"Marse Henry" 
 
 .yW yiUTOBlOCRAPHY 
 
IIEXRY WATTEUSOX FIFTY YEARS AGO 
 
"Marse Henry ' 
 
 ^N AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 By 
 HENRY WATTERSON 
 
 Volume II 
 Illustrated 
 
 NEW'xfij^YORK 
 
 GEORGE H.DORAN COMPANY 
 

 COPYRIGHT, 1919, 
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 xw^'y^ 
 
 Ma 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH 
 
 PAGE 
 
 l^HARLES EaMES AND ChARLES SuMNER— ScIIURZ AND 
 
 Lamar — I Go to Congress — A Heroic Ken- 
 TUCKiAN — Stephen Foster and His Songs — 
 Music and Theodore Thomas 15 
 
 CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH 
 
 Henry Adams and the Adams Family — John Hay 
 and Frank Mason — The Three Mousquetaires 
 of Culture — Paris — "The Frenchman" — The 
 South of France 33 
 
 CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH 
 
 Still the Gay Capital op France — Its Environs 
 — Walewska and de Morny — ^Thackeray in 
 Paris — ^A Pension Adventure 54 
 
 CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH 
 
 Monte Carlo — The European Shrine of Sport 
 AND Fashion — Apocryphal Gambling Stories 
 — Leopold, King of the Belgians — ^An Able 
 AND Picturesque Man of Business .... 73 
 
 CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH 
 
 A Parisian Pension — The Widow of Walewska — 
 Napoleon's Daughter-in-law — The Changeless 
 — A Moral and Orderly City 90 
 
 [v] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER THE EIGHTEExNTH 
 
 The Grover Cleveland Period — President Arthur 
 AND Mr. Blaine — John Chamberlin — The 
 Decrees of Destiny 102 
 
 CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH 
 
 Mr. Cleveland in the White House — Mr. Bayard 
 in the Department of State — Queer Appoint- 
 ments to Office — The One-party Power — The 
 End of North and South Sectionalism . . . 114 
 
 CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH 
 
 The Real Grover Cleveland — ^Two Clevelands 
 Before and After Marriage — A Correspond- 
 ence AND A Break of Personal Relations . . 132 
 
 CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST 
 
 Stephen Foster, the Song Writer — A Friend 
 Comes to the Rescue of His Originality — 
 "My Old Kentucky Home" and the "Old 
 Folks at Home" — General Sherman and 
 "Marching Through Georgia" 146 
 
 CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt — ^His Problematic Character 
 — He Offers Me an Appointment — His Bon- 
 homie and Chivalry — Proud of His Rebel Kin 158 
 
 CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD 
 
 The Actor and the Journalist — The Newspaper 
 and the State — Joseph Jefferson — His Per- 
 sonal and Artistic Career — ^Modest Character 
 
 and Religious Belief 170 
 
 [vi] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER THE T^^ENTY-FOURTH 
 
 The Writing of Memoirs — Some Characteristics 
 OF Carl Schurz — Sam Bowl.es — ^Horace White 
 AND THE Mugwumps 187 
 
 CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH 
 
 Every Trade Has Its Tricks — I Play One on 
 William McKinley — ^Far Away Party Politics 
 and Political Issues 198 
 
 CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH 
 
 A Libel on Mr. Cleveland — ^His Fondness for 
 Cards — Some Poker Stories — The "Senate 
 Game" — Tom Ochiltree, Senator Allison and 
 General Schenck 209 
 
 CHAPTER THE TWENTY^SEVENTH 
 
 The Profession of Journalism — Newspapers and 
 Editors in America — Bennett, Greeley and 
 Raymond — Forney and Dana — The Education 
 of a Journalist 224 
 
 CHAPTER THE TWENTY-EIGHTH 
 
 Bullies and Braggarts — Some Kentucky Illustra- 
 tions — The Old Galt House — The Throckmor- 
 TONs — A Famous Surgeon — " Old Hell's 
 Delight" 240 
 
 CHAPTER THE TWENTY-NINTH 
 
 About Political Conventions, State and National 
 — "Old Ben Butler" — His Appearance as a 
 Trouble-maker in the Democratic National 
 Convention of 1892 — Tarifa and the Tariff — 
 
 Spain as a Frightful Example 249 
 
 [vii] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 FAQE 
 
 CHAPTER THE THIRTIETH 
 
 The Makers of the Republic — ^Lincoln, Jefferson, 
 Clay and Webster — The Proposed League of 
 Nations — The Wilsonian Incertitude — The 
 "New Freedom" 263 
 
 CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIRST 
 
 The Age of Miracles — A Story of Franklin 
 Pierce — Simon Suggs and Billy Sunday — Jef- 
 ferson Davis and Aaron Burr — Certain Con- 
 stitutional Shortcomings 280 
 
 CHAPTER THE THIRTY-SECOND 
 
 A War Episode — I Meet My Fate — I Marry and 
 Make a Home — The Ups and Downs of Life 
 Lead to a Happy Old Age 296 
 
 [viii] 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Henbt Watterson — Fifty Years Ago , . Frontispiece 
 
 XT ^^''^ 
 
 Henry Woodfire Grady — One of Mr. Watterson's 
 
 "Boys" 48 
 
 Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield" . . 120 
 
 A Corner of "Mansfield" — Home of Mr. Watter- 
 son 136 
 
 Henry Watterson (Photograph Taken in Florida) 160 
 
 Henry Watterson. From a Painting by Louis 
 Mark in the Manhattan Club, New York . . 232 
 
 [ix] 
 
"Marse Henry' 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH 
 
 CHAELES EAMES AND CHARLES SUMNER — SCHURZ 
 AND LAMAR — I GO TO CONGRESS — A HEROIC 
 KENTUCKIAN — STEPHEN FOSTER AND HIS SONGS 
 — MUSIC AND THEODORE THOMAS 
 
 SWIFT'S definition of "conversation" did not 
 preside over or direct the daily intercourse be- 
 tween Charles Sumner, Charles Eames and Rob- 
 ert J. Walker in the old days in the National 
 Capital. They did not converse. They discoursed. 
 They talked sententiously in portentous essays and 
 learned dissertations. I used to think it great, 
 though I nursed no little disHke of Sumner, 
 
 Charles Eames was at the outset of his career a 
 ne'er-do-well New Englander — a Yankee Jack- 
 of-all-trades — kept at the front by an exceedingly 
 
 [15] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 clever wife. Through the favor she enjoyed at 
 court he received from Pierce and Buchanan unim- 
 portant diplomatic appointments. During their so- 
 journs in Washington their home was a kind of 
 political and literary headquarters. Mrs. Eames 
 had established a salon — the first attempt of the 
 kind made there; and it was altogether a success. 
 Her Sundays evenings were notable, indeed. Who- 
 ever was worth seeing, if in town, might usually be 
 found there. Charles Sumner led the procession. 
 He was a most imposing person. Both handsome 
 and distinguished in appearance, he possessed in an 
 eminent degree the Harvard pragmatism — or, shall 
 I say, affectation? — and seemed never happy ex- 
 cept on exhibition. He had made a profitable poli- 
 tical and personal issue of the Preston Brooks at- 
 tack. Brooks was an exceeding light weight, but 
 he did for Sumner more than Sumner could ever 
 have done for himself. 
 
 In the Charles Eames days Sumner was exceed- 
 ingly disagreeable to me. Many people, indeed, 
 thought him so. Many years later, in the Greeley 
 campaign of 1872, Schurz brought us together — 
 they had become as very brothers in the Senate — 
 [16] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and I found him the reverse of my boyish ill con- 
 ceptions. 
 
 He was a great old man. He was a delightful 
 old man, every inch a statesman, much of a scholar, 
 and something of a hero. I gi'cw in time to be 
 actually fond of him, passed with him entire after- 
 noons and evenings in his library, mourned sincere- 
 ly when he died, and went with Schurz to Boston, 
 on the occasion when that great German- American 
 delivered the memorial address in honor of the dead 
 Abolitionist. 
 
 Of all the public men of that period Carl Schurz 
 most captivated me. When we first came into per- 
 sonal relations, at the Liberal Convention, which 
 assembled at Cincinnati and nominated Greeley 
 and Brown as a presidential ticket, he was just 
 turned forty-three; I, two and thirty. The closest 
 intimacy followed. Our tastes were much ahke. 
 Both of us had been educated in music. He played 
 the piano with intelligence and feeling — especially 
 Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of 
 us ever having quite reached the "high jinks" of 
 Wagner. 
 
 To me his oratory was wonderful. He spoke to 
 an audience of five or ten thousand as he would 
 
 [17] 
 
''MARSE HENRY" 
 
 have talked to a party of three or six. His style 
 was simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid state- 
 ment and cogent argument now and again irradi- 
 ated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not j 
 too eloquent rhetoric. 
 
 He was quite knocked out by the nomination of 
 Horace Greeley. For a long time he could not 
 reconcile himself to support the ticket. Horace 
 White and I addressed ourselves to the task of 
 "fetching him into camp" — there being in point of 
 fact nowhere else for him to go^ though we had to 
 get up what was called The Fifth Avenue Con- 1 
 ference to make a bridge. 
 
 Truth to say, Schurz never wholly adjusted him- 
 self to political conditions in the United States. He 
 once said to me in one of the querulous moods that 
 sometimes overcame him: "If I should hve a hun- 
 dred years my enemies would still call me a — 
 Dutchman!" 
 
 It was Schurz, as I have said, who brought 
 Lamar and me together. The Mississippian had 
 been a Secession Member of Congress when I was 
 a Unionist scribe in the reporters' gallery. I was 
 a furious partisan in those days and disliked the 
 Secessionists intensely. Of them, Lamar was most 
 [18] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 aggressive. I later learned that he was very many- 
 sided and accomplished, the most interesting and 
 lovable of men. He and Schurz "froze together," 
 as, brought together by Schurz, he and I "froze to- 
 gether." On one side he was a sentimentalist and 
 on the other a philosopher, but on all sides a fighter. 
 
 They called him a dreamer. He sprang from a 
 race of chevaliers and scholars. Oddly enough, 
 albeit in his moods a recluse, he was a man of the 
 world ; a favorite in society ; very much at home in 
 European courts, especially in that of England; 
 the friend of Thackeray, at whose house, when in 
 London, he made his abode. Lady Ritchie — Anne 
 Thackeray — told me many amusing stories of his 
 whimsies. He was a man among brainy men and 
 a lion among clever women. 
 
 We had already come to be good friends and 
 constant comrades when the whirligig of time threw 
 us together for a httle while in the lower house of 
 Congress. One day he beckoned me over to his 
 seat. He was leaning backward with his hands 
 crossed behind his head. 
 
 As I stood in front of him he said; "On the 
 eighth of February, 1858, Mrs. Gwin, of Cali- 
 fornia, gave a fancy dress ball. Mr. Lamar, of 
 
 [19] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Mississippi, a member of Congress, was there. 
 Also a glorious young woman — a vision of beauty 
 and grace — ^with whom the handsome and distin- 
 guished young statesman danced — danced once, 
 twice, thrice, taking her likewise down to supper. 
 He went to bed, turned his face to the wall and 
 dreamed of her. That was twenty years ago. To- 
 day this same Mr. Lamar, after an obscure inter- 
 regnum, was with IMrs. Lamar looking over Wash- 
 ington for an apartment. In quest of cheap lodg- 
 ing they came to a mean house in a mean quarter, 
 where a poor, wizened, ill-clad woman showed them 
 through the meanly furnished rooms. Of course 
 they would not suffice. 
 
 "As they were coming away the great Mr. Lamar 
 said to the poor landlady, 'Madam, have you Hved 
 long in Washington?' She said all her life. 
 'Madam,' he continued, 'were you at a fancy dress 
 ball given by Mrs. Senator Gwin of California, the 
 eighth of February, 1858?' She said she was. 'Do 
 you remember,' the statesman, soldier and orator 
 continued, 'a young and handsome Mississippian, a 
 member of Congi'ess, by the name of Lamar?' She 
 said she didn't." 
 
 I rather think that Lamar was the biggest 
 [20] 
 
 <i 
 
 I 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 brained of all the men I have met in Washington, 
 He possessed the courage of his convictions. A 
 doctrinaii-e, there was nothing of the typical doc- 
 trinaire, or theorist, about him. He really believed 
 that cotton was king and would compel England to 
 espouse the cause of the South. 
 
 Despite his wealth of experience and travel he 
 was not overmuch of a raconteur, but he once told 
 me a good story about his friend Thackeray. The 
 two were driving to a banquet of the Literary 
 Fund, where Dickens was to preside. "Lamar," 
 said Thackeray, "they say I can't speak. But if 
 I want to I can speak. I can speak every bit as 
 good as Dickens, and I am going to show you to- 
 night that I can speak almost as good as you." 
 When the moment arrived Thackeray said never a 
 word. Returning in the cab, both silent, Thackeray 
 suddenly broke forth. "Lamar," he exclaimed, 
 "don't you think you have heard the greatest speech 
 to-night that was never delivered?" 
 
 n 
 
 Holding office, especially going to Congress, had 
 never entered any wish or scheme of mine. Office 
 
 [21] 
 
'jMARSE HENRY" 
 
 seemed to me ever a badge of bondage. I knew 
 too much of the national capital to be allured by 
 its evanescent and lightsome honors. When the 
 opportunity sought me out none of its illusions ap- 
 pealed to me. But after a long uphill fight for per- 
 sonal and political recognition in Kentucky an elec- 
 tion put a kind of seal upon the victory I had won 
 and enabled me in a way to triumph over my 
 enemies. I knew that if I accepted the nomination 
 offered me I would get a big popular vote — as I 
 did — and so, one full term, and half a term, inci- 
 dent to the death of the sitting member for the 
 Louisville district being open to me, I took the short 
 term, refusing the long term. 
 
 Though it was midsummer and Congress was 
 about to adjourn I went to Washington and was 
 sworn in. A friend of mine, Col. Wake Holman, 
 had made a bet with one of our pals I would be 
 under arrest before I had been twenty-four hours 
 in town, and won it. It happened in this wise: The 
 night of the day when I took my seat there was an 
 all-night session. I knew too well what that meant, 
 and, just from a long tiresome journey, I went to 
 bed and slept soundly till sunrise. Just as I was 
 up and dressing for a stroll about the old, familiar, 
 [22] 
 
"MARSE HENRY'* 
 
 dearly loved quarter of the town there came an im- 
 perative rap upon the door and a voice said: ",Get 
 up, colonel, quick! This is a sergeant at arms. 
 There has been a call of the House and I am after 
 you. Everybody is drunk, more or less, and they 
 are noisy to have some fun with you." 
 
 It was even as he said. Everybody, more or less, 
 was drunk — especially the provisional speaker 
 whom Mr. Randall had placed in the chair — and 
 when we arrived and I was led a prisoner down the 
 center aisle pandemonium broke loose. 
 
 They had all sorts of fun with me, such as it was. 
 It was moved that I be fined the full amount of my 
 mileage. Then a resolution was offered suspend- 
 ing my membership and sending me under guard 
 to the old Capitol prison. Finally two or three of 
 my friends rescued me and business was allowed to 
 proceed. It was the last day of a very long session 
 and those who were not drunk were worn out. 
 
 When I returned home there was a celebration 
 in honor of the bet Wake Holman had won at my 
 expense. Wake was the most attractive and lovable 
 of men, by nature a hero, by profession a "filibus- 
 ter" and soldier of fortune. At two and twenty he 
 was a private in Col. Humphrey Marshall's Regi- 
 
 [23] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ment of Kentucky Riflemen, which reached the 
 scene of hostilities upon the Rio Grande in the 
 midsummer of 1846. He had enhsted from Owen 
 county — "Sweet Owen," as it used to be called — 
 and came of good stock, his father. Col. Harry Hol- 
 man, in the days of aboriginal fighting and j ournal- 
 ism, a frontier celebrity. Wake's company, out on 
 a scout, was picked off by the Mexicans, and the dis- 
 tinction between United States soldiers and Texan 
 rebels not being yet clearly established, a drumhead 
 court-martial ordered "the decimation." 
 
 This was a decree that one of every ten of the 
 Yankee captives should be shot. There being a 
 hundred of Marshall's men, one hundred beans — 
 ninety white and ten black — were put in a hat. 
 Then the company was mustered as on dress 
 parade. Whoso drew a white bean was to be held 
 prisoner of war; whoso drew a black bean was to 
 die. 
 
 In the early part of the drawing Wake drew a 
 white bean. Toward the close the turn of a neigh- 
 bor and comrade from Owen county who had left 
 a wife and baby at home was called. He and Wake 
 were standing together, Holman brushed him 
 aside, walked out in his place and drew his bean. It 
 [24] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 turned out to be a white one. Twice within the 
 half hour death had looked him in the eye and 
 found no blinking there. 
 
 I have seen quite a deal of hardihood, endurance, 
 suffering, in both women and men; splendid cour- 
 age on the field of action ; perfect self-possession in 
 the face of danger; but I rather think that Wake 
 Holman's exploit that day — next to actually dying 
 for a friend, what can be nobler than being willing 
 to die for him? — is the bravest thing I know or have 
 ever been told of mortal man. 
 
 Wake Holman went to Cuba in the Lopez Re- 
 bellion of 1851, and fought under Pickett at the 
 Battle of Cardenas. In 1855-56 he was in Nica- 
 ragua, with Walker. He commanded a Kentucky 
 regiment of cavalry on the Union side in our War 
 of Sections. After the war he lived the hfe of a 
 hunter and fisher at his home in Kentucky; a 
 cheery, unambitious, big-brained and big-hearted 
 chei-ub, whom it would not do to "projeck" with, 
 albeit with entire safety you could pick his pocket ; 
 the soul of simplicity and amiability. 
 
 To have known him was an education in primal 
 manhood. To sit at his hospitable board, with him 
 at the head of the table, was an inspiration in the 
 
 [25] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 genius of life and the art of living. One of his 
 familiars started the joke that when Wake drew 
 the second white bean "he got a peep." He took it 
 kindly ; though in my intimacy with him, extending 
 over thirty years, I never heard hkn refer to any 
 of his adventures as a soldier. 
 
 It was not possible that such a man should pro- 
 vide for his old age. He had little forecast. He 
 knew not the value of money. He had humor, af- 
 fection and courage. I held him in real love and 
 honor. When the Mexican War Pension Act was 
 passed by Congress I took his papers to General 
 Black, the Commissioner of Pensions, and related 
 this story. 
 
 "I have promised Gen. Cerro Gordo Williams," 
 said General Black, referring to the then senior 
 United States Senator from Kentucky, "that his 
 name shall go first on the roll of these Mexican 
 pensioners. But" — and the General looked beam- 
 ingly in my face, a bit tearful, and says he: "Wake 
 Hohnan's name shall come right after." And there 
 
 it is. 
 
 ni 
 
 I was very carefully and for those times not 
 ignorantly taught in music. Schell, his name was, 
 [26] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and they called liim "Professor." He lived over 
 in Georgetown, where he had organized a little 
 group of Prussian refugees into a German club, 
 and from my tenth to my fifteenth year — at first 
 regularly, and then in a desultory way as I came 
 back to Washington City from my school in Phila- 
 delphia, he hammered Bach and Handel and Mo- 
 zart — nothing so modern as Mendelssohn — into my 
 not unwilling nor unreceptive mind, for my bent 
 was in the beginning to compose dramas, and in 
 the end operas. 
 
 Adelina Patti was among my child companions. 
 Once in the national capital, when I was 12 years 
 old and Adelina 9, we played together at a charity 
 concert. She had sung "The Last Rose of Sum- 
 mer," and I had played her brother-in-law's varia- 
 tion upon "Home, Sweet Home." The audience 
 was enthusiastic. We were called out again and 
 again. Then we came on the stage together, and 
 the applause increasing I sat down at the keyboard 
 and played an accompaniment with my own inter- 
 polations upon "Old Folks At Home," which I had 
 taught Adehna, and she sang the words. Then 
 they fairly took the roof off. 
 
 Once during a sojourn in Paris I was thrown 
 
 [27] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 with Christine Nilsson. She was in the heyday of 
 her success at the Theater Lyrique under the 
 patronage of Madame Miolan-Carvalho. One day 
 I said to her: "The time may come when you will 
 be giving concerts." She was indignant. "Never- 
 theless," I continued, "let me teach you a sure en- 
 core." I played her Stephen Foster's immortal 
 ditty. She was delighted. The sequel was that it 
 served her even a better turn than it had served 
 Adelina Patti. 
 
 I played and transposed for the piano most of 
 the melodies of Foster as they were published, they 
 being first produced in public by Christy's 
 Minstrels. 
 
 IV 
 
 Stephen Foster was the ne'er-do-well of a good 
 Pennsylvania family. A sister of his had married 
 a brother of James Buchanan. There were two 
 daughters of this marriage, nieces of the President, 
 and when they were visiting the White House we 
 had — shall I dare write it? — high jinks with our 
 nigger-minstrel concerts on the sly. 
 
