been almost openly practiced since the first settlement of the country. The company, by its charter, was entitled to half the land within forty miles of its road as soon as the road was built and accepted, so it had a vital interest in the preservation of the timber. Acting for the company, and with all expenses paid by it, but in the name and with the authority of the United States Land Office, General Stevens seized every raft of logs cut on public land, and with a powerful tug towed them to the nearest town.
Here they were sold at auction, unless the logger would agree to quit trespassing on public land, in which case he was allowed to redeem his logs at half the market price, or two dollars a thousand feet. General Stevens followed this matter up with such energy that by the end of a year illegal logging was completely stopped. It cost the company a little over $10,000, and the receipts from seized timber slightly exceeded that amount, so it really cost the company nothing. After agreeing to run its railroad to Olympia, the Northern Pacific Railroad Company built it far to the eastward, leaving the town 15 miles away with no communication except a stagecoach, and located its terminus at Tacoma. There was great discouragement in the former town, and a number of families removed to Tacoma, and it seemed almost that the place might die out.
General Stevens organized the people of the town in the Olympia Railroad Union for the purpose of building a railroad to connect with the northern Pacific, He was chosen president of the Union, and inspired the people with such hope and courage that they graded the first five miles by working bees on weekly field days, when the whole population, from governor and judges to the humblest laborer, worked on the road. Contributions of money, food, land, and labor were made by the people, and finally, with the aid of $75,000 of county bonds, the road was completed and opened. As there were scarcely 2,000 people in the town, the difficulty of this enterprise may be realized. In 1874, he was appointed by President Grant, commissioner, to investigate the claims of British subjects on the San Juan Archipelago, which had been awarded to the United States by the Emperor of Germany, after being in dispute between this country and Great Britain for twenty years.
After giving public notice, he visited every settlement on the islands in a revenue vessel, prepared with a clerk, etc., to receive and note all claims, only to find that there were none, because all the British subjects had become naturalized American citizens, and had taken their land under the United States land laws. His report to that effect was the most satisfactory to the President and Secretary of State that could possibly be made. It was in consequence of the representations of the British government as to such claims that President Grant obtained from Congress authority and an appropriation for sending a commissioner to investigate them. Mount Tacoma, or Rainier, The loftiest and noblest in the United States, barring Alaska, 14,500 feet high and snow-clad halfway to its base, stands in full view from the prairies back of Olympia, and indeed from the town itself, although sixty miles away.
The failure of a gallant officer, General August V. Kautz, In 1857, to reach the summit after an attempt in which he and his party suffered great hardships led to the general belief that it was insurmountable. General Stevens organized a small party to attempt the ascent, traversed the dense intervening forest, And on August 17, 1870, with a single companion, Mr. P. B. Van Trump, stood upon the very summit after a climb from the foot of the snow line of thirteen and one-half hours. It being too late to descend that night the dangerous snow and rock steeps, they took refuge in the crater and were saved from freezing by the steam emitted therefrom. They were seventeen days on the trip. One of the party broke down and was left behind, and Mr.
Van Trump met with serious hurt in descending the mountain. General Stevens published a full and interesting account of this ascent in the Atlantic Monthly of November 1876. His mother and sisters, having returned to Boston in 1874, in consequence of the severe illness of one of the latter, The following year, General Stevens also went there and entered upon the practice of his profession. In 1885, he was elected to the General Court from the Dorchester Ward as an independent, having previously advocated the reform of the city charter in addresses and articles. He organized the Municipal Reform Association in order to bring its influence to bear upon the legislature in favor of the charter reform.
Although an independent and without party support, he soon gained the respect and confidence of the House. He was placed on the Committee on Cities, and the bill to reform the city charter was reported by him for the committee and carried through the House and became a law. He also drew the bill for limiting the rate of taxation and indebtedness, which is now the law. A large number of bills were submitted to the committee by different lawyers, but his was not only more concise and lucid, but self-executing, so was preferred. He was again elected to the House the following year. In that year, 1886, He was nominated for Congress by the Tariff Reformers, and certain assurances were given of the Democratic nomination, but this was given to Honorable Leopold Morse, and General Stevens withdrew in his favor.
He made many speeches in this state, and some in Rhode Island and Connecticut, in support of the election of Grover Cleveland as President. At the outbreak of the late Spanish War, he was strongly recommended for appointment as Brigadier General by General George W. Getty and General H. G. Wright, commanders of the division and corps in which he served in the Civil War, By General Miles, commanding the Army, and General Schofield, the preceding commander, by General James Wilson, General Thomas W. Hyde, Major Henry L. Higginson, and other prominent officers of the Civil War, and by Senators Wetmore of Rhode Island, Hoare and Lodge of Massachusetts, General Hawley of Connecticut, and by Secretary of the Navy, John D.
Long, But, as two citizens of Massachusetts had been appointed to that position, President McKinley declined to appoint him. General Stevens was one of the founders of the Massachusetts Tariff Reform League, and a member of its executive committee for years. In 1901, he became Secretary of the League, and continued in that position for three years. Mr. Henry W. Lamb was the president, and rendered the greatest support to the League during these and previous years, and his services and direction of its work were invaluable. During General Stevens' secretaryship, the League issued many tariff trust articles and plate matter for a large number of newspapers, and free trade almanacs in 1902 and 1903.
He was instrumental in changing the name of the League to American Free Trade League, and adopting the motto, Equal rights to all, special privileges to none. During the coal famine of the winter of 1903-04, he organized the notable Free Coal Meeting in Fenneal Hall, which undoubtedly brought about the suspension of the duty on coal for a year. In 1907 and 1908, he took the leading part in saving the old State House from the encroachments of the Boston Transit Commission, and drafted and secured the passage of the Act placing that historic structure under the joint care of the Governor and the Mayor of Boston, and prohibiting any commercial use thereof. He is the author of The Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens, His Distinguished Father, a work upon which he was engaged in research and preparation twenty-five years, and which was published by Houghton Mifflin & Company in 1901 in two octavo volumes containing one thousand pages.
This work has been highly commended, both as an interesting biography and as an historical authority, especially of the early history of the Pacific Northwest. Its author was made an honorary member of the State Historical Societies of Washington, Oregon, and Montana. Harvard College also, in recognition of this work and of his career as a brave soldier in the nation's cause and as a public-spirited citizen, conferred upon him the degree of Master of Arts. General Stevens is also the author of many papers on Civil War subjects read before the Mill Historical Society and the Royal Legion, among which are the Battle of Cedar Creek, The storming of the lines of Petersburg, the VI Corps in the Wilderness, the Battle of Sailors Creek, the Siege of Suffolk, the reform of the militia system, read before the Reform Club in 1899, the recommendations of which have been largely adopted by Congress and the War Department.
Although not a club man, he is a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, Royal Legion, Grand Army, Sons of the Revolution, and Massachusetts Mill Historical Society. In 1880, he built a home on Mount Bedouin, Dorchester, and has resided there ever since with his mother and sisters. He did much to improve that locality, and with the assistance of the people there founded the Mount Boudouin Library, now a branch of the public library. His interests in the state of Washington requiring much attention he has withdrawn from active practice of law. With characteristic courage and public spirit, he offers himself as a candidate for Congress, as the most direct and effective way to make the people actually realize the enormous burden of the present tariff upon them, their industries, and their foreign commerce, and to arouse and unite them, regardless of evasive parties and time-serving politicians, in an aggressive effort to throw off that burden by sending to Congress Both men, like himself, pledged to fight monopoly until they eradicate it.
End of A Brief Sketch of the Life of General Hazard Stevens
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6 06 - Good Old Will Rogers 9:23
Good Old Will Rogers by Samuel Goldwyn.
Good old Will Rogers. It is a far cry from the greatest emotional actress of the films to one of the world's most infectious comedians. Yet I have set aside chronological considerations in order to save for last my recollections of a man whose comedy touches brightened the Goldwyn lot almost as much as they did the Goldwyn screen. It was Rex Beach and I who brought Will Rogers into pictures. After our approach, he confided to us that he had been somewhat mystified. By the delayed recognition of his talents on the part of the picture world. I used to think it was funny, said he in his own inimitable way. Here motion pictures were booming along. They were getting in trained dogs and trained cats and grand opera singers and everybody in the world but me.
Couldn't make it out. Now after all these years, you fellows have come too. Rogers still loves to dwell on these fictitious pangs of slighted talent, and he always adds, Well, there was a movement on foot for making fewer and worse pictures, so they hired me. Certainly, if his coming into picture activities was the result of any such urge, we were woefully misled, for his Jubilo was one of the best pictures ever produced. By the Goldwyn Company. Around his selection for the chief character of this story, Will weaves one of his choicest monologues. Sam had bought a tramp story, he relates, and he was looking around the lot one day for somebody who could play the tramp. Well, he happened to see me in my street clothes, and he said, there is the very fellow to play the tramp.
Of course, he adds. I love to play a tramp. You can act so natural, and you never have to dress for it. Whether this story is historically correct or not, it does bring out one of Will's claims to distinction in the Hollywood community. An old slouch hat pulled down over his eyes, and some kind of nondescript trousers uncreased as a child's brow. This is his inveterate costume. Clad in this wise, He used to stand around the Goldwyn lawn, and surrounded by a crowd of cowboys and extras, would amuse himself by throwing the lariat at our Keep Off the Grass signs. The reader may imagine what a personality like this did for a studio somewhat overcharged with the artistic temperament. Temperament itself seemed to find relief in those droll remarks with which Rogers meets almost every issue of the day.
Numerous times I saw Mr. Farrar and Mr. Frederick talking with a comedian, and both gave every sign of an unshadowed enjoyment in his conversation. It was one of the two, I think, who asked Will one day whether he liked pictures as well as he did the stage. Oh, sure. Drawed he, with the unsmiling face which always makes his verbal twist the most irresistible. Why, up to the time I went into pictures, I had never annoyed more than one audience at a time. This is the only business in the world where you can sit out front and applaud yourself. Now, I was getting to that place on the stage where that feature appealed to me. Incidentally, one of Roger's most amusing memories of the stage implicates Miss Farrar.
I shall let him sketch this with his own pungency of style. I made one picture doubling for Romeo, he relates. The reason we made it was that we could use the same costumes that Miss Geraldine Farrar, and a friend of hers at the time, had worn in some costume pictures. All these Shakespearean tights and everything. I don't say this egotistically, but I wore Geraldine's. There may be those in the screen world who are overridden by emotions, who are played upon by gusts of alternate personal attraction and repulsion. Not so Rogers. He is essentially a home man, and the first thing he did when he came to Hollywood. He was to invest the savings of years in a house for his family. This residence of Bill's is on Beverly Hills, and its location imposed upon its owner a heavy social responsibility.
You know, I heard him telling somebody the other day, my principal occupation in California is not making pictures. It is official guide. I live on the same hill as Uncle Doug and Aunt Mary. Only I live much lower down the hill than they do. In fact, I live at the foot of the hill in a swamp. It's right at the forks of two streets, and all I do all day long is to tell tourists where Mary Pickford lives. I'll be out in the yard going through my daily work, maybe licking my second kid, when some Iowa car will drive up and say, can you tell us where Mary Pickford lives? So I stand and point it out. Just point and say, Mary Pickford lives right up there. You want to know why I came back to the stage for a while?
Why, just to get a rest. I was so tired pointing. Now, I have played for every charity affair that was ever held in Los Angeles, and their people are very appreciative. So when I die, they're going to give me a benefit and take the money and erect a statue of me with the arm pointing toward Mary's. And a sign on it. Mary Pickford lives right up there. There is nothing waspish about Roger's fun-making. Such a quality of humor as his implies, in fact, a true sense of life's values, a very wise and mellow spirit. Nothing shows this more clearly than a communication I received from him not very long ago. Dear Sam, it read. When you first announced that you were going to write this book of memoirs, I must say it didn't create much of a stir in the movie circles till they learned what memoirs were.
Then, when they found it meant truths, everybody, including myself, commenced to get leery and wondered if you were going to remember everything. Now, I don't know what you're going to put into this catalog of yours, but I do hope for the salvation of the infant industry, you don't tell all, especially not what some of my pictures grossed. But if you gotta say something about me, say this. They were the two happiest years of my life that I spent on the golden lot. We had some great troops there in those days, all of them good fellows. There was Miss Frederick, whom everybody that ever met her liked. Miss Madge Kennedy, than whom we have no sweeter character of stage or screen. Mabel Norman, the kidder, and good fellow, friend of every soul on earth, whose quiet and not-seen charity has helped many a poor soul in need.
Tom Moore, as good an Irishman as ever lived, and not stuck on his looks either. Also say this. I made, in the two years I was on the lot, twelve consecutive pictures, all with one director, Clarence Badger. That, I think, is a record, to be with the same director. And if there is anything worthwhile in any of them, it was certainly due to his efforts, as I am no actor. But he is patient, capable, And the finest man I ever met, I have saved this communication, because nothing else could reveal more forcibly the tolerance, the modesty, and the quick appreciation of anything good in us frail mortals, which formed the source of Will Rogers' ever-welling humor.
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7 07 - James Fenimore Cooper 17:14
James Fenimore Cooper from American Literary Masters by Leon Vincent. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox. Recording by Rita Boutros. James Fenimore Cooper. Part I. His Life. James Cooper was the eleventh of the twelve children of William and Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper, of Burlington, New Jersey. He was born in that picturesque town by the Delaware on September Fifteenth, 1789. The name James, given him in honor of his grandfather, had also been born by his first American ancestor, who was said to have come from Stratford-on-Avon in 1679. In fulfillment of a promise to his mother, whose family had become extinct in the male line, the novelist, in 1826, changed his name to Fenimore Cooper.
At the close of the Revolutionary War, William Cooper acquired large tracts of land on Otsego Lake in New York. Settled there in 1790, founded the village still known as Cooperstown, and built for himself a stately home to which he gave the name of Otsego Hall. He was the first judge of the county and a member of Congress, a man of strong character and agreeable address. Cooper's boyhood was passed amid picturesque natural surroundings on the edge of civilization, the scene of the Deerslayer and the pioneers, He attended the village school, prepared for college with the rector of St. Peter's Church, Albany, entered Yale in the second term of the freshman year, class of 18 O 6, and was dismissed in the junior year for some boyish escapade, the nature of which is unexplained.
It was decided that he should enter the Navy. There was then no training school. And Boyes took the first lessons in seamanship in the Merchant Marine. Cooper spent a year before the mast in the Stirling, sailing from New York to London, thence to Gibraltar, back to London, and from London to Philadelphia. His experiences are set forth in the early chapters of Ned Myers. The Stirling lost two of her best hands by impressment as soon as she reached English waters. Cooper's indignation at these outrages afterwards found voice through the lips of Ethuel Balt, in the story entitled Wing and Wing. He was commissioned midshipman on January 1st, 1808, and served a while on the Vesuvius. In the following winter, he was one of the party sent to Oswego to build a brig for the defense of the lake, and became acquainted with the regions described in the Pathfinder.
In the summer of 1809, he hit charge of the gunboats on Lake Champlain, and in the autumn was ordered to the sloop-of-war wasp. He left the service on his betrothal with Miss Susan Delancey of Mamaroneck, New York, whom he married on January 1st, 1811. For a few years he lived the life of a landed proprietor, dividing his time between Cooperstown, Scarsdale, and Mamaroneck. The dullness of a novel he was reading aloud to his wife provoked him to say that he could write a better one himself, Challenged to prove it, he produced Precaution, a story of English life, following conventional lines. It was apprentice work. The effort of composition taught Cooper that he could write, but not that he could write well.
He had no conceit of the book, and refused it a place in his collected writings. In 1821, The Spy, A Tale of the Neutral Ground, was published. Its unqualified good fortune made Cooper a professed man of letters. From that time on until his death, twenty-nine years later, he produced books with uninterrupted regularity. The Spy was followed by The Pioneers, or the sources of the Susquehanna, 1823. The Pilot, A Tale of the Sea, 1824. Lionel Lincoln, or the Leaguer of Boston, 1825. The Last of the Mohicans, A Narrative, of 1757, 1826. But one of this group of four can be pronounced a failure, and two have had a success almost phenomenal in the history of letters. Cooper shared the American passion for seeing foreign lands.
The proceeds of authorship enabled him to carry out a plan he had formed of spending some time abroad. With his family and servants, a party of ten in all, he set sail from New York on June 1st, 1826. He proposed to be gone five years. He overstayed that time by two years and five months. From May 1826 to about January 1829, he held the nominal position of American Consul at Lyon. His journeyings were made in a leisurely way after the fashion of the time. Eighteen months were spent in Paris and the vicinity, four months in London, and a few weeks in Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland. The winter of 1828 to 1829 was passed in Florence, and was followed by a voyage to Naples. After spending some months at Sorrento and Naples, he settled in Rome for the winter of 1829 to 1830, thence to Venice, Munich, Dresden, and finally back to Paris.
He published, while abroad, The Prairie, The Red Rover, Notions of the Americans, Picked up by a traveling bachelor, The Wept of Wish Ton Wish, The Water Witch, or The Skimmer of the Seas, The Bravo, The Haydn Mauer, or The Benedictines, The Headsman, or the Abbe des Vigneron, 1833. In November, 1833, Cooper returned to America. That and several ensuing winters were passed in New York, the summers in Cooperstown. Later he made Otsego Hall his permanent home. He soon became embroiled in quarrels with the press. While in Paris, his defense of Lafayette's position in what is known as the Expenses Controversy, had provoked from his native land criticism which Cooper resented. He angered a part of the inhabitants of Cooperstown by making clear to them that Three Mile Point, a wooded tract on the lake, long used by the villagers as a picnic ground, was not theirs.
as they maintained, but a part of the Cooper estate. With no thought of robbing them of their pleasure perk, he insisted on their understanding that they enjoyed its use by favor and not by right. For this, the country papers assailed him. Combative by nature, Cooper brought suits for libel and recovered damages. The novel spectacle of an author baiting the newspapers caused remark. The city press joined in the attack. The Courier and Enquirer, the New York Tribune, the Albany Evening Journal, edited by Thurlow Wheat, who once said, apropos of his skill in stirring up litigation, there is something in my manner of writing that makes the galled jades wince. Verdicts were given in Cooper's favor.
