History of the United States, v.3, by James Ford Rhodes, 1910 [c1892].

Chapter 12, Part 2: Morrill Tariff Bill through American Morals

In April, 1860, Morrill introduced his tariff bill into the House. The principles upon which it is founded, he said, "do not necessarily raise the question of protection, per se. Our manufacturers have made such advances, that a revenue tariff, with proper discriminations, will be found, in most instances, all that may be required for a fair share of prosperity. No prohibitory duties have been aimed at; but to place our people upon a level of fair competition with the rest of the world is thought to be no more than reasonable. Most of the highest duties fixed upon have been so fixed more with a view to revenue than protection."5 The bill was a good one; it had the great merit
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5 Congressional Globe, 1st Sess. 36th Congress p. 1832.

of returning to the principle of specific duties.1 It passed the House by 105 to 64. The Senate postponed its consideration. At the next session, however, of this Congress, after the senators from the seven seceding States had withdrawn from the Senate, the bill was passed by 25 to 14.2 Had it not been for the secession, the Morrill bill would probably have failed of passage.

It has sometimes been asserted that the revenue tariff in force from 1846-61 fostered our merchant marine. The increase of foreign trade in this period was naturally advantageous to the shipping interest, and there is a steady gain in the amount of freight carried in American bottoms, yet the influence of the tariffs of 1846 and 1857 on this has been exaggerated. As long as ships were built of wood, America had a great advantage over England. But towards the end of this revenue-tariff era it began to be estimated in England that iron was a cheaper material for ship-building than wood,3 and, should iron supplant wood, it was dimly appreciated that America would not fare as well as before in the competition with England. But we may be sure that, if the war had not occurred, there would have been recommendations of legislation to Congress by a Secretary of the Treasury like Chase, calculated to adapt our interests to the changed conditions.

The revenue tariffs of 1846 and 1857, however, demonstrated a fact of great value—that a high protective tariff is not necessary for the growth of our manufacturing industries. Brodhead of Pennsylvania said, in 1857, that in five years the production of iron had doubled.4 The growth of manufactures from 1850 to 1860 was at once large and
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1 The duty on pig-iron was made $6 per ton; on railroad iron, $12; on bar iron, $15; on coarse wools, 5 per cent.
2 It passed the Senate February 20, with some amendments, nearly all of which the House concurred in. The President signed it March 2.
3 See Senator Hunter's remarks, February 26, 1857.
4 Congressional Globe, vol. xxxv. p. 332.

healthy.1 As showing this fact an abundance of testimony might be adduced, but one witness will suffice. Morrill, who was then regarded as the apostle of protection, said, when introducing his tariff bill: "A comparison of our tariffs of 1824, 1828, 1832, 1842, 1846, 1857, will show that we have made more rapid strides in cheapening manufactures, and therefore lessening the necessity of individual protection, than ever England herself made in any equal period of time. . . . The British tariff existing in 1842, with the difference of circumstances, was more discriminating, and afforded more incidental protection, than what we ask for America now. The pupil will soon overtake his mistress." 2

To contrast society, in the sense in which the word is used by the sociologist, of the decade of 1850-60 with that of our own day, is for the student an easy task: two remarkable books furnish him complete and well-digested materials. Fortunate the country that has two such eulogists as De Tocqueville and Bryce! They had philosophic minds; and, loving America and loving the truth, they were correct delineators. The earlier traveller has described us as we were in 1832; the later has depicted the America of 1880-90. While the United States of 1850-60 is neither the United States of De Tocqueville nor the United States of Bryce, the development of one into the other was going on, and, in noting how some phases of the earlier life were disappearing, or were being merged into that of our own time, we may grasp the salient points that distinguish the decade we are studying.
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1 From 1850 to 1860 the production of pig-iron increased 75 per cent.; more than four times as many rails were made in 1860 as in 1850.—Iron in All Ages, Swank, pp. 387, 388. In the decade, cotton manufactures increased 83.4 percent.; woollen manufactures over 51 percent.; the production of wool increased 15 per cent.—Preliminary Report on the Eighth Census, pp. 65, 67. It must be remembered that, by the tariff of 1846, the duty on wool was 30 per cent. It was not made free until 1857.
2 Congressional Globe, 1st Session 36th Congress p. 1832.

The changes have been indeed great. The time before the war seems far removed from our present generation. The civil conflict is a sharp dividing line between two characteristically distinct periods, and it has been considered the cause of the transformation. If we confine our attention to the South, whose territory was devastated, whose property and the flower of whose youth were spent, and whose social system was revolutionized, we need seek no further reason; for in the States that seceded, the chronology of "before the war" or "since the war" has a living meaning such as it has never obtained at the North. A study of contemporary Europe, a close examination of social forces, will show us causes more potent than the civil commotion in bringing about the alteration that is so striking a fact of the last half of our century. These far-reaching forces are the railroad and its adjunct the telegraph.

Effects not infrequently attributed to the war and to the legislation which grew out of it had begun to show themselves before 1860. The executive and legislative departments of the national government were undoubtedly as much tainted with corruption between 1850-60 as they are at the present time. This will be clearly illustrated if we recall the scandal of the Galphin claim,1 and mention that, in 1857, three members of the House of Representatives were proved guilty of corrupt practices, and resigned their seats to avoid expulsion.' Plentiful evidence of the popular opinion that dishonesty prevailed may be found in the literature of the time. 3
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1 See vol. i. p. 202.
2 Congressional Globe, vol. xxxiv. pp. 925, 932, 952; see also vol. ii. p. 300 of this work.
3 On corruption in Congress, see American Review, April, 1851, cited by Von Hoist, vol. iv. p. 222; on corruption in the executive departments and in Congress, see Andrew Johnson's speech in the House of Representatives, January 12, 1853; on corruption in politics, see Harper's Magazine, March, 1853, p. 555; December 1853, p. 125; and December 1860, p. 119; on corruption in getting railroad grants through Congress, see New York Weekly Tribune, March 18, 1854 ; as to the Collins's steamship subsidy, ante, p. 12; on corruption in general, see Harper's Magazine, October 1856, p. 698. Buchanan, in his inaugural of March 4,1857, took occasion to warn the people that a large surplus in the treasury begot extravagant legislation and corruption, Curtis, vol. ii. p. 191; on corruption in Congress, see Philadelphia North American, cited in De Bow's Review, May, 1857; on corruption at the present day, see Bryce, vol. ii. pp. 127,132.

It was the common belief in the decade we are studying that, except in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, there was little or no bribery in the legislatures of the States. One does not often meet the charge that a candidate for United States senator had bought enough members of a caucus or a legislature to insure his election. But from that time to this the deterioration of our legislatures is striking.1

Municipal rottenness already existed in New York, and perhaps in some other Eastern cities. New England, the States west of Pennsylvania, and the Southern States do not appear to have been infected. The condition of New York may have been as bad as it is to-day; but the general complaint, now heard in almost every city having a population
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1 Compare Lyell's Second Visit, vol. ii. p. 260, and Bryce, vol. i. p. 512, and vol. ii. p. 128; see New York Nation, February 18,1892, p. 123; May 5,1892, p. 334.
   A majority of the Wisconsin Legislature of 1856 was purchased to vote for a valuable land grant to the La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad Company. $175,000 of stock and bonds were distributed among thirteen senators, and $355,000 of stock and bonds were distributed among members of the Assembly. The bank comptroller and lieutenant-governor each received $10,000, the private secretary of the governor $5000, the chief clerk of the Assembly $5000, and the assistant clerk $10,000, all in bonds. The governor's share in the transaction was $50,000 in bonds. The bonds were worth 48 cents on the dollar; but the stock, curiously enough, sold in New York City at from 60 to 75 cents.—Report of the Joint Select Committee of the Wisconsin Legislature, 1858; History of Wisconsin, Tuttle, p. 346. Wirth refers to this. A committee of the Assembly in 1859 whitewashed the governor. It did not deny that he had received $50,000 in La Crosse and Milwaukee bonds as a gratuity, but, as the bonds were not delivered until after the laud grant had been disposed of, and as no previous understanding existed, it did not believe that the gratuity had influenced his action in the discharge of his official duties.—History of Wisconsin, p. 356.

of more than 200,000, of bribery, jobbing, and misused funds, is not a feature of the decade of 1850-60.1

Outside of three or four of the largest Eastern cities, the direct use of money to buy voters was substantially unknown.
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1 The New York Tribune of June 29, 1860, has a noteworthy article, entitled "New York and Her Rulers." The writer (probably Greeley) said: "For mayor we have Fernando Wood; for chief dispensers of criminal justice, George G. Barnard and Abraham D. Russell. . . . The law is ostentatiously, persistently defied, in order that the aldermen and their confederates may steal a good share of the money. Jobs are got up and 'put through' the two boards merely as cover for such division of the spoils; operators divide with aldermen and councilmen. . . . Our great tax-payers look on at all this with stolid apathy, or bribe the requisite functionaries to undervalue their property. . . . The men of property, of culture, of leisure, having abdicated, the actual government of our city to-day rests on this basis:
   "1. A conspiracy of ten thousand rum-sellers to get rich or live uselessly at the general cost. . . .
   "2. Next in order come the great army of roughs sympathizing and cooperating with the rum-sellers."
   Bryce truly wrote: "There is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States. ... In New York, extravagance, corruption, and mismanagement have revealed themselves on the largest scale. . . . But there is not a city with a population exceeding 200,000 where the poison germs have not sprung into a vigorous life; and in some of the smaller ones, down to 70,000, it needs no microscope to note the results of their growth. Even in cities of the third rank, similar phenomena may occasionally be discerned."—Vol. i. p. 608.
   For a dark picture of public corruption based on an article in the New York Herald, May, 1858, and the report of the Bremen consul in New York, see Geschichte der Handelskrisen, Wirth, pp. 346, 347.
   The New York Herald of June 6, 1856, in making the comparison of municipal regulations in Paris, London, Berlin, and Vienna with that of New York, to the striking disadvantage of the latter, says : "The only city in Europe where corruption and filth and disorder hold as much sway as they do in New York is the city of Rome, which is under an ecclesiastical government."
   Andrew D. White wrote in the Forum for December, 1890, p. 361: "About a year since I stood upon the wharves and in the streets of Constantinople. I had passed from one end of Europe to the other: these were the worst I had seen since I left home, and a spasm of homesickness came over me. During all my residence in foreign cities, never before had the remembrance of New York, Philadelphia, and other American towns been so vividly brought back to me. There in Constantinople, as the result of Turkish despotism, was the same hap-hazard, careless, dirty, corrupt system which we in America know so well as the result of mob despotism; the same tumble-down wharves, the same sewage in the docks, the same 'pavements fanged with murderous stones,' the same filth, the same obstacles to travel and traffic. ... At various times it has been my lot to sojourn in nearly every one of the greater European municipalities, from Edinburg to Athens, from St. Petersburg to Naples, from Paris to Buda-Pesth. ... In every respect for which a city exists, they are vastly superior to our own."

President Buchanan wrote, in 1858, that "we never heard until within a recent period of the employment of money to carry elections." 1 Wherever, outside of New York City, this form of bribery was practised, it was done irregularly and in a bungling way. The present system, which, combining business and military methods, has decided many important elections, and seems able to circumvent any laws, did not then exist. Men did not boast of how the floating vote had been caught by the buying of captains of tens and of fifties; and it is safe to say that no man elected to high national office, when making a post-prandial speech, gloried in his party's and his own success by the judicious use of money in a close and seemingly purchasable State.2

Yet the United States of 1860 was more corrupt than the United States of De Tocqueville. De Tocqueville visited this country when the peculiar conditions that mark the Jacksonian era were seen in their pristine vigor; but, although he learned that the honesty of public functionaries was often doubted, he did not hear that voters were bought with money.3 The testimony of Pike is of great weight, for,
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1 Mackay's America, vol. ii. p. 188 ; National Intelligencer, November 29,1858; address of A. K. McClure before the Civil Service Reform Association, Philadelphia, New York Nation, April 28,1892.
2 See vol. ii. pp. 230, 231, 233, 338, 470 ; on bribery now, see Bryce, vol. ii. p. 130; an address delivered before the Massachusetts Reform Club, Boston, January 12, 1889, by F. J. Stimson; article by T. W. Jenks, entitled "Money in Practical Politics," Century Magazine, October, 1892; "Easy Chair," May, 1892, p. 148; remarks of Vice-President-elect Arthur at the Dorsey dinner, The Nation, February 24, 1881.
3 De la Democratic en Amerique, vol. ii. p. 88.

although an ardent Republican, he at this time looked on passing events with the eye of a philosopher. "There can be no doubt in any reasonable mind," he wrote from Niagara Falls, June 1, 1860, "that we are entered in this country upon what may be fairly termed the Era of Corruption in the administration of public affairs. We have reached it by rapid and, in some sort, natural stages. Not that all the corruption of mankind has at once centred upon our time, but circumstances have conspired to give it a remarkable development at this period. I confidently assume that the municipal government of New York City, the legislature of New York State 1 (as well as some other States), and the action of federal authority during the two past administrations are so well known to the public that this declaration will, without more elaborate proof, pass unchallenged by the intelligent reader." 2

By the decade of 1850-60, the accumulation of large fortunes had begun. This tendency was not a feature of the United States of De Tocqueville;3 it was coeval with the extension of railroads and the telegraph. If it be true that, with this growth of enormous fortunes, poverty has become more abject, this tendency had begun before the war, and has been the result rather of the constantly deteriorating character of the European immigration than of industrial changes on our own soil.4
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1 The legislature was Republican; the Senate stood: Republicans 23, Democrats 9 ; the Assembly: Republicans 91, Democrats 37.
2 J. S. Pike, New York Tribune, June 5, 1860.
3 The Predictions of Hamilton and De Tocqueville, Bryce (Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies), p. 30; De Tocqueville, vol. i. p. 14.
4 "With the princely fortunes accumulating on the one hand, and the stream of black poverty pouring in on the other, contrasts of condition are springing up as hideous as those of the Old World."—New York Tribune, April 21, 1854, cited by Chambers, Things in America, p. 199. David A. Wells wrote in 1876: "It cannot ... be doubted that the general tendency of events during the last quarter of a century of our national history has been to more unequally distribute the results of industrial effort, to accumulate great fortunes in a few hands—in short, to cause the rich to grow richer and the poor poorer."—First Century of the Republic, p. 172. At Johnson came to a different conclusion. "Is it not true," he asks, "that while the rich may have become relatively no poorer, the poor have been steadily growing richer, not so much in the accumulation of personal wealth, as in the power of commanding the service of capital in ever-increasing measure at a less proportionate charge? Can it be denied that labor as distinguished from capital has been and is securing to its own use an increasing share of an increasing product 1"—The Industrial Progress of the Nation, p. 79. It is impossible for any man to present all the evidence by which he arrives at such a conviction. It comes from much reading, observation, reflection, and a comparison of views with other observers. My own notion is, that Atkinson is nearer right than Wells. The different years in which Wells and Atkinson wrote may account in some degree for their opposite conclusions. Atkinson wrote in 1887. While there are now many fortunes which have been accumulated in a lifetime, and which could not under a perfect system have been amassed in that time, I incline to the opinion that most of them have been made at the expense of men of middling fortunes, and of men whose business and manufacturing operations are comparatively small, and not at the expense of those who work with their hands.