 Will S. Hays, the rival of Foster as a song writer 
 and one of my reporters on the Courier-Journal, 
 [28] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 told me this story: "Foster," said he, "was a good 
 deal of what you might call a barroom loafer. He 
 possessed a sweet tenor voice before it was spoiled 
 
 ; by drink, and was fond of music, though technically 
 he knew nothing about it. He had a German friend 
 who when he died left him a musical scrapbook, of 
 all sorts of odds and ends of original text. There 
 is where Foster got his melodies. When the scrap- 
 book gave out he gave out." * 
 I took it as merely the spleen of a rival composer. 
 But many years after in Vienna I heard a concert 
 given over exclusively to the performance of cer- 
 tain posthumous manuscripts of Schubert. Among 
 the rest were selections from an unfinished opera — 
 "Rosemonde," I think it was called — in which the 
 whole rhythm and movements and parts of the 
 score of Old Folks at Home were the feature. 
 It was something to have grown up contempo- 
 
 I rary, as it were, with these songs. Many of them 
 were written in the old Rowan homestead, just out- 
 side of Bardstown, Ky., where Louis Philippe lived 
 and taught, and for a season Talleyrand made his 
 
 ' abode. The Rowans were notable people. John 
 Rowan, the elder, head of the house, was a famous 
 lawyer, who divided oratorical honors with Henry 
 
 [29] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Clay, and like Clay, was a Senator in Congress; 
 his son, "young John," as he was called, Stephen 
 Foster's pal, went as minister to Naples, and fought 
 duels, and was as Bob Acres wanted to be, "a devil 
 of a fellow." He once told me he had been intimate 
 with Thackeray when they were wild young men in 
 Paris, and that they had both of them known the 
 woman whom Thackeray had taken for the original 
 of Becky Sharp. 
 
 The Foster songs quite captivated my boyhood. 
 I could sing a httle, as well as play, and learned 
 each of them — especially Old Folks at Home and 
 My Old Kentucky Home — as they appeared. Their 
 contemporary vogue was tremendous. Nothing has 
 since rivalled the popular impression they made, 
 except perhaps the Arthur Sullivan melodies. 
 
 Among my ambitions to be a great historian, 
 dramatist, soldier and writer of romance I desired 
 also to be a great musician, especially a great 
 pianist. The bone-felon did the business for this 
 later. But all my life I have been able to thumb 
 the keyboard at least for the children to dance, and 
 it has been a recourse and solace sometimes during 
 intervals of embittered journalism and unprosper- 
 ous statesmanship. 
 [30] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Theodore Thomas and I used to play duos to- 
 gether. He was a master of the vioHn before he 
 took to orchestration. We remained the best of 
 friends to the end of his days. 
 
 On the shghtest provocation, or none, we passed 
 entire nights together. Once after a concert he 
 suddenly exclaimed: "Don't you think Wagner was 
 a fraud?" 
 
 A little surprised even by one of his outbreaks, 
 I said: "Wagner may have written some trick music 
 but I hardly think that he was a fraud." 
 
 He reflected a moment. "Well," he continued, 
 "it may not lie in my mouth to say it — and perhaps 
 I ought not to say it — I know I am most respon- 
 sible for the Wagner craze — but I consider him a 
 fraud." 
 
 He had just come from a long "classic entertain- 
 ment," was worn out with travel and worry, and 
 meant nothing of the sort. 
 
 After a very tiresome concert when he was rail- 
 ing at the hard lines of a peripatetic musician I said : 
 "Come with me and I will give you a soothing quail 
 
 [31] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and as dry a glass of champagne as you ever had in 
 your life." 
 
 The wine was poured out and he took a sip. 
 
 "I don't call that dry wine," he crossly said, and 
 took another sip. "My God," without a pause he 
 continued, "isn't that great?" 
 
 Of course he was impulsive, even impetuous. Be- 
 neath his seeming cold exterior and admirable self- 
 control — the discipline of the master artist — lay 
 the moods and tenses of the musical temperament. 
 He knew little or nothing outside of music and did 
 not care to learn. I tried to interest him in politics. 
 It was of no use. First he laughed my suggestions 
 to scorn and then swore like a trooper. German he 
 was, through and through. It was well that he 
 passed away before the world war. Pat Gilmore 
 — "Patrick Sarsfield," we always called him — was a 
 born politician, and if he had not been a musician 
 he would have been a statesman. I kept the peace 
 between him and Theodore Thomas by an ingeni- 
 ous system of telling all kinds of kind things each 
 had said of the other, my "repetitions" being pure 
 inventions of my own. 
 
 [32} 
 
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH 
 
 HENRY ADAMS AND THE ADAMS FAMILY JOHN HAY 
 
 AND FKANK MASON THE THREE MOUSQU- 
 
 TAIRES OF CULTURE — PARIS — "tHE FRENCH- 
 MAN" — THE SOUTH OF FRANCE 
 
 I HAVE been of late reading The Education of 
 Henry Adams, and it recalls many persons 
 and incidents belonging to the period about which 
 I am now writing. I knew Henry Adams well; 
 first in London, then in Boston and finally through- 
 out his prolonged residence in Washington City. 
 He was an Adams ; very definitely an Adams, but, 
 though his ghost may revisit the glimpses of the 
 moon and chide me for saying so, with an English 
 "cut to his jib." 
 
 No three brothers could be more unlike than 
 Charles Francis, John Quincy and Henry Adams. 
 Brooks Adams I did not know. They represented 
 
 [33] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 the fourth generation of the brainiest pedigree — 
 that is in continuous line — known to our family his- 
 tory. Henry thought he was a philosopher and 
 tried to be one. He thought he was a man of the 
 world and wanted to be one. He was, in spite of 
 himself, a provincial. 
 
 Provincialism is not necessarily rustic, even sub- 
 urban. There is no provincial quite so provincial 
 as he who has passed his life in great cities. The 
 Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, 
 the cockney a little off Clapham Common and the 
 Strand, is lost. Henry Adams knew his London 
 and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy — we must 
 not forget Quincy — well. But he had been born, 
 and had grown up, between the lids of history, and 
 for all his learning and travel he never got very 
 far outside them. 
 
 In manner and manners, tone and cast of thought 
 he w^as English — delightfully Enghsh — though he 
 cultivated the cosmopolite. His house in the na- 
 tional capital, facing the Executive Mansion across 
 Lafayette Square — especially during the life of his 
 wife, an adorable woman, who made up in sweet- 
 ness and tact for some of the quahties lacking in 
 her husband — was an intellectual and high-bred 
 [34] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 center, a rendezvous for the best ton and the most 
 accepted people. The Adamses may be said to have 
 succeeded the Eameses as leaders in semi-social, 
 semi-literary and semi-political society. 
 
 There was a trio — I used to call them the Three 
 IMusketeers of Culture — John Hay, Henry Cabot 
 Lodge and Henry Adams. They made an interest- 
 ing and inseparable trinity — Caleb Cushing, Robert 
 J. Walker and Charles Sumner not more so — and 
 it was worth while to let them have the floor and to 
 hear them talk; Lodge, cool and wary as a politi- 
 cian should be ; Hay, helterskelter, the real man of 
 the world crossed on a Western stock; and Adams, 
 something of a literatteur, a statesman and a cynic. 
 
 John Randolph Tucker, who when he was in Con- 
 gress often met Henry at dinners and the like, said 
 to him on the appearance of the early volumes of 
 his History of the United States: "I am not dis- 
 appointed, for how could an Adams be expected 
 to do justice to a Randolph?" 
 
 While he was writing this history Adams said to 
 me: "There is an old villain — next to Andrew 
 Jackson the greatest villain of his time — a Ken- 
 tuckian — don't say he was a kinsman of yours! — 
 whose papers, if he left any, I want to see." 
 
 [35] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 "To whom are you referring?" I asked with mock 
 dignity. 
 
 "To John Adair," he answered. 
 
 "Well," said I, "John Adair married my grand- 
 mother's sister and I can put you in the way of 
 getting whatever you require." 
 
 I have spoken of John Hay as Master of the 
 Revels in the old Sutherland-Delmonico days. 
 Even earlier than that — in London and Paris — an 
 intimacy had been established between us. He mar- 
 ried in Cleveland, Ohio, and many years passed be- 
 fore I came up with him again. One day in White- 
 law Reid's den in the Tribune Building he reap- 
 peared, strangely changed — no longer the rosy- 
 cheeked, buoyant boy — an overserious, prematurely 
 old man. I was shocked, and when he had gone 
 Reid, observing this, said: "Oh, Hay will come 
 round all right. He is just now in one of his moods. 
 I picked him up in Piccadilly the other day and by 
 sheer force brought him over." 
 
 When we recall the story of Hay's life — one 
 
 weird tragedj^ after another, from the murder of 
 
 Lincoln to the murder of McKinley, including the 
 
 tragic end of two members of his immediate family 
 
 [36] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 — there rises in spite of the grandeur that pursued 
 him a single exclamation: "The pity of it!" 
 
 This is accentuated by Henry Adams' Educa- 
 tion. Yet the silent courage with which Hay met 
 disaster after disaster must increase both the sym- 
 pathy and the respect of those who peruse the 
 melancholy pages of that vivid narrative. Toward 
 the end, meeting him on a public occasion, I said: 
 "You work too hard — you are not looking well." 
 
 "I am dying," said he. 
 
 "Yes," I replied in the way of banter, "y^^ ^^^ 
 dying of fame and fortune." 
 
 But I went no further. He was in no mood for 
 the old verbal horseplay. 
 
 He looked wan and wizened. Yet there were 
 still several years before him. When he came from 
 Mannheim to Paris it was clear that the end was 
 nigh. I did not see him — he was too ill to see any 
 one — but Frank Mason kept me advised from day 
 to day, and when, a month or two later, having 
 reached home, the news came to us that he was dead 
 we were nowise surprised, and almost consoled by 
 the thought that rest had come at last. 
 
 Frank Mason and his wife — "the Masons," they 
 were commonly called, for Mrs. Mason made a 
 
 [37] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 wondrous second to her husband — were from Cleve- 
 land, Ohio, she a daughter of Judge Birchard — 
 Jennie Birchard — he a rising young journalist 
 caught in the late seventies by the glitter of a for- 
 eign appointment. They ran the gamut of the con- 
 sular service, beginning with Basel and Marseilles 
 and ending with Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris. 
 Wherever they were their house was a very home 
 — a kind of Yankee shrine — of visiting Americans 
 and militant Americanism. 
 
 Years before he was made consul general — in 
 point of fact when he was plain consul at Marseilles 
 — he ran over to Paris for a lark. One day he said 
 to me, "A rich old hayseed uncle of mine has come 
 to town. He has money to burn and lie wants to 
 meet you. I have arranged for us to dine with him 
 at the Anglaise to-night and we are to order the 
 dinner — carte blanche." The rich old uncle to whom 
 I was presented did not have the appearance of a 
 hayseed. On the contrary he was a most distin- 
 guished-looking old gentleman. The dinner we 
 ordered was "stunning" — especially the wines. 
 When the bill was presented our host scanned it 
 carefully, scrutinizing each item and making his 
 own addition, altogether "like a thoroughbred." 
 [38] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Frank and I watched him not without a bit of 
 anxiety mixed with contrition. When he had paid 
 the score he said with a smile: "That was rather a 
 steep bill, but we have had rather a good dinner, 
 and now, if you boys know of as good a dance hall 
 we'll go there and I'll buy the outfit." 
 
 II 
 
 First and last I have lived much in the erstwhile 
 gay capital of France. It was gayest when the 
 Duke de Morny flourished as King of the Bourse. 
 He was reputed the Emperor's natural half- 
 brother. The breakdown of the Mexican adven- 
 ture, which was mostly his, contributed not a little 
 to the final Napoleonic fall. He died of dissipation 
 and disappointment, and under the pseudonjon of 
 the Duke de Morra, Daudet celebrated him in 
 "The Nabob." 
 
 De Morny did not live to see the tumble of the 
 house of cards he had built. Next after I saw Paris 
 it was a pitiful wreck indeed ; the Hotel de Ville and 
 the Tuileries in flames ; the Column gone from the 
 Place Vendome; but later the rise of the Third 
 Republic saw the revival of the unquenchable spirit 
 of the irrepressible French. 
 
 [39] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Nevertheless I should scarcely be taken for a 
 Parisian. Once, when wandering aimlessly, as one 
 so often does through the Paris streets, one of the 
 touts hanging round the Cafe de la Paix to catch 
 the unwary stranger being a little more importu- 
 nate than usual, I ordered him to go about his busi- 
 ness. 
 
 "This is my business," he impudently answered. 
 
 "Get away, I tell you!" I thundered, "I am a 
 Parisian myself!" 
 
 He drew a little out of reach of the umbrella I 
 held in my hand, and with a drawl of supreme and 
 very American contemf)t, exclaimed, "Well, you 
 don't look it," and scampered off. 
 
 Paris, however, is not all of France. Sometimes 
 I have thought not the best part of it. There is the 
 south of France, with Avignon, the heart of Pro- 
 vence, seat of the French papacy six hundred years 
 ago, the metropolis of Christendom before the ^lidi 
 was a region — Paris yet a village, and Rome strug- 
 ghng out of the debris of the ages — with Aries and 
 Nimes, and, above all, Tarascon, the home of the 
 immortal Tartarin, for next-door neighbors. They 
 are all hard by ^larseilles. But Avignon ever most 
 [40] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 caught my fancy, for there the nights seem peopled 
 with the ghosts of warriors and cardinals, and there 
 on festal mornings the spirits of Petrarch and his 
 Laura walk abroad, the ramparts, which bade de- 
 fiance to Goth and Vandal and Saracen hordes, 
 now giving shelter to bats and owls, but the atmos- 
 phere laden with legend 
 
 "... tasting of Flora and the coimtry green. 
 Dance and Pi'ovejifal song and sun-hurnt mirth." 
 
 Something too much of this! Let me not yield 
 to the spell of the picturesque. To recur to mat- 
 ters of fact and get down to prose and the times we 
 live in let us halt a moment on tliis southerly 
 journey and have a look in upon Lyons, the in- 
 dustrial capital of France, which is directly on the 
 way. 
 
 The idiosjTicrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two 
 schools of introduction in the art of silk weaving, 
 one of them free to any lad in the city, the other re- 
 quiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these 
 witnesses the whole process of fabrication from the 
 reeling of threads to the finishing of dress goods, 
 
 [41] 
 
"MARSE HENRY'* 
 
 and the loom painting of pictures. It is most in- 
 teresting of course, the painstaking its most obvious 
 feature, the individual weaver living with his 
 family upon a wage representing the cost of the 
 barest necessities of life. Again, and ever and ever 
 again, the inequalities of fortune! Where will it 
 end? 
 
 The world has tried revolution and it has tried 
 anarchy. Always the survival of the strong, nick- 
 named by Spencer and his ilk the "fittest." Ten 
 thousand heads were chopped off during the Terror 
 in France to make room for whom? Not for the 
 many, but the few ; though it must be allowed that 
 in some ways the conditions were improved. 
 
 Yet here after a hundred years, here in Lyons, 
 faithful, intelligent men struggle for sixty, for | 
 forty cents a day, with never a hope beyond! What 
 is to be done about it? Suppose the wealth of the 
 universe were divided per capita, how long would 
 it remain out of the clutches of the Napoleons of I 
 finance, only a percentage of whom find ultimately 
 their Waterloo, little to the profit of the poor who 
 spin and delve, who fight and die, in the Grand 
 Army of the Wretched! 
 [42] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 in 
 
 We read a deal that is amusing about the 
 southerly Frenchman. He is indeed sui generis. 
 Some five and twenty years ago there appeared in 
 Louisville a dapper gentleman, who declared him- 
 self a Marseillais, and who subsequently came to be 
 known variously as The JNIajor and The French- 
 man. I shall not mention him otherwise in this 
 veracious chronicle, but, looking through the city 
 director}^ of Marseilles I found an entire page de- 
 voted to his name, though all the entries may not 
 have been members of his family. There is no doubt 
 that he was a ^Marseillais. 
 
 Wandering through the streets of the old city, 
 now in a cafe of La Cannebiere and now along a 
 quay of the Old Port, his ghost has often crossed 
 my path and dogged my footsteps, though he has 
 lain in his grave this many a day. I grew to know 
 him very well, to be first amused by him, then to be 
 interested, and in the end to entertain an affection 
 for him. 
 
 The Major was a delightful composite of Tar- 
 tarln of Tarascon and the Brigadier Gerard, with 
 a dash of the Count of Monte Cristo; for when he 
 
 [43] 
 
"MAKSJb: HJ^JNKY' 
 
 was flush — which by some odd coincidence hap- 
 pened exactly four times a year — ^he was as Hberal 
 a spendthrift as one could wish to meet anywhere 
 between the httle principality of Monaco and the 
 headwaters of the Nile; transparent as a child; 
 idiosyncratic to a degree. 
 
 I understand Marseilles better and it has always 
 seemed nearer to me since he was born there and 
 lived there when a boy, and, I much fear me, was 
 driven away, the scapegrace of excellent and 
 wealthy people; not, I feel sure, for any offense 
 that touched the essential parts of his manhood. A 
 gentler, a more upright and harmless creature I 
 never knew in all my life. 
 
 I very well recall when he first arrived in the 
 Kentucky metropolis. His attire and raiment were 
 faultless. He wore a rose in his coat, he carried a 
 delicate cane, and a most beautiful woman hung 
 upon his arm. She was his wife. It was a circum- 
 stance connected with this lady which led to the 
 after intimacy between him and me. She fell dan- 
 gerously ill. I had casually met her husband as an 
 all-round man-about-town, and by this token, seek- 
 ing sympathy on lines of least resistance, he came 
 to me with his sorrow. 
 [44] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 I have never seen grief more real and fervid. He 
 swore, on his knees and with tears in his eyes, that 
 if she recovered, if God would give her back to him, 
 he would never again touch a card; for gambhng 
 was his passion, and even among amateurs he would 
 have been accounted the softest of soft things. His 
 prayer was answered, she did recover, and he pro- 
 ceeded to fulfill his vow. 
 
 But what was he to do? He had been taught, 
 or at least he had learned, to do nothing, not even 
 to play poker! I suggested that as running a 
 restaurant was a French prerogative and that as 
 he knew less about cooking than about anything else 
 - — we had had a contest or two over the mysteries of 
 a pair of chafing dishes — and as there was not a 
 really good eating place in Louisville, he should set 
 up a restaurant. It was said rather in jest than in 
 earnest ; but I was prepared to lend him the money. 
 The next thing I knew, and without asking for a 
 dollar, he had opened The Brunswick. 
 
 In those days I saw the Courier- Journal to press, 
 turning night into day, and during a dozen years I 
 took my twelve o'clock supper there. It was thus 
 and from these beginnings that the casual acquaint- 
 ance between us ripened into intimacy, and that I 
 
 [45] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 gradually came into a knowledge of the reserves be- 
 hind The Major's buoyant optimism and occasional 
 gasconnade. 
 
 He ate and drank sparingly ; but he was not proof 
 against the seduction of good company, and he had 
 plenty of it, from William Preston to Joseph Jef- 
 ferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, 
 Boyd Winchester, Isaac Caldwell and Proctor 
 Knott, of the Home Guard — very nearly all the 
 celebrities of the day among the outsiders — myself 
 the humble witness and chronicler. He secured an 
 excellent chef, and of course we lived exceedingly 
 well. 
 
 The Major's most obvious peculiarity was that 
 he knew everything and had been everywhere. If 
 pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once into 
 an adventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land. 
 If it was Wall Street he had a reminiscence and a 
 scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck story and a sys- 
 tem. There was no quarter of the globe of which 
 he had not been an inhabitant. 
 
 Once the timbered riches of Africa being men- 
 tioned, at once the Major gave us a most graphic 
 account of how "the old house" — for thus he desig- 
 nated some commercial establishment, which either 
 [46] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 had no existence or which he had some reason for 
 not more particularly indicating — had sent him in 
 charge of a rosewood saw mill on the Ganges, and, 
 after many ups and downs, of how the floods had 
 come and swept the plant away; and Rudolph Fink, 
 who was of the party, immediately said, "I can 
 attest the truth of The JNIajor's story, because my 
 brother Albert and I were in charge of some fishing 
 camps at the mouth of the Ganges at the exact date 
 of the floods, and we caught many of those rose- 
 wood logs in our nets as they floated out to sea." 
 
 Augustine's Terrapin came to be for a while the 
 rage in Philadelphia, and even got as far as New 
 lYork and Washington, and straightway. The Ma- 
 jor declared he could and would make Augustine 
 and his terrapin look "hke a monkey." He pro- 
 posed to give a dinner. 
 
 There were great preparations and expectancy. 
 None of us ate much at luncheon that day. At the 
 appointed hour, we assembled at The Brunswick. 
 I will dismiss the decorations and the preludes ex- 
 cept to say that they were Parisian. After a while 
 in full regalia The Major appeared, a train of ser- 
 vants following with a silver tureen. The lid was 
 lifted. 
 
 [47] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 'Toilar says he. 
 
 The vision disclosed to our startled eyes was an 
 ocean that looked like bean soup flecked by a few 
 strands of black crape! 
 
 The explosion duly arrived from the assembled 
 gourmets, I, myself, I am sorry to say, leading the 
 rebellion. 
 
 "I put seeks terrapin in zat soup!" exclaimed 
 The Frenchman, quite losing his usual good Eng- 
 lish in his excitement. 
 