More libels followed. More suits were brought. More damages recovered. A cry arose that the liberty of the press was endangered. Cooper did not think so. He was a bulldog. When he had once fastened his teeth in a Whig editor, nothing could make him let go. He continued his prosecutions until he made his detractors respect him. It took about six years to do it. Bryant has described with grim humor the novelist's warfare with that leviathan, the press. "'He put a hook into the nose of this huge monster,' said Bryant admiringly. This warfare disturbed Cooper's peace of mind, but in no wise interrupted his literary activity. The following list records by no means all that he wrote after 1834. But will suffice to show his right copious and often happy industry.
Besides Ten Volumes of Travels, Cooper published a letter to his countrymen, 1834, The Monagans, 1835, The American Democrat, 1838, Homeward Bound, or The Chase, 1838, Home as Found, 1838, The history of the Navy of the United States of America, 1839, the Pathfinder, or the Inland Sea, 1840, Mercedes of Castile, or the Voyage to Cathay, 1840, the Deerslayer, or the First Warpath, 1841, the Two Admirals, 1842, the Wing and Wing, or Le Fou Foyer, 1842, Wyandotte, or The Hutted Knoll, Ned Myers, or A Life Before the Mast, A Float and Ashore, or The Adventures of Miles Wallingford, Miles Wallingford, the second part of A Float and Ashore, Satin Stowe, or The Little Page Manuscripts, The Chain Bearer, or the Little Page Manuscripts, 1846, Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers, 1846, The Redskins, or Indian and Injun, 1846, The Crater, or Vulcan's Peak, 1847, Jack Teer, or the Florida Reefs, 1848, The Oak Openings, or the Bee Hunter, 1848, The Sea Lions, or the Lost Sealers, 1849.
The Ways of the Hour, 1850. The Spy was dramatized and played successfully. Dramatizations were also made of the Pilot, the Red Rover, the Water Witch, the Pioneers, the Wigwam or Templeton Manor, and the Wept of Wishtunwish, Miantonema, and Naramata. An original comedy, Upside Down, or Philosophy in Petticoats, was withdrawn after four performances. No satisfactory account exists of Cooper's earnings by literature. It is believed that in the later years he was obliged to write, if not for the necessities of life, at least for the comforts and luxuries. The hostility provoked by his energetic criticisms subsided in time. There was even a project on foot in New York to pay him the compliment of a public dinner, as a proof of returning confidence.
His untimely illness put to one side the question of honors of this poor sort. Cooper died at Otsego Hall on September 14, 1851. His character. Cooper was a democrat in theory, but not in practice. The rude feudalism in which his boyhood was passed fostered the aristocratic sentiment. A residence abroad, in the obsequious atmosphere with which the serving classes invest anyone who has the appearance of wealth, aggravated it. No one could have been more heartily American than Cooper. But he made distinctions, and his countrymen abhorred the distinctions. Pride of this not unreasonable sort may go hand in hand with genuine modesty. Cooper was more unpretentious than his enemies were willing to allow.
With a reputation that would have opened many doors, he made no capital of it. He had no mind to thrust himself on all societies. He was never slow to make use of the inalienable American privilege of speaking one's mind. In 1835, the theory of the entire perfection of the American character was seldom challenged, at least by a native writer. That Cooper should entertain doubts on the subject was thought monstrous. It was resented in him the more because of his manner. Opinions quite as radical might have been uttered wittily and the end accomplished. Cooper had little wit. His touch was heavy, and he was in dead earnest. He lacked neither courage nor honesty nor high-mindedness nor generosity nor yet judgment, if his temper was unruffled, but he was entirely wanting in tact, and largely wanting in genealogy, of the useful, if superficial, sort which lessens the wear and tear of human intercourse.
A philosopher divides famous men into two classes, those who are admired in their own homes as well as in the world, and those who are admired anywhere but at home. Cooper belonged to the first class rather than the second. This proud, irascible, contentious, dogmatic man of letters enjoyed the unswerving loyalty and deep affection of every member of his family, and from this his biographer argues an essential sweetness of nature. Cooper somewhere says, Men are as much indebted to a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances for the characters they sustain in this world as to their personal qualities. It was his ill-luck to have the accidents of his character often mistaken for the character itself.
The Writer Cooper's English at best, though fluent and spirited, is without grace. At worst, it is clumsy and intractable. This writer of world-wide fame is singularly wanting in literary finish. He is not careless but colorless, not slovenly but neutral. He succeeds almost without the aid of what is commonly called style. He is read for what he has to say, not for the way in which he says it. There are surprises in store for the reader, but they are not to be found in the perfect word, the happy phrase, or the balance of a sentence, but always in the unexpected turn of an adventure, in a well-planned episode abounding in incident, in the release of mental tension following the happy issue out of danger.
As was said of another copious writer, he weaves a loose web. One might add that it is often of coarse fibre. In few writers of eminence is form so subservient to contents. The defect was due to haste, to the natural and lordly contempt of a spontaneous story-teller for the niceties of rhetoric.
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8 08 - Majorian (Julius Valerius Majorianus) 2:35
Majorian.
Majorian, Iulius Valerius Majorianus, Emperor of the West, from Four Fifty Seven to Four Sixty One. He had distinguished himself as a general by victories over the Franks and Alemanni, And six months after the deposition of Avitus, he was declared emperor by the regent Ricimer. After repelling an attack by the Vandals upon Campania, in Four fifty one, he prepared a large force, composed chiefly of barbarians, to invade Africa, which he previously visited in disguise. Having, during his stay in Gaul, defeated and concluded an alliance with Theodoric de Visigoth, At the beginning of 460, he crossed the Pyrenees for the purpose of joining the powerful fleet, which he had collected at Carthagena.
The Vandal king Genneseric, however, after all overtures of peace had been rejected, succeeded, through the treachery of certain officials, in surprising the Roman fleet, most of the ships being either taken or destroyed. Majorian thereupon made peace with Genneseric. But his ill success had destroyed his military reputation, his efforts to put down abuses and improve the condition of the people had roused the hatred of the officials, and Rikimer, jealous of his fame and influence, stirred up the foreign troops against him. A mutiny broke out in Lombardy, and on August 460, Majorian was forced to resign. He died five days afterwards, either of dysentery or by violence. Majorian was the author of a number of remarkable laws contained in the Theodosian code.
He remitted all arrears of taxes, the collection of which was for the future placed in the hands of the local officials. He revived the institution of defensores, defenders of cities, whose duty it was to protect the poor and inform the emperor of abuses committed in his name. The practice of pulling down the ancient monuments to be used as building material which was connived at by venal officials was strictly prohibited. He also passed laws against compulsory ordination and premature vows of celibacy.
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9 09 - The Making of An Aviator (1912) 35:22
The Making of an Aviator by Harry N. Atwood. Saturday Evening Post, December 7, 1912. How does it feel to be up in the air thousands of feet and to have something go wrong? What are your sensations when you realize that you and your machine are falling? How does it affect you to read daily of the tragic ends of your friends and fellow workers? How does it feel to be momentarily in danger of instant death? These are the harrowing questions constantly being asked of the aviator by a curious public, which seems to view him with a mixed air of respect, perplexity, and sympathy. People generally assume that this occupation is the most hazardous and the most foolhardy in the world, and therefore that in order to pursue it, he must be endowed with a special kind of mental makeup, which fears neither pain nor death.
This fearlessness, they believe, makes him carefree, easygoing, and reckless, not only in all the vocations in which he may be interested, but perhaps in his morals as well. They consider him in a class by himself, without the restraining conservatism of the ordinary man, therefore a person to be avoided in all intimate business or social relations, nevertheless an interesting person. In other words, they believe they could never follow, with any marked degree of success, such an occupation because their mental composition lacks the necessary special requirements. As a matter of fact, this supposition that the aviator must be equipped with a peculiar type of mentality in order to carry out his work, and the belief that his entire life is given to recklessness and indiscretion are absolutely wrong.
The belief is excusable, because few people have ever been able to make the intimate acquaintance of a birdman. and have, therefore, based their opinions of him wholly upon the sensational reports of his flights and exploits printed in the daily newspapers. Could they but get an insight into his actual thoughts and his inner life, they would have an entirely different opinion of him and of his ambitions, and would realize that the very harrowing questions they are constantly asking of him tend to keep them from intimate contact with his personality. They would understand that his apparent recklessness and air of unconcern are not inborn traits or tendencies, but rather conditions of the mind forced upon him by their own unintended curiosity and the attitude of the newspapers.
From the aviator's standpoint, it sometimes seems as if the people are not interested in his work other than to satisfy their curiosity by its sensational features. They do not care to assist him, financially or otherwise, in his undertakings, because they fear to lend their backing or conservative names to hazardous enterprises, even worthy ones. Moreover, it seems to the aviator that they are not satisfied in watching him carry on his work in a safe and sane manner, but they must see him perform daring and spectacular feats in the air, Before they are ready to give him any recognition of their appreciation.
If he succeeds in these spectacular performances, he is well applauded. If he fails, he is another foolish and reckless mortal, gone to his end. Therefore, because public opinion obliges the aviator to earn his livelihood in a reckless and dangerous manner, the assumption is made that he is naturally careless and indiscreet. Aviation can be made as safe or as dangerous as the aviator cares to make it. He is hardly to blame for making it dangerous when his safe enterprises are not supported. To avoidable fatalities. I shall not soon forget one sad afternoon in the summer of 1911, when the management of one of the large aviation meets insisted that I and several other aviators should make some exhibition flights when the conditions were exceptionally dangerous.
It was a squally, treacherous day, and no one had any business to be in the air at that particular time. But the gate receipts had been collected, and as the management could not afford to return the receipts to the public, the public, of course, was not to blame for desiring to see some good flying. At that time I was engaged in one of my long cross-country flights. and my part of the exhibition merely consisted in flying away under the escort of the several other aviators. Accordingly, at the appointed hour, and without a moment's allowance of delay on the part of the management, I flew away, accompanied by my escorts in their machines.
Two hours later, I landed in a little field bordering a country town, and was met by a multitude of people Whose first sad duty was to inform me that two of my brother aviators and their escorts had met their fate a few moments after I left them, on the aviation field 110 miles away. One, according to the reports, came to his end while performing a reckless stunt over the field, the other because something broke on his machine and it turned turtle. This double calamity was particularly deplorable to me, not only because the aviators were my personal friends, but because, if we had all been granted one hour's delay on the part of the management, when the weather conditions proved to be decidedly more favorable, I do not believe the accidents would have happened.
This incident may serve to show, with considerable emphasis, how recklessness is often imputed to the aviator as a natural trait at times when, as a matter of fact, it is really forced upon him. I feel, in fact I might put it more strongly, I know, that the trait of recklessness, or even of fearlessness, is not an essential in the making of an aviator. Having had the pleasure of the intimate acquaintance of most of the prominent aviators in this country, I can further say that a careful study of their natures would reveal that there is no one trait or tendency which predominates in their mental make-ups, and I do not believe that any definite trait or tendency is necessary for success in their profession.
To illustrate my meaning, It might be well to compare aviators with men occupied in other definite lines of business or in professions. A study of the successful businessman will reveal that he is a type of individual with a more or less defined mental makeup. He possesses a certain progressiveness, a marked intuitiveness, a prophetic shrewdness. All these qualities are necessary for his success. Prominent engineers have minds that are similar, inasmuch as they possess mechanical insight, constructive ability, and inventive genius. Without these qualities, they would not be successful in their engineering problems. Professors and teachers of the world all have one common mental characteristic, the power to impart to other minds the knowledge they possess.
Without this power, their knowledge and learning would not be useful in the teaching of others. Again, actors who have made great hits upon the stage all possess the power of being able to depict life as they see it and as others wish it. Similarly, noted physicians and surgeons are conspicuous for their great coolness and composure in the face of gruesome and nerve-wracking situations. The Safest Type of Man In other words, all the conservative vocations and professions of life seemed to require men whose minds run in certain definite channels. Otherwise they could not make a success of their industry or profession. A careful study of the aviator, however, will reveal that his mental make-up is conspicuous because of the absence of any one essential trait or characteristic.
Though there may not be any one tendency essential to the making of an aviator, there may be conditions that, by prevailing in his nature, would help toward his success. For example, the fact that he possessed courage might bring him the greatest of success, provided he had the proper inspiration for taking up the vocation. His lack of fear would enable him to pass through difficulties where coolness and composure were vital. Perhaps not so obviously, but in my opinion much more probably. The man possessing confidence would tend to make the more successful aviator. He might be afraid, then he would use caution. He would never undertake anything unless he were confident, then he would be depending wholly upon his judgment.
And thoughtful judgment is usually safe. Of course, this last type of man might be wholly lost, should an accident occur, that would cause him to lose his confidence, whereas the man with courage would pass through the ordeal safely.
Obviously, the safest type of man would, therefore, be one who possessed not only courage but confidence. Another characteristic that might be suggested is necessary for the mental make-up of an aviator is caution. But here again I can recite instances where caution has killed and where caution has saved. No one entering into an occupation or profession can make a success of it unless he is first inspired with a real interest in the subject and can see a definite reason as to why he should follow it. He must see wherein it is going to benefit him or perhaps others. He must see wherein it fits into or adapts itself to his particular life. He must understand its present limitations as well as its future possibilities.
And so I want to point out wherein I believe aviation is adapted to businessman, sportsman, professional man, engineer, and even artist.
Flying with my hydro-aeroplane in Lake Winnipesaukee this past summer, A lake on which sailboats are never safe. I had a chance to demonstrate the usefulness of the flying machine from both the businessman's and the sportsman's point of view. I had just accomplished a tour of the lake and was talking to a little throng assembled on the pier at Wire's Landing when a businessman singled himself out and began to question me. He stated that he was vacationing on one of the many islands in Lake Winnipesaukee, and that he enjoyed the distinction of owning the fastest motorboat on the lake.
Do you believe, he asked me, there is really any future for the flying machine, other than as an exhibition freak?
According to my Yankee nature, I answered his question by asking one of my own. Would you care to take a little ride over the lake this afternoon? For a minute he hesitated. Then his desire to risk it overcame him, and he stepped into the machine. Just previous to starting, I said to him, I'm going to answer your question, Mr. Mann, by demonstration, and I want you to watch every detail of this flight. Watch me circle round the islands, watch your safe altitude above the water, Watch the squalls upon the water's surface and see how little they affect me. Watch how easily the machine is controlled. Watch how gently I can land you in the water, or at your very doorstep. Watch the distance we cover in the next few minutes.
His camp was eleven miles away. The engine was started, and for a hundred yards I glided over the surface of the water. Then I rose from it and took to the air. Over the blue surface we flew, winding in and out among the islands, occasionally touching the tips of the waves, and every now and then saluting the motorboats as we rushed by them. At no time did I attain an altitude of over ten feet. Twelve and a half minutes from the time we had started, I had landed him safely at his pier, a convinced man. A peculiar coincidence connected with this episode was the fact that his fast motorboat in returning with his people to the island, took fire on the way, and the occupants had to be transferred into a passing launch while the flames were being subdued.
This affair must at least indicate that there is a field for the aeroplane right at the present time, which is of common interest to the businessman and the sportsman.
I am not trying to show that the aeroplane is safer than the motorboat, but I am ready to state That there would not be twenty-five days in any one year on which I would be prevented from safely making this same flight. And the safety would depend wholly upon the judgment and skill of the operator. Moreover, on none of the remaining three hundred and forty days, would it require an extraordinary amount of courage, confidence, and caution to make such a flight safely. It would merely require a little skill which can easily be acquired by anyone. And if its acquisition is not desired, this skill can be hired in the person of an aerial chauffeur. Risk lessened by caution. It is hardly necessary to show what enormous possibilities the field of aviation presents to the engineer.
Think for a moment what it means from the engineer's standpoint. to construct and to operate a mechanical bird. Think what it means for a mechanism to lift itself from the ground into the air, thousands of feet high, and to sail hither and yon at the will of the operator. A mechanism that, at the lightest, weighs half a ton. For that matter, a machine in France recently flew into the air, carrying a load of two tons in addition to its own weight. A heavy load for a modern automobile truck. Aviation at present is a virgin field for the engineer. It is full of problems, and the greatest problem, how to make it safe for the multitude, is not yet wholly solved. But I can state positively that should the engineer who enters the field be thorough and cautious, and should he follow the teachings of men who have had actual experience in the air, He may undertake aviation engineering with but little risk.
Aviation is perhaps most interesting from the artist's standpoint, and affords him an unlimited field of possibilities. The adventurer, a species of artist, can find all the excitement and all the glory his heart desires. The poet and literary genius will find in it a virgin field of golden opportunities. The lover of nature will find in it a study that will exceed all bounds of his imagination. Think of the freedom experienced, and freedom is that which all the world seeks, in flying over the meadows, the swamps, the hills, the valleys, the rivers, and the lakes, yes, and even the tall mountains. Imagine the picture lying beneath you in flying over the big city, above the smoke, the dust, and turmoil.
You can observe at the same instant the congested streets and the crowded squares of the city proper, and the clear-shaded highways of the suburbs. From your position above the big city, you can observe simultaneously the street fight that is taking place in Central Square, the trolley accident that has just occurred on Main Street, the blockade that is formed in the Market District, and the sports that are being conducted on the public playgrounds. Even the happy couples who were seeking some sequestered spot for a day's outing on the outskirts of the city are not exempt from a place in the picture. Then picture the experience of flying over the fresh green country in the early morning light, when the air currents have not become sufficiently strong to disturb the mist in the valley.
You can follow the course of a river, and when it turns and winds through some gateway in the hills, you can simply jump the curve and pick it up at another point. It is impossible for me to describe the pictures that I have seen, and the feelings and sensations with which I have been inspired when I have been on some of my cross-country flights. It would take an artist to describe them so that they would be adequately appreciated. Then again, an interesting feature connected with low flying is the power to observe the details in the moving picture beneath you, either in the depths of a body of water or in the seclusion of a forest. In passing over a lake on a calm day, it is possible to observe the bottom when the water is fifty or even a hundred feet deep, and to follow plainly the fishes they sport about.