The student of morals and manners is fortunate in possessing, in addition to the incomparable works of De Tocqueville and Bryce, the recorded observations of many foreign travellers. On the whole, our country has been fairly treated. The captious criticisms of Basil Hall, Mrs. Trollope, and Dickens may be set off by the books of Grund, Lady Wortley, and Chambers. These last came to admire the United States, and succeeded in their purpose. They make excuses for the faults and ordinary annoyances of travel; they see merits that the average American could not discern; they even depreciate their own country to praise America. Delighting in the journey, they show a charming disposition of mind, and take thoroughly optimistic views. They display an amiability that should be the special envy of travellers, receiving pleasure from almost every experience, and undoubtedly communicating their own charm of manner to their entertainers. Their books, with the exception of Chambers's description of a slave auction,1 are now of little value, but the temper of the writers is admirable. Other works which take a middle course between
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1 See vol. i. p. 320.

carping and indiscriminate praise are those of Harriet Martineau, Lyell, Ampere, and Mackay.

English travellers, with hardly an exception, were struck with the poor health of Americans. "An Englishman," wrote Lyell, "is usually recognized at once in a party by a more robust look, and greater clearness and ruddiness of complexion."1 He also noted "a careworn expression in the countenances of the New-Englanders."2 Harriet Martineau said we were distinguished for "spare forms and pallid complexions," and that "the feeling of vigorous health" was almost unknown.3 Thackeray wrote from New York, "Most of the ladies are as lean as greyhounds."4 Our shortcomings in this respect were fully appreciated by ourselves. The Atlantic Monthly pointed out that in the appearance of health and in bodily vigor we compared very unfavorably with English men and women.5 George William Curtis spoke of the typical American as "sharp-faced, thought-furrowed, hard-handed," with "anxious eye and sallow complexion, nervous motion, and concentrated expression;" and he averred that we were "lantern-jawed, lean, sickly, and serious of aspect."6 Emerson mentioned "that depression of spirits, that furrow of care, said to mark every American brow;"7 and on another occasion he referred to "the invalid habits of this country ;" 8 when in England, in 1847, he wrote home: "When I see my muscular neighbors day by day I say, Had I been born in England, with but one chip of English oak in my willowy constitution!"9 The Atlantic Monthly declared that, "in truth, we are a nation of health-hunters, betraying the want by the search." 10 It
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1 Second Visit, vol. i. p. 124.
2 Ibid., p. 123.
3 Society in America, vol. ii. p. 263; see also Homes of the New World, Fredrika Bremer, vol. i. p. 199; Things in America, Chambers, p. 349.
4 December 23, 1852, Letters of Thackeray, p. 159.
5 May, 1859, p. 539.
6 Lotus-Eating, pp. 29, 30.
7 On "Success" (1858).
8 On "Culture."
9 Memoir of Emerson, Cabot, p. 514.
10 October 1858, p. 529. A writer in Harper's Magazine for December, 1856, p. 60, says: "The American's lungs are never inflated with a full breath, and his chest accordingly contracts, and his shoulders bend under their own weight; his muscles shrink, and his legs become lank from disuse; his face waxes pale from indoor life; his brain grows languid from exhaustion, and his nerves are raw and irritable from excitement. All the succulency of health is burnt out of him." An editorial in the New York Times for March 9, 1855, states: "Strange that we do not see in our pale, waxen-faced men the signs of our growing impotence, and in our delicate, bloodless women tokens that the race degenerates." "Foreigners see in us a degenerate offspring of a nobler race, and with them a skeleton-frame, a yellow-dyed, bilious face, an uncomfortable, dyspeptic expression, an uneasy, spasmodic motion, and a general ghost-like, charnel-house aspect, serve to make up a type of the species Yankee."—Harper's Magazine, October, 1856, p. 643. The same writer speaks of "the excitability which is the characteristic of the fast-moving American," and of "the universal irritability and restlessness of our people," and adds: "A foreign medical adviser while travelling in this country remarked that the whole nation seemed to be suffering from a paroxysm of St. Vitus's dance."

was admitted that the young men were coming up badly. Holmes wrote: "I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage." 1 In the "Easy Chair" Curtis observed, "In the proportion that the physique of Young America diminishes, its clothes enlarge."2 The students in the colleges were no better than the young men of the cities.3 The women sadly lacked physical tone. Dr.
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1 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, p. 197. The Autocrat papers began with the publication of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857.
 2 "Easy Chair," Harper's Magazine, October, 1853, p. 701. "Young America —a man before he is out of his teens, a score of years ahead of his age. He never trundled a hoop nor spun a top, but he can handle the cue with the skill of a master."—Harper's Magazine, Dec, 1856, p. 58. "Look at our young men of fortune. Were there ever such weaklings? An apathetic-brained, a pale, pasty-faced, narrow-chested, spindle-shanked, dwarfed race—mere walking manikins to advertise the last cut of the fashionable tailor!"—Ibid., October, 1856, p. 646.
3 "Contrast the life of the American with that of the English student. Look at that pale-faced, dirty-complexioned youth, flitting like the ghost of a monk from his college cell to chapel or recitation hall. His very dress is shadowy and unsubstantial. His meagre frame is hung with a limp calico gown, and his feet drag after him in slouchy slippers. Follow him to his room, where he lives his life almost unconscious of the air, earth, or sky, and you see him subside suddenly into that American abomination, a rocking-chair, or fall upon his bed, where, with his pipe and a book wearily conned, he awaits the unwelcome call of the bell to lecture. To move he is indisposed; and yet when at rest he seems exhausted. He does not sit, but sprawls; and he and his fellows, in their loose and fusty dress, as they listlessly lounge or drawl out their recitations, might readily pass for so many captives of a watch-house, half-awakened into sobriety from a night's debauch."—Harper's Magazine, December, 1856, p. 59.

Holmes spoke of the "American female constitution, which collapses just in the middle third of life, and comes out vulcanized india-rubber, if it happen to live through the period when health and strength are most wanted." 1

Curiously enough, we advertised our ailments. The hearty English salutation of " good-morning " had given way to an inquiry about one's health, which, instead of being conventional, like that of the French and the Germans, was a question requiring an answer about one's physical feelings and condition. 2 Pleas of ill-health in the national Senate and the House of Representatives were not infrequent. 3
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1 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, p. 47; see article, "Our Daughters," Harper's Magazine, Dec, 1857; New York Times, March 9, 1855; Our Old Home, Hawthorne, p. 59; see also ibid., p. 868, where Hawthorne writes: "I often found, or seemed to find, ... in the persons of such of my dear countrywomen as I now occasionally met, a certain meagreness (Heaven forbid that I should call it scrawniness!), a deficiency of physical development, a scantiness, so to speak, in the pattern of their material make, a paleness of complexion, a thinness of voice."
2 An anecdote illustrating this is thus told in the "Easy Chair" of Harper's Magazine, December, 1857, p. 123: "It is related of Mr. Webster that, being once in a great Western city, waiting for the cars, he was entreated by the mayor to devote the hour he had on his hands to the business of being introduced to the citizens. Somewhat reluctantly, being jaded by travel, Mr. Webster consented. The first gentleman led up was Mr. Janes—a thousand closely treading on his heels, all anxious to take the great man by the hand, and only an hour for the whole to do it in. 'Mr. Webster,' said the mayor, 'allow me to introduce to you Mr. Janes, one of our most distinguished citizens.' 'How do you do, Mr. Janes ?' said Mr. Webster, in a tone not calculated to attract much confidence. 'The truth is, Mr. Webster,' replied Janes, 'I am not very well.' 'I hope nothing serious is the matter,' sternly answered Mr. Webster. 'Well, I don't know that, Mr. Webster. I think it's rheumatiz, but my wife—' Here the mayor rapidly interposed with the next citizen."
3 "My health for a long time has been bad."—Senator Dixon, February 4, 1854. "Being somewhat indisposed."—Senator Toombs, February 23, 1854. "If my health and strength and voice will permit."—Douglas, March 12, 1856. "If I were to consult my feelings, my strength and physical ability, I should not trespass upon the patience of the House."—Stephens, July 31, 1856. "I have suffered all day with a severe headache."—Senator Bigler, February 26, 1857. "My system is so reduced that it is with difficulty I can speak at all."—Senator Bayard, February 26, 1857. "I know not that my strength is sufficient to enable me to be present to-night."—Douglas, March 22, 1858. Even Sumner early caught the infection. He said, July 28, 1852: "My bodily health for some time past down to this very week has not been equal to the service I have undertaken." These are some of many such expressions that I have noted. I have only come across one similar statement in English reported speeches. Burke, in his speech on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, said: "Your lordships will have the goodness to consult the strength which, from late indisposition, begins almost to fail me." Mr. Shepherd, a student of history at Oxford, informed me that, in an extensive reading of the House of Commons debates, he did not recollect of ever meeting with such excuses.

Our physical degeneracy was attributed to the climate.1 Yet it is difficult to reconcile this opinion with the enthusiasm of many European travellers over certain aspects of nature in America. The bright sunshine, the blue sky, the golden, Oriental sunsets, the exhilarating air were an astonishment and delight.' "The climate of the Union," wrote De Tocqueville, "is upon the whole preferable to that of Europe."' We have now come to recognize the fact that a climate to be salubrious need not be moist; that between the dryness of Colorado and the humidity of England, there may be a mean — such as is found in the larger part of
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1 See Lyell, vol. i. p. 123; a well-considered article in New York Weekly Tribune, January 14, 1854, entitled "The American Climate;" The Homes of the New World, Bremer, pp. 178, 199, 228; Harper's Magazine, December, 1857, p. 74. ''We, in our dry atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated, unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser."—Hawthorne's Our Old Home, p. 76; see also London Times, cited by New York Times, February 19,1858.
2 “Depuis l’Égypte, je n’ai vu un semblable coucher de soleil. Méme en Italie on ne trouverait point ces teintes enflames et sanglantes.”—Ampère, vol. i, p. 19; see also pp. 30, 56; Bremer, vol. i, pp. 70, 219; Travels in the United States, Lady Wortley, vol. I, pp. 1, 4, 65.
3 Vol. iii, p. 428; see also Things in America, Chambers, p. 349; Grund, vol. i, p. 35,

the Northern States—better adapted to health than either and that the greater amount of sunshine compensates for the wider variations in temperature.1

But without begging the question of American ill-health by ascribing it to climate, it may unquestionably be found to be due to a bad diet, bad cooking, fast eating, and insufficient exercise in the open air. The appetizing forms in which the genius of New England cookery displayed itself provoked an inordinate consumption of sweets, hot breads, and cakes. With what surprise does this generation read that our greatest philosopher always ate pie for breakfast!' The use of the frying-pan in the West and the South pointed well the quaint remark that " God sends meat and the Devil sends cooks." Men ate too much animal food and especially too much pork. The cooking and the service at hotels and other public places made dinner "the seedtime of dyspepsia."' A fashionable tendency prevailing in the cities to live in hotels and large boarding-houses, promoted unwholesome living. The use of wine at table was rare, the drinking of drams before dinner habitual. Tobacco was used to excess, and chewing was as common as smoking.4
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1''We may safely presume that the climate and other features of our continent, with perhaps the exception of the district about the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic country, are on the whole as well fitted for the uses of Northern Europeans as any part of the mother-country. We may reasonably conclude that it suits the whole Teutonic branch of the Aryan race."—Nature and Man in America, Shaler (1891), p. 278. 2 Life of Emerson, Holmes, pp. 269, 362.
3 Curtis's Lotus-Eating, p. 30.
4 See Society in America, Martineau, vol. ii. p. 264; The Homes of the New World, Bremer, vol. i. pp. 142, 152; Dickens's American Notes; The Upper Ten Thousand, Bristed; The Atlantic Monthly, October 1858, p. 529; Harper's Magazine, September, 1858, p. 491. Sam Slick has a lesson from Abernethy: "The Hon. Alden Gobble was dyspeptic, and he suffered great uneasiness after eating; so he goes to Abernethy for advice. 'What's the matter with you?' said the doctor. 'Why,' says Alden, 'I presume I have the dyspepsy.' 'Ah!' said he, 'I see—a Yankee—swallowed more dollars and cents than he can digest.' 'I am an American citizen,' says Alden, with great dignity; 'I am Secretary to our legation at the Court of St. James.' 'The devil you are,' said Abernethy; 'then you'll soon get rid of your dyspepsy.' 'I don't see that inference,' said Alden; 'it don't follow from what you predicate at all; it ain't a natural consequence, I guess, that a man should cease to be ill because he is called by the voice of a free and enlightened people to fill an important office.' 'But I tell you it does follow,' said the doctor, 'for in the company you'll have to keep you'll have to eat like a Christian.' It was an everlasting pity that Alden contradicted him, for he broke out like one moon-distracted mad. 'I'll be d—d,' said he, 'if I ever saw a Yankee that don't bolt his food whole, like a boa-constrictor. How the devil can you expect to digest food that you neither take the trouble to dissect nor the time to masticate? It's no wonder you lose your teeth, for you never use them; nor your digestion, for you overload it; nor your saliva, for you expend it on the carpets instead of on your food. It's disgusting; it's beastly. You Yankees load your stomachs as a Devonshire man does his cart, as full as it can hold, and as fast as he can pitch it in with a dung-fork, and drive off; and then you complain that such a load of compost is too heavy for you. Dyspepsy, eh? Infernal guzzling, you mean. I'll tell you what, Mr. Secretary of Legation, take half the time to eat that you do to drawl out your words, chew your food half as much as you do your filthy tobacco, and you'll be well in a month.'"—Cited in Harper's Magazine, December, 1858, p. 66.