 We reproached him. We denounced him. He 
 was driven from the field. But he bore us no malice. 
 Ten days later he invited us again, and this time 
 Sam Ward himself could have found no fault with 
 the terrapin. 
 
 Next afternoon, when I knew The Major was 
 asleep, I shpped back into the kitchen and said to 
 Louis Gamier, the chef: "Is there any of that 
 terrapin left over from last night?" 
 
 All unconscious of his treason Louis took me into 
 the pantry and triumphantly showed me three j ars 
 bearing the Augustine label and the Philadelphia 
 express tags! 
 
 On another occasion a friend of The Major's, 
 passing The Brunswick and observing some dia- 
 [48] 
 
HENRY WOODFIN GRADY 
 
 OXE OF ."MR. WATTERSOX'S "BOYS", 
 
''MARSE HENRY" 
 
 mond-back shells in the window said, "Major, have 
 you any real live terrapins?" 
 
 "Live !" cried The Frenchman. "Only this morn- 
 ing I open the ice box and they were all dancing 
 the cancan." 
 
 "Major," persisted the friend, "I'll go you a 
 bottle of Veuve Cliquot, you cannot show me an 
 actual living terrapin." 
 
 "What do you take me for — confidence man?" 
 The Major retorted. "How you expect an old 
 sport like me to bet upon a certainty?" 
 
 "Never mind your ethics. The wager is drink, 
 not money. In any event we shall have the wine." 
 
 "Oh, well," says The Frencliman, with a shrug 
 and a droll grimace, "if you insist on paying for a 
 bottle of wine come with me." 
 
 He took a lighted candle, and together they went 
 back to the ice box. It was literally filled with 
 diamond backs, and my friend thought he was gone 
 for sure. 
 
 "La!" says The Major with triumph, rummag- 
 ing among the mass of shells with his cane as he 
 held the candle aloft. 
 
 "But," says my friend, ready to surrender, yet 
 
 [49] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 taking a last chance, "y^^ told me they were 
 dancing the cancan !" 
 
 The Major picked up a terrapin and turned it 
 over in his hand. Quite numb and frozen, the 
 animal within made no sign. Then he stirred the 
 shells about in the box with his cane. Still not a 
 show of life. Of a sudden he stopped, reflected a 
 moment, then looked at his watch. 
 
 *'Ah," he murmured. "I quite forget. The terra- 
 pin, they are asleep. It is ten-thirty, and the terra- 
 pin he regularly go to sleep at ten o'clock by the 
 watch every night." And without another word he 
 reached for the Veuve Cliquot! 
 
 For all his volubihty in matters of romance and 
 sentiment The Maj or was exceeding reticent about 
 his immediate self and his own affairs. His legends 
 referred to the distant of time and place. A certain 
 dignity could not be denied him, and, on occasion, 
 a proper reserve; he rarely mentioned his business 
 — though he worked Hke a slave, and could not have 
 been making much or any profit — so that there rose 
 the query how he contrived to make both ends meet. 
 Little by little I came into the knowledge that there 
 was a money supply from somewhere; finally, it 
 matters not how, that he had an annuity of forty 
 [SO] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 thousand francs, paid in quarterly installments of 
 ten thousand francs each. 
 
 Occasionally he mentioned "the Old House," and 
 in relating the famous Sophonisba episode late at 
 night, and only in the very fastnesses of the wine 
 cellar, as it were, at the most lachrymose passage 
 he spoke of "I'Oncle Celestin," with the deepest 
 feeling. 
 
 "Did you ever hear The Frenchman tell that 
 story about Sophonisba?" Doctor Stoic, whom on 
 account of his affectation of insensibility we were 
 wont to call Old Adamant, once asked me. "Well, 
 sir, the other night he told it to me, and he was 
 drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was drunk, and I 
 cried too !" 
 
 I had known The Frenchman now ten or a dozen 
 years. That he came from Marseilles, that he had 
 served on the Confederate side in the Trans- 
 Mississippi, that he possessed an annuity, that he 
 must have been well-born and reared, that he was 
 simple, yet canny, and in his money dealings scru- 
 pulously honest — was all I could be sure of. What 
 had he done to be ashamed about or wish to con- 
 ceal? In what was he a black sheep, for that he 
 had been one seemed certain? Had the beautiful 
 
 [51] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 woman, his wife — a tireless church and charity 
 worker, who Hved the hfe of a recluse and a saint — 
 had she reclaimed him from his former self? I 
 knew that she had been the immediate occasion of 
 his turning over a new leaf. But before her time 
 what had he been, what had he done? 
 
 Late one night, when the rain was falling and the 
 streets were empty, I entered The Brunswick. It 
 was empty too. In the farthest corner of the little 
 dining room The Major, his face buried in his 
 hands, laid upon the table in front of him, sat 
 silently weeping. He did not observe my entrance 
 and I seated myself on the opposite side of the 
 table. Presently he looked up, and seeing me, with- 
 out a word passed me a letter which, all blistered 
 with tears, had brought him to this distressful state. 
 It was a formal French burial summons, with its 
 long list of family names — his among the rest — 
 the envelope, addressed in a lady's hand — ^his sis- 
 ter's, the wife of a nobleman in high military com- 
 mand — the postmark "Lyon." Uncle Celestin was 
 dead. 
 
 Thereafter The Frenchman told me much which 
 I may not recall and must not repeat ; for, included 
 in that funeral hst were some of the best names in 
 [52] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 France, Uncle Celestin himself not the least of 
 them. 
 
 At last he died, and as mysteriously as he had 
 come his body was taken away, nobody knew when, 
 nobody where, and with it went the beautiful 
 woman, his wife, of whom from that day to this I 
 have never heard a word. 
 
 [53] 
 
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH 
 
 STILL THE GAY CAPITAL OF FRANCE — ITS ENVIRONS 
 — WALEWSKA AND DE MORNY — THACKERAY IN 
 PARIS — A "pension" ADVENTURE. 
 
 EACH of the generations thinks itself com- 
 monplace. Familiarity breeds equally indif- 
 ference and contempt. Yet no age of the world 
 has witnessed so much of the drama of life — of the 
 romantic and picturesque — as the age we live in. 
 The years betwixt Agincourt and Waterloo were 
 not more delightfully tragic than the years between 
 Serajevo and Senlis. 
 
 The gay capital of France remains the center of 
 the stage and retains the interest of the onlooking 
 universe. All roads lead to Paris as all roads led to 
 Rome. In Dickens' day "a tale of two cities" could 
 only mean London and Paris then, and ever so un- 
 alike. To be brought to date the title would have 
 now to read "three," or even "four," cities, New 
 [54] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 York and Chicago putting in their claims for 
 mundane recognition. 
 
 I have been not only something of a traveller, but 
 a diligent student of history and a voracious novel 
 reader, and, once-in-a-while, I get my history and 
 my fiction mixed. This has been especially the case 
 when the hum- drum of the Boulevards has driven 
 me from the fascinations of the Beau Quartier into 
 the by-ways of the Marais and the fastnesses of 
 what was once the Latin Quarter. More than fifty 
 years of intimacy have enabled me to learn many 
 things not commonly known, among them that 
 Paris is the most orderly and moral city in the 
 world, except when, on rare and brief occasions, it 
 has been stirred to its depths. 
 
 I have crossed the ocean many times — ^have lived, 
 not sojourned, on the banks of the Seine, and, as I 
 shall never see the other side again — do not want to 
 see it in its time of sorrow and garb of mourning — 
 I may be forgiven a retrospective pause in this 
 egotistic chronicle. Or, shall I not say, a word or 
 two of affectionate retrogression, though perchance 
 it leads me after the manner of Silas Wegg to drop 
 into poetry and take a turn with a few ghosts into 
 certain of their haunts, when you, dear sir, or 
 
 [55] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 madame, or miss, as the case may be, and I were 
 living that "other hfe," whereof we remember so 
 httle that we cannot recall who we were, or what 
 name we went by, howbeit now-and-then we get a 
 glimpse in dreams, or a "hunch" from the world of 
 spirits, or spirts-and-water, which makes us fancy 
 we might have been Julius Caesar, or Cleopatra — 
 as maybe we were! — or at least Joan of Arc, or 
 Jean Valjean! 
 
 II 
 
 Let me repeat that upon no spot of earth has the 
 fable we call existence had so rare a setting and 
 rung up its curtain upon such a succession of per- 
 formances; has so concentrated human attention 
 upon mundane affairs ; has called such a muster roll 
 of stage favorites; has contributed to romance so 
 many heroes and heroines, to history so many signal 
 episodes and personal exploits, to philosophy so 
 much to kindle the craving for vital knowledge, to 
 stir sympathy and to awaken reflection. 
 
 Greece and Rome seem but myths of an Age of 
 
 Fable. They live for us as pictures hve, as statues 
 
 live. What was it I was saying about statues — 
 
 that they all look alike to me? There are too many 
 
 [56] 
 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 of them. They bring the ancients down to us in 
 marble and bronze, not in flesh and blood. We do 
 not really laugh with Terence and Horace, nor weep 
 with ^schylus and Homer. The very nomencla- 
 ture has a ticket air like tags on a collection of cu- 
 rios in an auction room, droning the dull iteration 
 of a catalogue. There is as little to awaken and in- 
 spire in the system of religion and ethics of the 
 pagan world they lived in as in the eyes of the stone 
 effigies that stare blankly upon us in the British 
 Museum, the Uffizi and the Louvre. 
 
 We walk the streets of the Eternal City with 
 wonderment, not with pity, the human side quite 
 lost in the archaic. What is Caesar to us, or we to 
 Caesar? Jove's thunder no longer terrifies, and we 
 look elsewhere than the JNIedici Venus for the lights 
 o' love. 
 
 Not so with Paris. There the unbroken line of 
 five hundred years — semi-modern years, marking a 
 longer period than we commonly ascribe to Athens 
 or Rome — beginning with the exit of this our own 
 world from the dark ages into the partial light of 
 the middle ages, and continuing thence through the 
 struggle of man toward achievement — tells us a tale 
 more consecutive and thrilhng, more varied and in- 
 
 [57] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 structive, than may be found in all the pages of all 
 the chroniclers and poets of the civilizations which 
 vibrated between the Bosphorus and the Tiber, to 
 yield at last to triumphant Barbarism swooping 
 down from Tyrol crag and Alpine height, from the 
 fastnesses of the Rhine and the Rhone, to swallow 
 luxury and culture. Refinement had done its per- 
 fect work. It had emasculated man and unsexed 
 woman and brought her to the front as a political 
 force, even as it is trying to do now. 
 
 The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset 
 and Hugo — even of Thackeray — could still be seen 
 when I first went there. Though our age is as full 
 of all that makes for the future of poetry and 
 romance, it does not contemporaneously lend itself 
 to sentimental abstraction. Yet it is hard to sepa- 
 rate fact and fiction here; to decide between the 
 true and the false; to pluck from the haze with 
 which time has enveloped them, and to distinguish 
 the puppets of actual flesh and blood who lived and 
 moved and had their being, and the phantoms of 
 imagination called into life and given each its local 
 habitation and its name by the poet's pen working 
 its immemorial spell upon the reader's credulity. 
 
 To me D'Artagnan is rather more vital than 
 [58] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Richelieu. Hugo's imps and Balzac's bullies dance 
 down the stage and shut from the view the tax-col- 
 lectors and the court favorites. The mousquetaires 
 crowd the field marshals off the scene. There is 
 something real in Quasimodo, in Ceesar de Birot- 
 teau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in 
 Mazarin, in the Regent and in Jean Lass. Even 
 here, in faraway Kentucky, I can shut my eyes and 
 see the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were 
 coming out of the Bristol or the Ritz to step into 
 her automobile, while the Grande Mademoiselle is 
 merely a cloud of clothes and words that for me 
 mean nothing at all. 
 
 I once passed a week, day by day, roaming through 
 the Musee Carnavalet. Madame de Sevigne had 
 an apartment and held her salon there for nearly 
 twenty years. Hard by is the house where the 
 Marquise de Brinvilliers — a gentle, blue-eyed thing 
 they tell us — a poor, insane creature she must have 
 been — disseminated poison and death, and, just 
 across and beyond the Place des Vosges, the Hotel 
 de Sens, whither Queen Margot took her doll-rags 
 and did her spriting after she and Henri Quatre 
 had agreed no longer to slide down the same cellar 
 door. There is in the Museum a death-mask, col- 
 
 [59] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ored and exceeding life-like, taken the day after 
 Ravaillac delivered the finishing knife-thrust in the 
 Rue de Ferronnerie, which represents the Bearnais 
 as anything but a tamer of hearts. He was a 
 fighter, however, from Wayback, and I dare say 
 Dumas' narrative is quite as authentic as any. 
 
 One can scarce wonder that men like Hugo and 
 Balzac chose this quarter of the town to live in — 
 and Rachael, too! — it having given such frequent 
 shelter to so many of their fantastic creations, hav- 
 ing been the real abode of a train of gallants and 
 bravos, of saints and harlots from the days of Diane 
 de Poitiers to the days of Pompadour and du 
 Barry, and of statesmen and prelates likewise from 
 Sully to Necker, from Colbert to Turgot. 
 
 ni 
 
 I speak of the Marais as I might speak of Madi- 
 son Square, or Hyde Park — as a well-known local 
 section — yet how few Americans who have gone to 
 Paris have ever heard of it. It is in the eastern di- 
 vision of the town. One finds it a curious circum- 
 stance that so many if not most of the great cities 
 [60] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 somehow started with the rising, gradually to mi- 
 grate toward the setting sun. 
 
 When I first wandered about Paris there was lit- 
 tle west of the Arch of Stars except groves and 
 meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant \allages. 
 Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, 
 with comic opera villas nestled in high-walled gar- 
 dens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and his Camille 
 hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days 
 there was a lovely lane called ]Marguerite Gautier, 
 with a dovecote pointed out as the very "rustic 
 dwelling" so pathetically sung in Verdi's tuneful 
 score and tenderly described in the original Dumas 
 text. The Boulevard Montmorenci long ago 
 plowed the shrines of romance out of the knowledge 
 of the living, and a part of the Longchamps race- 
 course occupies the spot whither impecunious poets 
 and adventure-seeking wives repaired to escape the 
 insistence of cruel bailiffs and the spies of suspicious 
 and monotonous husbands. 
 
 Tempus fugit ! I used to read Thackeray's Paris 
 Sketches with a kind of awe. The Thirties and the 
 Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his glowing 
 spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, hke the 
 figures in the Nibelungenhed, weird, remote, glori- 
 
 [61] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 fied. I once lived in the street "for which no rhyme 
 our language yields," next door to a pastry shop 
 that claimed to have furnished the mise en scene 
 for the "Ballad of Bouillabaisse," and I often fol- 
 lowed the trail of Louis Dominic Cartouche "down 
 that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth 
 from a palace yard, led finally to the rear gate of 
 a den of thieves." Ah, well-a-day! I have known 
 my Paris now twice as long as Thackeray knew his 
 Paris, and my Paris has been as interesting as his 
 Paris, for it includes the Empire, the Siege and the 
 Republic. 
 
 I knew and sat for months at table with Comtesse 
 Walewska, widow of the bastard son of Napoleon 
 Bonaparte. The Duke de Morny was rather a per- 
 son in his way and Gambetta was no slouch, as 
 Titmarsh would himself agree. I knew them both. 
 The Mexican scheme, which was going to make 
 every Frenchman rich, was even more picturesque 
 and tragical than the Mississippi bubble. There 
 were lively times round about the last of the Sixties 
 and the early Seventies. The Terror lasted longer, 
 . but it was not much more lurid than the Commune ; 
 the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames, the 
 column gone from the Place Vendome, when I got 
 [62] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 there just after the siege. The regions of the beau- 
 tiful Opera House and of the venerable Notre 
 Dame they told me had been but yesterday run- 
 ning streams of blood. At the corner of the Rue 
 de la Paix and the Rue Dannou (they called it 
 then the Rue St. Augustine) thirty men, women, 
 and boys were one forenoon stood against the wall 
 and shot, volley upon volley, to death. In the 
 Sacristy of the Cathedral over against the Morgue 
 and the Hotel Dieu, they exhibit the gore-stained 
 vestments of three archbishops of Paris murdered 
 within as many decades. 
 
 IV 
 
 Thackeray came to Paris when a very young 
 man. He was for painting pictures, not for writ- 
 ing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings if 
 not ambitions long after he had become a great and 
 famous man of letters. It was in Paris that he 
 married his wife, and in Paris that the melancholy 
 finale came to pass ; one of the most heartbreaking 
 chapters in literary history. 
 
 His little girls lived here with their grandparents. 
 The elder of them relates how she was once taken 
 
 [03] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 up some flights of stairs by the Countess X to the 
 apartment of a frail young man to whom the Coun- 
 tess was carrying a basket of fruit; and how the 
 frail young man insisted, against the protest of the 
 Countess, upon sitting at the piano and playing; 
 and of how they came out again, the eyes of the 
 Countess streaming with tears, and of her saying, 
 as they drove away, "Never, never forget, my child, 
 as long as you live, that you have heard Chopin 
 play." It was in one of the lubberly houses of 
 the Place Vendome that the poet of the keyboard 
 died a few days later. Just around the corner, in 
 the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de Musset. 
 A brass plate marks the house. 
 
 May I not here transcribe that verse of the fa- 
 mous "Ballad of Bouillabaisse," which I have never 
 been able to recite, or read aloud, and part of which 
 I may at length take to myself: 
 
 "Ah me, how quich the days are flitting! 
 
 I mind ine of a time that's gone. 
 When here Td sit, as now Tm sitting 
 
 In this same place — hut not alone — 
 A fair young form was nestled near me, 
 
 A dear, dear face looked fondly up, 
 
 [64] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 And sweetly spohe and smiled to hear me. 
 There's no one now to share my cwp/* 
 
 The writer of these lines a cynic! Nonsense. 
 When will the world learn to discriminate? 
 
 It is impossible to speak of Paris without giving 
 a foremost place in the memorial retrospect to the 
 Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian's Coney Island. I 
 recall that I passed the final Sunday of my last 
 Parisian sojourn just before the outbreak of the 
 World War with a beloved family party in the joy- 
 ous old Common. There is none like it in the world, 
 uniting the urban to the rural with such surpassing 
 grace as perpetually to convey a double sensation 
 of pleasure; primal in its simplicity, superb in its 
 setting; in the variety and brilliancy of the life 
 which, upon sunny afternoons, takes possession of 
 it and makes it a cross between a parade and a para- 
 dise. 
 
 There was a time when, rather far away for foot 
 travel, the Bois might be considered a driving park 
 for the rich. It fairly blazed with the ostentatious 
 
 [65] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 splendor of the Second Empire; the shoddy Duke 
 with his shady retinue, in gilded coach-and-four; 
 the world-famous courtesan, bedizened with costly 
 jewels and quite as well known as the Empress; the 
 favorites of the Tuileries, the Comedie Fran9aise, 
 the Opera, the Jardin Mabille, forming an unceas- 
 ing and dazzling line of many-sided frivolity from 
 the Port de Ville to the Port St. Cloud, circhng 
 round La Bagatelle and ranging about the Cafe 
 Cascade, a human tiara of diamonds, a moving bou- 
 quet of laces and rubies, of silks and satins and 
 emeralds and sapphires. Those were the days when 
 the Due de Morny, half if not full brother of the 
 Emperor, ruled as king of the Bourse, and Cora 
 Pearl, a clever and not at all good-looking Irish 
 girl gone wrong, reigned as Queen of the Demi- 
 monde. 
 
 All this went by the board years ago. Every- 
 where, more or less, electricity has obliterated dis- 
 tinctions of rank and wealth. It has circumvented 
 lovers and annihilated romance. The Republic 
 ousted the bogus nobility. The subways and the 
 tram cars connect the Bois de Boulogne and the 
 Bois de Vincennes so closely that the poorest may 
 make himself at home in either or both. 
 [66] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 The automobile, too, oddly enough, is proving a 
 very leveller. The crowd recognizes nobody amid 
 the hurly-burly of coupes, pony-carts, and taxicabs, 
 each trying to pass the other. The conglomeration 
 of personalities effaces the identity alike of the 
 statesman and the artist, the savant and the cyprian. 
 No six-inch rules hedge the shade of the trees and 
 limit the glory of the grass. The ouvrier can bring 
 his brood and his basket and have his picnic where 
 he pleases. The pastry cook and his chere amie, the 
 coiffeur and his grisette can spoon by the lake-side 
 as long as the moonlight lasts, and longer if they 
 list, with never a gendarme to say them nay, or a 
 rude voice out of the depths hoarsely to declaim, 
 "allez!" The Bois de Boulogne is literally and ab- 
 solutely a playground, the playground of the peo- 
 ple, and this last Sunday of mine, not fewer than 
 half a million of Parisians were making it their own. 
 
 Half of these encircled the Longchamps race- 
 course. The other half were shared by the boats 
 upon the lagoons and the bosky dells under the 
 summer sky and the cafes and the restaurants with 
 which the Bois abounds. Our party, having ex- 
 hausted the humors of the drive, repaired to Pre 
 Catalan. Aside from the "two old brides" who are 
 
 [67] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 always in evidence on such occasions, there was a 
 veritable "young couple," exceedingly pretty to 
 look at, and delightfully in love ! That sort of thing 
 is not so uncommon in Paris as cynics affect to 
 think. 
 