It is likewise possible, in passing over dense woods, to observe the details in their midst almost as plainly as you could observe the details on an open meadow. I remember following two deer that were fleeing wildly through a central main forest when I was flying over it. They could hear my engine very plainly, and I suppose they were wondering what sort of a bird monster was pursuing them. Yes, to the artist, the vocation of aviation presents a world of possibilities, and he may roam as far as his heart desires into this labyrinth of possibilities, making his journey as safe or as dangerous as he desires. Off to Dinner by Aeroplane. Of course, it is impossible to show business or professional men wherein the taking-up of aviation may be of commercial value to them at the present time, Because the industry is only in its infancy.
But it is possible to conceive that future years will find it of a great commercial value. We must remember the automobile has only just commenced its commercial conquest. We must first show that the aviation profession is one which can be followed with reasonable safety as a sport. We must show, secondly, that it has an important bearing upon future worldly progress if it is made safe. Then it will conduct its own progress. I remember one bleak, cloudy afternoon in September 1911, when the aeroplane did me a considerable and significant service. I was flying for a little fair at Riverhead, Long Island, as much to the amusement of myself as of the delighted community beneath me. Having a dinner engagement at six o'clock in New York, 75 miles away, I had intended to finish the day's flying in time to catch the train leaving Riverhead at three-fifteen.
A slight accident to the aeroplane engine delayed matters, and consequently I was finishing my last flight as late as 4 p.m. There was then no means of conveyance to New York other than by aeroplane, which would allow me to meet my engagement. I decided to make the attempt. Hurrying to the hotel in the little village, I donned my dress suit, opera cape, and tall hat, and, much to the surprise and amusement of the multitude, jumped into the aeroplane seat, thus attired. I did not forget to strap my cane to a pillar of the aeroplane. The engine was started, and a moment later I was flying high over the wilderness of central Long Island, bound for the big city. There was a high easterly wind blowing.
But as New York lay due west from Riverhead, this helped rather than hindered the situation. One hour and ten minutes after I had left Riverhead, I alighted gently upon an ash dump just outside of Long Island City. There was not a spot of dirt or dust upon my clothes. My hands were not even soiled, and my tall hat was still standing upright upon my head. Placing the aeroplane under the chaperonage of a nearby policeman, I hailed a taxi-cam and arrived at the dinner party in New York on time. This little experience was, of course, favored by good luck, but it only goes to show what may be expected in future years when good luck is not such an essential factor. Another incident occurred about a year ago when I was flying near Canton, Ohio at the State Fair.
and it might be particularly interesting from the standpoint of a professional man. It was a windy, treacherous afternoon, and Mr. Walter Brookens had taken to the air to start the day's flying. He was soaring here and there over the surrounding country, in a manner that only those who had seen Mr. Brookens fly can appreciate, when suddenly his motor ceased throbbing, and he dived for the earth. Down and down he came at a frightful speed. and ended his precipitous flight from the standpoint of the spectators on the field by disappearing behind some tall pines in the distance. People ran wildly in the direction of the locality where he had fallen, realizing that he was probably in need of assistance.
Answering a hurry call. In the midst of the confusion, a doctor made himself known, and said that if an automobile would convey to the scene of the wreck, He would gladly lend his medical assistance. But the natives told us there were no automobile roads leading up to the scene of Mr. Brookens' fall. "'Doctor,' said I, "'jump into my machine, and I will take you to the accident.' Without a word, he took his seat beside me. The engine was started, and away we flew. In less than two minutes from the time we left the field, we located Walter Brookens, and were standing beside him in the midst of a little swamp. congratulating him on his narrow escape. We were the first upon the scene. Here again this little episode only goes to show to what purposes the aeroplane of the future may be put.
Purposes that may not always be practical now, but will be in the near future. I wish to point out the features that stand out most prominently in this incident, namely the ease with which we were able to locate the scene of the supposed calamity This power of locating objects hidden from the view of people on the ground is adaptable to many useful purposes. The most prominent purpose that might suggest itself would be the locating of a hidden enemy in war maneuvers. A useful purpose would be the locating of children lost in the woods or criminals seeking refuge from justice. Having tried to show that which may interest the business man, the sportsman and the artist in the line of aviation, and how they can pursue their interest, I want next to show more definitely that they can do so safely.
In the first place, any one taking up aviation must be properly taught before it is safe to trust himself to his own care in the air. He must learn to fly steadily and evenly in calm weather. And to know the limits of his machine in those conditions. He must then be taught to fly in a similar manner when the air is in a disturbed condition. He must know the dangers of rising too rapidly, of descending too slowly, of banking too steeply, and of changing the course of his flight in any given direction too suddenly. He must learn these conditions until they are instinctive to him. One of the greatest dangers connected with aviation is the fact that things happen with very little warning. And if the aviator fails to catch the warning when it is given, disaster is likely to follow.
For example, an automobile driver has a warning that his machine is taking a curve too rapidly by the fact that it either starts to skid or else he is leaned to one side or the other with a greater force than ordinarily. Both warnings are obvious to the expert and easily discerned by the novice. In the case of an airship, there is no such warning, because in taking the curve, the machine is always banked, and therefore the operator has no tendency to be thrown on one side or the other. He is merely pressed into his seat a little harder than usual, but this additional pressure into the seat is most important. The aviator must remember or consider that the heavy engine, the gasoline tank with its weight of fuel, and perhaps an additional passenger are all being forced into their seats or framework with a proportionately greater force, and that all this combined force is being thrown upon the wings of the machine.
There is, of course, a limit to the strength of these wings, and the aviator must understand and instinctively feel this limit before he is safe.
The aviator in windy weather will under no conditions approach these limits too closely, because an unexpected squall or gust of wind may upset his calculations. But this matter of mastery of the aeroplane cannot be taken up in this article. Just now I wish it to suffice to say that, should anyone master the above situations thoroughly, And they are really very simple. And if he will never attempt to exceed the limits the teacher has taught him, he will be nearly as safe in the air as up on the ground. When it rained cigars. Having tried to show wherein aviation is adaptable to almost any type of individual, I want to return again to the subject of the mental makeup of the aviator. Many people have said to me, I know I never could fly, because I am affected with a great sense of dizziness when I get on high places.
This so-called sense of dizziness is unknown in the aeroplane. Time and again I have taken into the air, to high altitudes, people who have particularly impressed upon me the fact that they are troubled with this sense of stationary altitude dizziness. But I have never seen or heard of anyone who had the slightest tendency in that direction while in the air. I cannot personally analyze the reasons why one should be dizzy at a stationary height and not from a movable altitude, but I believe they exist chiefly because the aeroplane is being forced through the air by a great power that gives one a sense of security, so long as the power is in evidence. I was flying in a little New England community one beautifully calm afternoon, and in view of the conditions of the weather, had offered to take up one passenger.
While the crowd was debating who should be the lucky or unlucky person to make the flight, a group of prominent men in the locality singled out one of their members and dared him to make the flight. He finally agreed that he would draw lots with his companions, and if the lot fell to him, he would then Take a chance. Strangely enough, the lot did fall to him, and he was a frightened-looking man. Bravely, however, he took his seat in the aeroplane, and not being satisfied with my assurance that he would not be dizzy in the slightest, he obliged me to strap him firmly to his seat. Just before we took to the air, one of the men in the group passed him a box of cigars, requesting him to distribute its contents to the crowd beneath him when he was in the air.
Peacefully and smoothly we rose from the field, and little by little, as my passenger nodded his consent, I rose higher and higher. When we were about three hundred feet above the heads of the multitude, he suddenly realized that he had the box of cigars in his hand, and with great glee he proceeded to distribute them. I was looking down to see the scrambling in the crowd as the cigars reached them, when there was a great crash back of me, and immediately the air was filled with cigar-box wood and fragments of tobacco. Shutting off the power, I made an immediate descent to the ground and landed in an adjacent field, thinking that my propeller must have been broken. As I stepped from the seat, Feeling joyful at our narrow escape, my passenger said to me, Let's get some more boxes of cigars and throw them down to the crowd.
That was certainly the greatest fun I ever had. I looked at him very seriously and said, You may not be affected with aerial dizziness, but you certainly are affected by a much more dangerous condition of the mind. Many people suppose that the aviator must have a delicate sense of equilibrium in order to fly an aeroplane. They believe he must first be proficient in walking rail fences, in standing on his head, or in balancing upon a tightrope. This art of balancing oneself on stationary objects is by no means essential. It requires no sense of equilibrium whatsoever to operate an aeroplane, because it does not have to be balanced. An aeroplane steers in three dimensions instead of in two, as in the case of an automobile.
It is no more difficult to keep the aeroplane in a correct lateral position than it is to steer an automobile in a straight line. Like the automobile, the machine will not hold a straight course unguided, because there are deflections in the air, just as there are deflections in the roadway. But the machine is so heavy that the shifting of a few pounds upon it, even many pounds, one way or the other, will have little or no effect. It is possible to keep on enumerating the various things an aviator does not have to be, and which the general public thinks are necessary. But I can state positively the fact that there is nothing he has to be other than a sane and normally intelligent person.
Following the Mohawk The great future of the aeroplane, its coming necessity to mankind, and its marvelous possibilities, was impressed upon my mind most strongly one night when I was making a leg of my flight between the cities of St. Louis and New York. Owing to the inclemency of the weather, I had been obliged to remain upon the ground until late in the afternoon. I was located in a little valley in the hills just outside the suburbs of Syracuse. In accordance with my customary schedule, I desired to cover at least a hundred miles more toward my destination. At sunset, the disturbing wind elements suddenly died out, and I immediately prepared for flight. Ten minutes later, and the smoke of the city of Syracuse was fast becoming a speck in the western horizon.
I shall never forget that beautiful evening. The Mohawk River lay beneath me. But as it wound in and out between the hills, I would leave its course for a few minutes at a time, and pick it up again at another point. Twilight set in, and the valley and the river became very indistinct. The tops of the hills and the mountains, however, stood out clearly in the waning light. One by one I could make out the lights of the farmhouses, thousands of feet beneath me in the valley. And they seemed to increase in number in exactly the same manner as the stars above me increased in number. Finally the Mohawk became shrouded in darkness, and it was only when passing over a lighted village or town that I was able to distinguish anything.
I felt as if I were in a dream. I gazed into the dark depths and wondered what sensations the mortals down there were experiencing, as I roared over their communities. I did not experience any inability to keep my equilibrium, but I did experience a peculiar sense of giddiness, which was probably due to the unusual surroundings. Mile after mile I flew high over the valley, marveling at the wonders of the situation, and forgetting that sooner or later I should be obliged to make a landing. This realization came to me very forcibly, when I discovered that it was almost impossible to make out even the tops of the mountains. Then I selected the first hill I came to, and began circling round it in long spirals, gradually coming to it closer and closer.
Finally, discovering an opening among the trees, I dropped into it safely. It seems to me that this experience alone demonstrates very clearly the possibilities and the adaptability of aviation to almost every type of mankind. The only feature about it that can be criticized or questioned is the fact that it is accompanied by considerable danger. But it will not take long for human ingenuity to eliminate this one and only obstacle.
End of The Making of an Aviator by Harry N.
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10 10 - Mother Hubbard's Cupboard: Beverage Recipes (1880) 5:50
Mother Hubbard's Cupboard. Recipes collected by the Young Ladies' Society. First Baptist Church, Rochester, New York. Fourth edition. By the Young Ladies' Society. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Beverages. Vienna Coffee. Equal parts mocha and java coffee. Allow one heaping tablespoon of coffee to each person, and two extra to make good strength. Mix one egg with the grounds. Pour on the coffee half as much boiling water as will be needed. Let the coffee froth, then stir down the grounds, and let it boil five minutes. Then let the coffee stand where it will keep hot, but not boil. For five or ten minutes, and add the rest of the water.
To one pint of cream, add the white of an egg, well beaten. This is to be put in the cups with the sugar and the hot coffee added. Mrs. A.W. Mudge. K-O-K-A Coffee. Put into an ordinary tea or coffee pot the same quantity of K-O-K as would be used of coffee. Pour on sufficient boiling water to extract the strength, letting boil 15 minutes, after which add enough boiling water for the requirements of the family, remove from the stove, and let settle for a few moments, milk or cream and sugar to taste. It will be found to improve by long simmering on the stove, but be sure to let it settle before using. Do not throw away any of the clear liquid. But heat it up again, and add to the next brewing, it is even better than the first.
Ellen's Coffee for six persons. Take one full cup ground coffee, one egg, a little cold water, stir together, add one pint boiling water, boil up, then add another pint boiling water, and set back to settle before serving. Tea. One teaspoon of tea is allowed for each person. Pour on a little boiling water and let it come to boil. Add as much hot water as is necessary. Chocolate. Tablespoon chocolate for each person. Pour on boiling water and allow to thicken up. Milk enough to cool, then stir in well-beaten egg and sugar to taste. Add milk and boil 15 or 20 minutes. Flavor with vanilla. Beat whites of eggs and pour over them when ready to serve. Wine whey. One pint sweet milk. Boil and pour sherry wine until it curdles.
Then strain and use the whey. EHH. Blackcurrant cordial. Five quarts blackcurrants. Two ounces ginger root. One ounce cloves. Two ounces stick cinnamon. Two ounces allspice. Four nutmegs. One teaspoon cayenne pepper. Bruise the currants, the ginger root, and cinnamon. Add all the other spices except pepper. Put into a thin muslin bag. Put the pepper in another bag. Pour over all one half gallon whiskey. Let it stand 48 hours. Stirring occasionally. Strain this off and put over the currants another half gallon of whiskey. Stir thoroughly and strain into the other whiskey. Add to this liquor four pounds granulated sugar. If too strong, dilute with a little water, then bottle. Grandma Reed.
Bullion. Two pounds lean beef, chopped fine. Pour over it one quart cold water. Put it in a porcelain kettle. Cover tight and let it simmer four hours. Strain off the tea and let it cool. Beat the white of one egg and add to the tea. Put it on the stove and stir until it comes to a boil. Let it boil until it becomes perfectly clear. Skimming, then strain through a fine napkin. Season with salt to taste. Ms. Edgar Holmes. Raspberry vinegar. Cut the berries with vinegar. Let them stand 48 hours. Strain them through a sieve. Add one pound white sugar to one pint of juice. Boil one half hour, then bottle. If possible, use half red berries. They give a richer flavor than the black ones in color. Ms.
A. Lane. Raspberry vinegar. Three pints red berries. Pour over them one pint cider vinegar, and let stand 24 hours. Strain, and to one pint of juice, add one pound sugar. Boil one half hour, and when cold, bottle for use. Miss Hiram Dottie. End of Mother Hubbard's Cupboard. Recipes collected by the Young Ladies Society. First Baptist Church, Rochester, NY. Fourth edition. Beverages by the Young Ladies Society.
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11 11 - News from Scotland Concerning Witchcraft (1591) 33:59
News from Scotland, by Anonymous, from a collection of rare and curious tracks on witchcraft and the second sight, printed for David Webster of Edinburgh. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. News from Scotland, declaring the damnable life of Dr. Fian, a notable sorcerer who was burned at Edinburgh. In January last, 1591, which doctor was registered to the devil that sundry times preached at North Barrettkirk to a number of notorious witches, with the true examinations of the said doctor and witches as they uttered them in the presence of the Scottish King, discovering how they pretended to bewitch and drown His Majesty in the sea coming from Denmark.
with other such wonderful matters as the like have not been heard at any time. Published according to the Scottish copy. Printed for William Wright. Edinburgh. Reprinted for D. Webster. 35 West College Street. 1820. To the Reader. The manifold untruths which are spread abroad concerning the detestable actions and apprehension of those which is Whereof this history following truly entreateth, has caused me to publish the same in print, and the rather, for that sundry written copies are lately dispersed thereof, containing that the Sid witches were first discovered by means of a poor peddler travelling to the town of Trenent, and that, by a wonderful manner, he was in a moment conveyed at midnight from Scotland to Bordeaux in France, being places of no small distance, into a merchant's cellar there, and After being sent from Bordeaux into Scotland by certain Scottish merchants to the King's Majesty, that he discovered those witches and was the cause of their apprehension, with a number of matters miraculous and incredible, all which in truth are most false.
Nevertheless, to satisfy a number of honest minds who are desirous to be informed of the verity and truth of their confessions, which for certainty is more stranger than the common report runneth, and yet... With more truth, I have undertaken to publish this short treatise which declares the true discourse of all that happened, as well as what was pretended by those wicked and detestable witches against the King's Majesty, as also by what means they wrought the same. All witch examinations, gentle reader, I have here truly published as they were taken and uttered in the presence of the King's Majesty. Praying thee to accept it for verity, the same being so true as cannot be reproved.
A true discourse of the apprehension of sundry witches lately taken in Scotland, whereof some are executed and some are yet imprisoned, with a particular recital of their examinations taken in the presence of the King's Majesty. Goed by his omnipotent power, Hath at all times and daily doeth take such care, and is so vigilant for the weal and preservation of his own, that thereby he disappointeth the wicked practices and evil intents of all such as by any means whatsoever seek indirectly to conspire any thing contrary to his holy will. And by the same power he hath lately overthrown and hindered the intentions and wicked dealings of a great number of ungodly creatures. No better than devils, who, suffering themselves to be allured and enticed by the devil whom they served, and unto whom they were privately sworn, entered into the detestable art of witchcraft, which they studied and practiced so long time that in the end they had seduced by their sorcery a number of others to be as bad as themselves.
Dwelling in the bounds of the Louthian, which is a principal shire or part of Scotland, where the King's Majesty useth to make his chiefest residence or abode, and to the end that their detestable wickedness, which they had privily pretended against the King's Majesty, the Commonwealth of the country, with the nobility and the subjects of the same, should come to light. God of his unspeakable goodness did reveal and let open in very strange sort thereby to make known to the world that their actions were contrary to the law of God, and the natural affection which we ought generally to bear one to another. The manner of the revealing whereof was as followeth. Within the town of Trenent, in the kingdom of Scotland, there dwelleth one David Seton, who, being the deputy bailiff in the said town, had a maid called Gillies Duncan, who used secretly to absent and lie forth of her master's house every other night.