Boys at schools and colleges, young men who were clerks and salesmen in the cities, and the sons of rich parents alike formed these bad habits.1 Neither men nor women took exercise in the open air. No one walked when he could ride. The trotting buggy took the place of the horse's back. The Americans were gregarious, and loved town life, having no taste for healthful country recreations. Their idea of the country was the veranda of a large caravansary at Saratoga or Newport. Athletics were almost unknown. "There is no lack," said Edward Everett, in 1856, "of a few tasteless and soulless dissipations which are called amusements, but noble, athletic sports, manly out-door exercises, which
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1 Young America smokes regalias, drinks brandy-and-water; "can stand more drinks than would stagger a coal-heaver; he becomes pale and pasty in the face, like badly-baked pie-crust, weak in the back, dwarfish in stature, and shaky in the limbs."—Harper's Magazine, December, 1856, p. 58 ; see also The Upper Ten Thousand, Bristed, p. 19. "' Who cares' says Young America, and straightway he goes on chewing his tobacco, thrusting his feet through hotel windows, burning his vitals with coarse brandy."— "Easy Chair" of Harper's Magazine, September, 1856, p. 561.

strengthen the mind by strengthening the body, and bring man into a generous and exhilarating communion with nature, are too little cultivated in town or country." 1 "We have a few good boatmen," wrote Holmes, in 1858—" no good horsemen that I hear of—I cannot speak for cricketing—but as for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in these latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the Common in five minutes."2 Athletics were not a prominent feature even of college life.3

The improvement in these respects since the decade of 1850-60 is marked, and despite the large element of truth in the precise observations of Emerson, Everett, Holmes, and Curtis, they do not embrace with scientific breadth the whole subject, for the experience of our Civil War gave little indication of physical degeneracy in the Northern people: signs of improvement were already manifest before this period closed.4 The gospel of physical culture had been preached with effect, and "Muscular Christianity" was set up as an ideal worth striving to realize. "Health is the condition of wisdom," declared Emerson in 1858,5 and not long after the world of fashion, discarding the Parisian model of life and beginning the imitation of the English, shortened the city season, acquired a love for the country, for out-door exercise and athletic sports. But the French cuisine, almost the sole outward trace left of the period of French domination, was a potent and enduring influence. Any one who considers the difference between the cooking and the service of a dinner at a hotel or restaurant before the war and now, will
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1 Everett's Orations and Speeches, vol. iii. p. 407.
2 The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, p. 197 ; see also New York Times, September 26, 1856.
3 See Harper's Magazine, December 1856, p. 59. Intercollegiate boating began during this decade. The first Harvard-Yale boat-race occurred August 3, 1852, on Lake Winnepesaukee. Organized field-games did not begin at Yale until 1872.—The Yale Book.
4 New York Tribune, October 7 and 15, 1859; Nature and Man in America, Shaler, p. 271.
5 On "Success."

appreciate what a practical apostle of health and decent living has been Delmonico, who deserves canonization in the American calendar. With better digestion and more robust bodies, the use of stimulants has decreased. While wine at table is more common, tippling at bars has come to be frowned upon; lager beer and native wines have to a considerable extent taken the place of spirituous liquors; hard drinkers are less numerous, total abstainers are probably on the increase, and tobacco-chewing is dying out. The duration of life is now at least as long in America as it is in Europe.1

During the last forty years the American physique has unquestionably improved. A philosopher now, contrasting Englishmen and ourselves, would not make the comparison to our so great disadvantage as did Emerson from his observations in 1848, when he wrote: "The English, at the present day, have great vigor of body and endurance. Other countrymen look slight and undersized beside them, and invalids. They are bigger men than the Americans. I suppose a hundred English, taken at random out of the street, would weigh a fourth more than so many Americans. Yet, I am told, the skeleton is not larger." 2 "I used to think myself," said Edward Atkinson, "only an
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1 Nature and Man in America, Shaler, p. 267.
2 English Traits, chap. iv. "It is good to see," wrote Hawthorne, "how stanch they [the English] are after fifty or sixty years of heroic eating, still relying upon their digestive powers, and indulging a vigorous appetite; whereas an American has generally lost the one and learned to distrust the other long before reaching the earliest decline of life ; and thenceforward he makes little account of his dinner, and dines at his peril, if at all."— Our Old Home, p. 343. "Comparing him [the Englishman] with an American, I really thought that our national paleness and lean habit of flesh gave us greatly the advantage in an aesthetic point of view. ... I fancied that not merely the Suffolk bar, but the bar of any inland county in New England, might show a set of thin-visaged men, looking wretchedly worn, sallow, deeply wrinkled across the forehead, and grimly furrowed about the mouth, with whom these heavy-cheeked English lawyers, slow-paced and fat-witted as they must needs be, would stand very little chance in a professional contest."—Ibid., p. 852.

average man in size, height, and weight at home, but when I made my first visit to England (in 1877), I was rather surprised to find myself a tall and large man by comparison with those whom I passed in the streets." 1 The American school-boy and college student are to-day equal in physical development to the English youth. This is due in some degree to the growth of athletics. But an advance in the physique of American students as compared with English was observed as early as 1877.2
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1 The Industrial Progress of the Nation, p. 23. Mr. Atkinson informs me that when this visit was made he weighed about 185 pounds, and was 5 feet 8 ½  inches high; and he further writes me: "The impression that I then obtained of my relative height, as compared to the great body of the English, has been confirmed by subsequent visits." In Science for November 11, 1887, he gives a number of interesting facts collected from clothiers, which show that "the American man is decidedly gaining in size and weight;" see also chapter entitled "English and American Health," in T. W. Higginson's Concerning All of Us.
2 The Industrial Progress of the Nation, Atkinson, p. 23; Eighth Annual Report of the Massachusetts State Board of Health, January, 1877, where Dr. Henry P. Bowditch says: "A comparison of the pupils of the selected Boston schools [the Public Latin School, the Private Latin School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] with the children of the English non-laboring classes at the public schools and universities, shows that the former are in general heavier in proportion to their height than the latter. . . . The Boston boy is therefore by no means to be described as tall and thin in comparison with his English cousin. Dr. Baxter's conclusion, that 'the mean weight of the white native of the United States is not disproportionate to his stature,' seems, therefore, as far as these boys are concerned, as applicable to growing children as to adults. It will thus be seen that the theory of the gradual physical degeneration of the Anglo-Saxon race in America derives no support from this investigation" (p. 304). Dr. Bowditch writes me April 15, 1892: "Some tables furnished me by Mr. Roberts, after the publication of my paper, showing the height and weight of English boys at Marlborough, Eton, Oxford, Cambridge, etc., seem to show that there is no great difference between English and American boys. The question therefore arises, whether these later figures represent a class of boys more truly comparable with those whom I measured than were the first ones which I used. It is very difficult to decide this question, but I think it may be safely said that, judging by the physique of the children, the Anglo-Saxon race has not undergone any important change in being transplanted to New England. It certainly has not degenerated physically."
   On the improvement in physique in college students, see Public Hygiene in America, Dr. Henry I. Bowditch (1877), p. 115; on statistics of Amherst College, the New York Nation, vol. liii. p. 3; for comparisons from table of measurements of American white men compiled from report of Sanitary Commission made from measurements of United States volunteers during the Civil War, by B. A. Gould, see article of Dr. A. A. Sargent in The United States of America, Shaler, vol. ii. p. 454.

When we come to consider society in the narrower sense given to the word, we find we must study it as something distinct from the great throbbing life of the American people of 1850-60. New York, whose "Upper Ten Thousand "1 have been described by N. P. Willis and Charles Astor Bristed, furnishes the example.2 Bristed introduces us into what is a curious world, when we reflect that he writes of the United States of 1850-52. While his sketches show a touch of caricature, they represent well enough the life of a fashionable set of New York City. We see men working hard to get money for their personal enjoyment; idlers who have come into a fortune; pretty and stylish girls; women who preside gracefully at table and converse with wit and intelligence.3 Bristed takes us among men whose sole aim in life seemed to be to make a lucky hit in stock speculation; to compound a sherry cobbler; to be apt in bar-room repartee; to drink the best brands of claret and champagne, and to expatiate on them in a knowing manner; to drive a fast horse; to
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1" I have not been into fashionable society yet, what they call the upper ten thousand here."—Thackeray, New York, December 23,1852, Letters, p. 158.
2 Rural Letters (1850), Hurry-graphs (1851), Life Here and There (1853), Fun-Jottings (1853), Willis; The Upper Ten Thousand, Bristed (1852).
3 "There was sitting by me," wrote Thackeray of a dinner, "O! such a pretty girl, the very picture of Rubens's second wife, and face and figure." "Have you heard," lie asked, later, "that I have found Beatrix at New York? I have basked in her bright eyes. . . . She has a dear woman of a mother upwards of fifty-five, whom I like the best, I think, and think the handsomest—a sweet lady." In New York he wrote: "It suffices that a man should keep a fine house, give parties, and have a daughter, to get all the world to him."—Thackeray's Letters in 1852 and 1853, pp. 159,163, 164. On the beauty of American women, see Harper's Magazine, September, 1857, p. 526,

dance well, and to dress in the latest fashion. We assist at a wedding "above Bleecker Street;" we are taken to a country-house and see a family dinner served at four o'clock, where, although the only guest is a gentleman just from England, and the viands are not remarkable, "champagne decanted and iced to the freezing-point" followed Manzanilla sherry, and "a prime bottle of Latourand a swelling slender-necked decanter of the old Vanderlyn Madeira" succeeded the champagne.1 Bristed describes the fashionable life at "Oldport Springs," a disguise for Saratoga. He speaks of a huge caravansary, a profuse American breakfast, a promenade on the wide porticos, cigars and ten-pins, the bar-room and billiards, lounging and gossip, a bad dinner at three, which the ladies dressed for, a drive after dinner, dancing until two in the morning for men and women, and gambling the rest of the night for the men.2
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1 Bristed, p. 70.
2 The "Easy Chair" of Harper's Magazine, June, 1857, p. 128, makes "Toddle" say of Saratoga: At dinner, "those horrid waiters will tramp in like an army and crush any conversation I may attempt, and ruin my dinner with their abominable flourishes of pewter dish-covers. . . . The wagons will come next, and I shall watch women in the most bewitchingly absurd dresses for dust and driving; and nincompoops who sit up high like ramrods and say nothing while they drive. The ladies will scrutinize the dresses and looks of the other ladies, and the nincompoops will compare each other's horses and wagons. They will come home and say they have had such a delightful time, and change their dresses and drink their tea, and then go into other dresses and begin to dance, especially if it is a hot night. At one or two o'clock the girls will go to their rooms, the men will take cobblers and cigars and get away about three in the morning. At nine or ten, they will appear in the most extraordinary costumes, which they will wear with entire negligence, as if they never did anything else; and, after eating an egg, a chop, and some kidneys, they will make up parties to bowl and billiards. Then comes the dinner—and then all the rest." October, 1857, p. 700, the "Easy Chair" says: "About a million and a half of dollars are left at Saratoga alone every season for the privilege of doing penance in the cells of its mammoth hotels during the hot weather and grumbling about it during cold weather." Another characteristic description may be found in the "Easy Chair" for June, 1858, p. 122: "Saratoga? A caravanserai crowded with rich people, and drinkers and dancers; belles bowling in muslin and flirting in a public parlor; very young men gambling and getting drunk, and sick with tobacco; an army of black waiters manoeuvring in the dining-hall; people polking themselves into perspirations ; a scraggy green square patch with starved Germans tooting on wind-instruments after dinner; and people full of ditto languidly toddling around."