 If it be true, as the witty Frenchman observes, 
 that "gambling is the recreation of gentlemen and 
 the passion of fools," it is equally true that love is 
 a game where every player wins if he sticks to it 
 and is loyal to it. Just as credit is the foundation 
 of business is love both the asset and the trade-mark 
 of happiness. To see it is to believe it, and — though 
 a little cash in hand is needful to both — where either 
 is wanting, look out for sheriffs and scandals. 
 
 Pre Catalan, once a pasture for cows with a 
 pretty kiosk for the sale of milk, has latterly had 
 a tea-room big enough to seat a thousand, not count- 
 ing the groves which I have seen grow up about it 
 thickly dotted with booths and tables, where some 
 thousands more may regale themselve-s. That Sun- 
 day it was never so glowing with animation and 
 color. As it makes one happy to see others happy 
 it makes one adore his own land to witness that 
 which makes other lands great. 
 
 I have not loved Paris as a Parisian, but as an 
 [68] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 American; perhaps it is a stretch of words to say 
 I love Paris at all. I used to love to go there 
 and to behold the majesty of France. I have al- 
 ways liked to mark the startling contrasts of light 
 and shade. I have always known what all the world 
 now knows, that beneath the gayety of the French 
 there burns a patriotic and consuming fire, a high 
 sense of public honor; a fine spirit of self-sacrifice 
 along with the sometimes too aggressive spirit of 
 freedom. In 1873 I saw them two blocks long and 
 three files deep upon the Rue St. Honore press up 
 to the Bank of France, old women and old men 
 with their little all tied in handkerchiefs and stock- 
 ings to take up the tribute required by Bismarck 
 to rid the soil of the detested German. They did 
 it. Alone they did it — the French people — the 
 hard-working, frugal, loyal commonalty of France 
 — without asking the loan of a sou from the world 
 outside. 
 
 yi 
 
 Writing of that last Sunday in the Bois de Bou- 
 logne, I find by recurring to the record that I said: 
 "There is a deal more of good than bad in every 
 Nation. I take off my hat to the French. But, 
 
 [69] 
 
'MARSE HENRY" 
 
 I have had my fling and I am quite ready to go 
 home. Even amid the gayety and the glare, the 
 splendor of color and light, the Hungarian band 
 wafting to the greenery and the stars the strains 
 of the delicious waltz, La Veuve Joyeuse her very 
 self — yea, many of her — tapping the time at many 
 adjacent tables, the song that fills my heart is 
 'Hame, Hame, Hame ! — Hame to my ain countree.* 
 Yet, to come again, d'ye mind? I should be loath 
 to say good-by forever to the Bois de Boulogne. 
 I want to come back to Paris. I always want to 
 come back to Paris. One needs not to make an 
 apology or give a reason. 
 
 "We turn rather sadly away from Pre Catalan 
 and the Cafe Cascade. We glide adown the flower- 
 bordered path and out from the clusters of Chinese 
 lanterns, and leave the twinkling groves to their 
 music and merry-making. Yonder behind us, like 
 a sentinel, rises Mont Valerien. Before us ghmmer 
 the lamps of uncountable coaches, as our own, veer- 
 ing toward the city, the moon just topping the tower 
 of St. Jacques de la Boucherie and silver-plating 
 the bronze figures upon the Arch of Stars. 
 
 "We enter the Port Maillot. We turn into the 
 Avenue du Bois. Presently we shall sweep with 
 [70] 
 
 I 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 the rest through the Champs Elysees and on to the 
 ocean of the infinite, the heart of the mystery we 
 call Life, nowhere so condensed, so palpable, so 
 appealing. Roll the screen away! The shades of 
 Clovis and Genevieve may be seen hand-in-hand 
 with the shades of jNIartel and Pepin, taking the 
 round of the ghost-walk between St. Denis and 
 St. Germain, now le Balafre and again Navarre, 
 now the assassins of the Lignie and now the as- 
 sassins of the Terror, to keep them company. Nor 
 yet quite all on murder bent, some on pleasure ; the 
 Knights and Ladies of the Cloth of Gold and the 
 hosts of the Renaissance: Cyrano de Bergerac and 
 Francois Villon leading the ragamuffin procession ; 
 the jades of the Fronde, Longueville, Chevreuse 
 and fair-haired Anne of Austria; and Ninon, too, 
 and INIanon; and the never-to-be-forgotten Four, 
 'one for all and all for one ;' Cagliostro and Monte 
 Cristo; on the side, Rabelais taking notes and 
 laughing under his cowl. Catherine de INIedici and 
 Robespierre slinking away, poor, guilty things, into 
 the pale twilight of the Dawn! 
 
 "Names! Names! Only names? I am not just 
 so sure about that. In any event, what a roll call! 
 We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our 
 
 [Tl] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 little life is rounded by a sleep; the selfsame sleep 
 which these, our living dead men and women in 
 steel armor and gauzy muslins, in silken hose and 
 sock and buskin, epaulettes and top boots, brocades 
 and buff facings, have endured so long and know 
 so well! 
 
 "If I should die in Paris I should expect them 
 — or some of them — to meet me at the barriers and 
 to say, 'Behold, the wickedness that was done in the 
 world, the cruelty and the wrong, dwelt in the body, 
 not in the soul of man, which freed from its foul 
 incasement, purified and made eternal by the hand 
 of death, shall see both the glory and the hand of 
 God!'" 
 
 It was not to be. I shall not die in Paris. I 
 shall never come again. Neither shall I make 
 apology for this long quotation by myself from 
 myself, for am I not inditing an autobiography, so 
 called? 
 
 [72] 
 
CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH 
 
 MONTE CARLO THE EUROPEAN SHRINE OF SPORT 
 
 AND FASHION APOCHRYPHAL GAMBLING STO- 
 RIES LEOPOLD, KING OF THE BELGIANS AN 
 
 ABLE AND PICTURESQUE MAN OF BUSINESS 
 
 HAVING disported ourselves in and about 
 Paris, next in order comes a journey to the 
 South of France — that is to the Riviera — by geog- 
 raphy the main circle of the Mediterranean Sea, by 
 proclamation Cannes, Nice, and Mentone, by actual 
 fact and count, Monte Carlo — even the swells 
 adopting a certain hypocrisy as due to virtue. 
 
 Whilst Monte Carlo is chiefly, I might say ex- 
 clusively, identified in the general mind with gam- 
 bling, and was indeed at the outset but a gambling 
 resort, it long ago outgrew the limits of the Casino, 
 becoming a Mecca of the world of fashion as well as 
 the world of sport. Half the ruling sovereigns of 
 
 [73] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Europe and all the leaders of European swelldom, 
 the more prosperous of the demi-mondames and no 
 end of the merely rich of every land, congregate 
 there and thereabouts. At the top of the season the 
 show of opulence and impudence is bewildering. 
 
 The little principality of Monaco is hardly big- 
 ger than the Cabbage Patch of the renowned Mrs. 
 Wiggs. It is, however, more happily situate. Nes- 
 tled under the heights of La Condamine and Tete 
 de Chien and looking across a sheltered bay upon 
 the wide and blue Mediterranean, it has better pro- 
 tection against the winds of the North than Nice, 
 or Cannes, or Mentone. It is an appanage — in 
 point of fact the only estate — remaining to the once 
 powerful Grimaldi family. 
 
 In the early days of land-piracy Old Man Gri- 
 maldi held his own with Old Man HohenzoUern 
 and Old Man Hapsburg. The Savoys and the 
 Bourbons were kith and kin. But in the long run 
 of Freebooting the Grimaldis did not keep up with 
 the procession. How they retained even this rem- 
 nant of inherited brigandage and self-appointed 
 royalty, I do not know. They are here under leave 
 of the Powers and the especial protection, strange 
 to say, of the French Republic. 
 [74] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Something over fifty years ago, being hard-up 
 for cash, the Grimaldi of the period fell under the 
 wiles of an ingenious Alsatian gambler, Guerlac 
 by name, who foresaw that Baden-Baden and 
 Hombourg were approaching their finish and that 
 the sports must look elsewhere for their living, the 
 idle rich for their sport. This tiny "enclave" in 
 French territory presented many advantages over 
 the German Dukedoms. It was an independent 
 sovereignty issuing its own coins and postage 
 stamps. It was in proud possession of a half-dozen 
 pohcemen which it called its "army." It was para- 
 disaic in beauty and climate. Its "ruler" was as 
 poor as Job's turkey, but by no means as proud as 
 Lucifer. 
 
 The bargain was struck. The gambler smote the 
 rock of ]Monte Carlo as with a wand of enchant- 
 ment and a stream of plenty burst forth. The 
 mountain-side responded to the touch. It chortled 
 in its glee and blossomed as the rose. 
 
 II 
 
 The region known as the Riviera comprises, as 
 I have said, the whole land- circle of the JNIediter- 
 
 [75] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ranean Sea. But, as generally written and under- 
 stood, it stands for the shoreline between Marseilles 
 and Genoa. The two cities are connected by the 
 Corniche Road, built by the First Napoleon, who 
 learned the need of it when he made his Italian 
 campaign, and the modern railway, the distance 
 260 miles, two-thirds of the way through France, 
 the residue through Italy, and all of it surpassing 
 fine. 
 
 The climate is very like that of Southern Florida. 
 But as in Florida they have the "Nor'westers" 
 and the "Nor'easters," on the Riviera they have 
 the "mistral." In Europe there is no perfect win- 
 ter weather north of Spain, as in the United States 
 none north of Cuba. 
 
 I have often thought that Havana might be made 
 a dangerous rival of Monte Carlo under the one- 
 man power, exercising its despotism with benignant 
 intelligence and spending its income honestly upon 
 the development of both the city and the island. 
 The motley populace would probably be none the 
 worse for it. The Government could upon a lib- 
 eral tariff collect not less than thirty-five millions 
 of annual revenue. Twenty-five of these millions 
 would suffice for its own support. Ten millions a 
 [T6] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 year laid out upon harbors, roadways and internal 
 improvements in general would within ten years 
 make the Queen of the Antilles the garden spot and 
 playground of Christendom. They would build a 
 Casino to outshine even the architectural miracles 
 of Charles Gamier. Then would Havana put 
 Cairo out of business and give the Prince of 
 Monaco a run for his money. 
 
 With the opening of every ^lonte Carlo season 
 the newspapers used to tell of the colossal winnings 
 of purely imaginary players. Sometimes the fa- 
 vored child of chance was a Russian, sometimes 
 an Englishman, sometimes an American. He was 
 usually a myth, of course. As Mrs. Prig observed 
 to Mrs. Camp, "there never was no sich person." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Charles Garnier, the Parisian architect, came and 
 built the Casino, next to the Library of Congress 
 at Washington and the Grand Opera House at 
 Paris the most beautiful building in the world, with 
 incomparable gardens and commanding esplanades 
 to set it off and display it. Around it palatial hotels 
 and private mansions and villas sprang into exist- 
 
 [77] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ence. Within it a gold-making Avheel of fortune 
 fabricated the wherewithal. Old Man Grimaldi in 
 his wildest dreams of land-piracy — even Old Man 
 Holienzollern, or Old JNIan Hapsburg — never con- 
 ceived the like. 
 
 There is no poverty, no want, no taxes — not any 
 sign of dilapidation or squalor anywhere in the prin- 
 cipality of JNIonaco. Yet the "people," so called, 
 have been known to lapse into a state of discontent. 
 They sometimes "yearned for freedom." Too well 
 fed and cared for, too rid of dirt and debt, too flour- 
 ishing, they "riz." Prosperity grew monotonous. 
 They even had the nerve to demand a "Constitu- 
 tion." 
 
 The reigning Prince was what Yellowplush 
 would call "a scientific gent." His son and heir, 
 however, had not his head in the clouds, being in 
 point of fact of the earth earthly, and, of conse- 
 quence, more popular than his father. He came 
 down from the Castle on the hill to the market- 
 place in the town and says he: "What do you ga- 
 loots want, anyhow?" 
 
 First, their "rights." Then a change in the com- 
 mander-in-chief of the army, which had grown from 
 [78] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 six to sixteen. Finally, a Board of Aldermen and 
 a Common Council. 
 
 "Is that all?" says his Royal Highness. They 
 said it was. "Then," says he, "take it, mes enfants, 
 and bless you!" 
 
 So, all went well again. The toy sovereignty 
 began to rattle around in its own conceit, the "peo- 
 ple" regarded themselves, and wished to be re- 
 garded, as a chartered Democracy. The little gim- 
 crack economic system experienced the joys of re- 
 form. A "New Nationalism" was established in 
 the brewery down by the railway station and a reci- 
 procity treaty was negotiated between the Casino 
 and Vanity Fair, witnessing the introduction of 
 two roulette tables and an extra brazier for cigar 
 stumps. 
 
 But the Prince of Monaco stood on one point. 
 He would have no Committee on Credentials. 
 He told me once that he had heard of Tom Reed 
 and Champ Clark and Uncle Joe Cannon, but that 
 he preferred Uncle Joe. He would, and he did, 
 name his own committees both in the Board of Al- 
 dermen and the Common Council. Thus, for the 
 time being, "insurgency" was quelled. And once 
 more serenely sat the Castle on the hill hard by the 
 
 [79] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Cathedral. Calmly again flowed the waters in 
 the harbor. More and more the autos honked out- 
 side the Casino. Within "the little ball ever goes 
 merrily round," and according to the croupiers and 
 the society reporters "the gentleman wins and the 
 poor gambler loses!" 
 
 IV 
 
 To illustrate, I recall when on a certain season 
 the lucky sport of print and fancy was an English- 
 man. In one of those farragos of stupidity and 
 inaccuracy which are syndicated and sent from 
 abroad to America, I found the following piece 
 with the stuff and nonsense habitually worked off 
 on the American press as "foreign correspondence": 
 
 "Now and then the newspapers report authentic 
 instances of large sums having been won at the 
 gaming tables at Monte Carlo. One of the most 
 fortunate players at iMonte Carlo for a long time 
 past has been a Mr. Darnbrough, an Englishman, 
 whose remarkable run of luck had furnished the 
 morsels of gossip in the capitals of Continental 
 Europe recently. 
 
 "If reports are true, he left the place with the 
 snug sum of more than 1,000,000 francs to the good 
 [80] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 as the result of a month's play. But this, I hear, 
 did not represent all of ^Ir. Darnbrough's win- 
 nings. The story goes that on the opening day of 
 his play he staked 24,000 francs, winning all along 
 the line. Emboldened by his success, he continued 
 playing, winning again and again with marvelous 
 luck. At one period, it is said, his credit balance 
 amounted to no less than 1,850,000 francs; but from 
 that moment Dame Fortune ceased to smile upon 
 him. He lost steadily from 200,000 to 300,000 
 francs a day, until, recognizing that luck had turned 
 against him, he had sufficient strength of wuU to 
 turn his back on the tables and strike for home with 
 the very substantial winnings that still remained. 
 
 "On another occasion a well-known London 
 stock broker walked off with little short of £40,000. 
 This remarkable performance occasioned no small 
 amount of excitement in the gambling rooms, as 
 such an unusual incident does invariably. 
 
 "Bent on making a 'plunge,' he went from one 
 table to another, placing the maximum stake on 
 the same number. Strange to relate, at each table 
 the same number won, and it was his number. 
 Recognizing that this perhaps might be his lucky 
 day, the player wended his way to the trente-et- 
 
 [81] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 quarante room and put the maximum on three of 
 the tables there. To his amazement, he discovered 
 that there also he had been so fortunate as to select 
 the winning number. 
 
 "The head croupier confided to a friend of the 
 writer who happened to be present that that day- 
 had been the worst in the history of the Monaco 
 bank for years. He it was also who mentioned the 
 amount won by the fortunate Londoner, as given 
 above." 
 
 It is prudent of the space-writers to ascribe such 
 "information" as this to "the head croupier," be- 
 cause it is precisely the like that such an authority 
 would give out. People upon the spot know that 
 nothing of the kind happened, and that no person 
 of that name had appeared upon the scene. The 
 story on the face of it bears to the knowing its own 
 refutation, being absurd in every detail. As if con- 
 scious of this, the author proceeds to quality it in 
 the following: 
 
 "It IS a well-known fact that one of the most 
 successful players at the Monte Carlo tables was 
 Wells, who as the once popular music-hall song 
 put it, 'broke the bank' there. He was at the zenith 
 of his fame, about twenty years ago, when his esca- 
 [82] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 pades — and winnings — were talked about widely 
 and envied in European sporting circles and among 
 the demi-monde. 
 
 "In ten days, it was said, lie made upward of 
 £35,000 clear winnings at the tables after starting 
 with the modest capital of £400. It must not be 
 forgotten, however, that at his trial later Wells 
 denied this, stating that all he had made was £7,000 
 at four consecutive sittings. He made the state- 
 ment that, even so, he had been a loser in the end. 
 
 "The reader may take his choice of the two state- 
 ments, but among frequenters of the rooms at 
 Monte Carlo it is generally considered impossible 
 to amass large winnings without risking large 
 stakes. Even then the chances are 1,000 to 1 in 
 favor of the bank. Yet occasionally there are win- 
 nings running into four or five figures, and to 
 human beings the possibility of chance constitutes 
 an irresistible fascination. 
 
 "Only a few years ago a young American was 
 credited with having risen from the tables $75,000 
 richer than when first he had sat down. It was his 
 first visit to IMonte Carlo and he had not come with 
 any system to break the bank or with any 'get-rich- 
 quick' idea. For the novelty of the thing he risked 
 
 [83] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 about $4,000, and lost it all in one fell swoop with- 
 out turning a hair. Then he 'plunged' with double 
 that amount, but the best part of that, too, went 
 the same way. Nothing daunted, he next ventured 
 $10,000. This time fickle fortune favored him. He 
 played on with growing confidence and when his 
 winnings amounted to the respectable sum of $75,- 
 000 he had the good sense to quit and to leave the 
 place despite the temptation to continue." 
 
 The "man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo," 
 and gave occasion for the song, was not named 
 "Wells" and he was not an Englishman. He was 
 an American. I knew him well and soon after the 
 event had from his own lips the whole story. 
 
 He came to Monte Carlo with a good deal of 
 money won at draw-poker in a club at Paris and 
 went away richer by some 100,000 francs (about 
 $20,000) than he came. 
 
 The catch-line of the song is misleading. There 
 
 is no such thing as "breaking the bank at Monte 
 
 Carlo." This particular player won so fast upon 
 
 two or three "spins" that the table at which he 
 
 [84] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 played had to suspend until it could be replenished 
 by another "bank," perhaps ten minutes in point 
 of time. There used to be some twenty tables. 
 Just how one man could play a'c more than one of 
 them at one time a "foreign correspondent," but 
 only a "foreign correspondent," might explain to 
 the satisfaction of the horse-marines. 
 
 I very much doubt whether any player ever won 
 more than 100,000 francs at a single sitting. To 
 do even that he must plunge hke a ship in a hurri- 
 cane. There is, of course, a saving limit set by the 
 Casino Company upon the play. It is to the in- 
 terest of the Casino to cultivate the idea, and the 
 letter writers are willing tools. Not only at Monte 
 Carlo, but everywhere, in dearth of news, gambling 
 stories come cheap and easy. And the cheaper the 
 story the bigger the play. "The Jedge raised him 
 two thousand dollars. The Colonel raised him back 
 ten thousand more. Both of 'em stood pat. The 
 Jedge bet him a hundred thousand. The Colonel 
 called. 'What you got?' says he. *Ace high,' says 
 the Jedge; 'what you got?' 'Pair o' deuces,' says 
 the Colonel." 
 
 Assuredly the "play" in the Casino is entirely 
 fair. It could hardly be otherwise with such crowds 
 
 [85] 
 
"MARSE HENHY" 
 
 of players at the tables, often covering the whole 
 "layout." But there is no such thing as "honest 
 gambling." The "house" must have "the best of 
 it." A famous American gambler, when I had re- 
 ferred to one of his guild, lately deceased, as "an 
 honest gambler," said to me: "What do you mean 
 by 'an honest gambler'?" 
 
 "A gambler who will not take unfair advantage 1" 
 I answered. 
 
 "Well," said he, "the gambler must have his ad- 
 vantage, because gambling is his livelihood. He 
 must fit himself for its profitable pursuit by learn- 
 ing all the tricks of trade like other artists and 
 artificers. With him it is win or starve." 
 
 Among the variegate crowds that thronged the 
 highways and byways of Monte Carlo in those days 
 there was no single figure more observed and strik- 
 ing than that of Leopold the Second, King of the 
 Belgians. He had a bungalow overlooking the sea 
 where he lived three months of the year like a coun- 
 try gentleman. Although I have made it a rule to 
 avoid courts and courtiers, an event brought me 
 into acquaintance with this best abused man in Eu- 
 rope, enabling me to form my own estimate of his 
 very interesting personality. 
 [86] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 He was not at all what his enemies represented 
 him to be, a sot, a gambler and a roue. In appear- 
 ance a benignant burgomaster, tall and stalwart; 
 in manner and voice very gentle, he should be de- 
 scribed as first of all a man of business. His weak- 
 ness was rather for money than women. Speaking 
 of the most famous of the Parisian dancers with 
 whom his name had been scandalously associated, 
 he told me that he had never met her but once in 
 his life, and that after the newspaper gossips had 
 been busy for years with their alleged love affair, 
 "I kissed her hand," he related, "and bade her 
 adieu, saying, 'Ah, ma'mselle, you and I have in- 
 deed reason to congratulate ourselves.' " 
 
 It was the Congo business that lay at the bottom 
 of the abuse of Leopold. Henry Stanley had put 
 him up to this. It turned out a gold mine, and then 
 two streams of defamation were let loose ; one from 
 the covetous commercial standpoint and the other 
 from the humanitarian. Between them, seeking to 
 drive him out, they depicted Mm as a monster of 
 cruelty and depravity. 
 