This Gillies Duncan took in hand to help all such as were troubled or grieved with any kind of sickness or infirmity, and in short space did perform many matters most miraculous, which things, forasmuch as she began to do them upon a sudden, having never done the like before, made her master and others be in great admiration, and wondered thereat. By means whereof the said David Seaton had his maid in great suspicion that she did not those things By natural unlawful ways, but rather supposed it to be done by some extraordinary and unlawful means. Whereupon her master began to grow very inquisitive, and examined her, which way and by what means she was able to perform matters of so great importance.
Whereat she gave him no answer. Nevertheless, her master, to the intent that he might try to find out the truth of the same, Did with the help of others torment her with the torture of the Pillywinks upon her fingers, which is a grievous torture, and binding or wrenching her head with a cord or rope, which is a most cruel torment also. Yet she would not confess anything. Whereupon they, suspecting that she had been marked by the devil, as commonly witches are, made diligent search about her, and found the enemy's mark to be in her forkrag. or four parts of her throat, which being found, she confessed that all her doings was done by the wicked allurements and enticements of the devil, and that she did them by witchcraft.
After this her confession, she was committed to prison, where she continued a season, where immediately she accused these persons following to be notorious witches, and caused them forthwith to be apprehended one after another, viz. Agnes Sampson, the eldest witch of them all, dwelling in Haddington, Agnes Thompson of Edinburgh, Dr. Thean, alias John Cunningham, master of the school at Saltpans in Lothian, whose life and strange acts you shall hear more largely in the end of this discourse. These were by the said Gillies Duncan Hughes, as also George Mott's wife, dwelling in Lothian, Robert Grayson, Skipper, and Janet Blandylunds. With the potter's wife of Satan, the smith at Brig Halley's, with innumerable others in those parts, and dwelling in the bounds aforesaid, of whom some are already executed, the rest remain in prison to receive the doom of judgment at the King's Majesty's will and pleasure.
The said Gailies Duncan also caused Euphemy Macalrean to be apprehended, who conspired and performed. The death of her godfather, and who used her art upon a gentleman, being one of the lords and justices of the Session, for bearing goodwill to her daughter. She also caused to be apprehended one Barbara Napier for bewitching to death Archibald, late Earl of Angus, who languished to death by witchcraft, and yet the same was not suspected. But that he died of so strange a disease as the physician knew not how to cure or remedy the same. But of all the other said witches, these two last, before recited, were reputed as civil and honest women as any that dwelled within the city of Edinburgh before they were apprehended.
Many other besides were taken dwelling in Leith, who were detained in prison until His Majesty's further will and pleasure be known. Of whose wicked doings you shall particularly hear, which was as followeth.
This aforesaid Agnes Sampson, which was the elder witch, was taken and brought to Holyrood House before the King's Majesty, and sundry other of the nobility of Scotland, where she was straightly examined. But all the persuasions which the King's Majesty used to her with the rest of his counsel might not provoke or induce her. to confess anything, but stood stiffly in the denial of all that was laid to her charge. Whereupon they caused her to be conveyed away unto prison, there to receive such torture as hath been lately provided for witches in that country. And forasmuch by due examination of witchcraft and witches in Scotland, it hath lately been found that the devil doeth generally mark them with a privy mark.
By reason, the witches have confessed themselves that the devil doth lick them with his tongue in some privy part of their body, before he doeth receive them to be his servants. Which mark commonly is given under the hair in some part of their body, whereby it may not easily be found out or seen, although they be searched. And generally. So long as the mark is not seen to those which search them, so long the parties which have the mark will never confess anything. Therefore, by special commandment, this Agnes Sampson had all her hair shaven off in each part of her body, and her head thrown with a rope according to the custom of that country, being a pain most grievous, which they continued for almost an hour.
During which time she would not confess anything until the devil's mark was found upon her privities. Then she immediately confessed whatsoever was demanded of her, and justifying those persons aforesaid to be notorious witches. Item. The said Angus Samson was after but again before the King's Majesty and his council, and being examined of the meeting, And detestable dealings of those witches, she confessed that upon the night of All Hallow Eve and last, she was accompanied as well with the persons aforesaid, as also with a great many other witches, to the number of two hundredth, and that all they together went to see, each one in a riddle or sif, and went in the same very substantially, with flagons of wine, making merry and drinking.
By the way, in the same riddles or sifts, to the kirk of North Barrack in Lothian, and that after they had landed, took hands on the land, and danced this reel, or short dance, singing all with one voice. Come a go ye before, come a go ye, gift ye will not go before, come a let me. At which time she confessed that this gill is Duncan, Did go before them, playing this reel or dance, upon a small trumpie, called a dews trumpie, until they entered into the kirk of North Barrack. These confessions made the king in a wonderful admiration, and sent for the said gillies Duncan, who upon the like trumpie, did play the said dance before the king's majesty, who in respect of the strangeness of these matters took great delight.
to be present at their examinations. Item. The said Agnes Sampson confessed that the devil, being they in North Barrett Kirk, attending their coming in the habit or likeness of a man, and seeing that they tarried overlong, he at their coming enjoined them all to a penance, which was that they should kiss his buttocks in sign of duty to him, which, being put over the pulpit bare, Every one did as he enjoined them. And having made his ungodly exhortations, wherein he did greatly inveigh against the King of Scotland, he received their oaths for their good and true service towards him, and departed. Which done, they returned to sea, and so home again. At which time the witches demanded of the devil, why did he bear such hatred?
Towards the king, who answered, by reason, the king is the greatest enemy he hath in the world, all which their confessions and depositions are still extant upon record.
Item. The said Agnes Sampson confessed before the king's majesty sundry things which were so miraculous and strange as that his majesty said they were all extreme liars. Whereat she answered, she would not wish his majesty to suppose her words to be false, but rather to believe them, in that she would discover such matters unto him as his majesty should not any way doubt of. And thereupon, taking his majesty a little aside, she declared unto him the very words which passed between the king's majesty and his queen at Upslo in Norway the first night of marriage. With the answer each to the other, whereat the King's Majesty wondered greatly, and swore by the living God, that he believed all the devils in Hale could not have discovered the same, acknowledging her words to be most true, and therefore gave the more credit to the rest that is before declared.
Touching this Agnes Sampson, she is the only woman who, by the devil's persuasion, should have intended and put in execution the King's Majesty's death in this manner. She confessed that she took a black toad, and did hang the same up by the heels three days, and collected and gathered the venom it dropped, and fell from it in an oyster shell, and kept the same venom close covered. Until she should obtain any part or piece of foul linen cloth that had appertained to the King's Majesty, as shirt, handkerchief, napkin, or any other thing, which she practised to obtain by means of one John Currs, who, being an attendant in His Majesty's Chamber, desired him for all acquaintance between them, to help her to one or a piece of such a cloth as is aforesaid.
Which thing? The said John Kerr's denied to help her to, saying he could not help her unto it. And the said Agnes Sampson, by her dispositions since her apprehension, saith that if she had obtained any one piece of linen cloth which the king had worn and fouled, she had bewitched him to death, and put him to such extraordinary pains as if he had been lying upon sharp thorns and ends of needles. Moreover, she confessed that at the time when His Majesty was in Denmark, she, being accompanied by the parties before specially named, took a cat and christened it, and afterward bound to each part of that cat the chiefest part of a dead man, and several joints of his body, and that in the night following the said cat was conveyed to the midst of the sea by all the witches.
Sailing in the riddles of saves, as is aforesaid, and so left the said-cart right before the town of Leith in Scotland. This done there did arise such a tempest in the sea as the greater hath not been seen. Which tempest was the cause of the perishing of a boat or vessel coming over from the town of Brunt Island to the town of Leith, wherein was sundry jewels and rich gifts which should have been presented to the now Queen of Scotland. At Her Majesty's coming to Leith.
Again it is confessed that the said Cressen cart was the cause that the King's Majesty's ship, at his coming forth of Denmark, had a contrary wind to the rest of his ships then being in his company. Which thing was most strange and true as the King's Majesty acknowledges? For when the rest of the ships had a fair and good wind, then was the wind contrary and altogether against his Majesty. And further, the said witch declared that His Majesty had never come safely from the sea if his faith had not prevailed above their intentions.
Moreover, the said witches being demanded how the devil would use them when he was in their company, they confessed that when the devil did receive them for his servants, and that they had vowed themselves unto him, then he would carnally use them, albeit to their little pleasure. In respect to his cold nature, and would do the like at sundry other times.
As touching the aforesaid Dr. Fian, alias John Cunningham, the examination of his acts since his apprehension declareth the great subtlety of the devil, and therefore maketh things to appear the more miraculous. For, being apprehended by the accusation of the said Gilles Duncan aforesaid, Who confessed he was their register, and that there was not one man suffered to come to the devil's readings, but only he. The said doctor was taken and imprisoned, and used with the accustomed pain provided for those offences inflicted upon the race as is aforesaid. First by the throwing of his head with a rope, where it he would confess nothing. Secondly, he was persuaded by fair means to confess his fullies.
But that would prevail as little. Lastly, he was put to the most severe and cruel pain in the world, called the Boots, who after he had received three strokes, being inquired if he would confess his damnable acts and wicked life, his tongue would not serve him to speak, in respect whereof the rest of the witches willed to search his tongue, under which was found two pins thrust up into the head. Whereupon the witches did say, Now the charm is stinted, and showed that those charm-pins were the cause he could not confess anything. Then he was immediately released of the boots, brought before the king, his confession was taken, and his own hand willingly set thereunto, which contained as followeth.
First, that at the general meetings of those witches he was always present, That he was the clerk to all those that were in subjection to the devil's service, bearing the name of the witches. That always he did take their oaths for their true service to the devil, and that he wrote for them such matters as the devil still pleased to command him.
Item. He confessed that by his witchcraft he did bewitch a gentleman dwelling near to the saltpans, where the said doctor kept school. Only for being enamoured of a gentlewoman whom he loved himself, by means of which his sorcery, witchcraft, and devilish practices, he caused the said gentleman that once in twenty-four hours he fell into a lunacy and madness, and so continued one whole hour together. And for the verity of the same, he caused the gentleman to be brought before the King's Majesty, which was upon the twenty-fourth day of December last. And being in his majesty's chamber, suddenly he gave a great screech and fell into madness, sometime bending himself and sometime capering so directly up that his head did touch the ceiling of the chamber, to the great admiration of his majesty and others then present, so that all the gentlemen in the chamber were not able to hold him until they called in more help, who together bound him hand and foot, And suffering the said gentleman to lie still until his fury was past, he within an hour came to himself, when being demanded by the King's Majesty what he saw or did all that while, answered that he had been in a sound sleep.
Item, the said doctor, did also confess that he had used means, sundry times, to obtain his purpose and wicked intent of the same gentlewoman. And seeing himself disappointed of his intention, he determined by all ways he might, to obtain the same, trusting by conjuring, witchcraft, and sorcery, to obtain it in this manner. It happened this gentlewoman, being unmarried, had a brother who went to school with the said doctor, and calling the said scholar to him, demanded if he did lie with his sister, who answered he did. By means whereof he thought to obtain his purpose, and therefore secretly promised to teach him without stripes, so he would obtain for him three hairs of his sister's privities, at such a time as he should spy the best occasion for it, which the youth promised faithfully to perform, and vowed speedily to put it into practice, taking a piece of conjured paper of his master to lap them in when he had gotten them.
And thereupon the boy practised nightly to obtain his maister's purpose, especially when his sister was asleep.
But God, who knoweth the secret of all hearts, and revealeth all wicked and ungodly practices, would not suffer the intents of this devilish doctor to come to that purpose which he supposed it would. And therefore, to declare that he was heavily offended with his wicked intent, did so work by the gentlewoman's own means, that in the end the same was discovered and brought to light. For she, being one night asleep, and her brother in bed with her, suddenly cried out to her mother, declaring that her brother would not suffer her to sleep, whereupon her mother, having a quick capacity, did vehemently suspect Dr. Fianne's intention, by reason she was a witch of herself, and therefore presently arose, and was very inquisitive of the boy to understand his intent, and the better to know the same did beat him with sundry stripes, whereby he discovered the truth unto her.
The mother, therefore being well practiced in witchcraft, Did think it most convenient to meet with the doctor in his own art, and thereupon took the paper from the boy, wherein he would have put the same hairs, and went to a young hiffy, which never had borne calf, nor gone on to the bull, and with a pair of shears clipped off three hairs from the udder of the cow, and wrapped them in the same paper, which he again delivered to the boy. And then willing him to give the same to his said master, which he immediately did. The schoolmaster, so soon as he did receive them, thinking them indeed to be the maid's hares, went straight and wrought his art upon them. But the doctor had no sooner done his intent to them.
But presently the heifer cow, whose hares they were indeed, came unto the door of the church wherein the schoolmaster was, into the which the heifer went. and made towards the schoolmaster leaping and dancing upon him, and following him forth of the church, and to what place soever he went, to the great admiration of all the townsmen of Saltpans, and many others who did behold the same. The report whereof made all men imagine that he did work it by the devil, without whom it could never have been so sufficiently effected. And thereupon the name of the said Dr. Fian, who was but a young man, began to grow common among the people of Scotland, that he was secretly nominated for a notable conjurer.
All which, although in the beginning he denied, and would not confess, yet having felt the pain of the boots, and the charm stinted as aforesaid, he confessed all the aforesaid to be most true. Without producing any witnesses to justify the same. And thereupon, before the King's Majesty, he subscribed the Seid Confession with his own hand, which for truth remaineth upon the record in Scotland. After that, the depositions and examinations of the Seid Docte de Fian, alias Cunningham, was taken, as already is declared, with his own hand willingly set thereunto. He was by the master of the prison committed to ward, and appointed to a chamber by himself, where forsaking his wicked ways, acknowledging his most ungodly life, showing that he had too much followed the allurements and enticements of Satan, and fondly practised his conclusions by conjuring, witchcraft, enchantment, sorcery, and such like.
He renounced the devil and all his wicked works. Vowed to lead the life of a Christian, and seemed newly converted towards God. The morrow after, upon conference had with him, he granted that the devil had appeared unto him the night before, apparelled all in black, with a white wand in his hand. And that devil demanded of him if he would continue his faithful service according to his first oath, and promise made to that effect. Whom, as he then said, he utterly renounced to his face, and said unto him in this manner, Avoid, Satan, avoid, for I have listened too much unto thee, and by the same thou hast undone me. In respect whereof I utterly forsake thee. To whom the devil answered, That once ere thou die, thou shalt be mine.
And with that, as he said, the devil break the white wand. And immediately vanished forth of his sight. Thus all the day this Dr. Fian continued very solitary, and seemed to have a care of his own soul, and would cool upon God, showing himself penitent for his wicked life. Neither the Lace, the same night he found such means that he stole the key of the prison door and the chamber in which he was, which in the night he opened and fled away to the saltpans, where he was always resident. And first apprehended. Of whose sudden departure, when the King's Majesty had intelligence, he presently caused diligent inquiry to be made for his apprehension. And for the better effecting thereof, he sent public proclamations into all parts of his land to the same effect.
By means of whose hot and hard pursuit he was again taken and brought to prison, and then, being called before the King's Highness, He was examined as well touching his departure, as also touching all that had before happened. But this doctor, notwithstanding his own confession, appeareth remaining in the record under his own handwriting, and the same thereunto fixed in the presence of the king's majesty and sundry of his council. Yet did he utterly deny the same. Thereupon, the King's Majesty, perceiving his stubborn wealthiness, conceived and imagined that in the time of his absence he had entered into a new conference and league with the devil, his master, and that he had been again newly marked, for which he was narrowly searched.
But it could not in any way be found, yet for more trial of him to make him confess he was commanded to have a most strange torment, which was done in this manner following. His nails upon all his fingers were riven and pulled off with an instrument called in Scottish a turkis, which in England we call a pair of pincers, and under every nail there was thrust in through needles, over even up to the heads. At all which torments, notwithstanding, the doctor never shrunk any whit. Neither would he confess it the sooner, for all the tortures inflicted upon him. Then he was with all convenient speed, by commandment, conveyed again to the torment of the boots, wherein he continued a long time, and did abide so many blows in them, that his legs were crushed and beaten to gear, as small as might be, and for the bones and flesh so bruised, that the blood and marrow spouted forth in great abundance, whereby they were made unserviceable for ever.
And notwithstanding these grievous pains and cruel torments, he would not confess anything. So deeply had the devil entered his heart, that he utterly denied that which he before avouched, and would say nothing thereunto but this, that what he had done and said before was only done and said for fear of pains which he had endured. Upon great consideration, therefore, taken by the King's Majesty and his counsel, as well as for the due execution of justice upon such detestable malefactors, as also, for example's sake, to remain a terror to all others hereafter that shall attempt dealing the like wicked and ungodly actions as witchcraft, sorcery, conjuration, and such like. The said Dr. Fian was soon after arraigned He was condemned and adjudged by the law to die, and then to be burned according to the law of that land, provided in that behalf.
Whereupon he was put into a cart, and being first strangled, he was immediately put into a great fire, being ready provided for that purpose. And then burned in the Castle Hill of Edinburgh on Saturday in the end of January, last past, 1591. The rest of the witches and not yet executed, remain in prison till farther trial and knowledge of his majesty's pleasure. This strange discourse before recited may perhaps give some occasion of doubt to such as shall happen to read the same, and thereby conjecture that the king's majesty would hazard himself in the presence of such notorious witches Lest thereby might have ensued great danger to his person and the general state of the land, which thing, in truth, might well have been feared.