The Upper Ten Thousand of 1850-60 lend themselves to delineation somewhat better than the same class of our own time. Those who did not go to Europe passed the summer at Saratoga, Newport or Sharon,1 and their watering-place life was open to the public gaze.2 N. P. Willis's chapter on "Manners at Watering-Places "3 would read oddly enough if set forth by a similar adviser of the fashionable world of our time. People of reserve, who wished for no other than their city acquaintances, were termed "absolute exclusives, "and counselled to have a summer resort of their own. For the very purpose of most in going to Saratoga and Newport in the gay season was to make new acquaintances. Yet care should be taken to avoid too great promiscuity in social intercourse. While young men who happened to be strangers to the reigning set could, of course, become acquainted with some of the "dandies" during "a game at billiards or a chance fraternization over juleps in the bar-room," those whose pleasure was not found in games or in drink might find it difficult to get properly introduced, and young ladies who were strangers would encounter the same obstacle. Therefore, in order that desirable acquaintances might be easily made, Willis, an authority whom society held in respect, proposed that a "committee of introduction" should be named by the landlord of each large hotel. These should act under a "code of etiquette," which Willis proceeded to outline. Such action, he declared, would delightfully harmonize, liberalize, and enliven our summer resorts. It is hardly probable that the plan proposed by the literary social leader of the day was systematically adopted. There
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1 "Easy Chair," September, 1857, p. 559.
2 "Every one lives in a blaze of publicity in the United States."—Mackay, Life and Liberty in America, vol. ii. p. 136.
3 Hurry-graphs, p. 290.

was little need of it, for entrance into watering-place society was not difficult. Respectability and fairly good manners were of course requisite, but, these being presupposed, the important qualification was wealth. "Wealth," wrote George William Curtis, "will socially befriend a man at Newport or Saratoga better than at any similar spot in the world."1 Yet all was not garish. At Newport, the votary of fashion could not be insensible to nature's charm. At Saratoga, "youth, health, and beauty" reigned;2 "we discriminate," the Lotus-eater said, "the Arctic and Antarctic Bostonians, fair, still, and stately, with a vein of scorn in their Saratoga enjoyment, and the languid, cordial, and careless Southerners, far from precise in dress or style, but balmy in manner as a bland Southern morning. We mark the crisp courtesy of the New-Yorker, elegant in dress, exclusive in association, a pallid ghost of Paris." 3 After the sectional excitement of 1850, however, fewer Southerners came North. The repeal of the slave sojournment laws of Pennsylvania and New York4 made the bringing of their slaves with them as body-servants inconvenient. The excitement about the Fugitive Slave act and the passage of the Personal Liberty laws involved the risk of losing their negroes; and, after the most powerful Northern party made, in 1856, a political shibboleth of the declaration that slavery was a relic of barbarism, it was still more disagreeable for Southern gentlemen accompanied by their servants to travel at the North.5

Newport, the leading watering-place in the country, was, in the opinion of Curtis, the vantage-ground to study the fashionable world. There he found wealth the touchstone, but he saw money spent without taste and in vulgar
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1 Lotus-Eating, p. 176.
2 Ibid., p. 122. The chapter on Saratoga conveys a good idea of the charm of the place in the decade we are considering.
3 Ibid., p. 114.
4 Benton's Thirty Years' View, vol. ii. p. 774.
5 De Bow's Review; Debate between Brownlow and Pryne, p. 258.

display. We Americans, he declared, had the money-getting, but not the "money-spending genius." If high society was "but the genial intercourse of the highest intelligences with which we converse—the festival of Wit and Beauty and Wisdom"—he saw none at Newport.1 "Fine society," he moralizes, "is a fruit that ripens slowly. We Americans fancy we can buy it." * The peripatetic observer was glad to get to Nahant.' There he wrote: "You find no village, no dust, no commotion. You encounter no crowds of carriages or of curious and gossiping people. No fast men in velvet coats are trotting fast horses;" and in the evenings " there are no balls, no hops, no concerts, no congregating under any pretence in hotel parlors." 4 But by the early part of the decade of 1850-60 the life in Newport had begun to change. Originally a Southern resort, New-Yorkers commenced to divide their favors between it and Saratoga. Cottages became the fashion. The hotel season declined.5

The fashionable people of New York generally went to Europe. When De Tocqueville wrote his last volume on America, the rich American in Europe was characteristic;6 and between 1850 and 1860 crowds went over the sea for the summer.7 To writers of books and writers for the magazine
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1 Lotus-Eating, p. 171 et ante. "Un Americain ne sait pas converser, mais il discute; il ne discourt pas, mais il disserte."—De Tocqueville, vol. ii. p. 129. A girl at a hotel in Newport wrote the "Easy Chair" (August, 1857, p. 413): "At present I am in Newport, bathing, dancing, driving, dressing. When I arrived I took a general survey of the field, and was grieved to find no worthy game. I saw only a range of youths who had apparently the same tailor, shoemaker, and hatter ; who wore very large coats and very small boots; and drove very fast horses in very light wagons; and waltzed beautifully, looking very serious in the face. I tried one or two of them at the first hop; but after they had performed their solemn dance they were dumb, or they talked, which was much worse, as they had nothing to talk about."
2 Ibid., p. 175.
3 Nahant was the favorite resort of Bostonians of wealth, culture, and high social standing. Cottage, and not hotel, life characterized the place.
4 Lotus-Eating, pp. 147, 156.
5 Ibid., p. 165.
6 Vol. iii. p. 281. This was published in 1840.
7 "Easy Chair," June, 1858, p. 122: "Since the Americans have  commenced to throng Europe in such crowds, they are no longer in vogue. Our countryman is too often known abroad by his high pretensions and low breeding."—Harper's Magazine, August, 1857, p. 390.

magazines, there seemed in the high American society much that was meretricious, and certainly no real enjoyment. The "uncommon splendatiousness" annoyed Thackeray.1 That Mammon had become the national saint,2 and that, as a consequence, dulness and gloom characterized the elegant people, was undeniable. This led a witty Frenchman to record that " the most cheerful place he could find in one of the metropolitan cities was the public cemetery."3 One of our stanch admirers found our society " sometimes fatiguing," 4 and another, who went frequently to dinner-parties in New York, thought they were very stupid.5 Men talked of trade,6 and women talked about dress, each other, and their troubles with servants.7 Yet the people Lady Wortley met on the streets in New York reminded her of Paris.8 The Americans were said to resemble the French more than the English.9 The ladies in New York, Thackeray wrote," dress prodigiously fine, taking for their models the French actresses, I think, of the Boulevard theatres." 10 He thought Boston, New York, and Philadelphia "not so civilized as our London, but more so than Manchester and Liverpool."11

Bristed noted that only makeshift liveries could be seen in the American metropolis. When liveries were first introduced there was a great outcry against them, which resulted in their being adopted in a half-way manner. "They
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1 Letters, p. 165.
2 In the American Church, money is God."—Theodore Parker in 1854, Additional Speeches, vol. i. p. 329. Yet Edward Dicey's judgment in 1862 was: "I have never known a country where money was less valued than in America."—Federal States, vol. i. p. 304.
3 Harper's Magazine, January, 1857, p. 210 et ante; ibid., June, 1858, p. 60 et seq.; also "Easy Chair," April, 1853, p. 703; also Ampere, vol. i. p. 181.
4 Grund, vol. i. p. 14.
5 Bremer, vol. i. p. 100.
6 Grund, vol. i. p. 14.
7 Harper's Magazine, February, 1858, pp. 358-59; see also comical illustration, ibid., January, 1857.
8 Travels in the United States, vol. i. p. 287.
9 Bristed, p. 113.
10 Letters, p. 159.
11 Ibid., p. 165.

were hooted out of Boston." None but the greatest dandies at Saratoga put their coachmen in uniform.1 In March, 1853, however, the New York Herald complained of the "alarming spread of flunkeyism," as evidenced from the rich people setting up liveries for their coachmen and their footmen.' The dress of gentlemen, in the decade we are studying, would in these days appear peculiar; that of the ladies, grotesque. In Washington, where society retained the tone imparted to it by President Madison and his wife,' senators went to the Senate and representatives to the House, as late as 1853, dressed as if they were going to a party.4

A reference to some of the topics on which Willis discourses will afford us a glimpse of the life of the people to whom he addressed himself. He complains of the " want of married belles in American society," and decries the public opinion that obliges a woman to give up " all active participation in society after the birth of her first child." He devotes a chapter to the consideration of the question, "Should married ladies go into society with their daughters?" In dilating upon " The Usages of Society," he asks, "Ought young girls to be left by mothers to themselves?
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1Bristed, pp. 16, 128.
2 "Go up Broadway any time during the day, between eleven and four, and you might fancy, from the number of aristocratic equipages rolling past, with liveried coachmen holding the ribbons, and tasselled and silver-laced footmen endeavoring to maintain their footing behind, that you had been transported to Regent Street. ... In fact, handsome liveries, gold lace, and splendid equipages are now the rage of the upper ten of New York."—New York Herald, March 9,1853.
3 " This is not the first time during this session we have heard this kind of talk about' social influence,' and the necessity of association with gentlemen from the South, in order to have intercourse with the refined and cultivated society of Washington."—Senator Wilson, June 13, 1856, on the Sumner-Brooks trouble. I take the description of Washington society by Laurence Oliphant (Life, vol. i. p. 114 et seq.) to be a caricature.
4 For example, see Things in America, Chambers, p. 288; Life of Jefferson Davis, by his wife, vol. i. pp. 278, 417; any painting or engraving representing Congress of this time. 

Should those who have incomes of $5000 vie with those who have $25,000? In a business country, should socialities commence near midnight and end near morning? Should very young children be dressed as expensively as their mothers ?"1

To the Upper Ten Thousand of to-day—or, if high society has increased proportionately to the growth of population, it must be more nearly the upper thirty thousand—the highest social class of 1850-60 would seem crude and garish. Extraordinary has been the development of taste, the growth of refinement, the improvement in manners since that time.2 When we take a broader view, and consider the whole Northern people, limiting our inquiry to men and women of American birth, we see a similar betterment in their personal bearing. The testimony of foreign travellers regarding American manners differs,3 but whether we rely on the favorable, the unfavorable, or the impartial opinions, we arrive alike at the conclusion that there has been a gain. Omitting a comparison regarding certain personal habits and uncouth behavior, that disgusted many Europeans and made the burden of much comment, we see, in one particular, an improvement, denoting a rising out of provincialism. "For fifty years," wrote De Tocqueville, " it has been impressed upon the inhabitants of the United States that they form the only religious, enlightened, and free people. They see that with them, up to the present, democratic institutions prosper, while meeting with failure in the rest of the world; they have then an immense opinion of themselves, and they are not far from believing that they form a
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1 Hurry-graphs, pp. 268, 272, 276; see also Grand, vol. i. p. 35.
2 "New York is emerging from the lingering influences of Puritanism and provincialism in her fashions."—Mrs. Burton Harrison, Ladies' Home Journal, January, 1892.
3 De Tocqueville, vol. iii. p. 354; Society in America, Martineau, vol. i. p. 271 ; Grund, vol. i. pp. 4, 31; Dickens's American Notes; Lady Wortley, vol. i. p. 40; Ampere, vol. i. pp. 208, 390; Thackeray's Letters, p. 158; Chambers, pp. 270, 341.

species apart from the human race." 1 Ampere notes of Americans their "perpetual glorification" of their country; and he cannot keep from thinking that it is a mortification for them "not to be able to pretend that an American discovered America."' But when we come to our own time, Bryce observes that one finds nowadays from European travellers the "general admission that the Americans are as pleasant to one another and to strangers, as are the French or the Germans or the English. The least agreeable feature to the visitors of former years, an incessant vaunting of their own country and disparagement of others, has disappeared, and the tinge of self-assertion which the sense of equality used to give is now but faintly noticeable."3

With improvement in this respect, there is no longer evident, as formerly, such extreme sensitiveness to the opinions of Europeans, and especially of the English.4 Harriet Martineau thought that the veneration in New England for Old England was greater "than any one people ought to feel for any other."' It is undeniable that, mingled with the unrestrained curiosity with which the American people ran headlong after the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his visit to the United States in 1860, there was a genuine enthusiasm and a kindly feeling for the country and the sovereign that he represented.6

With all our improvement, have we grown more interesting? De Tocqueville was just when he wrote: "In the long run, however, the view of that society, so agitated, appears monotonous, and, after having contemplated for a while this ever-changing picture, the spectator becomes weary."7 Somewhere about 1870, Lowell asked: "Did it
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1 Vol. ii. p. 363.
2 Vol. i. pp. 7, 8.
3 Vol. ii. p. 610.
4 See Mackay, vol. 11. p. 115; Lyell's Second Visit, vol. i. p. 131; My Study Windows, Lowell, p. 63; Predictions of Hamilton and De Tocqueville, Bryce, p. 40; De la Democratic en Amerique, vol. iii. p. 366; see Smalley's London Letters, vol. i. p. 289.
5 Society in America, vol. ii. p. 165.
6 See New York Tribune, September 22, 26, October 12,1860.
7 Vol. iii. p. 370.

never occur to you that somehow we are not interesting, except as a phenomenon?" 1

The people of the decade we are studying did not lack for public amusements. In music, the era began with Jenny Lind and ended with Adelina Patti. The impression made by the Swedish Nightingale still remains fresh.2 On her arrival at New York, she was received like a queen. Triumphal arches of flowers and evergreens were erected on the pier, where an enthusiastic crowd greeted her. The flag of Norway and Sweden floated over her hotel. Barnum,3 her manager, kept up the interest in the songstress by all sorts of clever advertising until the day of the sale of the tickets for the first concert, when fabulous prices were paid for seats.4 She sang at Castle Garden; and the accounts of the pressing crowd that gathered outside on the occasion of her first appearance, call to mind a national party convention rather than a host assembled to do homage to the greatest votary of the art of song. Her singing of operatic selections struck lovers of music with amazement and delight; but when she burst forth in one of her national airs, the great audience was thrilled, and their hearts vibrated with emotions that took them for the moment away from the earth.5
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1 My Study Windows, p. 86. Matthew Arnold writes: '' Human nature says tell me if your civilization is interesting ?"—Civilization in the United States (1888), p. 170.
2 See for example chapter on "Jenny Lind," From the Easy Chair, G. W. Curtis (1892), p. 145.
3 "The United States—a great hulk of a continent, that the very moon finds it fatiguing to cross—produces a race of Barnum’s on a pre-Adamite scale, corresponding in activity to its own enormous proportions."—De Quincey, Essay on California, written in 1852.
4 New York Tribune, September 9, 1850.
5 Memoranda of the Life of Jenny Lind, N. P. Willis, p. 112 et seq. When Jenny Lind sang in Washington, she received from the greatest man in America a tribute which not only gave her pleasure, but delighted the people, who thought that Webster but did the homage every one sincerely felt. The operatic music found in him no response ; but when she sang a mountain-song of her own Dalecarlia, she cast upon him her spell. He sat as one entranced. At the close of the song she curtseyed to him, and Webster "rose to his feet and bowed to her with the grace and stateliness of the monarch that he is."—Hurry-graphs, N. P. Willis, p. 193; see also Foote's Casket of Reminiscences, p. 10; Reminiscences, Ben: Perley Poore, vol. i. p. 388.