 A King must be an anchorite to escape calumny, 
 and Leopold was not an anchorite. I asked him 
 
 [87] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 • why I never saw him in the Casino. "Play," he 
 answered, "does not interest me. Besides, I do not 
 enjoy being talked about. Nor do I think the 
 game they play there quite fair." 
 
 "In what way do you consider it unfair, your 
 Majesty?" I asked. 
 
 "In the zero," he replied. "At the Brussels 
 Casino I do not allow them to have a zero. Come 
 and see me and I will show you a perfectly equal 
 chance for your money, to win or lose." 
 
 Years after I was in Brussels. Leopold had 
 gone to his account and his nephew, Albert, had 
 come to the throne. There was not a roulette table 
 in the Casino, but there was one conveniently ad- 
 jacent thereto, managed by a clique of New York 
 gamblers, which had both a single "and a double 
 O," and, as appeared when the municipality made 
 a descent upon the place, was ingeniously wired 
 to throw the ball wherever the presiding coupler 
 wanted it to go. 
 
 I do not believe, however, that Leopold was a 
 
 party to this, or could have had any knowledge of 
 
 it. He was a skillful, not a dishonest, business man, 
 
 who showed his foresight when he listened to Stan- 
 
 [88] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ley and took him under his wing. If the Congo 
 had turned out worthless nobody would ever have 
 heard of the deHnquencies of the King of the Bel- 
 gians. 
 
 [89] 
 
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH 
 
 A PARISIAN "pension" — THE WIDOW OF WALEWSKA, 
 
 napoleon's DAUGHTEE - in - LAW THE 
 
 CHANGELESS — A MORAL AND ORDERLY CITY 
 
 I HAVE said that I knew the widow of Wa- 
 lewska, the natural son of Napoleon Bona- 
 parte by the Polish countess he picked up in War- 
 saw, who followed him to Paris ; and thereby hangs 
 a tale which may not be without interest. 
 
 In each of our many sojourns in Paris my wife 
 and I had taken an apartment, living the while in 
 the restaurants, at first the cheaper, like the Cafe 
 de Progress and the Duval places; then the Boeuf 
 a la Mode, the Cafe Voisin and the Cafe Anglais, 
 with Champoux's, in the Place de la Bourse, for a 
 regular luncheon resort. 
 
 At length, the children something more than 
 half grown, I said: "We have never tried a Paris 
 pension." 
 [90] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 So with a half dozen recommended addresses we 
 set out on a house hunt. We had not gone far 
 when our search was rewarded by a veritable find. 
 This was on the Avenue de Courcelles, not far from 
 the Pare Monceau; newly furnished; reasonable 
 charges; the lady manager a beautiful well-man- 
 nered woman, half Scotch and half French. 
 
 We moved in. When dinner was called the 
 boarders assembled in the very elegant drawing- 
 room. Madame presented us to Baron . Then 
 
 followed introductions to Madame la Duchesse and 
 Madame la Princesse and Madame la Comtesse. 
 Then the folding doors opened and dinner was an- 
 nounced. 
 
 The baron sat at the center of the table. The 
 meal consisted of eight or ten courses, served as if 
 at a private house, and of surpassing quality. Dur- 
 ing the three months that we remained there was 
 no evidence of a boarding house. It appeared an 
 aristocratic family into which we had been hospit- 
 ably admitted. The baron was a delightful per- 
 son. Madame la Duchesse was the mother of Ma- 
 dame la Princesse, and both were charming. The 
 Comtesse, the Napoleonic widow, was at first a lit- 
 
 [91] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 tie formal, but she came round after we had got 
 acquainted, and, when we took our departure, it 
 was like leaving a veritable domestic circle. 
 
 Years after we had the sequel. The baron, a 
 poor young nobleman, had come into a little money. 
 He thought to make it breed. He had an equally 
 poor Scotch cousin, who undertook to play hostess. 
 Both the Duchess and the Countess were his kins- 
 women. How could such a menage last? 
 
 He lost his all. What became, of our fellow- 
 lodgers I never learned, but the venture coming to 
 naught, the last I heard of the beautiful high-bred 
 lady manager, she was serving as a stewardess on 
 an ocean liner. Nothing, however, could exceed the 
 luxury, the felicity and the good company of those 
 memorable three months chez V Avenue de Cour- 
 celleSj Pare Monceau. 
 
 We never tried a pension again. We chose a de- 
 lightful hotel in the Rue de Castiglione off the Rue 
 de Rivoli, and remained there as fixtures until we 
 were reckoned the oldest inhabitants. But we never 
 deserted the dear old Boeuf a la Mode, which we 
 lived to see one of the most flourishing and popular 
 places in Paris. 
 [92] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 II 
 
 In the old days there was a little hotel on the Rue 
 Dannou, midway between the Rue de la Paix and 
 what later along became the Avenue de 1' Opera, 
 called the Hotel d'Orient. It was conducted by a 
 certain Madame Hougenin, whose family had held 
 the lease for more than a hundred years, and was 
 typical of what the comfort-seeking visitor, some- 
 what initiate, might find before the modern tourist 
 onrush overflowed all bounds and effaced the an- 
 cient landmarks — or should I say townmarks? — 
 making a resort instead of a home of the gay French 
 capital. The d'Orient was delightfully comfort- 
 able and fabulously cheap. 
 
 The wayfarer entered a darksome passage that 
 led to an inner court. There were on the four sides 
 of this seven or eight stories pierced by many win- 
 dows. There was never a lift, or what we Ameri- 
 cans call an elevator. If you wanted to go up you 
 walked up; and after dark your single illuminant 
 ■was candlehght. The service could hardly be rec- 
 ommended, but cleanliness herself could find no 
 fault with the beds and bedding; nor any queer 
 
 [93] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 people about; changeless; as still and stationary as 
 a nook in the Rockies. 
 
 A young girl might dwell there year in and year 
 out in perfect safety — many young girls did so — 
 madame a kind of duenna. The food — for it was a 
 'pension — was all a gourmet could desire. And the 
 wine! 
 
 I was lunching with an old Parisian friend. 
 
 "What do you think of this vintage?" says he. 
 
 "Very good," I answered. "Come and dine with 
 me to-morrow and I will give you the mate to it." 
 
 "What— at the d'Orient?" 
 
 "Yes, at the d'Orient." , 
 
 "Preposterous 1" i 
 
 Nevertheless, he came. When the wine was ; 
 poured out he took a sip. [ 
 
 "By !" he exclaimed. "That is good, isn't 
 
 it? I wonder where they got it? And how?" '\ 
 
 During the week after we had it every day. Then 
 no more. The headwaiter, with many apologies, 
 explained that he had found those few bottles in 
 a forgotten bin, where they had lain for years, and 
 he begged a thousand pardons of monsieur, but we 
 had drunk them all — rieri du plus — no more. I J 
 might add that precisely the same thing happened " 
 [94] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 to me at the Hotel Continental. Indeed, it is not 
 uncommon with the French caravansaries to keep a 
 little extra good wine in stock for those who can 
 distinguish between an ordinaire and a superieur^ 
 and are willing to pay the price. 
 
 Ill 
 
 "See Naples and die," say the Italians. "See 
 Paris and live," say the French. Old friends, who 
 have been over and back, have been of late telling 
 me that Paris, having woefully suffered, is nowise 
 the Paris it was, and as the provisional offspring 
 of four years of desolating war I can well believe 
 them. But a year or two of peace, and the city will 
 rise again, as after the Franco-Prussian War and 
 the Commune, which laid upon it a sufficiently 
 blighting hand. In spite of fickle fortune and its 
 many ups and downs it is, and will ever remain, 
 "Paris, the Changeless." 
 
 I never saw the town so much itself as just be- 
 fore the beginning of the world war. I took my 
 departure in the early summer of that fateful year 
 and left all things booming — not a .sign or trace 
 that there had ever been aught but boundless happi- 
 
 [95] 
 
*'MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ness and prosperity. It is hard, the saying has it, 
 to keep a squirrel on the ground, and surely Paris 
 is the squirrel among cities. The season just ended 
 had been, everybody declared, uncommonly success- 
 ful from the standpoints ahke of the hotels and 
 cafes, the shop folk and their patrons, not to men- 
 tion the purely pleasure-seeking throng. People 
 seemed loaded with money and giddy to spend it. 
 
 The headwaiter at Voisin's told me this: "Mr. 
 Barnes, of New York, ordered a dinner, carte 
 blanche, for twelve. 
 
 " 'Now,' says he, 'gar9on, have everything bang 
 up, and here's seventy-five francs for a starter.' 
 
 "The dinner was bang up. Everybody hilarious. 
 Mr. Barnes immensely pleased. When he came to 
 pay his bill, which was a corker, he made no ob- 
 jection. 
 
 " 'Gar9on,' says he, 'if I ask you a question will 
 you tell me the truth?' 
 
 " 'Old, monsieur; certainement/ 
 
 "Well, how much was the largest tip you ever 
 received?" 
 
 "Seventy-five francs, monsieur." 
 
 " 'Very well; here are 100 francs.' 
 
 "Then, after a pause for the waiter to digest his 
 [96] 
 
"MATISE HENRY" 
 
 joy and express a proper sense of gratitude and 
 wonder, Mr. Barnes came to time with: 'Do you 
 remember who was the idiot that paid you the sev- 
 enty-five francs?' 
 
 " 'Oh, yes, monsieur. It was you.' " 
 
 IV 
 
 It has occurred to me that of late years — I mean 
 the years immediately before 1914 — Paris has been 
 rather more bent upon adapting itself to human 
 and moral as well as scientific progress. There has 
 certainly been less debauchery visible to the naked 
 eye. I was assured that the patronage had so fal- 
 len away from the Moulin Rouge that they were 
 planning to turn it into a decent theater. Nor 
 during my sojourn did anybody in my hearing so 
 much as mention the Dead Rat. I doubt whether 
 it is still in existence. 
 
 The last time I was in Maxim's — quite a dozen 
 years ago now — a young woman sat next to me 
 whose story could be read in her face. She was a 
 pretty thing not five and twenty, still blooming, 
 with iron-gray hair. It had turned in a night, I 
 was told. She had recently come from Baltimore 
 
 [97] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and knew no more what she was doing or whither 
 she was drifting than a baby. The old, old story: 
 a comfortable home and a good husband; even a 
 child or two; a scoundrel, a scandal, an elopement, 
 and the inevitable desertion. Left without a dollar 
 in the streets of Paris. She was under convoy of 
 a noted procuress. 
 
 "A duke or the morgue," she whimpered, "in six 
 months." 
 
 Three months sufficed. They dragged all that 
 remained of her out of the Seine, and then the whole 
 of the pitiful disgrace and tragedy came out. 
 
 If ever I indite a volume to be entitled Adven- 
 tures in Paris it will contain not a line to feed any 
 prurient fancy, but will embrace the record of many 
 little journeys between the Coiffeur and the JNIarche 
 des Fleurs, with maybe an excursion among the 
 cemeteries and the restaurants. 
 
 Each city is as one makes it for himself. Paris 
 
 has contributed greatly to my appreciation, and 
 
 perhaps my knowledge, of history and literature 
 
 and art and Hfe. I have seen it in all its aspects; 
 
 [98] 
 
*'MARSE HENRY" 
 
 under the empire, when the Due de Morny was 
 king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make every 
 Frenchman rich ; after the commune and the siege, 
 when the Hotel de Ville was in ruins, the palace of 
 the Tuileries still aflame, the column gone from 
 the Place Vendome, and everything a blight and 
 waste; and I have marked it rise from its ashes, 
 grandly, proudly, and like a queen come to her own 
 again, resume its primacy as the only complete me- 
 tropolis in all the universe. 
 
 There is no denying it. No city can approach 
 Paris in structural unity and regality, in things 
 brilliant and beautiful, in buoyancy, variety, charm 
 and creature comfort. Drunkenness, of the kind fa- 
 miliar to London and New York, is invisible to 
 Paris. The brandy and absinthe habit has been 
 greatly exaggerated. In truth, everywhere in Eu- 
 rope the use of intoxicants is on the decline. They 
 are, for the first time in France, stimulated partly 
 by the alarming adulteration of French wines, rig- 
 orously applying and enforcing the pure-food laws. 
 
 As a consequence, there is a palpable and decided 
 improvement of the vintage of the Garonne and the 
 Champagne country. One may get a good glass of 
 wine now without impoverishing himself. As men 
 
 [99] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 drink wine, and as the wine is pure, they fall away 
 from stronger drink. I have always considered, 
 with Jefferson, the brewery in America an excel- 
 lent temperance society. That which works other- 
 wise is the dive which too often the brewery fathers. 
 They are drinking more beer in France — even mak- 
 ing a fairly good beer. And then 
 
 But gracious, this is getting upon things con- 
 troversial, and if there is anything in this world that 
 I do hybominate, it is controversy! 
 
 Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of 
 Miracles has wrought in my day and generation 
 exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner 
 is but a moving palace. Between the ports of the 
 Old World and the ports of the new the transit is 
 so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There are 
 no more adventures on the high seas. The ocean 
 is a thoroughfare, the crossing a ferry. ^ly expe- 
 rience forty years ago upon one of the ancient tubs 
 which have been supplanted by these liners would 
 make queer reading to the latter-day tourist, tak- 
 ing, let us say, any one of the steamers of any one 
 of the leading transatlantic companies. The differ- 
 ence in the appointments of the Wilham Penn of 
 1865 and the star boats of 1914 is indescribable. It 
 [100] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 seems a fairy tale to think of a palm garden where 
 the ladies dress for dinner, a Hungarian band which 
 plays for them whilst they dine, and a sky parlor 
 where they go after dinner for their coffee and 
 what not; a tea-room for the five-o'clockers ; and 
 except in excessive weather scarcely any motion at 
 all. It is this palm garden which most appeals to 
 a certain lady of my very intimate acquaintance 
 who had made many crossings and never gone to 
 her meals — sick from shore to shore — until the gods 
 ordained for her a watery, winery, flowery paradise 
 — where the billows ceased from troubling and a 
 woman could appear at her best. Since then she 
 has sailed many times, lodged a la Waldorf-Astoria 
 to eat her victuals and sip her wine with perfect 
 contentment. Coming ashore from our last cross- 
 ing a friend found her in the Red Room of that 
 hostel just as she had been sitting the evening be- 
 fore on shipboard. 
 
 "Seems hardly any motion at all," she said, look- 
 ing about her and fancying herself still at sea, as 
 well she might. 
 
 [101] 
 
CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH 
 
 THE GROVER CLEVELAND PERIOD PRESIDENT AR- 
 THUR AND MR. BLAINE JOHN CHAMBERLAIN 
 
 — THE DECREES OF DESTINY 
 
 WHAT may be called the Grover Cleveland 
 period of American politics began with the 
 election of that extraordinary person — another man 
 of destiny — to the governorship of New York. 
 Nominated, as it were, by chance, he carried the 
 State by an unprecedented majority,, That was 
 not because of his popularity, but that an incred- 
 ible number of Republican voters refused to sup- 
 port their party ticket and stayed away from the 
 polls. The Blaine-Conkling feud, inflamed by the 
 murder of Garfield, had rent the party of Lincoln 
 and Grant asunder. Arthur, a Conkling leader, 
 had succeeded to the presidency. 
 
 If any human agency could have sealed the 
 [102] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 breach he might have done it. No man, however, 
 can achieve the impossible. The case was hopeless. 
 
 Arthur was a man of surpassing sweetness and 
 grace. As handsome as Pierce, as affable as Mc- 
 Kinley, he was a more experienced and dextrous 
 politician than either. He had been put on the 
 ticket with Garfield to placate Conkling. All sorts 
 of stories to his discredit were told during the en- 
 suing campaign. The Democrats made him out a 
 tricky and typical "New York politician." In 
 point of fact he was a many-sided, accomplished 
 man who had a taking way of adjusting all con- 
 ditions and adapting himself to all companies. 
 
 With a sister as charming and tactful as he for 
 head of his domestic fabric, the White House 
 bloomed again. He possessed the knack of sur- 
 rounding himself with all sorts of agreeable people. 
 Frederick Frelinghuysen was Secretary of State 
 and Robert Lincoln, continued from the Garfield 
 Cabinet, Secretary of War. Then there were three 
 irresistibles : Walter Gresham, Frank Hatton and 
 "Ben" Brewster. His home contingent — "Clint" 
 Wheeler, "Steve" French, and "Jake" Hess— pic- 
 tured as "ward heelers" — were, in reahty, efficient 
 
 [103] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and all-around, companionable men, capable and 
 loyal. 
 
 I was sent by the Associated Press to Washing- 
 ton on a fool's errand — that is, to get an act of 
 Congress extending copyright to the news of the 
 association — and, remaining the entire session, my 
 business to meet the official great and to make my- 
 self acceptable, I came into a certain intimacy with 
 the Administration circle, having long had friendly 
 relations with the President. In all my life I have 
 never passed so dehghtful and useless a winter. 
 
 Very early in the action I found that my mission 
 involved a serious and vexed question — nothing less 
 than the creation of a new property — and I 
 proceeded warily. Through my uncle, Stanley 
 Matthews, I interested the members of the Su- 
 preme Court. The Attorney General, a great law- 
 yer and an old Philadelphia friend, was at my call 
 and elbow. The Joint Library Committee of Con- 
 gress, to which the measure must go, was with me. 
 Yet somehow the scheme lagged. 
 
 I could not account for this. One evening at a 
 dinner Mr. Blaine enlightened me. We sat to- 
 gether at table and suddenly he turned and said: 
 "How are you getting on with your bill?" And 
 [104] 
 
' MARSE HENRY" 
 
 my reply being rather halting, he continued, "You 
 won't get a vote in either House," and he pro- 
 ceeded very humorously to improvise the average 
 member's argument against it as a dangerous 
 power, a perquisite to the great newspapers and an 
 imposition upon the little ones. To my mind this 
 was something more than the post-prandial levity 
 it was meant to be. 
 
 Not long after a learned but dissolute old lawyer 
 said to me, "You need no act of Congress to pro- 
 tect your news service. There are at least two, 
 and I think four or five, English rulings that cover 
 the case. Let me show them to you." He did so 
 and I went no further with the business, quite agree- 
 ing with Mr. Blaine, and nothing further came of 
 it. To a recent date the Associated Press has relied 
 on these decisions under the common law of Eng- 
 land. Curiously enough, quite a number of news- 
 papers in whose actual service I was engaged, 
 opened fire upon me and roundly abused me. 
 
 II 
 
 There appeared upon the scene in Washington 
 toward the middle of the seventies one of those 
 
 [105] 
 
"MAKSE HENRY" 
 
 problematical characters the fiction-mongers delight 
 in. This was John Chamberlin. During two dec- 
 ades "Chamberlin's," half clubhouse and half chop- 
 house, was all a rendezvous. 
 
 "John" had been a gambler; first an underling 
 and then a partner of the famous Morrissy-Mc- 
 Grath racing combination at Saratoga and Long 
 Branch. There was a time when he was literally 
 rolling in wealth. Then he went broke — dead 
 broke. Black Friday began it and the panic of '73 
 finished it. He came over to Washington and his 
 friends got him the restaurant privileges of the 
 House of Representatives. With this for a start- 
 ing point, he was able to take the Fernando Wood 
 residence, in the heart of the fashionable quarter, 
 to add to it presently the adjoining dwelling of 
 Governor Swann, of ]Maryland, and next to that, 
 finally, the Blaine mansion, making a suite, as it 
 were, elegant yet cozy. "Welcker's," erst a fash- 
 ionable resort, and long the best eating-place in 
 town, had been ruined by a scandal, and "Cham- 
 berlin's" succeeded it, having the field to itself, 
 though, mindful of the "scandal" which had made 
 its opportunity, ladies were barred. 
 
 There was a famous cook — Emeline Simmons — 
 [106] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 a mulatto woman, who was equally at home in 
 French dishes and Mary land- Virginia kitchen mys- 
 teries — a very wonder with canvasback and terrapin 
 — who later refused a great money offer to be chef 
 at the White House — whom John was able to se- 
 cure. Nothing could surpass — could equal — her 
 preparations. The charges, like the victuals, were 
 sky-high and tip-top. The service was handled by 
 three "colored gentlemen," as distinguished in man- 
 ners as in appearance, who were known far and 
 wide by name and who dominated all about them, 
 including John and his patrons. 
 