But to answer generally to such let this suffice, that first it is well known that the King is the child and servant of God, and they but servants to the devil. He is the Lord's anointed, and they but vessels of God's wrath. He is a true Christian. And trusteth in God, they worse than infidels, for they only trust in the devil, who daily serve them, till he hath brought them to utter destruction. But hereby it seemeth that his Highness carried a magnanimous and undaunted mind, not feared with their enchantments, but resolute in this, that so long as God is with him, he feareth not who is against him. And truly, The whole scope of this treatise doth so plainly lay open the wonderful providence of the Almighty, that, if he had not defended by his omnipotence and power, his Highness had never returned alive in his voyage from Denmark.
So there is no doubt but God would as well defend him on land as on sea, where they pretended their damnable practice. FINNICE End of News from Scotland Binonymous.
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12 12 - Palace of the Alhambra 29:49
Palace of the Alhambra, excerpt from The Alhambra, by Washington Irving. 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 Rita Boutros.
Palace of the Alhambra. To the traveler imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, so inseparably intertwined in the annals of romantic Spain, the Alhambra is as much an object of devotion as is the Kaaba to all true Muslims. How many legends and traditions, true and fabulous, how many songs and ballads, Arabian and Spanish, of love and war and chivalry, are associated with this oriental pile. It was the royal abode of the Moorish kings, where, surrounded with the splendors and refinements of Asiatic luxury, they held dominion over what they vaunted as a terrestrial paradise, and made their last stand for empire in Spain. The royal palace forms but a part of a fortress, the walls of which, studded with towers, stretch irregularly round the whole crest of a hill, a spur of the Sierra Nevada, or snowy mountains, and overlook the city.
Externally, it is a rude congregation of towers and battlements, with no regularity of plan nor grace of architecture, and giving little promise of the grace and beauty which prevail within. In the time of the Moors, the fortress was capable of containing within its outward precincts an army of forty thousand men, and served occasionally as a stronghold of the sovereigns against their rebellious subjects. After the kingdom had passed into the hands of the Christians, the Alhambra continued to be a royal demence, and was occasionally inhabited by the Castilian monarchs. The Emperor, Charles V, commenced a sumptuous palace within its walls, but was deterred from completing it by repeated shocks of earthquakes.
The last royal residents were Philip V and his beautiful Queen Elizabeth of Parma, early in the 18th century. Great preparations were made for this reception. The palace and gardens were placed in a state of repair, and a new suite of apartments erected, and decorated by artists brought from Italy. The sojourn of the sovereigns was transient, and after their departure the palace once more became desolate. Still, the place was maintained with some military state. The governor held it immediately from the crown, its jurisdiction extended down into the suburbs of the city, and was independent of the captain-general of Granada. A considerable garrison was kept up. The governor had his apartments in the front of the old Moorish palace, and never descended into Granada without some military parade.
The fortress, in fact, was a little town of itself, Having several streets of houses within its walls, together with a Franciscan convent and a parochial church. The desertion of the court, however, was a fatal blow to the Alhambra. Its beautiful halls became desolate, and some of them fell to ruin. The gardens were destroyed, and the fountains ceased to play. By degrees the dwellings became filled with a loose and lawless population. Contrabandistas, who availed themselves of its independent jurisdiction, to carry on a wide and erring course of smuggling, and thieves and rogues of all sorts, who made this their place of refuge, whence they might depredate upon Granada and its vicinity. The strong arm of government at length interfered.
The whole community was thoroughly sifted. None were suffered to remain, but such as were of honest character, and had legitimate right to a residence. The greater part of the houses were demolished, and a mere hamlet left, with the parochial church and the Franciscan convent. During the recent troubles in Spain, when Granada was in the hands of the French, the Alhambra was garrisoned by their troops, And the palace was occasionally inhabited by the French commander. With that enlightened taste which has ever distinguished the French nation in their conquests, this monument of Moorish elegance and grandeur was rescued from the absolute ruin and desolation that were overwhelming it. The roofs were repaired, the saloons and galleries protected from the weather, the gardens cultivated, the water-courses restored.
The fountains once more may to throw up their sparkling showers, and Spain may thank her invaders for having preserved to her the most beautiful and interesting of her historical monuments. On the departure of the French, they blew up several towers of the outer wall, and left the fortifications scarcely tenable. Since that time, the military importance of the post is at an end. The garrison is a handful of invalid soldiers, whose principal duty is to guard some of the outer towers, which serve occasionally as a prison of state. And the governor, abandoning the lofty hill of the Alhambra, resides in the center of Granada, for the more convenient dispatch of his official duties. I cannot conclude this brief notice of the state of the fortress without bearing testimony to the honorable exertions of its present commander, Don Francisco de Serna, who is tasking all the limited resources at his command to put the palace in a state of repair, and by his judicious precautions has for some time arrested its too certain decay.
Had his predecessors discharged the duties of their station with equal fidelity, the Alhambra might yet have remained in almost its pristine beauty. Were government to second him with means equal to his zeal, this relic of it might still be preserved for many generations, to adorn the land, and attract the curious and enlightened of every clime. Our first object of course on the morning after our arrival, was a visit to this time-honored edifice. It has been so often, however, and so minutely described by travelers, that I shall not undertake to give a comprehensive and elaborate account of it, but merely occasional sketches of parts, with the incidents and associations connected with them. Leaving our Posada, and traversing the renowned square of the Viva Rambla, Once the scene of Moorish jousts and tournaments, now a crowded market-place, we proceeded along the Zacatin, the main street of what, in the time of the Moors, was the Great Bazaar, and where small shops and narrow alleys still retain the oriental character.
Crossing an open place in front of the palace of the Captain-General, we ascended a confined and winding street, The name of which reminded us of the chivalric days of Granada. It is called the Calle, or Street of the Gomeras, from a Moorish family famous in Chronicle and Song. This street led up to the Puerta de las Granadas, a massive gateway of Grecian architecture built by Charles V, forming the entrance to the domains of the Alhambra. At the gate were two or three ragged superannuated soldiers dozing on a stone bench, the successors of the Zegrees and the Abensarages, while a tall, meager varlet, whose rusty brown cloak was evidently intended to conceal the ragged state of his nether garments, was lounging in the sunshine and gossiping with an ancient sentinel on duty.
He joined us as we entered the gate, and offered his services to show us the fortress. I have a traveller's dislike to officious Cicerone, and did not altogether like the garb of the applicant. You are well acquainted with the place, I presume? Ninguno mas, pues senor soy hijo de la Alhambra. Nobody better, in fact, sir. I am a son of the Alhambra. The common Spaniards have certainly a most poetical way of expressing themselves, a son of the Alhambra. The appellation caught me at once. The very tattered garb of my new acquaintance assumed a dignity in my eyes. It was emblematic of the fortunes of the place, and befitted the progeny of a ruin. I put some further questions to him, and found that his title was legitimate.
His family had lived in the fortress from generation to generation, ever since the time of the conquest. His name was Matteo Ximenez. Then, perhaps, said I, you may be a descendant from the great Cardinal Ximenez. Dios sabe, God knows, senor, it may be so. We are the oldest family in the Alhambra, Cristianos viejos, old Christians, without any taint of Moor or Jew. I know we belong to some great family or other, but I forget whom. My father knows all about it. He has the coat of arms hanging up in his cottage, up in the fortress. There is not any Spaniard, however poor, but has some claim to high pedigree. The first title of this ragged worthy, however, had completely captivated me, so I gladly accepted the services of the son of the Alhambra.
We now found ourselves in a deep, narrow ravine, filled with beautiful groves, with a steep avenue and various footpaths winding through it, bordered with stone seats and ornamented with fountains. To our left we beheld the towers of the Alhambra beetling above us. To our right, on the opposite side of the ravine, we were equally dominated by rival towers on a rocky eminence. These, we were told, were the Torres Vermejos, or Vermillion Towers, so called from their ruddy hue. No one knows their origin. They are of a date much anterior to the Alhambra. Some suppose them to have been built by the Romans, others by some wandering colony of Phoenicians. Ascending the steep and shady avenue, we arrived at the foot of a huge square, Moorish tower, forming a kind of barbican, through which passed the main entrance to the fortress.
Within the barbican was another group of veteran invalids, one mounting guard at the portal, while the rest, wrapped in their tattered cloaks, slept on the stone benches. This portal is called the Gate of Justice, from the tribunal held within its porch during the Muslim domination, for the immediate trial of petty causes. A custom common to the oriental nations, and occasionally alluded to in the sacred scriptures. Judges and officers, shall thou make thee in all thy gates, and they shall judge the people with just judgment. The great vestibule or porch of the gate is formed by an immense Arabian arch of the horseshoe form, which springs to half the height of the tower. On the keystone of this arch is engraven a gigantic hand.
Within the vestibule on the keystone of the portal is sculptured, in like manner, a gigantic key. Those who pretend to some knowledge of mohammedan symbols affirm that the hand is the emblem of doctrine, the five fingers designating the five principal commandments of the creed of Islam—fasting, pilgrimage, almsgiving, Ablution, and war against infidels. The key, say they, is the emblem of the faith or of power, the key of Diud or David, transmitted to the prophet. And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder, so he shall open and none shall shut, and he shall shut and none shall open.
Isiah 22, 22. The key, we are told, was emblazoned on the standard of the Muslims in opposition to the Christian emblem of the cross when they subdued Spain or Andalusia. It betokened the conquering power invested in the prophet. He that hath the key of David, he that openeth and no man shutteth, and shutteth and no man openeth. Revelations Three, Seven. A different explanation of these emblems, however, was given by the legitimate son of the Alhambra, and one more in unison with the notions of the common people, who attach something of mystery and magic to everything moorish, and have all kinds of superstitions connected with this old Muslim fortress. According to Matteo, it was a tradition handed down from the oldest inhabitants.
And which he had, from his father and grandfather, that the hand and key were magical devices, on which the fate of the Alhambra depended. The Moorish king who built it was a great magician, or, as some believed, had sold himself to the devil, and had laid the whole fortress under a magic spell. By this means it had remained standing for several years, in defiance of storms and earthquakes, While almost all other buildings of the Moors had fallen to ruin and disappeared. This spell, the tradition went on to say, would last until the hand on the outer arch should reach down and grasp the key, when the whole pile would tumble to pieces, and all the treasures buried beneath it by the Moors would be revealed.
Notwithstanding this ominous prediction, we ventured to pass through the spellbound gateway, Feeling some little assurance against magic art in the protection of the Virgin, a statue of whom we observed above the portal. After passing through the Barbican, we ascended a narrow lane, winding between walls, and came on an open esplanade within the fortress, called the Plaza de los Algibes, or Place of the Cisterns, From great reservoirs which undermine it, cut in the living rock by the Moors, to receive the water brought by conduits from the Darrow, for the supply of the fortress. Here also is a well of immense depth, furnishing the purest and coldest of water. Another monument of the delicate taste of the Moors, who were indefatigable in their exertions to obtain that element in its crystal purity.
In front of this esplanade is the splendid pile commenced by Charles V, and intended, it is said, to eclipse the residence of the Moorish kings. Much of the oriental edifice intended for the winter season was demolished to make way for this massive pile. The grand entrance was blocked up, so that the present entrance to the Moorish palace is through a simple and almost humble portal in a corner. With all the massive grandeur and architectural merit of the palace of Charles V, we regarded it as an arrogant intruder, and, passing by it with a feeling almost of scorn, rang at the Moslem portal. While waiting for admittance, our self-imposed cicerone, Matteo Ximenez, informed us that the royal palace was intrusted to the care of a worthy old maiden dame called Doña Antonia Molina, but who, according to Spanish custom, went by the more neighborly appellation of Tia Antonia, Aunt Antonia, who maintained the Moorish halls and gardens in order, and showed them to strangers.
While we were talking, the door was opened by a plump little black-eyed Andalusian damsel, whom Matteo addressed as Dolores, but who, from her bright looks and cheerful disposition, evidently merited a merrier name. Matteo informed me in a whisper that she was the niece of Tia Antonia, and I found she was the good fairy who was to conduct us through the enchanted palace. Under her guidance, we crossed the threshold, and were at once transported, as if by magic wand, into other times and an oriental realm, and were treading the scenes of Arabian story. Nothing could be in greater contrast than the unpromising exterior of the pile with the scene now before us. We found ourselves in a vast patio or court, one hundred and fifty feet in length, and upwards of eighty feet in breadth, paved with white marble, and decorated at each end with light Moorish peristiles, one of which supported an elegant gallery of fretted architecture.
Along the moldings of the cornices, and on various parts of the walls were escutcheons and ciphers, and cufic and Arabic characters in high relief, Repeating the pious mottoes of the Muslim Monarchs, the builders of the Alhambra, or extolling their grandeur and munificence. Along the centre of the court extended an immense basin or tank, a Stank, a hundred and twenty-four feet in length, twenty-seven in breadth, and five in depth, receiving its water from two marble vases. Hence it is called the Court of the Alberca, From albirka, the Arabic for a pond or tank. Great numbers of goldfish were to be seen gleaming through the waters of the basin, and it was bordered by hedges of roses. Passing from the court of the albirka under a Moorish archway, we entered the renowned court of lions.
No part of the edifice gives a more complete idea of its original beauty than this, for none has suffered so little from the ravages of time. In the centre stands the fountain famous in song and story. The alabaster basins still shed their diamond drops. The twelve lions which support them and give the court its name still cast forth crystal streams as in the days of Boabdil. The lions, however, are unworthy of their fame, being of miserable sculpture, the work probably of some Christian captive. The court is laid out in flower-beds, instead of its ancient and appropriate pavement of tiles or marble. The alteration, an instance of bad taste, was made by the French, when in possession of Granada.
Round the four sides of the court are light Arabian arcades of open filigree work, supported by slender pillars of white marble, which it is supposed were originally gilded. The architecture, like that in most parts of the interior of the palace, is characterized by elegance rather than grandeur, bespeaking a delicate and graceful taste, and a disposition to indolent enjoyment. When one looks upon the fairy traces of the peristyles and the apparently fragile fretwork of the walls, it is difficult to believe that so much has survived the wear and tear of centuries, the shocks of earthquakes, the violence of war, and the quiet, though no less baneful, pilferings of the tasteful traveler. It is almost sufficient to excuse the popular tradition that the hall is protected by a magic charm.
On one side of the court, a rich portal opens into the hall of the Abensarajis, so called from the gallant cavaliers of that illustrious line, who were here perfidiously massacred. There are some who doubt the whole story. But our humble ciceron Matteo pointed out the very wicket of the portal through which they were introduced one by one into the court of Lyons, and the white marble fountain in the center of the hall beside which they were beheaded. He showed us also certain broad, ruddy stains on the pavement, traces of their blood, which, according to popular belief, can never be effaced. Finding we listened to him apparently with easy faith, he added that there was often heard at night in the court of Lyons a low, confused sound, resembling the murmuring of a multitude, and now and then a faint tinkling, like the distant clank of chains.
These sounds were made by the spirits of the murdered Abensarages, who nightly haunt the scene of their suffering. and invoke the vengeance of heaven on their destroyer. The sounds in question had no doubt been produced, as I had afterwards an opportunity of ascertaining, by the bubbling currents and tinkling falls of water, conducted under the pavement through pipes and channels to supply the fountains. But I was too considerate to intimate such an idea to the humble chronicler of the Alhambra. Encouraged by my easy credulity, Matteo gave me the following as an undoubted fact which he had from his grandfather. There was once an invalid soldier who had charge of the Alhambra to show it to strangers.
As he was one evening about twilight passing through the Court of Lyons, he heard footsteps on the hall of the Eben Sarages. Supposing some strangers to be lingering there, he advanced to attend upon them, when to his astonishment he beheld four moors richly dressed, with gilded cuirasses and scimitars, and poignards glittering with precious stones. They were walking to and fro with solemn pace, but paused and beckoned to him. The old soldier, however, took to flight, and could never afterwards be prevailed upon to enter the Alhambra. Thus it is that men sometimes turn their backs upon fortune, for it is the firm opinion of Matteo that the Moors intended to reveal the place where their treasures lay buried.
A successor to the invalid soldier was more knowing. He came to the Alhambra poor, but at the end of a year went off to Malaga, Bought houses, set up a carriage, and still lives there, one of the richest as well as oldest men of the place. All which, Matteo sagely surmised, was in consequence of his finding out the golden secret of these phantom moors. I now perceived I had made an invaluable acquaintance in this son of the Alhambra, one who knew all the apocryphal history of the place, and firmly believed in it. and whose memory was stuffed with a kind of knowledge for which I have a lurking fancy, but which is too apt to be considered rubbish by less indulgent philosophers. I determined to cultivate the acquaintance of this learned Theban.
Immediately opposite the hall of the ebn Sarajis, a portal, richly adorned, leads into a hall of less tragical associations. It is light and lofty, exquisitely graceful in its architecture, paved with white marble, and bears the suggestive name of the Hall of the Two Sisters. Some destroy the romance of the name by attributing it to two enormous slabs of alabaster, which lie side by side, and form a great part of the pavement. An opinion strongly supported by Matteo Ximenez. Others are disposed to give the name a more poetical significance, as the vague memorial of moorish beauties who once graced this hall, which was evidently a part of the royal harem. This opinion I was happy to find entertained by our little bright-eyed guide Dolores, who pointed to a balcony over an inner porch, which gallery, she had been told, belonged to the women's apartment.
"'You see, senor,' said she, "'it is all graded and latticed, like the gallery in a convent chapel, where the nuns hear mass. For the Moorish kings,' added she indignantly, "'shut up their wives just like nuns. The latticed jalousies, in fact, still remain, whence the dark-eyed beauties of the harem might gaze unseen upon the zambras and other dances and entertainments of the hall below. On each side of this hall are recesses or alcoves for ottomans and couches, on which the voluptuous lords of the Alhambra indulged in that dreamy repose so dear to the orientalists. A cupola or lantern admits a tempered light from above, and a free circulation of air, while on one side is heard the refreshing sound of waters from the fountain of the lions, and, on the other side, the soft splash from the basin in the garden of Lindaraxa.