Jenny Lind sang in many cities, and everywhere she endeared herself to the people by her unaffected manner, her purity of life, her good heart, and generous disposition.1
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1 Jenny Lind gave her share of the net proceeds of the first concert, amounting to $10,000, to various charities in New York City.—Memoranda, N. P. Willis, p. 116. "Through the angel of rapt music, as through the giver of queenly bounties, is seen honest Jenny Lind. She looks forever true to the ideal for which the world of common hearts has consented to love her."—Hurry-graphs, Willis, p. 260.
   Her stay was full of interesting incidents. Perhaps the most charming story told of her was when she made a visit to Trenton Falls: Out in the woods she began to sing; a bird replied; a dialogue in the form of a contest ensued between the two, each endeavoring to out-sing the other. At last, as a rustic tells the story, "Jenny Lind sang as well as ever she could. Her voice seemed to fill the woods all up with music, and when it was over, the little bird was still a while, but tried it again in a few moments. He could not do it. He sang very bad."—Lotus-Eating, Curtis, p. 65. This seems to be an old conceit, and the finest expression of it is in John Ford's " Lover's Melancholy," act i. scene 1.

"I heard
The sweetest and most ravishing contention
That art and nature ever were at strife in.

I saw
This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute,
With strains of strange variety and harmony,
Proclaiming, as it seemed, so bold a challenge
To the clear quiristers of the woods, the birds,
That, as they flocked about him, all stood silent,
Wondering at what they heard. . . .

A nightingale,
Nature's best-skilled musician, undertakes
The challenge, and for every several strain
The well-shap'd youth could touch she sung her own;
He could not run division with more art
Upon his quaking instrument than she,
The nightingale, did with her various notes
Reply to:. . .

They were rivals and their mistress, harmony.—
Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last
Into a pretty anger, that a bird,
Whom art had never taught cliffs, moods, or notes,
Should vie with him for mastery, whose study
Had busied many hours to perfect practice:
To end the controversy, in a rapture
Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly,
So many voluntaries and so quick,
That there was curiosity and cunning,
Concord in discord, lines of differing method
Meeting in one full centre of delight.

The bird, ordain'd to be
Music's first martyr, strove to imitate
These several sounds; which, when her warbling throat
Fail'd in, for grief down dropp'd she on his lute,
And brake her heart."

   Ford's verses are a translation,with embellishments, of a rhetorical exercise by Famian Strada. See his Academica, II., Prolus VI.

People who heard her sing and people who only heard about her singing were better because she had come. "We have seen," wrote Emerson, "a woman who by pure song could melt the souls of whole populations."1

New York, Philadelphia, and Boston generally had a season of Italian opera, beginning at New York in October. Willis wrote a chapter on " Opera Manners," and discoursed on the question, "Are operas moral and are prima donnas ladies?"2 Curtis spoke of the "interregnum of the opera, after the siren La Grange had fled to the tropics, and the other siren, Parodi, had not yet begun her witchery." 3 In the preceding decade, Fanny Ellsler had revealed that there
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1 On "Success." Comparison of singers leads to no conclusions. Each generation has its great songstress. Men of our time, who have been enraptured by Patti, are told they should have heard Jenny Lind. "Once," writes Curtis, "when the Easy Chair was extolling the melodious Swede to a senior, the hearer listened patiently with a remote look in his eyes, and replied at last, musingly, 'Yes, but you should have heard Malibran.' "—From the Easy Chair, p. 154.
2 Hurry-graphs, pp. 297, 357.
3 "Easy Chair," March, 1857, p. 564.

was decency as well as grace in the ballet. The ballet now became for a while an adjunct of the opera;' but being exotic, it did not at once gain the public favor. On the opening of the Academy of Music, October 2, 1854, the opera at last found a home in consonance with its requirements, and was fittingly inaugurated by Grisi and Mario in the opera of "Norma:"' there, in 1859, for one dollar, might be heard Adelina Patti in "Lucia" and "Sonnambula."2

The acting of the decade was characterized by a high order of merit. Burton interpreted the comic muse. Edwin Forrest, who excelled in the sensational drama, and whose robust acting seemed in keeping with so many features of the time, was the favorite tragedian. But taste was changing. The enthusiastic reception given to Edwin Booth, when he appeared in New York in 1857, showed that a less extravagant and a more natural interpretation of the great Shakespearean characters than Forrest could give commended itself to play-goers.4 Rachel, coming to this country in 1855, filled her coffers and at the same time afforded
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1 We may note a considerable change from the time of which Achille Murat speaks. "I was," he wrote, "at the first representation in New York of a corps de ballet from Paris. The appearance of the dancers in short dresses created an astonishment I know not how to describe; but at the first pirouette, when the short petticoats with lead at the extremities began to mount and assume a horizontal position, it was quite another matter; the women screamed aloud, and the greater part left the theatre; the men remained, for the most part roaring and sobbing with ecstasy, the sole idea which struck them being that of the ridiculous. They had yet to learn the grace of those voluptuous steps. And it is in a country in which respect for morals and decency is carried to such a point as this that complaint is made at there being no distinguished artists! For God's sake, how can it be otherwise?"—Sketch of the United States, London, 1833. Murat does not give the date of this episode. It was between 1821 and 1832.
2 New York Times, October 3, 1854. The price of seats in the parquet and boxes was three dollars.
3 New York Tribune, December 2, 1859.
4 On Booth in 1861, see G. W. Curtis, "Easy Chair, "Harper's Magazine, April, 1861, p. 702.

critical Frenchmen an opportunity to sneer at American taste. One said that to recite to us the immortal verses of Corneille was to cast pearls before swine;1 and another declared that "Rachel did not know what a thing it is to amuse, night after night, tradesmen insensible to the charms of accent, voice, gesture; insensible to learned speech, to the soul and spirit of ancient genius."' Yet we may be sure that many Americans agreed with Emerson, who, when in Paris, saw Rachel in " Phedre," and wrote home: "She deserves all her fame, and is the only good actress I have ever seen." 3

Between 1850 and 1860 the starring and stock-company system was general;4 and while the stage-setting was inferior to that of the present day, and many performances undoubtedly lacked finish, yet the variety of plays and the versatility of the actors imparted a charm to the theatre. Many players of talent trod the boards. When we call to mind that in this decade most of the tragedians and comedians that have since entertained and instructed the American public were beginning their careers, we may set the era down as a school of good acting.5 A large proportion of the religious people of the country —much larger than at present—thought it wrong to go to
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1 Beauvallet, author of Rachel and the New World, cited by the "Easy Chair," January, 1857, p. 272.
2 Jules Janin in the Journal des Debate, cited by the New York Times, November 6, 1855.
3 Cabot, p. 543. See an appreciative criticism, Rachel in Boston, New York Weekly Tribune, November 3, 1855; also G. W. Curtis, "Easy Chair," Harper's Magazine, April, 1861, p. 702.
4 Most of the theatres had a regular company which supported the stars, who travelled from city to city, remaining generally one week in a place. The stock company would be called upon one week to act with Forrest or Proctor in high tragedy, the next to assist Could-dock in the domestic drama, and the next perhaps to support Mr. and Mrs. Florence in comedy and farce.
5 In regard to the theatre in general and Forrest and Booth in particular, see The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson; Life of Edwin Forrest, Lawrence Barrett.

the playhouse. The Independent spoke for many men and women when it declared the theatre "an unmitigated evil." 1 While in the smaller towns of the North theatrical performances were given at irregular intervals, if at all, the lecture, the concert, and the minstrel show formed substantially the only public amusements of people outside of the largest cities.2 In the decade of 1850-60 the lecture system reached its height. As the lecture was instructive and moral, it received the support of religious people; also, it served a good purpose as an entertainment for the long winter evenings.3 Of the two hundred lecturers 4 who were in request in many parts of the country, only a few might boast of eloquence, and still fewer spoke with a voice of power. Much that was ephemeral and commonplace was discoursed from the platform in an oracular manner.5 Yet chief of those who always drew a crowd, and whose utterances in the lyceum are notes of the intellectual and moral
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1 March 23, 1854. A similar sentiment regarding the theatre was noted by De Tocqueville. He wrote: […] Vol. iii. pp. 136, 137.
2 "The lecture season has set in again with the usual severity. There are a few new names and a very few new subjects. But no one can doubt that the lecture system is an institution and not a fashion, and that we are to have much more of it and continually. Why should we regret it? If people pay two shillings to see white men blackened like negroes and singing maudlin sentiment, why should we not hope to see them paying the same sum to hear white men talk sense?"—"Easy Chair," January, 1857, p. 273.
3 On this point, see an editorial in the New York Tribune, September 9, 1859.
4 See the list of names, ibid. Among them were R. W. Emerson, H. W. Beecher, E. H. Chapin, J. G. Saxe, Bayard Taylor, E. P. Whipple, Wendell Phillips, G. W. Curtis, T. S. King, Parke Godwin, T. W. Higginson, H. D. Thoreau, E. L. Youmans, O. B. Frothingham, J. G. Holland. Nearly all these had been announced in 1854.—Weekly Tribune, September 30th.
5 See New York Herald, October 27, 1852; November 24, 1859.

development of the time, was Emerson. "I have heard," wrote Lowell, "some great speakers and some accomplished orators, but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he." His hearers owed much "to the benign impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything ignoble, the never-sated hunger of self-culture that were personified in the man before them." Much of the "country's intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus of his teaching and example," and because "he had kept burning the beacon of an ideal life above our lower region of turmoil." 1

In 1852 Thackeray came to this country and "preached," as he called it, on " The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century." "The lectures," he wrote, "are enormously suivies, and I read at the rate of a pound a minute nearly."2 The great novelist was pleased to find how much his books were read and liked. He wrote home: "The prettiest girl in Philadelphia, poor soul, has read 'Vanity Fair' twelve times." 3 Two great orators are identified with the lyceum, Henry Ward Beecher and Wendell Phillips. Beecher, who was looked up to as the apostle of a great congregation, swayed powerfully immense audiences;4 Phillips, who spoke oftener and more willingly on the slavery question than on any other subject, owed to the lecture system his frequent opportunity to address people in various parts of the country.
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1 My Study Windows, pp. 382, 383; see also Hurry graphs, p. 169; From the Easy Chair, p. 21.
2 January 23, 1853, Letters, p. 162. An example of criticism from the puritanical point of view may be seen in a letter of Horace Mann. He wrote: Thackeray's lectures "had much quiet humor ; . . . but there was not a high sentiment in either lecture, and he spoke of the intemperate habits of the wits of Queen Anne's time as if he would like to have drunk with them."—Life, p. 393.
3 Letters, p. 163. Thackeray came again in 1855 and delivered his lectures on "The Four Georges."
4 "The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher having been hired to give twelve lectures, independent of all societies, in Western cities, for $125 per night, the speculator in brains has fixed his price for Cleveland at fifty cents per ticket, which is complained of — not without reason." — New York Weekly Tribune, October 27, 1855.

While Edward Everett was not a lyceum orator, his oration on Washington, heard as it was by vast numbers, deserves mention as one of the events of this character.