 No such place ever existed before, or will ever 
 exist again. It was the personality of John Cham- 
 berlin, pervasive yet invisible, exhaling a silent, 
 welcoming radiance. General Grant once said to 
 me, "During my eight years in the White House, 
 John Chamberlin once in a while — once in a great 
 while — came over. He did not ask for anything. 
 He just told me what to do, and I did it." I men- 
 tioned this to President Arthur. "Well," he laugh- 
 ingly said, "that has been my experience with John 
 Chamberlin. It never crosses my mind to say him 
 'nay.' Often I have turned this over in my thought 
 to reach the conclusion that being a man of sound 
 
 [107] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 judgment and worldly knowledge, he has fully con- 
 sidered the case — his case and my case — leaving me 
 no reasonable objection to interpose." 
 
 John obtained an act of Congi-ess authorizing 
 him to build a hotel on the .Government reservation 
 at Fortress Monroe, and another of the Virginia 
 Legislature confirming this for the State. Then he 
 came to me. It was at the moment when I was 
 flourishing as "a Wall Street magnate." He said: 
 "I want to sell this franchise to some man, or com- 
 pany, rich enough to carry it through. All I expect 
 is a nest egg for Emily and the girls" — he had mar- 
 ried the beautiful Emily Thorn, widow of George 
 Jordan, the actor, and there were two daughters — 
 "you are hand-and-glove with the millionaires. 
 Won't you manage it for me?" Like Grant and 
 Arthur, I never thought of refusing. Upon the 
 understanding that I was to receive no commission, 
 I agreed, first ascertaining that it was really a most 
 valuable franchise. 
 
 I began with the Willards, in whose hotel I had 
 grown up. They were rich and going out of busi- 
 ness. Then I laid it before Hitchcock and Darling, 
 of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. They, 
 rich like the Willards, were also retiring. Then a 
 [108] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 bright thought occurred to me. I went to the 
 Prince Imperial of Stcandard Oil. "Mr. Flagler," 
 I said, "you have hotels at St. Augustine and you 
 have hotels at Palm Beach. Here is a halfway 
 point between New York and Florida," and more 
 of the same sort. "My dear friend," he answered, 
 "every man has the right to make a fool of himself 
 once in his life. This I have already done. Never 
 again for me. I have put up my last dollar south 
 of the Potomac." Then I went to the King of the 
 transcontinental railways. "Mr. Huntington," I 
 said, "you own a road extending from St. Louis to 
 Newport News, having a terminal in a cornfield 
 just out of Hampton Roads. Here is a franchise 
 which gives you a magnificent site at Hampton 
 Roads itself. Why not?" He gazed upon me 
 with a blank stare — such I fancy as he usually 
 turned upon his suppliants — and slowly replied: "I 
 would not spend another dollar in Virginia if the 
 Lord commanded me. In the event that some su- 
 pernatural power should take the Chesapeake & 
 Ohio Railway by the nape of the neck and the seat 
 of the breeches and pitch it out in the middle of the 
 Atlantic Ocean it would be doing me a favor." 
 So I returned John his franchise marked "noth- 
 
 [109] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ing doing." Afterward he put it in the hands of 
 a very near friend, a great capitalist, who had no 
 better luck with it. Finally, here and there, lit- 
 erally by piecemeal, he got together money enough 
 to build and furnish the Hotel Chamberlin, had a 
 notable opening with half of Congress there to see, 
 and gently laid himself down and died, leaving little 
 other than friends and debts. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Macaulay tells us that the dinner-table is a won- 
 drous peacemaker, miracle worker, social solvent; 
 and many were the quarrels composed and the plans 
 perfected under the Chamberlin roof. It became a 
 kind of Congressional Exchange with a close White 
 House connection. If those old walls, which by the 
 way are still standing, could speak, what tales they 
 might tell, what testimonies refute, what new lights 
 throw into the vacant corners and dark places of 
 history! 
 
 Coming away from Chamberlin's with Mr. 
 
 Blaine for an after-dinner stroll during the winter 
 
 of 1883-4, referring to the approaching National 
 
 Republican Convention, he said: "I do not want 
 
 [110] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 the nomination. In my opinion there is but one 
 nominee the Republicans can elect this year and 
 that is General Sherman. I have written him to 
 tell him so and urge it upon him. In default of him 
 the time of you people has come." He subsequently 
 showed me this letter and General Sherman's reply. 
 My recollection is that the General declared that he 
 would not take the presidency if it were offered him, 
 earnestly invoking Mr. Blaine to support his broth- 
 er, John Sherman. 
 
 This would seem clear refutation that ]Mr. Blaine 
 was party to his own nomination that year. It as- 
 suredly reveals keen political instinct and fore- 
 sight. The capital prize in the national lottery was 
 not for him. 
 
 I did not meet him until two years later, when 
 he gave me a minute account of what had happened 
 immediately thereafter; the swing around the cir- 
 cle; Belshazzar's feast, as a fatal New York ban- 
 quet was called; the far-famed Burchard incident. 
 "I did not hear the words, 'Rum, Romanism and 
 Rebellion,' " he told me, "else, as you must know, 
 I would have fittingly disposed of them." 
 
 I said: "Mr. Blaine, you may as well give it up. 
 The doom of Webster, Clay, and Douglas is upon 
 
 [111] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 you. If you are nominated again, with an assured 
 election, you will die before the day of election. If 
 you survive the day and are elected, you'll die be- 
 fore the 4th of March." He smiled grimly and 
 replied: "It really looks that way." 
 
 ]My own opinion has always been that if the Re- 
 publicans had nominated Mr. Arthur hi 1884 they 
 would have elected him. The New York vote would 
 scarcely have been so close. In the count of the 
 vote the Arthur end of it would have had some ad- 
 vantage — certainly no disadvantage. Cleveland's 
 nearly 200,000 majority had dwindled to the claim 
 of a beggarly few hundred, and it was charged that 
 votes which belonged to Butler, who ran as an in- 
 dependent labor candidate, were actually counted 
 for Cleveland. 
 
 When it was over an old Republican friend of 
 mine said: "Now we are even. History will attest 
 that we stole it once and you stole it once. Turn 
 about may be fair play; but, all the same, neither 
 of us likes it." 
 
 So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buf- 
 falo two years before, was to be President of the 
 United States. The night preceding his nomina- 
 tion for the governorship of New York, General 
 [112] 
 
"MARSE HENRY'' 
 
 Slocum seemed in the State convention sure of that 
 nomination. Had he received it he would have car- 
 ried the State as Cleveland did, and Slocum, not 
 Cleveland, would have been the Chief Magistrate. 
 It cost Providence a supreme effort to pull Cleve- 
 land through. But in his case, as in many another, 
 Providence *'got there" in fulfilment of a decree 
 of Destiny. 
 
 [118] 
 
CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH 
 
 MR. CLE\^LAND IN THE WHITE HOUSE — MR. BAYARD 
 IN THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE QUEER AP- 
 POINTMENTS TO OFFICE — THE ONE-PARTY 
 POWER — THE END OF NORTH AND SOUTH SEC- 
 TIONALISM 
 
 I 
 
 (HE futility of political as well as of other hu- 
 man reckoning was set forth by the result of 
 the presidential election of 1884. With a kind of 
 prescience, as I have related, JNIr. Blaine had fore- 
 seen it. He was a sagacious as well as a lovable and 
 brilliant man. He looked back affectionately upon 
 the days he had passed in Kentucky, when a poor 
 school-teacher, and was especially cordial to the 
 Kentuckians. In the House he and Beck were 
 sworn friends, and they continued their friendship 
 when both of them had reached the Senate. 
 
 I inherited Mr. Blaine's desk in the Ways and 
 Means Committee room. In one of the drawers of 
 [114] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 this he had left a parcel of forgotten papers, which 
 I returned to him. He made a joke of the secrets 
 they covered and the fortunate circumstance that 
 they had fallen into the hands of a friend and not 
 of an enemy. 
 
 No man of his time could hold a candle to Mr. 
 Blaine in what we call magnetism — that is, in manly 
 charm, supported by facility and brain power. 
 Clay and Douglas had set the standard of party 
 leadership before his time. He made a good third 
 to them. I never knew ^Ir. Clay, but with Judge 
 Douglas I was well acquainted, and the difference 
 between him and ^Ir. Blaine in leadership might 
 be called negligible. 
 
 Both were intellectually aggressive and individu- 
 ally amiable. They at least seemed to love their fel- 
 low men. Each had been tried by many adventures. 
 Each had gone, as it were, "through the flint mill." 
 Born to good conditions — Mr. Blaine sprang from 
 aristocratic forebears — each knew by early albeit 
 brief experience the seamy side of life ; as each, like 
 Clay, nursed a consuming passion for the presi- 
 dency. Neither had been made for a subaltern, and 
 they chafed under the subaltern yoke to which fate 
 had condemned them. 
 
 [115] 
 
"MARSE henry; 
 
 n 
 
 In Grover Cleveland a total stranger had ar- 
 rived at the front of affairs. The Democrats, after 
 a rule of more than half a century, had been out 
 of power twenty-four years. They could scarce 
 realize at first that they were again in power. The 
 new chieftain proved more of an unknown quantity 
 than had been suspected. William Dorsheimer, a 
 life-long crony, had brought the two of us together 
 before Cleveland's election to the governorship of 
 the Empire State as one of a group of attractive 
 Buffalo men, most of whom might be said to have 
 been cronies of mine, Buffalo being a dehghtful 
 halfway stop-over in my frequent migrations be- 
 tween Kentucky and the Eastern seaboard. As in 
 the end we came to a parting of the ways I want to 
 write of Mr. Cleveland as a historian and not as a 
 critic. 
 
 He said to Mr. Carlisle after one of our oc- 
 casional tiffs : "Henry will never like me until God 
 makes me over again." The next time we met, re- 
 ferring to this, I said: "Mr. President, I like you 
 [116] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 very much — very much indeed — but sometimes I 
 don't like some of your ways." 
 
 There were in point of fact two Clevelands — be- 
 fore marriage and after marriage — the inter- 
 mediate Cleveland rather unequal and indetermi- 
 nate. Assuredly no one of his predecessors had 
 entered the White House so wholly ignorant of 
 pubHc men and national affairs. Stories used to be 
 told assigning to Zacharj^ Taylor this equivocal dis- 
 tinction. But General Tajdor had grown up in the 
 army and advanced in the military service to a chief 
 command, was more or less famihar with the party 
 leaders of his time, and was by heredity a gentle- 
 man. The same was measurably true of Grant. 
 Cleveland confessed himself to have had no social 
 training, and he literally knew nobody. 
 
 Five or six weeks after his inauguration I went 
 to Washington to ask a diplomatic appointment for 
 my friend, Boyd Winchester. Ill health had cut 
 short a promising career in Congress, but ]Mr. Win- 
 chester was now well on to recovery, and there 
 seemed no reason why he should not and did not 
 stand in the line of preferment. ]My experience 
 may be worth recording because it is illustrative. 
 
 In my quest I had not thought of going beyond 
 
 [117] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Mr. Bayard, the new Secretary of State. I did go 
 to him, but the matter seemed to make no headway. 
 There appeared a hitch somewhere. It had not 
 crossed my mind that it might be the President him- 
 self. What did the President know or care about 
 foreign appointments? 
 
 He said to me on a Saturday when I was intro- 
 ducing a party of Kentucky friends: "Come up to- 
 morrow for hmcheon. Come early, for Rose" — his 
 sister, for the time being mistress of the White 
 House — "will be at church and we can have an old- 
 fashioned talk-it-out." 
 
 The next day we passed the forenoon together. 
 He was full of homely and often whimsical talk. 
 He told me he had not yet realized what had hap- 
 pened to him. 
 
 "Sometimes," he said, "I wake at night and rub 
 my eyes and wonder if it is not all a dream." 
 
 He asked an infinite number of questions about 
 this, that and the other Democratic politician. He 
 was having trouble with the Kentucky Congress- 
 men. He had appointed a most unlikely scion of a 
 well-known family to a foreign mission, and an- 
 other young Kentuckian, the son of a New York 
 magnate, to a leading consul generalship, without 
 [118] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 consultation with any one. He asked me about 
 these. In a way one of them was one of my boys, 
 and I was glad to see him get what he wanted, 
 though he aspired to nothing so high. He was in- 
 deed all sorts of a boy, and his elevation to such a 
 post was so grotesque that the nomination, like 
 that of his mate, was rejected by the Senate. I 
 gave the President a serio-comic but kindly ac- 
 count, at which he laughed heartily, and ended by 
 my asking how he had chanced to make two such 
 appointments. 
 
 "Hewitt came over here," he answered, "and then 
 Dorsheimer. The father is the only Democrat we 
 have in that great corporation. As to the other, 
 he struck me as a likely fellow. It seemed good 
 politics to gratify them and their friends." 
 
 I suggested that such backing was far afield and 
 not very safe to go by, when suddenly he said: "I 
 have been told over and over again by you and by 
 others that you will not take office. Too much of 
 a lady, I suppose! What are you hanging round 
 Washington for anyhow? What do you want?" 
 
 Here was my opportunity to speak of Winches- 
 ter, and I did so. 
 
 [119] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 When I had finished he said: "What are you 
 doing about Winchester?" 
 
 "Relying on the Secretary of State, who served 
 in Congress with him and knows him well." 
 
 Then he asked: "What do you want for Win- 
 chester?" 
 
 I answered: "Belgium or Switzerland.'* 
 
 He said: "I promised Switzerland for a friend 
 of Coming's. He brought him over here yesterday 
 and he is an out-and-out Republican who voted for 
 Blaine, and I shall not appoint him. If you want 
 the place for Winchester, Winchester it is." 
 
 Next daj^ much to Mr. Bayard's surprise, the 
 commission was made out. 
 
 ]\Ir. Cleveland had a way of sudden fancies to 
 new and sometimes queer people. Many of his ap- 
 pointments were eccentric and fell like bombshells 
 upon the Senate, taldng the appointee's home peo- 
 ple completely by 'surprise. 
 
 The recommendation of influential politicians 
 seemed to have little if any weight with him. 
 
 There came to Washington from Riclmiond a 
 gentleman by the name of Keiley, backed by the 
 Virginia delegation for a minor consulship. The 
 President at once fell in love with him. 
 [120] 
 
MR. WATTERSOX'S LIBRARY AT "MAXSFIEI.D' 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 "Consul be damned," he said. "He is worth more 
 than that," and named him Ambassador to Vienna. 
 
 It turned out that Mrs. Keiley was a Jewess and 
 would not be received at court. Then he named 
 him Ambassador to Italy, when it appeared that 
 Keiley was an intense Roman Catholic, who had 
 made at least one ultramontane speech, and would 
 be persona non grata at the Quirinal. Then Cleve- 
 land dropped him. Meanwhile poor Keiley had 
 closed out bag and baggage at Richmond and was 
 at his wit's end. After much ado the President was 
 brought to a realizing sense and a place was found 
 for Keiley as consul general and diplomatic agent 
 at Cairo, whither he repaired. At the end of the 
 four years he came to Paris and one day, crossing 
 the Place de la Concorde, he was run over by a 
 truck and killed. He deserved a longer career and 
 a better fate, for he was a man of real capacity. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Taken to task by thick and thin Democratic 
 partisans for my criticism of the only two Demo- 
 cratic Presidents we have had since the War of 
 Sections, Cleveland and Wilson, I have answered 
 
 [121] 
 
' MARSE HENRY" 
 
 by asserting the right and duty of the journalist 
 to talk out in meeting, flatly repudiating the claims 
 as well as the obligations of the organ grinder they 
 had sought to put upon me, and closing with the 
 knife grinder's retort — 
 
 Things have come to a hell of a pass 
 When a man can't wallop his own jackass. 
 
 In the case of Mr. Cleveland the break had come 
 over the tariff issue. Reading me his first message 
 to Congress the day before he sent it in, he had said: 
 "I know nothing about the tariff, and I thought 
 I had best leave it where you and Morrison had put 
 it in the platform." 
 
 We had indeed had a time in the Platform Com- 
 mittee of the Chicago convention of 1884. After 
 an unbroken session of fifty hours a straddle was all 
 that the committee could be brought to agree upon. 
 The leading recalcitrant had been General Butler, 
 who was there to make trouble and who later along 
 bolted the ticket and ran as an independent candi- 
 date. 
 
 One aim of the Democrats was to get away from 
 the bloody shirt as an issue. Yet, as the sequel 
 proved, it was long after Cleveland's day before the 
 [122] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 bloodj^ shirt was laid finally to rest. It required a 
 patriot and a hero like William INIcKinley to do 
 this. When he signed the commissions of Joseph 
 Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, Confederate generals 
 and gi'aduates of the West Point JNlilitary Acad- 
 emy, to be generals in the Army of the United 
 States, he made official announcement that the War 
 of Sections was over and gave complete amnesty to 
 the people and the soldiers of the South. 
 
 Yet the bloody shirt lingered long as a trouble- 
 maker, and was invoked by both parties. 
 
 IV 
 
 That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred 
 by the bombast of self-exploiting orators eager for 
 notoriety or display — loose mobs of local non- 
 descripts led by pension sharks so aptly described 
 by the gallant General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as 
 coffee coolers and camp followers — should tear their 
 passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, 
 exercising an indisputable right and violating no 
 reasonable sensibility, should elect to send mem- 
 orials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of 
 Statues in the nation's Capitol, came in the ac- 
 
 [123] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 customed way of bloody-shirt agitation. It merely 
 proved how easily men are led when taken in droves 
 and stirred by partyism. Such men either bore 
 no part in the fighting when fighting was the order 
 of the time, or else they were too ignorant and 
 therefore too unpatriotic to comprehend the mean- 
 ing of the intervening years and the glory these 
 had brought with the expanse of national progress 
 and prowess. In spite of their lack of representa- 
 tive character it was not easy to repress impatience 
 at ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and of 
 course it was not possible to dissuade or placate 
 them. 
 
 All the while never a people more eager to get 
 together than the people of the United States after 
 the War of Sections, as never a people so averse to 
 getting into that war. A very small group of ex- 
 tremists and doctrinaires had in the beginning made 
 a War of Sections possible. Enough of these sur- 
 vived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to 
 keep sectionalism alive. 
 
 It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan 
 
 advantage. But it made the presidential campaigns 
 
 lurid in certain quarters. There was no end of 
 
 objurgation, though it would seem that even the 
 
 [124] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 most embittered Northerner and ultra Republican 
 who could couple the names of Robert E. Lee and 
 Benedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign 
 lingo, would not hesitate, if his passions were roused 
 or if he fancied he saw in it some profit to himself 
 or his party, to liken George Washington to Judas 
 Iscariot. 
 
 The placing of Lee's statue in the Capitol at 
 Washington made the occasion for this. 
 
 It is true that long before Confederate officers 
 had sat in both Houses of Congress and in Repubh- 
 can and Democratic cabinets and upon the bench of 
 the Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors 
 and envoys extraordinary in foreign lands. But 
 McKinley's doing was the crowning stroke of union 
 and peace. 
 
 There had been a weary and varied interim. Sec- 
 tionahsm proved a sturdy plant. It died hard. We 
 may waive the reconstruction period as ancient his- 
 tory. There followed it intense party spirit. Yet, 
 in spite of extremists and malignants on both sides 
 of the line, the South rallied equally with the 
 North to the nation's drumbeat after the Maine 
 went down in the harbor of Havana. It fought as 
 bravely and as loyally at Santiago and JNIanila. 
 
 [125] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into 
 the Chief Magistracy one who gloried in the cir- 
 cumstance that on the maternal side he came of 
 fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal ap- 
 plause, declared that no Southerner could be 
 prouder than he of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall 
 Jackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his mother's 
 brother, who had stood at the head of the Con- 
 federate naval establishment in Europe and had 
 fitted out the Confederate cruisers, as the noblest 
 and purest man he had ever known, a composite of 
 Colonel Newcome and Henry Esmond. 
 
 Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. 
 The graven effigj^ of Jefferson Davis at length ap- 
 peared upon the silver service of an American bat- 
 tleship. This told the ]Mississippi's guests, wherever 
 and whenever they might meet round her hospitable 
 board, of national unification and peace, giving the 
 lie to sectional malignancy. In the most famous 
 and conspicuous of the national cemeteries now 
 stands the monument of a Confederate general not 
 only placed there by consent of the Government, 
 but dedicated with fitting ceremonies supervised by 
 the Department of War, which sent as its official 
 [126] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 representative the son of Grant, himself an army 
 ojSicer of rank and distinction. 
 
 The world has looked on, incredulous and 
 amazed, whilst our country has risen to each suc- 
 cessive act in the drama of reconcihation with in- 
 creasing enthusiasm. 
 
 I have been all my life a Constitutional Nation- 
 ahst; first the nation and then the state. The 
 episode of the Confederacy seems already far away. 
 It was an interlude, even as matters stood in the 
 Sixties and Seventies, and now he who would 
 thwart the unification of the countrj^ on the lines of 
 oblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, 
 throws himself across the highway of his country's 
 future, and is a traitor equally to the essential prin- 
 ciples of free government and the spirit of the age. 
 
 If sectionalism be not dead it should have no 
 place in popular consideration. The country seems 
 happily at last one with itself. The South, like 
 the East and the West, has come to be the merest 
 geographic expression. Each of its states is in the 
 Union, precisely hke the states of the East and the 
 West, all in one and one in all. Interchanges of 
 every sort exist. 
 