It is impossible to contemplate this scene so perfectly oriental without feeling the early associations of Arabian romance, and almost expecting to see the white arm of some mysterious princess beckoning from the gallery, or some dark eye sparkling through the lattice. The abode of beauty is here as if it had been inhabited but yesterday. But where are the two sisters, where the Zoraedas and Lindaraxas? An abundant supply of water brought from the mountains by old Moorish aqueducts circulates throughout the palace, supplying its baths and fish-pools, sparkling in jets within its halls, or murmuring in channels along the marble pavements. When it has paid its tribute to the royal pile, and visited its gardens and parterres, it flows down the long avenue leading to the city, tinkling in rills, gushing in fountains, and maintaining a perpetual verdure in those groves that embower and beautify the whole hill of the Alhambra.
Those only who have sojourned in the ardent climates of the South can appreciate the delights of an abode combining the breezy coolness of the mountain with the freshness and verdure of the valley. While the city below pants with the noontide heat, and the parched vega trembles to the eye, the delicate airs from the Sierra Nevada play through these lofty halls, bringing with them the sweetness of the surrounding gardens. Everything invites to that indolent repose the bliss of southern climes, and while the half-shut eye looks out from shaded balconies upon the glittering landscape, the ear is lulled by the rustling of groves and the murmur of running streams. I forbear for the present, however, to describe the other delightful apartments of the palace, My object is merely to give the reader a general introduction into an abode, where, if so disposed, he may linger and loiter with me day by day, until we gradually become familiar with all its localities.
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13 13 - Ricimer 2:45
. Ricimer died. Master of the Roman Empire in the West during part of the fifth century, was the son of a prince of the Suebi and the daughter of Valia, King of the Visigoths. His youth was spent at the court of Valentinian, the third, and he won distinction under Aetius. In Four fifty six, he defeated the Vandals in a sea-fight near Corsica, and on land near Agrigentum in Sicily, and backed by the popularity thus acquired, Ricimer then gained the consent of the Roman Senate to an expedition against the Emperor Avitus, whom he defeated in a bloody battle at Piacenza. On the 16th of October, four fifty six, a was taken prisoner and made bishop of Piacenza, and shortly afterwards sentenced to death.
Ricimer then obtained from Leo I, emperor at Constantinople, the title patrician, but in four fifty seven set up Majorianus as his own emperor in the West, and induced Leo to give his consent. When, however, Majorianus tried to rule by himself, Ricimer forced him to abdicate, and caused his assassination on the seventh of August. The successor whom Ricimer placed upon the throne was Libius Severus, who proved to be more docile than Majorianus, but had to face the rivalry of Leo in the east and Egidus in Gaul. Upon his death in Four sixty five, said to be due to the poison of Ricimer, This emperor-maker ruled the West for eighteen months without an emperor, and then accepted Leo's candidate, Anthemius, diplomatically married his daughter, and for some time lived in peace with him.
Before long, however, Ricimer moved to Milan, ready to declare war upon Anthemius. Saint Epiphanius, Bishop of Milan, patched up a truce, but in Four Seventy Two Ricimer was again before Rome with an army of Germans, Proclaimed as Emperor Olybrius, whom Leo had sent to pacify the two enemies, and after three months' siege took the city on the first of July. Antimius was massacred, and Rome was a prey to Ricimer's soldiers. He himself, however, died on the eighteenth of August, for seventy two of malignant fever. End of Ricimer
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14 14 - River Life 3:35
River Life by Raymond S. Spears. From Adventure Magazine, August 20th, 1923. 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 Dale Grothman. River Life by Raymond S. Spears Anxious Boy dreads the tameness of the present and future. The lurid past seems to have been a greater period in which to have lived than is the present. The fact is, where once the utter simplicity of life meant hunting, fishing, fighting savages, and enduring hardships, including hunger, we have now every opportunity for old-time difficulties, and all the adventures of modern developments. Fine experience lies at one's own doorstep.
The Mississippi River, from St. Paul to the Gulf of Mexico. The Missouri, from Fort Benning to the Gulf. The Ohio, Tennessee, Cumberland, Arkansas, Redd, some ten thousand miles of navigable stream. And some fifty thousand miles of skiff or canoe waters in the Mississippi basin alone offer everything but wild Indians to navigators. A few hundred youths and adults do discover the wonderland of experience that lies at their perfect command. While hundreds of thousands long for the waterway, only a few really take advantage of what is offered. A trip down the upper and lower Mississippi ought to be included in every university course. Skiff, motorboat, or shanty-boat navigation down the river would color the life, broaden the viewpoint, and increase the resourcefulness of everyone undertaking it.
The river supplies the power, and the cost would be less than a dollar a day for each one. River small boat navigation has had a big jump, owing to the very desperateness of certain types of humanity. The lower Mississippi is probably wilder, hides more lurking desperadoes and criminals, and offers as great experience as ever in its history, counting in actual numbers. True, the honest and intelligent element is far and away more numerous in proportion. The Mississippi itself has lost none of its taunts to daring spirits, as a river, and it has added countless variety of venturesome amusement. Even savage human nature does not change, but the resources of the mind give the Mississippi today what La Salle himself could never have found.
The rivers offer more than they did before, and lack little that they ever had. The end of River Life by Raymond S. Spears.
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15 15 - Seedling Fruits 8:02
Seedling Fruits by Henry Ward Beecher.
Already the varieties of hardy fruits have become so numerous that not only can they not all be cultivated, but the mere list of names is too bulky to be printed. Downing's book gives a list of 181 apples. The London Horticultural Society's catalogue, expurgated at that, gives 900 kinds of apples, and 1,500 have been tested in the Society's gardens. Manning's experimental grounds and nursery at the time of his death contained 1,000 named varieties of the pear. Swollen as is the list, there are scores annually added, many under the advice of scientific bodies. Many have popular approbation, many from the partialities of some parental nurseryman, and many come in as evil came into this world. No one can tell how.
It has become necessary, therefore, to exclude many from the catalogue, and especially necessary that none should enter without the very best passport. In the main, one set of tests will serve, both for receiving and expurgating. For no matter how long a fruit has been on the list, it should be ejected if, being out, its qualities would not gain it a fresh admission. There are no hereditary rights or rights of occupancy in pomological lists. Titles, rank, antiquity, pedigree, and other merciful means of compensating a want of personal merit may do for men, but not for apples. A very glorious pomological reformation broke out in the London Horticultural Society's gardens at Chiswick, and that Luther of the Orchard, Mr.
Thompson, has abolished an astonishing number of signatures, and reformed, if not worthless rotten burrows, very worthless apples and pears. The Society's first catalogue issued in 1826. Its third catalogue was published in December of 1842. The experience of the intervening sixteen years led to the total rejection from their list on the ground of inferiority, or as synonyms of six hundred varieties of apples, a hundred and thirty-nine of cherries, two hundred of gooseberries, eighty-two of grapes, eighty of strawberries, one hundred and fifty of peaches, two hundred of pears, and one hundred and fifty of plums. Only twenty-eight peaches are allowed to stand, and only twenty-six strawberries out of the hundreds that were proved.
We have no similar society in the United States whose authority would be generally acknowledged. Our only resource is the diffusion of the very best fruits that every neighborhood may have a standard of comparison by the reduction of experience to the form of rules. Although it is difficult to lay down general rules on this subject, there are three which may be mentioned. One. No fruit should be admitted to the list, and none retained upon it, which is decidedly poor. One would suppose this truism to be superfluous as a rule, but it is only necessary to go out into seedling orchards in any neighborhood to find small, tough, and flavorless apples, which hold their place alongside of orchards filled with choice grafted fruit.
Two. No seedling fruit should be added to the list which is in no respect better than those of the same period of ripening already cultivated. It is not enough that any apple is nearly or quite as good as another favorite apple. It must be as good in flavor and better in some of its habits. Three. In testing the merits of fruit, an estimate should be the result of a consideration of all the habits jointly of the tree and of the fruit. It is in the application of this rule that great experience and judgment are required. This will be plain if one considers how many essential particulars enter into a first-rate fruit beside mere flavor. Of two fruits equal in flavor, one may surpass the other in tenderness of flesh, in juiciness, in delicacy of skin, and in size.
It is rare that any single fruit combines all these excellences, and therefore it is that we retain several varieties among which such properties are distributed. There are many fruits which, having good substance and flavor, derive their value from some singular peculiarity. Thus a fruit may be no better than many others, but the tree, blooming very late in spring, is seldom overtaken by prowling and irregular frosts. Some of our best fruits have stingy bearing trees, or trees of very tender and delicate habit, and we are obliged to tolerate more hardy and prolific trees with fruits somewhat inferior. A few fruits are retained on the list because they have the singular property of being uninjured by frosts, and others because, though not remarkable for flavor, they are endless keepers, of both which properties the Rawls' geniting is an example.
In fruits designed for market, beauty and abundance must be allowed, to supersede mere excellence of flavor. Some very rich fruits are born in such a parsimonious way that none but amateurs can afford tree-room. Nor are we to overlook nursery qualifications, for, of two fruits equally good, preference should be given to that which will work the kindliest in the nursery. Some will bear grafting on the root, some will not. Some take well by budding and grow off promptly and with force. Others are dull and sluggish, and often reluctant to form the new partnership. While, then, it will always be to the nurseryman's interest to work such kinds as he can sell the most of, he has a right, insofar as he directs the public judgment of his neighborhood, to give a preference among equal fruits to such as work the surest and strongest.
It is as much the interest of the purchaser and the public to have the freest growing sorts as it is the nurseryman's interest. Thus, if another Seccle pear could be found growing on the tree of William's Bon Chrétien, it ought to supplant the old Seccle tree, which, in spite of its incomparable fruit, is a vexatious thing to manage. And, as often in the case of other and fairer fruit, makes one wonder how such amiable and beautiful daughters ever had such a surly and crusty old father. A palmological censor must also have regard to varieties of taste among men, and to commercial qualities of fruit, and to its adaptation to soil and climate. No one man has a right to make his tongue the monarch over other people's tongues.
Therefore, for instance, it is none of our business if a rugged mouth chooses to roll a slice of the austere Vanderveer Pippin, like Sin, as a sweet morsel under his tongue. The mild delicacy of an apple which fills our mouths with admiration would be mere insipidity to all who are flavored with leather mouths, so that there must be toleration even among apple-mongers. Nor are the humbler tests of cooking to be overlooked. Some fruits are good eaters and poor cookers. Some cook well but are villainous to the taste when raw. Some will stew to a fine flavor and sweetness without sugar. And some have remarkable jelly properties. But after the largest allowance is made for taste, hardiness, keeping, prolific bearing, color, size, texture, season, adaptation to soils, etc., etc., there will be found, we think, A large number of tenants in our nurseryman's catalogs, upon which should be instantly served a writ of ejectment.
End of Seedling Fruits by Henry Ward Beecher
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16 16 - The Sexual Life of Our Time in its Relations to Modern Civilization (1908) 12:04
Introduction to the sexual life of our time in its relations to modern civilization by Ivan Blanc, translated by M. Eden Paul. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Introduction The sexuality of the modern civilized man, the sum, that is to say, of the phenomena of sexual love dependent upon and associated with the sexual impulse, is the result of a process of development lasting many thousands of years. Therein, as in a mirror, we may see an accurate reflection of all the phases of the bodily and mental history of the human race. Anyone who wishes to understand modern love in all its complexity must, in the first place, succeed in informing himself, not merely regarding the first foundations of the feeling of love in the Great Primeval Age, but in addition as to the manner in which that feeling has been transformed and enriched in the course of the history of civilization.
For modern love is a complex of two constituents. The word love is applicable to the sexual impulse of human beings only. Its use implies that in the case of man the purely animal feelings have acquired an importance far greater than that of subserving the purposes of mere reproduction, and aim at a goal transcending that of the preservation of the species. The nature of human love can be understood and explained only with reference to this intimate and inseparable union of its purposes in respect of the preservation of the species and its independent significance in the life of the loving individual himself. Herein is to be found the starting point of the whole so-called sexual problem, and it is necessary that the matter should be clearly understood at the outset of this book.
In earlier days, human love was mainly concerned with the purposes of the species. Modern civilized man, conceiving history as progress in the consciousness of freedom, has also come to recognize the profound individual significance of love for his own inward growth, for the proper development of his free manhood.
To quote a phrase from Georg Hirth, A cultured modern writer, the genuine experienced love of a civilized man of the present day is one of the ways to freedom. By love is made manifest, and through love is developed, he is in most individual nature. For this reason, Schopenhauer's Metaphysique der Geschlechtsliebe Again, a recent writing The writer Arnold Lindborn, greatly influenced by Schopenhauer's teaching, in the introduction to his work entitled Über die Geschlechts Liebe in Soziale Ethische Beziehung, Sexual Love in its Socioethical Relations. He writes, This also formed the socio-ethical goal of all sexual love, inasmuch as the sole standard by which sexual love can be judged is the procreation and upbringing of children.
We, however, at the very outset contest the validity of such a standpoint, for we consider that it fails entirely to do justice to the nature of modern love. For the history of the human sexual impulse teaches us beyond dispute that, in the course of the development of the human species, that impulse Through its progressive association with intellectual and emotional elements to form the complex whole designated by the term love, has undergone a progressive individualization and has attained a more defined significance for the unitary human being. At the present day, sexual love constitutes a part of the very being of the civilized man. His sexual life clearly reflects his individual nature, and love influences his development in an enduring manner.
Love contains in a quite unique way the two principal classes of vital manifestations, the lower vegetative and the higher animal life, and it thus constitutes the highest and the most intense expression of the unity of life. Schopenhauer's focus of the will, Weisman's continuity of the germplasma. Whoever wishes to understand the developmental tendencies of love as they manifest themselves at the present day in the course of human history, whoever desires to grasp how remarkably love has been developed, enriched and ennobled in the course of civilization, Must, at the outset, gain a clear understanding of this apparently dualistic, but in reality thoroughly monistic nature of the Passion.
The matter may be expressed also in this way. That he who has scientifically investigated love, who has based his conception of it philosophically and has personally experienced it, will become a convinced monist in relation to life, at least, and to the organic world, and will be compelled to regard every dualistic division into a physical and a spiritual sphere as something quite artificial. In love, above all, is manifested this mystery of the life force, as for centuries the poets, the artists, and the metaphysicians have declared, and more especially, as the great natural philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries have proved, above all, Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel.
There is, indeed, no more happily chosen metaphor, none that better describes the fundamentally monistic nature of love, than the saying of the old aesthetic J. G. Sulzer. That love is a tree, that it has its roots in the physical sphere, but that its branches extend high above the physical world, expanding more and more, branching more and more abundantly into the sphere of the spiritual. It is certainly impossible to find a more appropriate comparison. Thereby, we show clearly the intimate, organic connection between the physical and spiritual phenomena of love. It is rooted forever in Mother Earth, but it grows always upwards into the subtle ether. Just as the arborescence of the tree has a richer, more manifold, more extensive development than the root, so also it is in the spiritual form that love is first capable of extending upwards and in all directions, compared with which its physical capacity for development is minimal and strictly limited.
But just as the arborescence of the tree grows from and is supplied with nutriment by the root, so also the higher love is inevitably founded upon a sensory basis. Even while love becomes spiritually richer, it remains as irrevocably as ever dependent upon the physical.
To put the matter briefly, The future developmental possibilities of human love rest purely in the spiritual sphere, but they are inseparably connected with the far less variable physical phenomena of sexuality.
Upon the development, the configuration and the differentiation of the spiritual elements of sexual love are alone based the intimate relations of love with the process of civilization. This fact is again reflected in the manifold phases of the evolution of the sentiment of love. For the human spirit, in the course of its development, has become not merely lord of the earth and of the elementary forces of nature. It has become also lord and master, interpreter and guide of the sexual impulse. For this impulse owes to the human spirit its new and peculiar life, its life capable of further development as manifested in the history of human love. The history of love is the history of mankind, of civilization.
For love manifests a continual progress which can be denied by those only who have failed to understand the deep significance of human love in the entire civilized life of all times. And who, observing the persistence of the primeval and ever-active sexual impulse, elemental in its nature, are led only to a hopeless doubt as to the possibility of all love, and thus justify the pessimism with which Schopenhauer has condemned the significance of human sexual love. Undoubtedly this elemental impulse persists forever, and to follow it alone leads to death, to utter desolation, to nothingness, as Tolstoy, Strindberg, and Weininger, the bitter opponents of modern love, have so vehemently declared. But did these men know true love?
Had they become conscious of the inevitable necessity with which civilization in the course of ages and generations had transformed the human sexual impulse into love as it now exists, transformed it in so manifold and so wonderful a way? Had they any idea of the development of love, and of its place and its significance in history? Let them believe this, these doubting and despairing souls. Nothing has been destroyed of all the spiritual relations, of all the wonderful possibilities of development which have manifested themselves in the course of the long and varied history of the evolution of love. To describe this evolution, it is necessary to draw attention to all those elements of civilization which remain at present influential in love, but it is further indispensable to forecast their future development.
Once again, we stand at an important turning point in the history of love. The old separates itself from the new, the better will once more be the enemy of the good. But love regarded, as it must now be regarded, in its inner nature as a sexual impulse most perfectly and completely infused with a spiritual content, will remain the inalienable gain of civilization. It will stand forth ever purer and more promotive of happiness, like a mirror of marvelous clearness wherein is reflected a peculiar and accurate picture of the successive epochs of civilization.
End of the introduction to the sexual life of our time in its relations to modern civilization by Ivan Bloch, translated by M. Eden Poole.
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17 17 - The Story of Brick 6:57
A manual of face-brick construction by American Face Brick Association.
The story of brick. The manufacture and use of brick go back to the remotest antiquity, far beyond the earliest recorded history. Which is supposed to be about 3,800 BC, the date of a clay tablet assigned to the age of Sargon Becad, founder of the Chaldean dynasty, fully 2,000 years before the time of Abraham. Babylonian origin. Naturally, the use of brick originated where clay, of which they are made, was abundant. And there is every reason to believe that the brick industry had its beginning in the broad alluvial valley of the Euphrates, which is the traditional cradle of human civilization. At any rate, according to one authority, good bricks have been taken from excavations in old Babylonia dating back to 4,500 BC, as good as the day they were made.