To eke out a scanty income was the inducement which led most of the platform speakers to traverse the country and deliver lectures. The writing of the lecture was perhaps not difficult; the delivery of it might be an agreeable task; but the getting from place to place was hard work indeed. Emerson, on returning from one of these winter journeys, wrote in his diary: "'Twas tedious, the obstructions and squalor of travel. The advantage of these offers made it needful to go. It was, in short—this dragging a decorous old gentleman out of home and out of position, to this juvenile career—tantamount to this: 'I'll bet you fifty dollars a day for three weeks that you will not leave your library, and wade, and freeze, and ride, and run, and suffer all manner of indignities, and stand up for an hour each night reading in a hall;' and I answer, 'I'll bet I will.' I do it and win the nine hundred dollars."1

The period we are reviewing may be called the golden age of American literature. Irving was still writing, and, although his best work had been done, his great fame cast a halo around our literature and was the inspiration of many. Prescott won his laurel wreath before 1850, but his singularly patient and diligent life did not come to an end until
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1 Cabot, p. 565, see also p. 567; New York Tribune, September 9, 1859. "The years when Youmans was travelling and lecturing were the years when the old lyceum system of popular lectures was still in its vigor. The kind of life led by the energetic lecturer in those days was not that of a Sybarite, as may be seen from a passage in one of his letters: 'I lectured at Sandusky and had to get up at five o'clock to reach Elyria; I had had but very little sleep. To get from Elyria to Pittsburg, I must take the five o'clock a.m. train, and the hotel darky said he would try to awaken me. I knew what that meant, so I did not get a wink of sleep that night. Rode all day to Pittsburg, and had to lecture in the great Academy of Music over footlights. The train that left for Zanesville departed at two in the morning. Was assured there would be a sleeping-car on the train, but found none.'"—John Fiske on " Youmans," Popular Science Monthly, May,1890.

1859. He was then at work on " Philip the Second," which, had he been able to finish it, would have proved a fitting and brilliant close to his useful career.

Rather as journalist than poet did Bryant make his mark on this era, for his noted poems were written before 1850. But the renown he had acquired as poet gave meaning and power to his journalistic pen, and literature claimed him as one of its lights. Longfellow, the most popular of American poets, living a serene and beautiful life, shed his radiance over this period. He had already won fame, but the poems which gave him that fame were now read and reread: they had entered into the life of the people as a wholesome influence. When this loved and admired poet came to publish "The Courtship of Miles Standish," he created a sensation and conferred a pure delight such as has fallen to few in the literary world of America.1 He told a simple tale of love, wherein the Plymouth colony was the scene, and the beautiful Puritan maiden, the doughty captain, the fair-haired, azure-eyed lover were the actors. That this unaffected story should have appealed so powerfully to the Northern people was a tribute not only to the art of the poet, but a tribute to his readers as well, and was an indication of the profound interest inspired by the Pilgrims of the Mayflower. It was declaimed from the platform by elocutionists, read by school-teachers to their pupils, and it made an evening entertainment at many a
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1 In Longfellow's journal we find these entries: "October 16, 1858. The Courtship of Miles Standish published. At noon, Ticknor told me he had sold 5000 in Boston, besides the orders from a distance. He had printed 10,000, and has another 10,000 in press. Met George Vandenhoff, who reads the poem in public to-night.
   "October 23d. Between these two Saturdays Miles Standish has marched steadily on. Another 5000 are in press, in all an army of 25,000 in one week. Fields tells me that in London 10,000 were sold the first day."— Life by S. Longfellow, vol. ii. p. 327. "Mrs. George Vandenhoff is announced to read Longfellow's forthcoming poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish, at Springfield, on Saturday evening, the day of its publication." —New York Tribune, October 13, 1858.

family fireside. Whittier, who, of all the poets, took rank in popularity next to Longfellow, fired the hearts of many citizens with manly purpose. To him is the honor of having been the pre-eminent poet of the anti-slavery cause.

During the decade of 1850-60, Bancroft published several volumes of his monumental work. At the close of the year 1849, Ticknor's " History of Spanish Literature" appeared.1 In 1856, Motley burst upon the world with " The Rise of the Dutch Republic," which achieved an immediate success and a lasting recognition. His enthusiasm for liberty and human rights found a response in the temper of the time.

For the great works of Lowell we must look before 1850 and after 1860. But in spirit, though not in time, "The Biglow Papers" belong to the period of our review. With some of the enduring qualities of a classic, this satire combines a point and freshness that were felt more keenly in the days of slavery and Southern domination than now. "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" delivered his oracular discourses at the end of this decade. "The Autocrat," wrote Motley to Holmes, "is an inseparable companion. ... It is of the small and rare class to which ' Montaigne's Essays,' 'Elia,' and one or two other books belong, which one wishes to have forever under one's thumb."2 In this same period came "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," "The Blithedale Romance," and "The Marble Faun."3 The teaching of Emerson's long life can be limited to no
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1 "Ticknor is a fine example of a generous-principled scholar, anxious to assist the human intellect in its efforts and researches. Methinks he must have spent a happy life (as happiness goes among mortals), writing his great three-volumed book for twenty years ; writing it, not for bread, nor with an uneasy desire of fame, but only with a purpose to achieve something true and enduring."—American Note-Books, Hawthorne, vol. ii. p. 159.
2 March 29, 1860, Motley's Correspondence, vol. i. p. 335.
3 " Hawthorne's literary talent is of the first order—the finest, I think, which America has yet produced."—Matthew Arnold, Discourses in America, p. 178.

decade, though he undoubtedly spoke with the greatest vigor in the ten years before the war. In those lectures and essays he is speaking still. The Christian, the agnostic, the transcendentalist, the scientific investigator alike learn from him wisdom. The apostle of literature and the apostle of science both do him honor.1

The Americans of the decade we are studying were great readers. Of periodicals—an embarrassment of wealth in our day—there were but three which may be called characteristic of the period, and these occupied a larger space in the public mind than they or any similar magazines occupy at this time. "Dear old 'Easy Chair,'" a letter from Springfield, Illinois, said, "I am a schoolmistress out West, and it is a bright day when Harper's comes."2 George William Curtis, whose eloquence as an orator is overshadowed by his brilliancy as an essayist, began writing the" Easy Chair" in October, 1853. The nineteenth century Addison had a million readers. To what an audience did those words of wholesome morality, healthy criticism on literature and art, and acute observations on society appeal! His ability, combined with literary urbanity, gave him unbounded influence; his monthly essays must be reckoned among the educating and refining influences of the decade. The works of fiction spread by Harper's Magazine before its readers deserve mention. When Dickens's "Bleak House" was finished, Thackeray's "Newcomes" was begun. To have the first reading in serial of "The Newcomes" seems almost as delightful as it would have been to see the first representation of "The Merry Wives of Windsor." 3 "The Newcomes" was followed by
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1 "During the present century, Emerson's Essays are, I think, the most important work done in prose. His work is more important than Carlyle's."—Matthew Arnold, Discourses in America, p. 196. "The loftiest, purest, and most penetrating spirit that has ever shone in American literature—Ralph Waldo Emerson."—Tyndall, New Fragments, p. 397.
2 Harper's Magazine, December, 1858, p. 126.
3 The praise of Putnam's Magazine (September, 1855, p. 283) is worth quoting: "In laying down the last page of 'The Newcomes,' one is tempted to exclaim, in language similar to that the eminent critic, F. Bayham, Esq., used to apply to his good friend and patron, the Colonel: 'Brave old Thackeray, noble old soul; if you ain't a trump and a brick, there isn't any on the face of this earth.'"

Dickens's "Little Dorrit," and that by Thackeray's "Virginians," "Lovel the Widower," and "The Four Georges." The first instance perhaps of the publication in the United States of an extensive historical work as a serial in a magazine was that of John S. C. Abbott's " Life of Napoleon," which began in August, 1851, and was continued for nearly four years. This work, reflecting the enthusiasm of Thiers, presented a view of Napoleon radically different from that which had been familiar to American readers, and implanted in the minds of the youth of the decade an admiration for his career.

Putnam’s Magazine, instead of reprinting English works, aimed at the development of American literature; thus it served as a medium of expression for writers full of ideas and eager to get a hearing. As one now turns over the volumes of this magazine, refinement and good taste seem to exhale from their pages, and the student of this surging decade, of this period of storm and stress, after wading through a mass of polemical literature, feels a calming influence when he reads Putnam's, where political and social reforms are advocated in the language of literature, and in a tone which appears to indicate that one is moving in the best society. George William Curtis again appears as a laborer, and Parke Godwin was an intimate associate. Godwin wrote a series of political articles remarkable for their high character and moral elevation. They treated of the necessity for ridding the nation of slavery, and convinced many people of culture, to whom the rugged arguments of the Tribune and the powerful invective of the Liberator would have appealed in vain. 1
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1 Many of Godwin's Political Essays were reprinted in 1856, and will repay a careful reading. In his address before the Century Association, December 17, 1892, on George William Curtis, Godwin gives an interesting account of Putnam's. There are several references to it in the "Easy Chair." "The time ... of Planco Consule, which . . . means in the time of the old Putnam's Monthly Magazine."—From the Easy Chair, p. 177.

The starting of The Atlantic Monthly, in November, 1857, with Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, and Holmes as its sponsors, was a literary event of the first order. Lowell was editor. He wrote literary criticisms, and in his political articles brought to bear upon the questions of the day rare insight, clear statement, and vigorous expression. Emerson's voice came to the cultivated readers of this magazine in poetry and prose. Longfellow contributed poems; while the merry vein of Holmes in "The Autocrat" and "The Professor at the Breakfast Table" cast a lightsome charm over people whose religious and political lives tended to deep seriousness.

When we know what a reading people like the Americans read, we have an index to their moral life. Men and women whose intellectual pabulum was of the character I have spoken of above could not fail to have sound ideas of conduct and a sincere desire to live up to them. The cleanness of the three popular magazines which have been mentioned, any article in which a young girl might read, is certainly an ethical measure.1 Repeating that our inquiry in this chapter is confined to Northern people of American birth, we may affirm of their morals a high degree of excellence. Since 1800—the period of which Henry Adams has graphically written, "Almost every American family, however respectable, could show some victim to intemperance among its men" there had been an improvement in drinking habits. The temperance agitation had exerted a marked influence. Although the prohibitory legislation to which it led was not long strictly
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1 Harper's Magazine was jocularly supposed to have a million readers (February, 1858, p. 419, October, 1858, p. 715); but the supposition was not probably far out of the way. Of course there was much in periodical literature that was trifling and baneful.
2 History of the United States, vol. i. p. 49, vide ante.

enforced, and was open to grave objections, yet the movement left its trace in a better sentiment and a better practice. Since the decade we are reviewing, the tendency towards moderation in the use of alcoholic drinks has been sure. Social opinion and physiological teaching joined with moral feeling in frowning upon excessive indulgence.

The sexual morality of the country, whether we consider the United States of 1800, of De Tocqueville, of 1850-60, or of the present, is high.1 Of the influences tending to this, race and religion count for something. But a more special reason is the influence of women.' "Perhaps in no way,"
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1 History of the United States, Adams, vol. i. p. 49. "Quoique les voyageurs qui ont visité l'Amérique du Nord différent entre eux sur plusieurs points, ils s'accordent tous à remarquer que les moeurs y sont infiniment plus sévères que partout ailleurs. Il est évident que, sur ce point, les Américains sont très-supérieurs a leurs pères les Anglais."—De Tocqueville, vol. iii. p. 331. "Sexual immorality is condemned by American more severely than by European opinion."—Bryce, vol. ii. p. 34.
   While more freedom was allowed young unmarried women then than now, no fact appears to the student of the life of the people of the decade of 1850-60 with greater clearness and emphasis than the purity in the main of the relations between the sexes. I have become so convinced of this that I am glad to give some extracts from an article in De Bow's Review (March, 1857, p. 225) which I came across early in this investigation, and which induced me probably to make it more thorough than I should otherwise have done. "In eighty years, the social system of the North has developed to a point in morals only reached by that of Rome in six centuries from the building of the city. . . . Home life is being rapidly substituted for that of a segregationalizing and animalizing hotel life." "Already married women, moving in the fashionable circles of the North, forego the duties of domestic life, bestow their minds upon dress and equipage, and refuse to no inconsiderable extent to undergo the pains of child-bearing. . . . Already the priceless gem of chastity in woman has been despoiled of its talismanic charm with men." The moral rule is, "so long as exposure is avoided, no wrong is done." "The purest, freest, most honorable and comfortable society on God's earth is that of the South." I am well convinced that so much of this article as relates to the North is not a correct description of the smallest phase of any society, but it is a striking example of the provincialism of Southern opinion during this decade.
2 " Si on me demandait a quoi je pense qu'il faille principalement attribuer la prosperite singuliere et la force croissante de ce peuple, je repon drais que c'est 4 la superiorite de ses femmes."—De Tocqueville, vol. iii. p. 348. "La religion regne souverainement sur l'fime de la femme, et c'est la femme qui fait les moeurs. L'Amerique est assurement le pays du monde ou le lien du mariage est le plus respecté, et ou Ton a concu l'idee la plus haute et la plus juste du bonheur conjugal."—Ibid., vol. ii. p. 215.

writes Spencer, "is the moral progress of mankind more clearly shown than by contrasting the position of women among savages with their position among the most advanced of the civilized;" and he further says: "In the United States women have reached a higher status than anywhere else."1 It is obvious that in no way will the influence of virtuous women be more strenuously exerted than against irregular relations between the sexes.