 These exchanges underlie and interlace our so- 
 
 [127] 
 
"MAKSE HENRY" 
 
 cial, domestic and business fabric. That the ar- 
 rangement and relation after half a century of 
 strife thus established should continue through all 
 time is the hope and prayer of every thoughtful, \ 
 patriotic American. There is no greater dissonance i 
 to that sentiment in the South than in the North, i 
 To what end, therefore, except ignominious recrimi- i 
 nation and ruinous dissension, could a revival of old j 
 sectional and partisan passions — if it were possible j 
 — be expected to reach ? j 
 
 Humor has played no small part in our pohtics. 
 It was Col. Mulberry Sellers, Mark Twain's hero, 
 who gave currency to the conceit and enunciated the 
 principle of "the old flag and an appropriation." He 
 did not claim the formula as his own, however. He 
 got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, his patriotic ' 
 file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship. 
 
 The original of Senator Dillworthy was recog- 
 nized the country over as Senator Pomeroy, of 
 Kansas, "Old Pom," as he had come to be called,, 
 whose oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, ad-' 
 justing themselves with equal facility to the pur- 
 [128] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 loining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, to 
 prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves 
 upon the Satirist of the Gilded Age as upon his 
 immediate colleagues in Congress. He was a ruffle- 
 shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, 
 and resembled Cruikshank's pictures of Pecksniff. 
 There have not been many "Old Poms" in our 
 public life ; or, for that matter Aaron Burrs either, 
 and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen 
 people of God did not dwell amid the twilight of the 
 ages and in far-away Judea, but were reserved to a 
 later time, and a region then undiscovered of men, 
 and that the American republic was ordained of 
 God to illustrate upon the theater of the New 
 World the possibilities of free government in con- 
 trast with the failures and tyrannies and corrup- 
 tions of the Old, I do truly believe. That is the 
 first article in my confession of faith. And the 
 second is like unto it, that Washington was raised 
 up by God to create it, and that Lincoln was raised 
 up by God to save it; else why the militia colonel 
 of Virginia and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no 
 reason that was obvious at the time, before all other 
 men? God moves in a mysterious way his wonders 
 to perform. The star of the sublime destiny that 
 
 [129] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 hung over the manager of our blessed Savior hung 
 over the cradle of our blessed Union. 
 
 Thus far it has weathered each historic danger 
 which has gone before to mark the dechne and fall 
 of nations; the struggle for existence; the foreign 
 invasion; the internecine strife; the disputed suc- 
 cession; religious bigotry and racial conflict. One 
 other peril confronts it — the demoralization of 
 wealth and luxury; too great prosperity; the con- 
 centration and the abuse of power. Shall we sur- 
 vive the lures with which the spirit of evil, playing 
 upon our self-love, seeks to trip our wayward foot- 
 steps, purse-pride and party spirit, mistaken zeal 
 and perverted religion, fanaticism seeking to 
 abridge liberty and liberty running to license, greed 
 masquerading as a patriot and ambition making a 
 commodity of glory — or under the process of a 
 divine evolution shall we be able to mount and ride 
 the waves which swallowed the tribes of Israel, 
 which engulfed the phalanxes of Greece and the 
 legions of Rome, and which still beat the sides and 
 sweep the decks of Europe? 
 
 The one-party power we have escaped; the one- 
 man power we have escaped. The stars in their 
 
 courses fight for us; the virtue and intelligence of 
 [130] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 the people are still watchful and alert. Truth is 
 mightier than ever, and justice, mounting guard 
 even in the Hall of Statues, walks everywhere the 
 battlements of freedom I 
 
 [131] 
 
CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH 
 
 THE REAL GROVER CLEVELA^T) TTTO CLEYELANDS, 
 
 BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE A CORRESPON- 
 DENCE AND A BREAK OF PERSONAL RELATIONS 
 
 THERE were, as I have said, two Grover 
 Clevelands — before and after marriage — and, 
 it might be added, between his defeat in 1888 and 
 his election in 1892. He was so sure of his election 
 in 1888 that he could not be induced to see the 
 danger of the situation in his own State of New 
 York, where David Bennett Hill, who had suc- 
 ceeded him in the governorship, was a candidate for 
 reelection, and whom he personally detested, had 
 become the ruling party force. He lost the State, 
 and with it the election, while Hill won, and thereby 
 arose an ugly faction fight. 
 
 I did not believe as the quadrennial period ap- 
 proached in 1892 that ]Mr. Cleveland could be 
 elected. I still think he owed his election, and Har- 
 [132] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 rison his defeat, to the Homestead riots of the mid- 
 summer, which transferred the lahor vote bodily 
 from the Repubhcans to the Democrats. Mainly 
 on account of this belief I opposed his nomination 
 that year. 
 
 In the Kentucky State Convention I made my op- 
 position resonant, if not effective. "I understand," 
 I said in an address to the assembled delegates, 
 "that you are all for Grover Cleveland?" 
 
 There came an affirmative roar. 
 
 "Well," I continued, "I am not, and if you send 
 me to the National Convention I will not vote for 
 his nomination, if his be the only name presented, 
 because I firmly believe that his nomination will 
 mean the marching through a slaughter-house to an 
 open grave, and I refuse to be party to such a 
 folly." 
 
 The answer of the convention was my appoint- 
 ment by acclamation, but it was many a day before 
 I heard the last of my unlucky figure of speech. 
 
 Notwithstanding this splendid indorsement, I 
 went to the National Convention feeling very like 
 the traditional "poor boy at a frolic." All seemed 
 to me lost save honor and conviction. I had be- 
 come the embodiment of my own epigram, "a tariff 
 
 [133] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 for revenue only." Mr. Cleveland, in the begin- 
 ning very much taken by it, had grown first luke- 
 warm and then frightened. His "Free Trade" 
 message of 1887 had been regarded by the party 
 as an answering voice. But I knew better. 
 
 In the national platform, over the protest of 
 Whitney, his organizer, and Vilas, his spokesman, 
 I had forced him to stand on that gospel. He flew 
 into a rage and threatened to modify, if not to re- 
 pudiate, the plank in his letter of acceptance. We 
 were still on friendly terms and, upon reaching 
 home, I wrote him the following letter. It 
 reads like ancient history, but, as the quarrel which 
 followed cut a certain figure in the political 
 chronicle of the time, the correspondence may not 
 be historically out of date, or biographically un- 
 interesting : 
 
 n 
 
 ME. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND 
 
 Courier- Journal Ofiice, Louisville, July 9, 1892. 
 — My Dear Mr. President: I inclose you two edi- 
 torial articles from the Courier-Journal, and, that 
 their spirit and purpose may not be misunderstood 
 [134] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 by you, I wish to add a word or two of a kind di- 
 rectly and entirely personal. 
 
 To a man of your robust understanding and 
 strong will, opposition and criticism are apt to be 
 taken as more or less unfriendly; and, as you are 
 at present advised, I can hardly expect that any 
 words of mine will be received by you with senti- 
 ments either of confidence or favor. 
 
 I was admonished by a certain distrust, if not dis- 
 dain, visited upon the honest challenge I ventured 
 to offer your Civil Service policy, when you were 
 actually in office, that you did not differ from some 
 other great men I have known in an unwilhngness, 
 or at least an inability, to accept, without resent- 
 ment, the question of your infallibihty. Neverthe- 
 less, I was then, as I am now, your friend, and 
 not your enemy, animated by the single purpose to 
 serve the country, through you, as, wanting your 
 great opportunities, I could not serve it tlu'ough 
 myself. 
 
 During the four years when you were President, 
 I asked you but for one thing that lay near my 
 heart. You granted that handsomely; and, if you 
 had given me all you had to give beside, you could 
 not have laid me under greater obligation. It is a 
 
 [135] 
 
"MARSE HENKY" 
 
 gratification to me to know, and it ought to be some 
 warrant both of my intelhgence and fidehty for 
 you to remember that that matter resulted in credit 
 to the Administration and benefit to the pubhc 
 service. 
 
 But to the point; I had at St. Louis in 1888 and 
 at Chicago, the present year, to oppose what was 
 represented as your judgment and desire in the 
 adoption of a tariff plank in our national platform ; 
 successfully in both cases. The inclosed articles set 
 forth the reasons forcing upon me a different con- 
 clusion from yours, in terms that may appear to 
 you bluntly specific, but I hope not personally of- 
 fensive; certainly not by intention, for, whilst I 
 would not suppress the truth to please you or any 
 man, I have a decent regard for the sensibilities 
 and the rights of all men, particularly of men so 
 eminent as to be beyond the reach of anj^thing ex- 
 cept insolence and injustice. Assuredly in your 
 case, I am incapable of even so much as the covert 
 thought of either, entertaining for you absolute re- 
 spect and regard. But, my dear ]Mr. President, I 
 do not tliink that you appreciate the overwhelming 
 force of the revenue reform issue, which has made 
 you its idol. 
 [136] 
 
CORXER OF "IMANSFIELD"— HOME OF HENRY WATTERSON 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 If you will allow me to say so, in perfect frank- 
 ness and without intending to be rude or unkind, 
 the gentlemen immediately about you, gentlemen 
 upon whom you rely for material aid and energetic 
 party management, are not, as to the Tariff, Demo- 
 crats at all ; and have little conception of the place 
 in the popular mind and heart held by the Revenue 
 Reform idea, or, indeed of any idea, except that of 
 organization and money. 
 
 Of the need of these latter, no man has a more 
 realizing sense, or larger information and experi- 
 ence, than I have. But they are merely the brakes 
 and wheels of the engine, to which principles and 
 inspirations are, and must always be, the elements 
 of life and motion. It is to entreat you therefore, 
 in your coming letter and address, not to under- 
 estimate the tremendous driving power of this 
 Tariff issue, and to beg you, not even to seem to 
 qualify it, or to abridge its terms in a mistaken 
 attempt to seem to be conservative. 
 
 You cannot escape your great message of 1887 
 if you would. I know it by heart, and I think that 
 I perfectly apprehend its scope and tenor. Take 
 it as your guiding star. Stand upon it. Reiterate 
 
 [137] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 it. Emphasize it, amplify it, but do not subtract 
 a thought, do not erase a word. For every vote 
 wliich a bold front may lose you in the East you will 
 gain two votes in the West. In the East, particu- 
 larly in New York, enemies lurk in your very cup- 
 board, and strike at you from behind your chair 
 at table. There is more than a fighting chance for 
 IlHnois, Iowa, and [Minnesota, and next to a cer- 
 tainty in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, if you 
 put yourself personally at the head of the column 
 which is moving in your name, supposing it to be 
 another name for reduced taxes and freer ex- 
 changes. 
 
 Discouraged as I was by the condition of things 
 in New York and Indiana prior to the Chicago 
 Convention, depressed and almost hopeless by your 
 nomination, I can see daylight, if you will relax 
 your grip somewhat upon the East and throw your- 
 self confidently upon the West. 
 
 I write warmly because I feel warmly. If you 
 again occupy the White House, and it is my most 
 constant and earnest prayer that you may, be sure 
 that you will not be troubled by me. I cannot hope 
 that my motives in opposing your nomination, con- 
 [138] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 sistent as you know them to have been, or that my 
 conduct during the post-convention discussion and 
 canvass, free as I know it to have been of ill-feeling, 
 or distemper, has escaped misrepresentation and 
 misconception. I could not, without the loss of my 
 self-respect, approach you on any private matter 
 whatever; though it may not be amiss for me to say 
 to you, that three weeks before the meeting of the 
 National Convention, I wrote to Mr. .Gorman and 
 Mr. Brice urging the withdrawal of any opposi- 
 tion, and declaring that I would be a party to no 
 movement to work the two-thirds rule to defeat the 
 will of the majority. 
 
 This is all I have to say, Mr. President, and you 
 can beheve it or not, as you please; though you 
 ought to know that I would write you nothing ex- 
 cept in sincere conviction, nor speak to you, or of 
 you, except In a candid and kindly spirit. Trust- 
 ing that this will find you hale, hearty, and happy, 
 I am, dear sir, your fellow democrat and most 
 faithful friend, 
 
 Henry Watterson. 
 
 The Honorable Grover Cleveland. 
 
 [139] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 III 
 
 MR. CLEVELAND TO MR. WATTERSON 
 
 By return mail I received this answer : 
 
 Gray Gables, Buzzards Bay, Mass., 
 July 15, 1892. 
 My Dear Mr. Watterson : 
 
 I have received your letter and the clippings you 
 inclosed. 
 
 I am not sure that I understand perfectly all 
 that they mean. One thing they demonstrate be- 
 yond any doubt, to-wit: that you have not — I think 
 I may say — the slightest conception of my disposi- 
 tion. It may be that I know as little about yours. 
 I am surprised by the last paragraph of The 
 Courier-Journal article of July 8 and amazed to 
 read the statements contained in your letter, that 
 you know the message of 1887 by heart. It ij a 
 matter of very small importance, but I ho^ie vOii 
 will allow me to say, that in all the platform .i ash- 
 ing you ever did, you never injured nor ii ;iii'ed 
 me that I have ever seen or heard of, except .ft of 
 1888. I except that, so I may be exactly c< . n;ct 
 [140] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 when I write, "seen or heard of," — for I use the 
 words literally. 
 
 I would like very much to present some views to 
 you relating to the tariff position, but I am afraid 
 to do so. 
 
 I will, however, venture to say this : If we are de- 
 feated this year, I predict a Democratic wandering 
 in the dark wilds of discouragement for twenty-five 
 years. I do not purpose to be at all responsible 
 for such a result. I hope all others upon whom 
 rests the least responsibihty will fully appreciate it. 
 
 The world will move on when both of us are dead. 
 While we stay, and especially while we are in any 
 way concerned in pohtical affairs and while we are 
 members of the same political brotherhood, let us 
 both resolve to be just and modest and amiable. 
 Yours very sincerely, 
 
 Gro^ter Cleveland. 
 
 Hon. Henry Watterson, Louisville, Ky. 
 
 IV 
 
 ME. WATTERSON TO MH. CLEVELAND 
 
 I said in answer : 
 
 Louisville, July 22, 1892.— My Dear Sir: I do 
 not see how you could misunderstand the spirit in 
 
 [141] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 which I wrote, or be offended by my plain words. 
 They were addressed as from one friend to another, 
 as from one Democrat to another. If you enter- 
 tain the idea that this is a false view of our relative 
 positions, and that your eminence lifts you above 
 both comradeship and counsels, I have nothing to 
 say except to regret that, in underestimating your 
 breadth of character I exposed myself too con- 
 tumely. 
 
 You do, indeed, ride a wave of fortune and favor. 
 You are quite beyond the reach of insult, real or 
 fancied. You could well afford to be more tolerant. 
 
 In answer to the ignorance of my service to the 
 Democratic party, which you are at such pains to 
 indicate — and, particularly, with reference to the 
 sectional issue and the issue of tariff reform — I 
 might, if I wanted to be unamiable, suggest to you 
 a more attentive perusal of the proceedings of the 
 three national conventions which nominated you for 
 President. 
 
 But I purpose nothing of the sort. In the last 
 five national conventions my efforts were decisive 
 in framing the platform of the party. In each of 
 them I closed the debate, moved the previous ques- 
 tion and was sustained by the convention. In all 
 [142] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 of them, except the last, I was a maker, not a 
 smasher. Touching what happened at Chicago, the 
 present year, I had a right, in common with good 
 Democrats, to be anxious; and out of that sense of 
 anxiety alone I wrote you. I am sorry that my 
 temerity was deemed by you intrusive and, enter- 
 ing a respectful protest against a ban which I can- 
 not believe to be deser^^ed by me, and assuring you 
 that I shall not again trouble you in that way, I 
 am, your obedient servant, 
 
 Henry Watteeson. 
 The Hon. Grover Cleveland. 
 
 This ended my personal relations with Mr. Cleve- 
 land. Thereafter we did not speak as we passed 
 by. He was a hard man to get on with. Over- 
 credulous, though bj^ no means excessive, in his 
 likes, very tenacious in his dislikes, suspicious 
 withal, he grew during his second term in the White 
 House, exceedingly "high and mighty," suggest- 
 ing somewhat the "stuffed prophet," of ^Ir. Dana's 
 relentless lambasting and verifying my insistence 
 that he posed rather as an idol to be worshiped, 
 
 [143] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 than a leader to be trusted and loved. He was in 
 truth a strong man, who, sufficiently mindful of 
 his limitations in the beginning, grew by unexam- 
 pled and continued success overconfident and over- 
 conscious in his own conceit. He had a real desire 
 to serve the country. But he was apt to think that 
 he alone could effectively serve it. In one of our 
 spats I remember saying to him, "You seem, Mr. 
 President, to think you are the only pebble on 
 the beach — the one honest and brave man in the 
 party — but let me assure you of my own knowl- 
 edge that there are others." His answer was, "Oh, 
 
 you go to 1" 
 
 He split his party wide open. The ostensible 
 cause was the money issue. But, underlying this, 
 there was a deal of personal embitterment. Had 
 he been a man of foresight — or even of ordinary 
 discernment — he might have held it together and 
 with it behind him have carried the gold standard. 
 I had contended for a sound currency from the 
 outset of the fiscal contention, fighting first the 
 green-back craze and then the free silver craze 
 against an overwhelming majority in the West and 
 South, nowhere more radically relentless than in 
 Kentucky. Both movements had their origin on 
 [144] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 economic fallacies and found their backing in dis- 
 honest purpose to escape honest indebtedness. 
 
 Through JNlr. Cleveland the party of Jefferson, 
 Jackson, and Tilden was converted from a Demo- 
 crat into a Populist, faUing into the arms of Mr. 
 Bryan, whose domination proved as baleful in one 
 way as JNlr. Cleveland's had been in another, the 
 final result shipwreck, with the extinguishment of 
 all but the label. 
 
 Mr. Bryan was a young man of notable gifts of 
 speech and boundless self-assertion. When he 
 found himself well in the saddle he began to rule 
 despotically and to ride furiously. A party leader 
 more short-sighted could hardly be imagined. None 
 of his judgments came true. As a consequence the 
 RepubHcans for a long time had everj^thing their 
 own way, and, save for the Taft-Roosevelt quar- 
 rel, might have held their power indefinitely. All 
 history tells us that the personal equation must be 
 reckoned with in public life. Assuredly it cuts no 
 mean figure in human affairs. And, when politi- 
 cians fall out — well — the other side comes in. 
 
 [145] 
 
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST 
 
 STEPHEN FOSTEE, THE SONG WRITER — A FRIEND 
 COMES TO THE RESCUE OF HIS ORIGINALITY — 
 "my OLD KENTUCKY HOME" AND "OLD FOLKS 
 
 AT home" GENERAL SHERMAN AND "mARCH- 
 
 ING THROUGH GEORGIA." 
 
 I HAVE received many letters touching what I 
 said a httle while ago of Stephen Collins 
 Foster, the song writer. In that matter I had, and 
 could have had, no unkindly thought or purpose. 
 The story of the musical scrapbook rested not with 
 me, but as I stated, upon the averment of Will S. 
 Hays, a rival song writer. But that the melody of 
 Old Folks at Home may be found in Schubert's 
 posthumous Rosemonde admits not of contradic- 
 tion for there it is, and this would seem to be in 
 some sort corroborative evidence of the truth of 
 Hays' story. 
 
 Among these letters comes one from Young E. 
 Allison which is entitled to serious consideration. 
 [146] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ^Ir. Allison is a gentleman of the first order of 
 character and culture, an editor and a musician, 
 and what he writes cannot fail to carry with it very- 
 great weight. I need make no apology for quoting 
 him at length. 
 
 "I have long been collecting material about 
 Foster from his birth to his death," says Mr. 
 Allison, "and aside from his weak and fatal love of 
 drink, which developed after he was twenty-five, 
 and had married, his life was one continuous de- 
 votion to the study of music, of painting, of poetry 
 and of languages; in point of fact, of all the arts 
 that appeal to one who feels within him the stir of 
 the creative. He was, quite singularly enough, a 
 fine mathematician, which undoubtedly aided him 
 in the study of music as a science, to which time and 
 balance play such an important part. In fact, I 
 believe it was the mathematical devil in his brain 
 that came to hold him within such bare and 
 primitive forms of composition and so, to some ex- 
 tent, to delimit the wider development of his genius. 
 
 "Now as to Foster's drinking habits, however 
 unfortunate they proved to him they did not affect 
 the quality of his art as he bequeathed it to us. No 
 one cares to recall the unhappy fortunes of Burns, 
 
 [147] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 De Musset, Chopin or — even in our own time — of 
 O. Henry, and others who might be named. In 
 none of their productions does the hectic fever of 
 over-stimulation show itself. No purer, gentler or 
 simpler aspirations were ever expressed in the vary- 
 ing forms of music and verse than flowed from 
 Foster's pen, even as penetrating benevolence came 
 from the pen of O. Henry, embittered and solitary 
 as his life had been. Indeed when we come to re- 
 gard what the drinkers of history have done for the 
 world in spite of the artificial stimulus they craved, 
 we may say with Lincoln as Lincoln said of Grant, 
 'Send the other generals some of the same brand.' 
 "Foster was an aristocrat of aristocrats, both by 
 birth and gifts. He inherited the blood of Richard 
 Steele and of the Kemble family, noted in English 
 letters and dramatic annals. To these artistic 
 strains he added undoubtedly the musical tempera- 
 ment of an Italian grandmother or great-grand- 
 mother. He was a cousin of John Rowan, the dis- 
 tinguished Kentucky lawyer and senator. Of 
 Foster's family, his father, his brothers, his sisters 
 were all notable as patriots, as pioneers in en- 
 gineering, in commerce and in society. One of his 
 brothers designed and built the early Pennsylvania 
 [148] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Railroad system and died executive vice-president 
 of that great corporation. Thus he was born to the 
 arts and to social distinction. But, like many men 
 of the creative temperament, he was born a solitary, 
 destined to live in a land of dreams. The singular 
 beauty and grace of his person and countenance, 
 the charm of his voice, manner and conversation, 
 were for the most part familiar to the limited circle 
 of his immediate family and friends. To others he 
 was reticent, with a certain hauteur of timidity, 
 uvoiding society and public appearances to the day 
 of his death. 
 