And the same authority adds that brick making The sun hardened the mud along the riverbank and cracked it into irregular pieces, which the native could utilize after shaping them to the desired size for piling up in the walls of his crude hut. It was an easy step to advance to shape the mud beforehand, while soft and laid out in the sun to bake. This produced what we call adobe brick, afterward greatly improved by mixing chopped reeds or straw with soft mud before baking. It will be remembered how the Egyptian pharaoh embittered the slavery of the children of Israel by compelling them to find their own straw for the brick they were required to make. At a very early date, the dwellers in the Euphrates Valley learned to burn brick.
As indicated by the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, and by the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the great Babylonian king, 604 through 562 BC, not only were well-burned brick made and used extensively, but colored enamels or successfully applied for decorative effects. Considerable remains of this ancient brickwork are still found. Although for many centuries, the ruined cities of the Mesopotamian plain were used as sources of building material for the more modern cities which have since come into being. Spread of the Craft in Antiquity From the Euphrates, brick crafts spread eastward to Persia, India, and China, and westward to Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The Romans Who were the great builders of ancient times, made very extensive use of brick in their immense building operations, wherever good clay could be found.
For the numerous monuments of Rome brickwork that still remained, The bricks are seen to be of excellent hard-burn quality, and generally of a large, flat, thin, rectangular, or triangular form. Brick work in the Middle Ages When the nations of Europe took form out of the ruins of the Roman Empire, they inherited among other arts that of making brick, and subsequently carried it to a higher state of development, especially in countries such as northern Italy, southern France, the Netherlands, and northern Germany, where the absence of good building stone gave a natural impulse to brick-making. In the great Gothic epic of the 13th and 14th centuries, brick enjoyed a wide vogue and was freely and effectively used in the best types of buildings, such as city halls, great churches, palaces, and mansions of the wealthy.
In England, the use of brick in England began with the Romans in the early centuries of our era, but native brick-making does not appear until well after the days of the Magna Carta and Henry VIII's time. English brick-making, probably under Flemish influence, was greatly developed. But it was not until the days of Queen Anne and the Georges in the eighteenth century that brick-building reached its greatest vogue, so much so that brick nearly drove out all other materials. This period accounts for those fine old country houses So representative of substantial comfort and dignity scattered throughout England, which delight the eye of the traveler today. And ever since that time, English builders have maintained a fine sense of the architectural values in sound and beautiful brickwork, as may be seen in many splendid examples of modern construction.
The use of brick in America. In America, Aside from the adobe construction which the Spanish found in Mexico and Peru, the first bricks were brought over from England or Holland. The native industry, however, had an early start in the 17th century, so that the colonial times saw many fine specimens of brick building from New England to Virginia. In the 19th century, up to about 1880, There was no general attempt to use brick to the best advantage. For the most part, the brick building of that period was confined to the use of common brick for ordinary construction or for the backing of stone-faced walls. From this date, however, to the present, a growing taste has demanded and secured artistic effects in the brick wall by use of the specially manufactured face brick.
Which, in a bewildering variety of color tones and textures, have been sympathetically and artistically treated by our leading architects, as may be seen all over our country. End of A Manual of Face Brick Construction by the American Face Brick Association The Story of Brick
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18 18 - The Sun's Motion in Space (1891) 20:02
The Sun's Motion in Space by Agnes Mary Clark from Scientific American Supplement No. 829, November 21, 1891. 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 Avaee in November, The Sun's motion in space.
Science needed two thousand years to disentangle the Earth's orbital movement from the revolutions of the other planets, and the incomparably more arduous problem of distinguishing the solar share in the confused multitude of stellar displacements first presented itself as possibly tractable a little more than a century ago. In the lack for it, as yet of a definite solution, there is, then, no ground for surprise, but much for satisfaction in the large measure of success attending the strenuous attacks of which it has so often been made the object. Approximately correct knowledge as to the direction and velocity of the sun's translation is indispensable to a profitable study of sidereal construction, but apart from some acquaintance with the nature of sidereal construction, it is difficult, if not impossible, of attainment.
One, in fact, presupposes the other. To separate a common element of motion from the heterogeneous shiftings upon the sphere of three or four thousand stars is a task practicable only under certain conditions. To begin with, the proper motions investigated must be established with general exactitude. The errors inevitably affecting them must be such as pretty nearly, in the total upshot, to neutralize one another. For, should they run mainly in one direction, the result will be falsified in a degree enormously disproportionate to their magnitude. The adoption, for instance, of system of declinations as much as one second of arc astray might displace to the extent of ten degrees north or south the point fixed upon as the apex of the Sun's way.
Risks on this score, however, will become less formidable with the further advance of practical astronomy along a track definable as an asymptote of ideal perfection. Besides this obstacle to be overcome, there is another which it will soon be possible to evade. Hitherto, inquiries into the solar movement have been hampered by the necessity for preliminary assumptions of some kind as to the relative distances of classes of stars. But all such assumptions, especially when applied to selected lists, are highly insecure, and any fabric reared upon them must be considered to stand upon treacherous ground. The spectrographic method, however, here fortunately comes into play. Proper motions are only angular velocities.
They tell nothing as to the value of the perspective element they may be supposed to include, or as to the real rate of going of the bodies they are attributed to, until the size of the sphere upon which they are measured has been otherwise ascertained. But the displacement of lines in stellar spectra give directly the actual velocities relative to the earth of the observed stars. The question of their distances is, therefore, at once eliminated. Now, the radial component of stellar motion is mixed up precisely in the same way as the tangential component, with the solar movement, and since complete knowledge of it, in a sufficient number of cases, is rapidly becoming accessible, while knowledge of tangential velocity must for a long The advantage of replacing the discussion of proper motions by that of motions in line of sight is obvious and immediate.
And the admirable work carried on at Potsdam during the last three years will soon afford the means of doing so in the first, if only a preliminary investigation of the solar translation based upon measurements of photographed stellar spectra. The difficulties, then, caused either by inaccuracies in star catalogues or by ignorance of star distances, may be overcome, but there is a third. Impossible at present to be surmounted, and not without misgiving to be passed by. All inquiries upon the subject of the advance of our system through space start with a hypothesis most unlikely to be true. The method uniformly adopted in them, and no other is available, is to treat the inherent motions of the stars, their so-called motus peculiares, as pursued indifferently in all directions.
The steady drift extricable from them by rules founded upon the science of probabilities is presumed to be solar motion visually transferred to them in proportions varying with their remoteness in space and their situations on the sphere. If this presumption be in any degree baseless, the result of the inquiry is, pro tanto, falsified. Unless the deviations from the parallactic line of the stellar motions balance one another on the whole, their discussion may easily be as fruitless as that of observations tainted with systematic errors. It is scarcely, however, doubtful that law, and not chance, governs the sidereal revolutions. The point open to question is whether the workings of law may not be so exceedingly intricate as to produce a grand sum total of results, which, from the geometrical side, may justifiably be regarded as casual.
The search for evidence of a general plan in the wanderings of the stars over the face of the sky has so far proved fruitless. Local concert can be traced, but no widely diffused preference for one direction over any other makes itself definitely felt. Some regard, nevertheless, must be paid by them to the plane of the Milky Way, since it is altogether incredible that the actual construction of the heavens is without dependence upon the method of their revolutions. The apparent anomaly vanishes upon the consideration of the profundities of space and time in which the fundamental design of the sidereal universe lies buried. Its composition out of an indefinite number of partial systems is more than probable, but the inconceivable leisureliness with which their mutual relations develop renders the harmony of those relations inappreciable by short-lived terrestrial denizens.
Proper motions, if this be so, are of a subordinate kind. They are indexes simply to the mechanism of particular aggregations, and have no definable connection with the mechanism of the whole. No considerable error may then be involved in treating them, for purposes of calculation, as indifferently directed. And the elicited solar movement may genuinely represent the displacement of our system relative to its more immediate stellar environment. This is perhaps the utmost to be hoped for until sidereal astronomy has reached another stadium of progress. Unless, indeed, effect should be given to Clark Maxwell's suggestion for deriving the absolute longitude of the solar apex from observations of the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites.
But this is far from likely. In the first place, the revolutions of the Jovian system cannot be predicted with anything like the required accuracy. In the second place, there is no certainty that the postulated phenomena have any real existence. If, however, it be safe to assume that the solar system, cutting its way through space, virtually raises an ethereal counter-current, and, if it be further granted, that light travels less with than against such a current, then indeed it becomes speculatively possible Through slight alternate accelerations and retardations of eclipses taking place respectively ahead of, and in the wake of, the Sun, to determine his absolute path in space as projected upon the ecliptic.
That is to say, the longitude of the apex could be deduced together with the resolved part of the solar velocity. The latitude of the apex, as well as the component of velocity perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, remaining, however, unknown. The beaten track, meanwhile, has conducted two recent inquiries to results of some interest. The chief aim of each was the detection of systematic peculiarities in the motions of stellar assemblages after the subtraction from them of their common perspective element. By varying the materials and method of analysis, Prof. Louis Boss, director of the Albany Observatory, hopes that corresponding variations in the upshot may betray a significant character.
Thus, if stars selected on different principles give notably and consistently different results, the cause of the difference may with some show of reason be supposed to reside in specialties of movement appertaining to the several groups. Professor Boss broke ground in this direction by investigating two hundred eighty-four proper motions, few of which had been similarly employed before. They were all taken from an equatorial zone 4 degrees 20 minutes in breadth, with a mean declination of plus 3 degrees, observed at Albany for the catalogue of the Astronomische Gesellschaft, and furnished data accordingly for a virtually independent research of a somewhat distinctive kind. It was carried out to three separate conclusions.
Setting aside five stars with secular movements ranging above 100 minutes, Professor Boss divided the 279 left available into two sets, one of 185 stars brighter, the other of 144 stars fainter than the eighth magnitude. The first collection gave for the goal of solar translation a point about four degrees north of Alpha Lyrae, in RA 280 degrees, declination plus 43 degrees. The second won some 37 minutes of time to the west of Delta Cygni in RA 286 degrees, declination plus 45 degrees. For a third and final solution, 26 stars moving 40 minutes to 100 minutes were rejected, and the remaining 253 classed in a single series. The upshot of their discussion was to shift the apex of movement to RA 289 degrees, declination plus 51 degrees.
So far as the difference from the previous pair of results is capable of interpretation, it would seem to imply a predominant set toward the northeast of the 26 swifter motions subsequently dismissed as prejudicial. But in truth, the data employed were not accurate enough to warrant so definite an inference. The Albany proper motions, as Professor Boss was careful to explain, depend for the most part upon the right ascensions of Bessel's and Lalance zones and are hence subject to large errors. Their study must be regarded as suggestive rather than decisive. A better quality and a larger quantity of material was disposed of by the latest and perhaps the most laborious investigator of this intricate problem.
Mr. Oskar Stumpe of Bonn took his stars to the number of 1,054 from various quarters, if chiefly from Ower's and Arglander's lists, critically testing, however, the movement attributed to each of not less than 16 minutes a century. This he fixed as the limit of secure determination, unless for stars observed with exceptional constancy and care. His discussion of them is instructive in more ways than one. Adopting, the additional computative burden imposed by it notwithstanding, Schoenfeld's modification of Aries formulae He introduced into his equations a fifth unknown quantity expressive of a possible stellar drift in galactic longitude. A negative result was obtained. No symptom came to light of rotation in the plane of the Milky Way.
Mr. Stumpe's intrepid industry was further shown in disregard of customary, scamping subterfuges. Expedients for abbreviation vainly spread their allurements. Every one of his 2,108 equations was separately and resolutely solved. A more important innovation was his substitution of proper motion for magnitude as a criterion of remoteness. Dividing his stars on this principle into four groups, he obtained an apex for the Sun's translation corresponding to each as follows. Group One. Number of included stars.
Proper motion. 0.16 minutes to 0.32 minutes. Apex. RA 287.4 degrees. Declination 42 degrees. Group Two. Number of included stars, 340. Proper motion, 0.32 minutes to 0.64 minutes. Apex, AR.
Group 3. Number of included stars, 105. Proper motion, 0.64 minutes to 1.28 minutes. Group Four. Number of included stars, 58. Proper motion, 1.28 minutes and upward. Apex, Ar, 285.2 degrees, declination, 30.4 degrees. Here again we find a marked and progressive descent of the apex toward the equator with the increasing swiftness of the objects serving for its determination, leading to the suspicion that the most northerly may be the most genuine position, Because the one least affected by stellar individualities of movement. By nearly all recent investigations, moreover, the solar Poin de Mere has been placed considerably further to the east and nearer to the Milky Way than seemed admissible to their predecessors, so that the constellation Lyra may now be said to have a stronger claim than Hercules to include it.
And the necessity has almost disappeared for attributing to the solar orbit a high inclination to the medial galactic plane. From both the Albany and the Bonn discussions, there emerged with singular clearness a highly significant relation. The mean magnitudes of the two groups into which Professor Boss divided his 279 stars were respectively 6.6 and 8.6. The corresponding mean proper motions, 21.9 minutes and 20.9 minutes. In other words, a set of stars on the whole six times brighter than another set owned a scarcely larger sum total of apparent displacement. And that this approximate equality of movement Really denoted approximate equality of mean distance was made manifest by the further circumstance that the secular journey of the Sun proved to subtend nearly the same angle whichever of the groups was made the standpoint for its survey.
Indeed, the fainter collection actually gave the larger angle, 13.73 minutes as against 12.39 minutes. And so far an indication that the stars composing it were, on average, nearer to the Earth than the much brighter ones considered apart.
A result similar in character was reached by Mr. Stumpe. Between the mobility of his star groups and the values derived from them for the angular movement of the Sun, the conformity proved so close as materially to strengthen the inference that apparent movement measures real distance. The mean brilliancy of his classified stars seemed, on the contrary, quite independent of their mobility. Indeed, its changes tended in an opposite direction. The mean magnitude of the slowest group was 6.0, of the swiftest 6.5, of the intermediate pair 6.7 and 6.1. And these are not isolated facts. Comparisons of the same kind, and leading to identical conclusions, were made by Professor Eastman at Washington in 1889.
What meaning can we attribute to them? Uncritically considered, they seem to assert two things, one reasonable, the other palpably absurd. The first, that the average angular velocity of the stars varies inversely with their distance from ourselves, few will be disposed to doubt. The second, that their average apparent lustre has nothing to do with greater or less remoteness, few will be disposed to admit. But, in order to interpret truly, While ascertained, if unexpected, relationships, we must remember that the sensibly moving stars used to determine the solar translation are chosen from a multitude sensibly fixed, and that the proportion of stationary to travelling stars rises rapidly with descent down the scale of magnitude.
Hence, a mean struck in disregard of the zeros is totally misleading. While the account is no sooner made exhaustive, Then its anomalous character becomes largely modified. Yet it does not wholly disappear. There is some warrant for it in nature, and its warrant may perhaps consist in a preponderance among suns endowed with high physical speed, of small or slightly luminous overpowerfully radiative bodies. Why this should be so, it would be futile, even by conjecture, to attempt to explain. Nature.
End of The Sun's Motion in Space by Agnes Mary Clarke.
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19 19 - Wasps Find an Alternative Use for an Artist's Paint Brushes 21:03
Wasps find an alternative use for an artist's paintbrushes. This is the chapter entitled A Familiar Guest from My Studio Neighbors by William Hamilton Gibson 1904. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Familiar Guest Solitude. Where under trees and sky shall you find it? The more solitary the recluse, and the more confirmed and grounded his seclusion, the wider and more familiar becomes the circle of his social environment, until, at length, like a very dryad of old, the birds build and sing in his branches, and the wee wild beasties nest in his pockets. If he fails to be aware of the fact, more's the pity.
His desolation is within, not without, in spite of, not because of his surroundings. Here in my country's studio, not a hermitage, tis true, but secluded among trees, some distance isolated from my own home, and out of sight of any other, what company? What occasional tumultuous privacy is mine? I have frequently been obliged to step out upon the porch and request a modulation of hilarity and a more courteous respect for my hospitality. But this is evidently entirely a matter of point of view, and judging from the effects of my protests at such times, my assumed superior air of condescension is apparently Construed as a huge joke, if the resultant rejoinder of wild volupuk and expressive pantomime has any significance, it is plain that I am desired to understand that my exact status is that of a squatter on contested territory.
There are those snickering squirrels, for instance. At this moment, Two of them are having a rollicking game of tag on the shingled roof, a pandemonium of scrambling, scratching, squealing, and growling, ever and anon clambering down at the eaves to the top of a blind and peeping in at the window to see how I like it. A woodchuck is perambulating my porch. He was a moment ago, presumably in renewed quest of that favorite pabulum, more delectable than Rowan Clover, the splintered cribbings from the legs of a certain pine bench, which, up to date, he has lowered about three inches, a process in which he has considered average rather than symmetry, or the comfort of the too-trusting visitor who happens to be unaware of his carpentry.
The drone of bees and the carol of birds are naturally an incessant accompaniment to my toil. At least in these spring and summer months, the tall straight flue of the chimney, like the deep diapason of an organ, is softly murmurous, with the flurry of the swifts in their afternoon or vesper flight. There is a robin's nest, close by one window, a vario's nest on a forked dogwood within touch of the porch, And continual reminders of similar snuggeries of indigo bird, chat, and oriole within close limits, to say nothing of an ant's nest not far off, whose proximity is soon manifest as you sit in the grass and immediately get up again. Fancy a wild fox for a daily entertainment. For several days in succession last year, I spent a half hour observing his frisky gambles on the hillside, across the dingle below my porch, as he jumped apparently from mice in the sloping rowan field.
How quickly he responded to my slightest interruption of voice or footfall, running to the cover of the alders. The little red-headed chippy, the most familiar and sociable of our birds, of course pays me his frequent visit, hopping in at the door and picking up I don't know what upon the floor. A barn swallow occasionally darts in through the open window, and out again at the door, as though for very sport only a few days since, skimming beneath my nose while its wings fairly tipped the pen with which I was writing. The chipmunk has long made himself at home, and his scratching footsteps on my door-sill, or even in my closet, is a not uncommon episode. Now and then through the day, I hear a soft pat-pat on the hardwood floor at intervals of a few seconds, and realize that my pet Toad, which has voluntarily taken up its abode in an old bowl on the closet floor, is taking his afternoon outing, and with his always seemingly inconsistent Lightning Tongue is picking up his casual flies at three inches' sight around the baseboard.