For the correct understanding of this subject, an intimate knowledge of the life of the people is necessary. Southern and English observers reproached the North as being the land of isms —a reproach which was based on many undoubted facts. The decade of 1850-60 was rife with social and moral movements, all of which, with one exception, had a certain support from respectable and influential people. But observers from a distance were naturally unable to discriminate in regard to the importance of the different movements; and in classing the Free Convention at Rutland, Vermont, with other social and moral gatherings, they made a palpable error. This convention, held in June, 1858, was an assemblage of spiritualists, women's rights advocates, land reformers, non-resistants, and abolitionists, and it would have received a certain justification from the reformer's point of view, had not the conduct of it fallen into bad hands, and had not its platform been used for a vigorous and enthusiastic advocacy of free-love. The salient feature of the convention was a speech from a woman of pleasing appearance and manner, who elucidated this doctrine, and commended its practice to her audience. The speech was received with such favor that the meeting went forth to the world as a free-love convention, and it served
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1 Spencer's Sociology, vol. i. pp. 713, 730.

as a text for a satirical article in the London Saturday Review, where a comparison was drawn between "morals beyond the Atlantic" and " the social state of Pompeii and China;" between " the dirt of Walt Whitman " and " certain Greek epigrams." 1 But the almost unanimous Northern sentiment in regard to this convention, and the haste with which some participators in it rushed into print to clear themselves from any accusation of sympathy with free-love, are an indication of the severity of opinion touching sexual relations.2

An additional reason to the reasons that have been mentioned for the comparatively small prevalence of sexual vices lies in the fact that Americans, whether rich or poor, are constant workers, and that no class is addicted to idleness, the fruitful parent of such mischief.' The gospel of work is believed in with good results. Those who argue that Americans labor too much do not give a proper direction to their well-meant counsel. Let the doctrine of more rational and better-prepared food, of more active exercise in the open air be preached; but, remembering that what is called over-work is frequently but under-oxygenation,4 let the springs of our morality be carefully examined before we
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1 Cited by New York Times, August 17, 1858.
2 New York Times, June 29, July 2, 1858; New York Tribune, June 29, 1858; the Liberator, July 2, 9, 30, 1858.
3 "Aux Etats-Unis, un bomme riche croit devoir a l'opinion publique de consacrer ses loisirs a quelque operation d'industrie, de commerce, ou it quelques devoirs publics. II s'estimerait mal fame s'il n'employait sa vie qu' a vivre."—De Tocqueville, vol. iii. p. 247. "J'ai rencontrS quelquefois en Amerique des gens riches, jeunes, ennemis par temperament de tout effort penible, et que etaient forces de prendre une profession. Leur nature et leur fortune leur permettaient de rester oisifs; l'opinion publique le leur defendait imperieusement, et il lui fallait obeir."—Ibid., p.387. "In America, the adverse comments on a man who does nothing almost force him into some active pursuit."—Herbert Spencer, Sociology, vol. ii. p. 635. The relation between idleness and sexual immorality is acutely treated by E. L. Godkin in the Forum for May, 1892.
4 Remark, I think, made by Huxley, but with no special reference to Americans.

arrive at the conviction that Americans work too much. It is true, indeed, that there is a higher end of effort than the gain of money; but an honest striving for wealth is better than idleness; and habits of industry, acquired in the pursuit of riches through many generations, may be directed by some of their inheritors to the most noble aims.1

"America," wrote De Tocqueville, "is the country of the whole world where the Christian religion has conserved the most real power over the souls of men."2 This may be affirmed as exactly true also of the decade we are reviewing. Whatever line of investigation, political, social, or moral, be pursued, there will appear as salient facts the religious character of the people, the authority of the church, and the influence of the clergy. These in some cases led to asceticism. In the matter of public amusements, New York was the most liberal city of the country; yet a professor of the University of the City of New York told Ampere that if he went to the theatre too often he would be in danger of losing his position.3 The Northern people made of the first day of the week a puritanical Sabbath. The Independent seriously objected to the railroads running Sunday trains, and frowned upon Sunday excursions.4 In its issue of April 2, 1857, this
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1" Pour def richer, feconder, transformer ce vaste continent inhabite, qui est son domaine, il faut ft l'Americain l'appui journalier d'une passion energique; cette passion ne saurait Stre que l'amour des richesses; la passion des richesses n'est done point fletrie en Amerique, et pourvu qu'elle ne depasse pas les limites que l'ordre public lui assigne, on l'honore. L'Americain appelle noble et estimable ambition, ce que nos peres du moyen age nommaient cupidite servile; de mSme qu'il donne le nom du fureur aveugle et barbare ft l'ardeur conquerante et 8. l'humeur guerrifire qui les jetaient chaque jour dans de nouveaux combats."—De Tocqueville, vol. iii. p. 384. A thoughtful criticism of the gospel of work may be found in Herbert Spencer's speech at New York, November 9, 1882. Essays, vol. iii. p. 480.
2 Vol. ii. p. 214.
3 Vol. i. p. 266.
4 A correspondent, receiving editorial approval, wrote to the Independent of October 2, 1851: "Rum, profaneness, and Sabbath-breaking always go together. I am sorry to find that the stockholders of the Saratoga Railroad still run their cars upon the Sabbath. It is an odious and monstrous violation, not only of the laws of God, but of all the decencies of Christian society. And yet I have noticed ladies travelling in them, thundering into Saratoga on the Lord's day ! Women travelling in public conveyances on the Sabbath ! There is something in this peculiarly degrading and shameful. It ought to be only the lowest of the sex that will stoop to such debasement;" see also the Independent, November 27, 1851. "We are sorry to learn that the directors have established an accommodation train for Sunday morning between this city and Poughkeepsie, in addition to the mail train for Albany. Mr. James Boorman, through whose efficient service as president the road was mainly built, has resigned his office as director, and has addressed a firm remonstrance to the board against this impiety."— The Independent, June 3, 1852.

paper had a leading article inveighing against the proposed plan of keeping the horse-cars in operation on Sunday in the city of Brooklyn. It appears that, in the original charter of the City Railroad Company, stipulations had been made that the cars should not be run on the Sabbath, and now an act had passed the common council, rescinding this article of the contract. It only needed the mayor's approval to become a law. Against such action, the Independent earnestly protested. "This measure," it declared, " tends directly and most emphatically to demoralize the town. . . . The running of these Sunday cars . . . gives the formal sanction of the authorities of the city to the pursuit of secular business and pleasure on the Lord's day." As a last consideration, since the ordinance only empowered the railroad to run its cars on Sunday, and as several of the directors were members of Brooklyn evangelical churches, it was hoped that they would "feel that they owe it to the cause of religion, to the cause of good morals ... to refuse to avail themselves of any such permission." This hope did not prove vain. In its next issue, the Independent was much rejoiced to report that the directors of the Brooklyn City Railroad Company had decided, by a vote of eight to four, "not to take advantage of the recent permission of the common council to run the cars in that city on Sunday."

Early in 1858, began a revival which was declared to be "the most extensive and thorough ever experienced in

America."1 Certainly no similar movement since has even approached it in fervor. Following what has been asserted to be a social law,2 which, indeed, has not lacked several illustrations in our history, the immediate apparent cause of the revival was the financial panic of 1857. But only in a country where religious feelings were deep could there have been aroused such a poignant sense of sin and such a real terror at the thought of hell. It was fitly called "the great awakening;" 3 it was "a great turning of the public mind to religion." 4 The language used to describe its manifestations, although to some extent characterized by religious conventionality, indicates what a clenching hold theological conceptions had on the minds of men. "Fruits of the spirit" were told about.5 From an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, came the report, "A great and glorious work of divine grace is being wrought here." A Baptist church in a village of Massachusetts had "enjoyed a heavenly refreshing from the presence of the Lord."6 "The greater part of the youth in Olean, New York, are indulging hope."7 In Cincinnati there was "a general outpouring of the Spirit."8 From the woods of Michigan men came into the village of Ionia, wrote a minister, "having heard that the Lord was with us, hoping to obtain mercy." At Minneapolis there were "scores of anxious inquirers." Everywhere was preached "the doctrines of depravity, regeneration, atonement, election, the influences of the Holy Spirit, the judgment, and future retribution."9 The secular as well as the religious newspapers were full of reports of the revival, which had extended throughout the North, and which had in a great degree distracted the attention of
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1 New York Observer, cited by the Liberator, November 5, 1858; see also the Independent, March 4, 1858.
2 Life of Parker, Weiss, vol. ii. p. 348.
3 New York Times, March 23; the Independent, March 18, 1858.
4 The Independent, March 11.
5 Ibid., April 8.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., March 11.
8 Ibid., March 18,
9Ibid., March 25.

men from the stirring political events at Washington—the outcome of the attempt of the administration to force the Lecompton Constitution upon Kansas, and of Douglas's revolt against that policy.1

It is interesting to study the progress of the revival in New York City, where material interests and the worship of wealth seemingly held sway. The daily "Noon Prayer Meeting of the North Dutch Church, Fulton Street,"2 had an historian who told of "Requests for prayers," of "Answers to prayers," and who graphically related "Instances of conversion." A conductor was converted in a Sixth Avenue horse-car; a sailor "met Christ at the wheel;" women "found Christ in the parlor;" a scoffer was turned from his evil ways; a play-actor was rescued. Almost a score of daily prayer-meetings were held at different places in New York and Brooklyn.3 Business men's prayer-meetings were a special feature. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote: "We trust since prayer has once entered the counting-room it will never leave it; and that the ledger, the sand-box, the blotting-book, the pen and the ink will all be consecrated by a heavenly presence."4 A notable occurrence was the reception of 190 converts at Beecher's Plymouth Church, where the great congregation, by rising and bursting out into appropriate song, testified that these new professors were received into the fellowship of faith.5 But the most characteristic and interesting incidents took place at the daily noon prayer-meetings held in Burton's old theatre in Chambers Street. The theatre was crowded as in days gone
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1 See vol. ii. p. 297. I remember well that the revival feeling pervaded the public-schools of Cleveland and affected profoundly many of the scholars. I have a vivid recollection of the Congregational minister speaking to us in an earnest manner, the burden of his talk being that we stood in jeopardy if we did not embrace the Christian faith. Prayer-meetings were frequently held in the school-room after school hours, and were led by the minister and the teacher.
2 See book of that title, New York, 1858.
3 The Independent, March 4, 18, 1858.
4 Ibid., April 8.
5 New York Times, May 4,1858

by when Burton had a benefit. Yet comedy had now given place to prayer; farce to exhortation; uproarious laughter to anxious interest and serious manner. A portion of the time was taken up in the telling of religious experiences. A young man related how, becoming an actor at sixteen, he had played in Burton's theatre, but that, since God had adopted him, he would forsake the stage to embrace the cross.1 At another meeting a man confessed to having been in that theatre once before to see Burton play "Aminadab Sleek," and, although he then had no serious convictions, he became disgusted at the burlesque on evangelical religion. He was now struck with being there again " under circumstances so unexpectedly, so strangely different. I am not here," he continued, "to see the 'Serious Family' ridiculed, but to meet this great family of God's praying people, this congregation of serious and anxious souls."2 One day Henry Ward Beecher conducted the services. Three thousand people packed the theatre from pit to dome. A man in the parquet fervently prayed for Burton, "that the great Father might let him know that there was a God. They had seen him stand before those foot-lights and there portray human nature; might he fall at the foot of the cross, and, calling on the name of Christ, there receive the remission of his sins." It is related that Burton was present and was visibly affected at being the subject of so earnest a petition.3 The sound of singing from another meeting was heard. Beecher stepped to the foot-lights, and, gaining the attention of the audience, said: "Brethren, do you hear that? Stop a moment! That's the sound of worship out of the old barroom of this theatre! Let us spend two minutes in silent prayer and thanksgiving 1"4 Then a speaker urged all unconverted persons to go home, prostrate themselves before God, and groan out the publican's prayer: "God be merciful
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1 New York Times, March 23.
2 The Independent, March 25,1858.
3 New York Tribune, cited by the Independent, March 25.
4 New York Times, March 23, 1858.

to me a sinner."1 The last meeting held in Burton's theatre was also presided over by Beecher, who spoke with earnestness. "What a history has been here!" he said. "The history of this building in other days no man has written, and no man can write; and only eternity itself can disclose the fictitious joys and the real sorrows—the seeming virtues that masked corruption of manners, or the ten thousand forms of external purity which covered hideous vice. . . . Then came the season of idleness—the old building where the lights had flashed so long upon such varied scenes was deserted. . . . Then came this strange transformation. It was opened for God's people to sing and pray in. . . . We are sure that tens and scores of men who, with reckless haste, were hurrying down to destruction, have been plucked as brands from the burning. . . . God be thanked that heaven's gates have been opened in the place of hell."2 Among the deadly sins were reckoned—according to the ethics of this revival—dancing, card-playing, and the theatre. The crusade against the theatre, reinforcing the hard times, caused the play-houses to be abandoned.3 But the lyceum continued to flourish.4

The revival was slow to begin in Boston, and failed to arouse there the intense interest which it had excited in New York. Yet the report came that the religious awakening in Boston was inducing many men to forsake the barrooms, and leading others to burn their playing-cards and their infidel books.5 A protest against the movement came from the Liberator. The revival, it said, "has spread like an epidemic in all directions, over a wide extent of country.
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1 New York Tribune, cited by the Independent, March 25.
2 New York Evening Post, cited by the Independent, April 8,1858; see a good description of the revival in the "Easy Chair," May, 1858, p. 844.
3 See the Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson, p. 188.
4 "Even this recent hard season has been less hard upon lectures than on anything else. In some few towns they have been omitted; but generally they have remarkably flourished."—"Easy Chair," April, 1858, p. 700.
5 The Independent, April 1, 1858.

. . . Prayer-meetings morning, noon, and night . . . prayer-meetings in town, village, and hamlet, North and South.1 . . . The whole thing is an emotional contagion without principle. . . . This revival, judging from the past, will promote meanness, not manliness—delusion, not intelligence— the growth of bigotry, not of humanity—a spurious religion, not genuine piety." 2 Theodore Parker, by a sermon upon the "Ecclesiastical and the Philosophical Methods in Religion," delivered in February, laid himself open to attacks from the revivalists. They began to pray for him. "O Lord! if this man is a subject of grace," was the petition of Elder Burnham, "convert him, and bring him into the kingdom of thy dear Son; but if he is beyond the reach of the saving influence of the gospel, remove him out of the way." In an afternoon sermon this same elder declared: "Hell never vomited forth a more wicked and blasphemous monster than Theodore Parker; and it is only the mercies of Jesus Christ which have kept him from eternal damnation already." Another prayed: "O Lord! put a hook in this man's jaws, so that he may not be able to speak." Still another petition ran: "Lord, we know that
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1 Naming particularly Richmond, Savannah, Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans.
2 The Liberator, April 30, 1858; see also Life of Garrison, vol. iii. p. 465. While at the Hague, Motley wrote his wife that he had met at dinner "some raw Scotchmen, just descended from their native heath, and mad with orthodoxy. One of them observed, on some reference to the late revival in America, that the hand of the Lord was most manifest in that great and wonderful development. He then gave an instance of a mercantile friend, who had gone out to New York in the midst of the commercial crisis to collect some money owing to him, but who had naturally, like every other creditor, been referred to the town-pump for liquidation. He had brought back, however, something far better than silver or gold, for he had himself experienced religion in New York, and had returned a regenerated sinner—a brand snatched from the burning. These were almost his exact expressions—saving the irreverent allusion to the pump—and I thought the idea of the New-Yorkers paying off their Scotch creditors by unlimited draughts upon the treasures of the next world one of the best dodges I have yet heard of."—Letter of August 15,1858, Motley's Letters, vol. i. p. 307.

we cannot argue him down; and, the more we say against him, the more will the people flock after him, and the more will they love and revere him! O Lord! what shall be done for Boston if thou dost not take this and some other matters in hand ?" 1

The expansion of feeling, induced by such a religious movement, thus brings into notice the survival of other aspects of puritanism as well as the continued use of the puritan phraseology. The influence of puritanism in New England, New York, northern Ohio, and the Northwest, in the decade we are reviewing, was great.2 Its inestimable value in politics and in morals has not been too highly rated. But the picture is not complete unless its unlovely side be shown. The spirit of puritanism has been hostile to art, partly because art has ministered in religion to what is esteemed idolatry, and partly because it appeals to the sensuous nature which, according to the puritan ideal, should be repressed. It may be questioned whether there is in the life of any other people a period at once so rich in intellectual and literary activity and so unproductive in other forms of art. The Puritan frowned upon anything that was mere diversion, and it was quite in keeping with his character that "Paradise Lost" should be preferred before "Hamlet" and "The Merchant of Venice." The poet of the austere Commonwealth spoke to people who had a silent aversion to the broad-minded, observing poet of the joyous
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1 Life of Parker, Frothingham, pp. 495, 496; Life of Parker, Weiss, vol. ii. pp. 249, 250.
2 "The early Puritans of New England were the parents of one third of the whole white population of the United States as it was in 1834. Within the first fifteen years—and there was never afterward any considerable increase from England—we have seen that there came over 21,200 persons, or 4000 families. Their descendants were, in 1834, not far from 4,000,000. Each family had multiplied on the average to 1000 souls. To New York and Ohio, where they then constituted half the population, they carried the Puritan system of free schools." See Bancroft, New York edition of 1887, vol. i. p. 322; compare Boston edition of 1845, vol. i. p. 467; see Lyell's Second Visit, vol. i. p. 159,

Elizabethan age; they could not forget that he was a writer and an actor of plays.1 But of course Shakespeare could not be tabooed; and for the merry Puritans (those who, deeming it a sin to go to the theatre, got in the lectures of Gough,2 a natural actor advocating temperance on the lyceum platform, a partial gratification of taste and curiosity, that needed the ministration of the mimic stage) an expurgated edition of Shakespeare was provided.3 Not content with simply eliminating the gross expressions of a less prudish age than our own, the puritan editor cut the plays to such an extent that their whole dramatic force and the development of their characters were entirely lost. The "Shakespearian Reader" made of the tragedy and the comedy a string of matchless declamations, in form like the Greek play, but without its orderly connection. This was an era when many read Martin Farquhar Tupper with delectation.4

It is not surprising that Europeans were struck with the gravity of mien and conduct of our people. "I believed," wrote De Tocqueville, "that the English were the most serious people on the earth, but I have seen the Americans
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1 Todd, in his Student's Manual, a popular and, in most respects, a meritorious book, of which a new edition was published in 1854, warns his readers not only against Byron, Moore, Hume, Paine, and Bulwer, but also against Scott and Cooper. His especial and emphatic warning against Scott is truly puritanical. See pp. 151, 153.
2 See the "Easy Chair," January, 1857, p. 274.
3 " Shakespeare, as we all know, has to be expurgated for families, if not for the stage."—Ibid., August, 1859, p. 414.
4 See references in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, pp. 18, 317, 361. "Martin Farquhar Tupper is or was popular. He deluged the public with dish-water, and the public rolled up eyes of delight and murmured 'nectar.' There were people who seriously believed, nay, the public at large believed, unto the thirtieth edition of Proverbial Philosophy, that Martin Farquhar Tupper was a poet."—"Easy Chair," October, 1859, p. 705. "Men not very old assure us that Tupper's long rambling lines were once copied by the page into extract-books."— The Nation, April 7, 1892. "Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy supposed to have reached a sale of over a million copies."—The Critic, vol. xii. p. 287.

and I have changed my opinion." 1 Froissart's remark of the English of the olden time, "They take their pleasure sadly, after their fashion," is almost reproduced by De Tocqueville. "In America," he wrote, "I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances which the world affords: it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad even in their pleasures." 2

But this touches only one side of the American character. Macaulay's description of the Puritans of the Commonwealth, Hawthorne's characterization of the Puritans of the Massachusetts colony will not fit the Americans of 1850-60. Harriet Beecher Stowe spoke of "our laughter loving people." 3 For they had a most keen appreciation of humor. Had it been otherwise the delicate wit of Lowell and Holmes would have seemed a grafted shoot instead of being racy of the soil. This statement is made stronger when, in addition to Lowell and Holmes, who wrote for more ages than their own, we consider the humorists who amused their generation, but whose writings, lacking the Attic salt, have died with them. In America their name is legion; and in the very decade we are studying several of them said their funny sayings, making men and women laugh, but of them all the man of 1894 knows but two names, and these two are only a memory. Yet the rhymes and the readings of Saxe and the letters and the lectures of Artemus Ward had a hearing and a popularity that they could never have received from people whose cast of thought was wholly serious. Abraham Lincoln, in so many ways the typical American, represents well the American character in its mixture of gravity and sensitiveness to humor. He who took supreme delight in the letters of Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, and who was himself a man of infinite jest, had in repose one of the saddest faces mortal
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1 Vol. iii. p. 361.
2 See vol. ii. p. 128.
3 Ibid., p. 219, Reeves's translation.

ever wore. When on the point of submitting to his cabinet the Emancipation Proclamation, the ushering in of the most momentous act of the century, he began the consultation by reading a chapter from Artemus Ward's book. Bryce, sweeping away some conventional opinions with that nicety he has so many times exhibited, arrived at the bottom truth when he stated that humor " is a commoner gift in America than elsewhere,"1 and that the Americans "are as conspicuously the purveyors of humor to the nineteenth century as the French were the purveyors of wit to the eighteenth."2 This remark will apply as well to the period before the war as now. Yet many circumstances seem to indicate that since 1865 the national seriousness has abated. An observer of manners and morals thirty-five years ago would hardly have charged that our "worst vice is want of seriousness." 3 While the work of shedding off " the sadness of Puritanism " 4 has continued, it would be difficult to maintain that the appreciation of humor had increased.

"The whole life of an American," wrote De Tocqueville, "is a game, a time of revolution, a day of battle."5 This is true of the decade we are reviewing; but it was a game played with imperturbable good-nature. All observers, whether they consider the United States of De Tocqueville, that of 1850-60, or that of Bryce, agree that the Americans are a good-natured people.

The standard of pecuniary honesty in the United States has seemed to many European observers to be low. From Niebuhr's interjectional and illustrative remark to his class in Roman history at the University of Bonn, " In some parts of America any profit which a person can make is thought
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1 Vol. ii. p. 652.
2 Ibid., p. 244. And Bryce adds: "Nor is this sense of the ludicrous side of things confined to a few brilliant writers. It is diffused among the whole people; it colors their ordinary life, and gives to their talk that distinctively new flavor which a European palate enjoys."
3 See a thoughtful article in the Atlantic Monthly, May, 1892, p. 625. 4 Bryce, vol. ii. p. 666.
5 Vol. ii. p. 416.

lawful;"1 and from De Tocqueville's careful and correct statement,2 other writers have been led to harp upon this subject, and, according to their disposition of mind, have painted this tendency in black colors or have found extenuating circumstances. When we take into account the mobility of American life, and reflect that many persons get placed in positions of trust without a previous mental, social, and moral training, and without any searching examination into their characteristics and descent; moreover, that much of the knavery in business is perpetrated by the foreign-born or by the sons of foreign-born parents, we shall not hesitate to have challenged a comparison with any European country in regard to honesty. It is my firm conviction that, since 1865, the country has, in private affairs, grown honest; that a higher standard of commercial honor prevails; that immense transactions are successfully carried through owing to an implicit confidence reposed and justified
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1 Niebuhr's Lectures, London edition of 1873, p. 17. For a black picture of financial and commercial private morality, based on an article in the New York Times for May, 1858, see Wirth, p. 345.
"At the close of the War of 1812 the superior average intelligence of Americans was so far admitted that Yankee acuteness, or smartness, became a national reproach ; but much doubt remained whether the intelligence belonged to a high order or proved a high morality. From the earliest ages shrewdness was associated with unscrupulousness; and Americans were freely charged with wanting honesty. The charge could neither be proved nor disproved. American morality was such as suited a people so endowed, and was high when compared with the morality of many older societies."—Henry Adams, vol. ix. p. 237.
2 "On montre, aux Etats-Unis, une indulgence si singuliere pour le commercant qui fait faillite: l'honneur de celui-ci ne souffre point d'un pareil accident. En cela, les Americains different, non seulement des peuples europeens, mais de toutes les nations commercantes de nos jours; aussi ne ressemblent-ils, par leur position et leurs besoins, & aucune d'elles.
"En Amerique, on traite avec une severite incounue dans le reste du monde tous les vices qui sont de nature a alterer la purete des moeurs et a detruire l'union conjugale. Celacontraste etrangement, au premier abord, avec la tolerance qu'on y montre sur d'autres points. On est surpris de rencontrer chez le m§me peuple une morale si rel&chee et si austere."—Vol. ii. p. 385.

by man in man; that all bankrupts are now looked upon with suspicion; and that, at any rate as far West as Chicago, the man who has made a notoriously dishonest failure finds it difficult, if not impossible, ever to regain social and business standing. In such respects I believe there has been improvement since the decade we have been reviewing. The improvement may be due to the older and more settled character of the country, and also to a thorough development of the doctrine the inculcation of which struck De Tocqueville1—that virtue should be practised, not because it is beautiful, but because it is useful. Yet it would be impossible to affirm that there are fewer defalcations and breaches of trust among employees than formerly. It is probable that, owing to the extension of the news-gathering agencies of the press, a larger number of those that occur are reported now than was the case thirty-five years ago. Moreover, within that time clerks and cashiers have been subjected to greater temptations. The growth in facilities for speculation, the increase in the cost of living which began about 1850, combined with the national and dominant taste for comfort,2 may account for the fact that the moralist cannot note an improvement in this respect. But the safe handling of funds by employees is largely a matter of administration and system, and, judging from steps that have already been taken in this direction, we may look for a better condition of things.

In public affairs in the United States there is a different standard of honesty from that which prevails in private life. In this respect, since 1860, owing undoubtedly to the demoralization in politics, the deterioration has been striking.
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1 See vol. iii. p. 199.
2 "L'amour du bien-Stre est devenu le gout national et dominant; le grand courant des passions humaines porte de ce cote, il entraine tout dans son cours."—De Tocqueville, vol. iii. p. 211. "11 pourrait bien s'etablir dans le monde une sorte de materialisme honnfite qui ne corromprait pas les Smes, mais qui les amollirait et flnirait par detendre sans bruit tous leurs ressorts."—Ibid., p. 215.

The excuses made to-day by good and honest people for public men and politicians are deplorable. Such excuses are rarely met with in the decade we have been reviewing. In such a discrepancy between the standards in public and in private affairs there is nothing novel. It has existed and does exist in other nations.1 But it is certain that in no Teutonic nation of our day is the difference so marked between the standards of public and private morality as in the United States. The one is lower than it was in 1860; the other, inconsistent as it may seem, is higher.

Other comparisons between the decade of 1850-60 and the present have occurred to me; but they can be better considered when, in a future volume, I shall discuss the intellectual, social, and moral state of the people of our own time.
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1"The conscience of the Romans, otherwise in economic matters so scrupulous, showed, so far as the state was concerned, a remarkable laxity. 'He who steals from a burgess,' said Cato, 'ends his days in chains and fetters; but he who steals from the community ends them in gold and purple.'"—Mommsen's History of Rome, vol. ii. p. 390.


Source: Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States; from the compromise of 1850 to the final restoration of home rule at the south in 1877, v.3. New York: Macmillan, 1910 [c1892].