A mouse, I see, has heaped a neat little pile of seeds upon the top of the wainscot nearby. Cherry pits, polygamum, and ragwood seeds, and others including some small oak galls, which I find have been abstracted from a box of specimens which I had stored in the closet for safekeeping. I wonder if it is the same little fellow that built its nest in an old shoe in the same closet last year, and among other mischief, removed the white grub in a similar lot of specimen galls, which I also missed, and subsequently found in the shoe and scattered on the closet floor. I have mentioned the murmur of the bees, but the incessant buzzing of flies and wasps is an equally prominent sound. Then there is the occasional sortie of the dragonfly, making his gauzy, skimming circuit about the room, or suggestively bobbing around against wall or ceiling, and that occasional, audible episode of the stifled, expiring buzz of a fly, which is too plainly in the toils of arachne up yonder.
For, in one corner of my room, I boast a prized, dusty cobweb, as yet spared from the household broom, a gossamer arena of two years standing, which makes a dense span of a length of about two feet from a clump of dried hydrangea blossoms to the sill of a transom window, and which, of course, somewhere in its dusty spread, tapers off into a dark tunnel where lurks the eight-eyed schemer, ere looking all his waving snares around. Sooner or later, it would seem, every too constant buzzing visitor encroaches on its domain, and is drawn to its silken vortex, and is eventually shed below as a clean-dried specimen, for this is an Agalina spider, which dispenses with the winding-sheet of the field species, Epeira and Argope.
Last week, a big bumble-bee-like fly paid me a visit, and suddenly disappeared. Today I find him dried and ready for the insect pen and the cabinet on the window-sill beneath the web, which affords at all times its liberal entomological assortment. Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Gypttera, and Lepidoptera. Many are the rare specimens which I have picked from these charnel remnants of my spider-net. Ah, hark! The talking robber fly, Ocilus, with his nasal-twanging buzz. Well, whar are ye, he seems to say, and with a suggestive onslaught against the windowpane, which betokens his satisfied quest, is out again at the window with a blue bottle fly in the clutch of his powerful legs, or, perhaps, impaled on his horny beak.
Solitude? Not here. Amid such continual distraction and entertainment, concentration on the immediate task in hand is not always of easy accomplishment. Last week, after a somewhat distracted morning, with some queer, beguiling little harlequins on the bittersweet vine about my porch, of which I have previously written, I had finally settled down to my work. and was engaged in putting the finishing touches upon a long-delayed drawing, when a new visitor claimed my attention, a small hornet, which alights upon the window-sill within a half-yard from my face. To be sure, she was no stranger here at my studio. Even now there are two of her yonder beneath the spider-nest, and was, moreover, an old friend, whose ways were perfectly familiar to me.
But this time the insect engaged my particular attention because it was not alone, being accompanied by a green caterpillar bigger than herself, which she held beneath her body as she traveled along on the window sill so near my face. So, so, my little wren wasp, you have found a satisfactory cranny at last and have made yourself at home. I have seen you prying about here for a week, and wondered where you would take up your abode. The insect now reaches the edge of the sill, and, taking a fresh grip on her burden, starts off in a bee-line across my drawing board and towards the open door and disappears. Wondering what her whimsical destination might be, my eye involuntarily began to wander about the room, in quest of nail-holes or other available similar crannies, but without reward, and I had fairly settled back to my work and forgotten the incident when the same visitor, or another just like her, again appeared, this time clearing the window-sill in her flight, and landing directly upon my drawing board, across which she sped Half creeping, half in flight, and tugging her green caterpillar as before, longer than herself, which she held beneath her body.
This time I shall learn your secret, I thought. Two such challenges as this are not to be ignored. So I concluded this time to observe her progress carefully. In a moment she had reached the right-hand edge of my easel board, from which she made a short flight, and settled upon a large table in the center of the room, littered with its characteristic chaos of professional paraphernalia—brushes, paints, dishes, bottles, color boxes, and cloths—among which she disappeared. It was a hopeless task to disclose her, so I waited patiently to observe the spot from which she would emerge, assuming that this, like the windowsill and my easel, was a mere way-station on her homeward travels. But she failed to appear, while I busied my wits in trying to recall which particular item in the collection had a hole in it.
Yes, there was a spool, among other odds and ends, in a Japanese boat-basket. That must be it. But on examination, the papers still covered both ends, and I was again at a loss. What, then, can be the attraction on my table? My wondering curiosity was immediately satisfied, for as I turned back to the board and resumed my work, I soon discovered another wasp, with its caterpillar freight, on the drawing board. After a moment's pause, she made a quiet, short flight. towards the table, and what was my astonishment, to observe her alight directly upon the tip of the very brush which I held in my hand, which I now noted for the first time had a hole in its end. In another moment she disappeared within the cavity, tugging the caterpillar after her.
My bamboo brushes! I had not thought of them. By mere chance a few years since, I happened upon some of these bamboo brushes in a Japanese shop. Large, long-handled brushes with pure white hair, nicely stiffened to a tapering point, which was neatly protected with a sheathing cover of bamboo. A number of them were at my elbow, a few inches distant, in a glass of water, And on the table by the vase beyond were a dozen or so in a scattered bundle. Normally, each of these brushes is closed at the end by the natural pith of the bamboo. I now find them all, either open or otherwise tampered with, and the surrounding surface of the table littered with tiny balls, apparently of sawdust. I picked up one of the nearest brushes, and upon inverting it and giving it a slight tap, a tiny green worm fell out of the opening.
From the next one, I managed to shake out seven of the caterpillars, while the third had passed beyond this stage, the aperture having been carefully plugged with a mud cork, which was even now moist. Two or three others were in the same plugged Condition, an investigation showed that no single brush had escaped similar tampering to a greater or less extent. One brush had apparently not given entire satisfaction, for the plug had been removed, and the caterpillars, eight or ten in number, were scattered about the opening. But the dissatisfaction probably lay with one of the caterpillars rather than with the maternal wasp. who had apparently failed in the full dose of anesthetic, for one of her victims, which I observed was quite lively, and had probably forced out the soft plug and in his squirming had ousted his luckless companions.
The caterpillars were all of the same kind, though varying in size, their length being from one half to three quarters of an inch. To all appearances, they were dead, But more careful observation revealed signs of slight vitality. Recognizing the species as one which I had long known, from its larva to its moth, it was not difficult to understand how my brushes might thus have been expeditiously packed with them. Not far from my studio door is a small thicket of wild rose, which should alone be sufficient to account for all these victimized caterpillars. This species is a regular dependent on the rose, dwelling within its cocoon-like canopy of leaves, which are drawn together with a few silken webs, and in which it is commonly concealed by day.
A little persuasion upon either end of its leafy case, however, soon brings the little tenant to view, as he wriggles out, backward or forward, as the case may be, and in a twinkling spider-like, hangs suspended by a web, which never fails him even in the most sudden emergency. I can readily fancy the tiny hornet making a commotion at one end of this leafy domicile, and the next instant catching the evicted caterpillar on a fly at the other. Grasping her prey with her legs and jaws in another moment, the wriggling body is passive in her grasp, subdued by the potent anesthetic of her sting. A hypodermic injection which instantly produces the semblance of death in its insect victim, reducing all the vital functions to the point of dissolution, and then holds them suspended literally prolongs life, it would sometimes seem even beyond its normal duration, by a process which I might call ductile equation.
This chemical resource is common to all the hornets. Whether their victims be grasshoppers, spiders, cicadae, or caterpillars. In a condition of helpless stupor, they are lugged off to the respective dens provided for them, and then, hermetically sealed on storage, are preserved as fresh living food for the young hornet larvae, which is left in charge of them and has a place waiting for them all. The developments within my brush handles may serve as a commentary on the ways and transformations of the average hornet. One after another of the little green caterpillars is packed into the bamboo cell, which is about an inch deep, and plugged with mud at the base. From seven to ten of the victims are thus stored, after which the little wasp deposits an egg among them and seals the doorway with a pellet of mud.
The young larva, which soon hatches from this egg, finds itself in a land of plenty, surrounded with living food, and, being born hungry, he loses no time in making a meal from the nearest victim. One after another of the caterpillars is devoured, until his larder, nicely calculated to carry him to his full growth, is exhausted. Thus the first stage is passed. The second stage is entered into within a few hours. and is passed within a silken cocoon, with which the white grub now surrounds itself, and with which, transformed to a pupa, it bides its time for about three weeks, as I now recall, when, third stage, out pops the mud cork, and the perfect wasp appears at the opening of the cell. I have shown sections of one of my brushes in the three stages.
This interesting little hornet is a common summer species, known as the solitary hornet, one of them, Odyneris flavipes. The insect is about a half inch in length, and to the careless observer might suggest a yellow jacket, though the yellow is here confined to two triangular spots on the front of the thorax, and three bands upon the abdomen. Like the wren among birds, it is fond of building in holes, and will generally obtain them ready-made, if possible. Burroughs has said of the Wren that it, quote, "...will build in anything that has a hole in it from an old boot to a bombshell," end quote. In similar whim, our little solitary hornet has been known to favor nail holes, hollow reeds, straws, the barrels of a pistol, holes in kegs, wormholes in old wood, and spools, to which we may now add bamboo brushes.
Ovid declared, and the ancient Greeks believed, that hornets were the direct progeny of the snorting war-horse. The phrase, mad as a hornet, has become a proverb. Think, then, of a brush loaded and tipped with this martial spirit of vespa, this cavorting afflatus, this testy animus. There is more than one pessimistic goose-quill, of course, mightier than the sword, Which, it occurs to me in my now charitable mood, might have been thus surreptitiously voodooed by the warlike hornet and the plug never removed. End of Wasps Find an Alternative Use for an Artist's Paintbrushes. The chapter entitled, A Familiar Guest from My Studio Neighbors by William Hamilton Gibson.
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20 20 - Work-A-Day London (1872) 12:20
Blanchard Girard, published in 1868. Chapter Fourteen. Work a Day, London. At Work. Before six in the morning, London winter and summer is astir. The postmen have already cleared the letter-boxes. It is not a place where the lazy man can lie under the canopy of heaven and live through a perpetual summer on dishes of macaroni. The lazaroni of Cocaine must needs be a cunning set. If they will not work and work hard, they must cheat or steal. He who falls from honest, methodical, skilled labor and the regular travel by the workman's train must earn his shilling or eight pence a day as boardman or dock laborer, or he must withdraw to the workhouse or starve or shift to the east and become of that terrible company whose headquarters may be taken to be somewhere about Blue Gate Fields.
The rigour of the climate, the swiftness of the life, the hosts of men with open mouth, the tough hand-to-hand wrestling for every crust, compel that sternness and produce that careworn look which sits upon the poorer classes of London workmen. Before six in the morning, while the mantle of night still lies over the sloppy streets, and the air stings the limbs to the marrow, the shadows of men and boys may be seen black objects against the deep gloom, gliding out of the side streets to the main thoroughfares. They are the vanguard of the army of labor, who are to carry forward the marvelous story of London industry another step before sundown. To add a new story to a new terrace, the cornerstone to another building, bulwarks to another frigate, another station to another railway, and tons upon tons of produce from every climb to the mighty stock that is forever packed along the shores of the Thames.
As they trudge on their way, the younger and lighter hearted Whistling defiance to the icy wind, the swift carts of fishmongers, butchers, and greengrocers pass them, and they meet the slow-returning wagoners of the market gardeners, with the men asleep upon the empty baskets. The baked potato man and the keeper of the coffee-stall are their most welcome friends and their truest, for they sell warmth that sustains and does not poison. As the day breaks in winter, the suburbs become alive with shopboys and shopmen, poorer clerks, needlework of quick and timorous gait, and waiters who have to prepare for the day. The night cabs are crawling home, and the day cabs are being horsed in the steamy mews.
The milkmen and women are abroad, first street vocalists of the day. The early omnibus draws up outside the public house, the bar of which has just been lit up. The barmaid serves, sharp of temper and short in word, in her curl papers. The blinds creep up the windows of the villas. The newsboy shambles along, laden with the morning papers, prodigal of chaff and profuse in the exhibition of comforters. The postman's knock rings through the street, and at the sound every man who has to labor for his bread, whether banker, banker's clerk, porter, or vendor of few C's at the bank entrance, is astir. Another working day has fairly opened. And mighty and multiform is its activity. Hasty making of tea and coffee, filling of shaving pots, brushing of boots and coats and hats, reading of papers, opening of morning letters, kissing of wives and daughters, grasping of reins, mounting of omnibuses, and catching of trains in every suburb.
The start has been made, and the sometimes silent city is filling at a prodigious rate. The trim omnibuses from Clapham and Fulham, from Hackney and Hempstead, make a valiant opposition to the suburban lines of railway. The bridges are choked with vehicles. While the city is being flooded with money-making humanity, the West End streets are given up to shop cleaners and town travelers, and while these early breadwinners are preparing for the fashion of the day, gentlemen who live at ease ambled to and fro the early burst in the park, And Her Majesty's civil servants honor the pavement, each looking as though he had just stepped out of a bandbox, and protested somewhat at the stern duty that compelled him to emerge before the day was aired, to use Beau Brummel's delightfully whimsical phrase.
On our way to the city, on the tide of labor, we light upon places in which the day is never aired, only the high points of which the sun ever hits, rents spread with rags, swarming with the children of mothers, forever greasing the walls with their shoulders, where there is an angry hopelessness and carelessness painted upon the face of every man and woman. And the oaths are loud, and the crime is continuous, and the few who do work with something like system are the ne'er-do-wells of the great army. As the sun rises, the court swarms at once, for here there are no ablutions to perform, no toilets to make. Neither brush nor comb delays the outpourings of babes and sucklings from the cellars and garrets.
And yet, in the midst of such a scene as this, we cannot miss touches of human goodness and of honorable instinct, making a tooth-and-nail fight against adverse circumstances. Some country wenches, who have been cast into London, Irish girls mostly, hasten out of the horrors of the common lodging-house to market, where they buy their flowers for the day's huckstering in the city. They are to be seen selling roses and camellias along the curb by the bank to dapper clerks. There is an affecting expression in the faces of some of these rough boqueteries that speak of honorable effort to make headway out of the lodging-house and the rents, and reminds one of Hood's Peggy rather than of the bold, daintily-attired damsel who decorated the buttonholes of the parish jockey club under the Empire.
Then there are sad, lonely, unclassed men, who are striving might and main to keep out of the lowest depths, widowers left with sickly children, small tradesmen who have been ruined and are not fit for rough, unskilled work, even men of superior station, as worn-out, unfortunate clerks or schoolmasters. Some, in their very despair, beg. Others become hireling scribes for their low associates. Others again fall ultimately out of the lists of labor, whether honest or dishonest, and are carried off protesting to the last, to the house. Some of merrier moods take to trifle-selling in the streets. Waking London is indeed a wonderful place to study, from the park where the fortunate in the world's battle are gathering roses, to the stone yard by Shadwell, where, at daybreak one chilly morning, we saw the houseless, who had had a crust and a shake-gown in the casual ward, turn to the dreary labour by which it was to be paid.
Waking London on the riverbanks is a picturesque phase of the general stirring. The first wherries put off through the ghostly shipping upon the leaden tide, as the sky pales in the east. There has been an illumination by Billingsgate for hours, and the murmur of the traders and porters strikes upon the ear as we lean over the parapet of London Bridge and mark the growing light peeping through the lines of the vast fleets at anchor on the north and south of the stream. The air is clear. It sometimes is in maligned London. The stars are twinkling fainter and fainter as the sun approaches, and only the skirmishes of the advanced guard that is to tramp and plunge across the bridge before many hours have passed are on the footways.
The grand dome of St. Paul's has unwanted grandeur in the blue, unblurred light. In the dreamers' fancy, may people the cross with angels spreading radiant wings to travel over the mightiest city of the earth, and protect the unknown heroes and heroines who every day toil and moil under deadening loads of trouble. The bees swarm curiously, too, at Charing Cross and Pimlico, whence they travel under the houses and over the houses to the city. The journey between Vauxhall and Charing Cross and Cannon Street presents to the contemplative man scenes of London life of the most striking description. He is admitted behind the scenes of the poorest neighborhoods, surveys interminable terraces of back gardens, alive with women and children, has a bird's-eye view of potteries and workyards of many kinds, and on all sides, from hundreds of fissures and corners, finds his imagination quickened by the feathering of all-compassing steam.
And so the city fills. The gates of the exchange are thrown open. The underwriters unfold their papers upon their tables. The flies from the suburbs bring ancient dames to the bank to touch their dividends. The stock exchange becomes noisy. The banks in Lombard Street fill with customers and clerks. The Lord Mayor takes his seat in his police court. The bankrupt appears in Basing Hall Street, and the pigeons of the Guild Hall strut about unconcernedly among the plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses, jurymen, and lawyers who follow in the wake of the judges to the sittings in the city. The center of the activity is the figure of George Peabody, the noble American citizen who made his piles of gold by honorable labor in these busy streets and buildings.
And while he travelled on his busy way, was mindful of the poor who passed by him, whom he watched as he travelled hither, just as we on our pilgrimage have watched them, and concluded that much of their misery and corruption came from the evil communications, which are inevitable in the crowded lanes and alleys, to which he who can command only a poor sum by the work of his hands is driven by necessity. The massing of the poor, the density increasing with the poverty, is at the root of the evils which afflict most of the great cities of Europe. It is the striking and affecting feature of London especially, where in the lanes and alleys the houses are so full of children that, to use a wits illustration, you can hardly shut the street door for them.
In the poorest of London districts, the men, women, and children appear on entering to have abandoned all hope. There is a desperate, ferocious levity in the air, and the thin, wan, woebegone faces laugh and jeer at you as you pass by. They are the workless of workaday London, born in idleness to die in the workhouse or upon bare boards.