 "Now those are the facts about Foster. They 
 certainly do not describe the 'ne'er-do-well of a 
 good family' who hung round barrooms, colored- 
 minstrel haunts and theater entrances. I can find 
 only one incident to show that Foster ever went to 
 hear his own songs sung in public. He was es- 
 sentially a sohtary, who, while keenly obseiwant of 
 and entering s;yTnpathizingly into the facts of life, 
 held himself aloof from immediate contact with its 
 crowded stream. He was solitary from sensitivity, 
 not from bitterness or indifference. He made a 
 large fortune for his day with his songs and was a 
 popular idol. 
 
 [149] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 "Let us come now to the gravamen of my com- 
 plaint. You charge on the authority of mere gossip 
 from the late Will S. Hays, that Foster did not 
 compose his own music, but that he had obtained 
 a collection of unpublished manuscripts by an un- 
 named old 'German musician and thus dishonestly, 
 by pilfering and suppression' palmed off upon the 
 public themes and compositions which he could not 
 himself have originated. Something like this has 
 been said about every composer and writer, big and 
 little, whose personahty and habits did not impress 
 his immediate neighbors as implying the possession 
 of genius. The world usually expects direct in- 
 heritance and a theatric impressiveness of genius in 
 its next-door neighbor before it accepts the proof 
 of his works alone. For that reason Napoleon's 
 paternity in Corsica was ascribed to General 
 Maboeuf, and Henry Clay's in early Kentucky to 
 Patrick Henry. That legend of the 'poor, un- 
 known German musician' who composed in poverty 
 and secrecy the deathless songs that have obsessed 
 the world of music lovers, has been told of number- 
 less young composers on their way to fame, but 
 died out in the blaze of their later work. I have no 
 doubt they told it of Foster, as they did also of 
 [150] 
 
*'MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Hays. And Colonel Hays doubtless repeated it to 
 you as the intimate gossip about Foster. 
 
 "I have an article written by Colonel Hays and 
 published in and cut from The Courier-Journal 
 some twelve years after the composer's death, in 
 which he sketches the life and work of Stephen Col- 
 lins Foster. In that article he lays especial stress 
 upon the surprising originality of the Foster 
 themes and of their musical setting. He praises 
 their distinct American or rather native inspiration 
 and flavor, and describes from his own knowledge 
 of Foster how they were 'written from his heart.' 
 No mention or suggestion in it of any German or 
 other origin for any of those melodies that the world 
 then and now cherishes as American in costume, but 
 universal in appeal. While you may have heard 
 something in Schubert's compositions that sug- 
 gested something in Foster's most famous song, 
 still I venture to say it was only a suggestion, such 
 as often arises from the works of composers of the 
 same general type. Schubert and Foster were both 
 young sentimentalists and dreamers who must have 
 had similar dreams that found expression in their 
 similar progressions. 
 
 "The German musicians from whom Foster got 
 
 [151] 
 
 I 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 inspiration to work were Beethoven, Gliick, Weber, 
 Mozart. He was a student of all of them and of 
 the Italian school also, as some of his songs show. 
 Foster's first and only music teacher — except in the 
 'do-re-mi' exercises in his schoolboy life — testifies 
 that Foster's musical apprehension was so quick, 
 his intuitive grasp of its science so complete that 
 after a short time there was nothing he could teach 
 him of the theory of composition; that his pupil 
 went straight to the masters and got illustration 
 and discipline for himself. 
 
 "This was to be expected of a precocious genius 
 who had written a concerted piece for flutes at 
 thirteen, who was trying his wings on love songs at 
 sixteen, and before he was twenty-one had com- 
 posed several of the most famous of his American 
 melodies, among them Oh Susannah, Old Dog Tray 
 and Old Uncle Ned. As in other things he taught 
 himself music, but he studied it ardently at the 
 shrines of the masters. He became a master of the 
 art of song writing. If anybody cares to hunt up 
 the piano scores that Verdi made of songs from his 
 operas in the days of Foster he will find that the 
 great Italian composer's settings were quite as thin 
 as Foster's and exhibited not much greater art. It 
 [152] 
 
"MAESE HENRY" 
 
 was the fault of the times on the piano, not of the 
 composers. It was not till long afterward that the 
 color capacities of the piano were developed. As 
 Foster was no pianist, but rather a pure melodist, 
 he could not be expected to surpass his times in the 
 management of the piano, the only 'orchestra' he 
 had. It will not do to regard Foster as a crude 
 musician. His own scores reveal him as the most 
 artful of 'artless' composers. 
 
 "It is not even presumption to speak of him in 
 the same breath with Yerdi. The breadth and 
 poignancy of Foster's melodies entitle them to the 
 highest critical respect, as they have received world- 
 wide appreciation from great musicians and plain 
 music lovers. Wherever he has gone he has reached 
 the popular heart. Here in the United States he 
 has quickened the pulse beats of four generations. 
 But this master ci-eator of a country's only native 
 songs has invariably here at home been apologized 
 for as a sort of 'cornfield musician,' a mere banjo 
 stnimmer, a hanger-on at barrooms where minstrel 
 quartets rendered his songs and sent the hat round. 
 The reflection will react upon his country; it will 
 not detract from the real Foster w^hen the con- 
 structive critic appears to write his brief and un- 
 
 [153] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" f 
 
 fortunate life. I am not contending that he was a 
 genius of the highest rank, although he had the dis- 
 tinction that great genius nearly always achieves, of 
 creating a school that produced many imitators and 
 established a place apart for itself in the world's 
 estimation. In ballad writing he did for the United 
 States what Watteau did for painting in France. 
 As Watteau found a Flemish school in France and 
 left a French school stamped forever, so Foster 
 found the United States a home for imitations of 
 English, Irish, German and Italian songs, and left 
 a native ballad form and melodic strain forever im- 
 pressed upon it as pure American. 
 
 "He was like Watteau in more than that. 
 Watteau took the elegancies and fripperies of the 
 corrupt French court and fixed them in art im- 
 mortal, as if the moment had been arrested and held 
 in actual motion. Foster took the curious and 
 melancholy spectacle of African slavery at its 
 height, superimposed by the most elegant and 
 picturesque social manners this country has known, 
 at the moment the institution was at its zenith. He 
 saw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the con- 
 trasts, the emotional depths — that lay unplumbed 
 beneath it all. He fixed it there for all time, for 
 [154] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 all hearts and minds everywhere. His songs are not 
 only the pictorial canvas of that time, they are the 
 emotional history of the times. It was done by a 
 boy who was not prophet enough to foresee the end, 
 or philosopher enough to demonstrate the condi- 
 tions, but who was born with the intuition to feel it 
 all and set it forth deeply and truly from every as- 
 pect. 
 
 "While Foster wrote many comic songs there is 
 ever in them something of the melancholy under- 
 current that has been detected under the laces and 
 arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. 
 Foster's ballad form was extremely attenuated, but 
 the melodic content filled it so completely that it 
 seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated 
 and repeated to furnish full gratification to the ear. 
 His form when compared with the modern ballad's 
 amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside a 
 Michelangelo statue — but the figurine is as fine in 
 its scope as the statue is in the greater. 
 
 "I hope you will think Foster over and revise 
 him 'upward.' " 
 
 All of us need to be admonished to speak no evil 
 of the dead. I am trying in Looking Backward to 
 square the adjuration with the truth. Perhaps I 
 
 [155] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 should speak only of that which is known directly 
 to myself. It costs me nothing to accept this state- 
 ment of Mr. Allison and to incorporate it as an 
 essential part of the record as far as it relates to 
 the most famous and in his day the most beloved 
 of American song writers. 
 
 Once at a Grand Army encampment General 
 Sherman and I were seated together on the plat- 
 form when the band began to play Marching 
 Through Georgia, when the general said rather im- 
 patiently: "I wish I had a dollar for every time I 
 have had to listen to that blasted tune." 
 
 And I answered: "Well, there is another tune 
 about which I might say the same thing," meaning 
 My Old Kentucky Home. 
 
 Neither of us was quite sincere. Both were un- 
 consciously pleased to hear the familiar strains. At 
 an open-air fiesta in Barcelona some American 
 friends who made their home there put the band- 
 master up to breaking forth with the dear old mel- 
 ody as I came dow^n the aisle, and I was mightily 
 pleased. Again at a concert in Lucerne, the band, 
 playing a potpourri of Swiss songs, interpolated 
 Kentucky's national anthem and the group of us 
 stood up and sang the chorus, 
 [156] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 I do not wonder that men march joyously to 
 battle and death to drum and fife squeaking and 
 rattling The Girl I Left Behind Me. It may be a 
 long way to Tipperary, but it is longer to the end 
 of the tether that binds the heart of man to the 
 cradle songs of his nativity. With the cradle songs 
 of America the name of Stephen Collins Foster 
 "is immortal bound," and I would no more dis- 
 honor his memory than that of Robert Burns or 
 the author of The Star-Spangled Banner. 
 
 [157] 
 
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND 
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT — HIS PROBLEMATIC CHARAC- 
 TER — HE OFFERS ME AN APPOINTMENT — HIS 
 BONHOMIE AND CHIVALRY — PROUD OF HIS 
 
 REBEL KIN. 
 
 I 
 
 IT is not an easy nor yet a wholly congenial task 
 to write — truthfully, intelligently and frankly 
 to write — about Theodore Roosevelt. He belonged 
 to the category of problematical characters. A 
 born aristocrat, he at no time took the trouble to 
 pose as a special friend of the people ; a born leader, 
 he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the 
 soul of controversy. To one who knew him from 
 his childhood as I did, always loving him and rarely 
 agreeing with him, it was plain to see how his most 
 obvious faults commended him to the multitude and 
 made for a popularity that never quite deserted 
 him. 
 
 As poorly as I rate the reign of majorities I 
 [158] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 prefer it to the one-man power, either elective or 
 dynastic. The scheme of a third term in the presi- 
 dency for General Grant seemed to me a conspiracy 
 though with many of its leaders I was on terms of 
 affectionate intimacy. I fought and helped to kill 
 in 1896 the unborn scheme to give Mr. Cleveland a 
 third term. Inevitably as the movement for the re- 
 tention of Theodore Roosevelt beyond the time al- 
 ready fixed began to show itself in 1907, my pen 
 was primed against it and I wrote variously and 
 voluminously. 
 
 There appeared in one of the periodicals for 
 January, 1908, a sketch of mine which but for a 
 statement issued concurrently from the White 
 House would have attracted more attention than it 
 did. In this I related how at Washington just be- 
 fore the War of Sections I had a musical pal — the 
 niece of a Southern senator — who had studied in 
 Paris, been a protegee of the Empress Eugenie and 
 become an out-and-out imperialist. Louis Napoleon 
 was her ideal statesman. She not only hated the 
 North but accepted as gospel tinith all the mislead- 
 ing theories of the South: that cotton was king; 
 that slavery was a divine institution; that in any 
 
 [159] 
 
"MAKSE HENRY" 
 
 enterprise one Southern man was a match for six 
 Northern men. 
 
 On these points we had many contentions. Wlien 
 the break came she went South with her family. 
 The last I saw of her was crossing Long Bridge in 
 a lumbering family carriage waving a tiny Con- 
 federate flag. 
 
 Forty-five years intervened. I had heard of her 
 from time to tune wandering aimlessly over Eu- 
 rope, but had not met her until the preceding winter 
 in a famous Southern homestead. There she led 
 me into a rose garden, and seated beneath its clust- 
 ered greeneries she said with an air of triumph, 
 "Now you see, my dear old friend, that I was right 
 and you were wrong all the time." 
 
 Startled, and altogether forgetful, I asked in 
 what way. 
 
 "Why," she answered, "at last the South is com- 
 ing to its own." 
 
 Still out of rapport with her thought I said some- 
 thing about the obliteration of sectionalism and the 
 arrival of political freedom and general prosperity. 
 She would none of this. 
 
 "I mean," she abruptly interposed, "that the son 
 [160] 
 
IIEXKY WATTElfSOX ( I'HOTOGIiAl'II TAKEX IN FLORinA) 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 of Martha Bullock has come to his own and he will 
 rescue us from the mudsills of the North." 
 
 She spoke as if our former discussions had been 
 but yesterday. Then I gave her the right of way, 
 interjecting a queiy now and then to give emphasis 
 to her theme, while she unfolded the plan which 
 seemed to her so simple and easy; God's own will; 
 the national destiny, first a third term, and then 
 life tenure a la Louis Napoleone for Theodore 
 Roosevelt, the son of IVIartha Bullock, the nephew 
 of our great admiral, who was to redress all the 
 wrongs of thfe South and bring the Yankees to their 
 just deserts at last. ' 
 
 "If," I ended my sketch, "out of the mouths of 
 babes and sucklings, why not out of the brain of 
 this crazed old woman of the South?" 
 
 Early in the following April I came from my 
 winter home in Florida to the national capital, and 
 the next day was called by the President to the 
 White House. 
 
 "The first thing I want to ask," said he, "is 
 whether that old woman was a real person or a 
 figment of your imagination?" 
 
 "She was a figment of my imagination," I an- 
 swered, "but you put her out of business with a 
 
 [161] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 single punch. Why didn't you hold back your 
 statement a bit? If you had done so there was room 
 for lots of sport ahead." 
 
 He was in no mood for joking. "Henry Watter- 
 son," he said, "I want to talk to you seriously about 
 this third-term business. I will not deny that I 
 have thought of the thing — thought of it a great 
 deal." Then he proceeded to relate from his point 
 of view the state of the country and the immediate 
 situation. He spoke without reserve of his rela- 
 tions to the nearest associated public men, of what 
 were and what were not his personal and party 
 obligations, his attitude toward the political ques- 
 tions of the moment, and ended by saying, "What 
 do you make of all this?" 
 
 "Mr. President," I replied, "you know that I am 
 your friend, and as your friend I tell you that if 
 you go out of here the fourth of next March plac- 
 ing your friend Taft in your place you will make 
 a good third to Washington and Lincoln ; but if you 
 allow these wild fellows willy-nilly to induce you, 
 in spite of your declaration, to accept the nomina- 
 tion, substantially for a third term, all issues will 
 be merged in that issue, and in my judgment you 
 will not carry a state in the Union." 
 [162] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 As if much impressed and with a show of feeling 
 he said: "It may be so. At any rate I will not do 
 it. If the convention nominates me I will promptly 
 send my declination. If it nominates me and ad- 
 journs I will call it together again and it will have 
 to name somebody else." 
 
 As an illustration of the implacability which pur- 
 sued him I may mention that among many leading 
 Republicans to whom I related the incident most 
 of them discredited his sincerity, one of them — a 
 man of national importance — expressing the 
 opinion that all along he was artfully playing for 
 the nomination. This I do not believe. Perhaps he 
 was never quite fixed in his mind. The presidency 
 is a wondrous lure. Once out of the White House 
 — what else and what ? 
 
 n 
 
 Upon his return from one of his several foreign 
 journeys a party of some hundred or more of his 
 immediate personal friends gave him a private din- 
 ner at a famous uptown restaurant. I was placed 
 next him at table. It goes without saying that 
 we had all sorts of a good time — he Caesar and I 
 
 [163] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Brutus — the prevailing joke the entente between 
 the two. 
 
 "I think," he began his very happy speech, "that 
 I am the bravest man that ever Hved, for here I 
 have been sitting three hours by the side of Brutus 
 — have repeatedly seen him clutch his knife — with- 
 out the blink of an eye or the turn of a feature." 
 
 To which in response when my turn came I said : 
 "You gentlemen seem to be surprised that there 
 should be so perfect an understanding between our 
 guest and myself. But there is nothing new or 
 strange in that. It goes back, indeed, to his cradle 
 and has never been disturbed throughout the inter- 
 vening years of political discussion — sometimes 
 acrimonious. At the top of the acclivity of his 
 amazing career — in the very plenitude of his emi- 
 nence and power — let me tell you that he offered 
 me one of the most honorable and distinguished 
 appointments within his gift." 
 
 "Tell them about that, Marse Henry," said he. 
 
 "With your permission, Mr. President, I will," 
 I said, and continued: "The centenary of the 
 West Point JNIilitary Academy was approaching. 
 I was at dinner with my family at a hot ^1 in Wash- 
 ington when General Corbin joined us. 'Will you,' 
 [164] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 he abruptly interjected, 'accept the chairmanship 
 of the board of visitors to the academy this coming 
 June?' 
 
 " 'What do you want of me?' I asked. 
 
 " *It is the academy's centenary, which we pro- 
 pose to celebrate, and we want an orator.' 
 
 " 'General Corbin,' said I, 'you are coming at 
 me in a most enticing way. I know all about West 
 Point. Here at Washington I grew up with it. 
 I have been fighting legislative battles for the Army 
 all my life. That you Yankees should come to a 
 ragged old rebel like me for such a service is a 
 distinction indeed, and I feel inmiensely honored. 
 But which page of the court calendar made you a 
 plural? Whom do you mean by "we"?' 
 
 " 'Why,' he replied in serio-comic vein, 'the 
 President, the Secretary of War and Me, myself.' 
 
 "I promised him to think it over and give him 
 an answer. Next day I received a letter from the 
 President, making the formal official tender and 
 expressing the hope that I would not dechne it. 
 Yet how could I accept it with the work ahead of 
 me? It was certain that if I became a part of the 
 presidential junket and passed a week in the de- 
 lightful company promised me, I would be unfit 
 
 [165] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 for the loyal duty I owed my belongings and my 
 party, and so reluctantly — more reluctantly than 
 I can tell you — I declined, obliging them to send 
 for Gen. Horace Porter and bring him over from 
 across the ocean, where he was ably serving as 
 Ambassador to France. I need not add how well 
 that gifted and versatile gentleman discharged the 
 distinguished and pleasing duty." 
 
 Ill 
 
 The last time I met Theodore Roosevelt was but 
 a little while before his death. A small party of 
 us, Editor Moore, of Pittsburgh, and Mr. Riggs, 
 of the New York Central, at his invitation had a 
 jolly midday breakfast, extending far into the 
 afternoon. I never knew him happier or heartier. 
 His jocund spirit rarely failed him. He enjoyed 
 life and wasted no time on trivial worries, hit-or- 
 miss, the kejuote to his thought. 
 
 The Dutch blood of Holland and the cavalier 
 blood of England mingled in his veins in fair pro- 
 portion. He was especially proud of the uncle, his 
 mother's brother, the Southern admiral, head of the 
 Confederate naval organizatioi in Europe, who 
 had fitted out the rebel cruisers and sent them to 
 [166] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 sea. And well he might be, for a nobler American 
 never lived. At the close of the War of Sections 
 Admiral Bullock had in his possession some half 
 million dollars of Confederate money. Instead of 
 appropriating this to his own use, as without re- 
 mark or hindrance he might have done, he turned 
 it over to the Government of the United States, 
 and died a poor man. 
 
 The inconsistencies and quarrels in which Theo- 
 dore Roosevelt was now and again involved were 
 largely temperamental. His mind was of that or- 
 der which is prone to believe what it wants to be- 
 lieve. He did not take much time to think. He 
 leaped at conclusions, and from his premise his con- 
 clusion was usually sound. His tastes were do- 
 mestic, his pastime, when not at his books, field 
 sports. 
 
 He was not what might be called convivial, 
 though fond of good companj^ — very little wine 
 affecting him — so that a certain self-control became 
 second nature to him. 
 
 To be sure, he had no conscientious or doctrinal 
 scruples about a third term. He had found the 
 White House a congenial abode, had accepted the 
 literal theory that his election in 1908 would not 
 
 [167] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 imply a third but a second term, and he wanted to 
 remain. In point of fact I have an impression that, 
 barring Jackson and Polk, most of those who have 
 got there were loath to give it up. We know that 
 Grant was, and I am sure that Cleveland was. 
 We owe a great debt to Washington, because if a 
 third why not a fourth term ? And then life tenure 
 after the manner of the Caesars and Cromwells of 
 history, and especially the Latin- Americans — Boli- 
 var, Rosas and Diaz? 
 
 Away back in 1873, after a dinner, Mr. Blaine 
 took me into his den and told me that it was no 
 longer a surmise but a fact that the group about 
 General Grant, who had just been reelected by an 
 overwhelming majority, was maneuvering for a 
 third term. To me this was startling, incredible. 
 Returning to my hotel I saw a light still burning 
 in the room of Senator IMorton, of Indiana, and 
 rapping at the door I was bidden to enter. With- 
 out mentioning how it had reached me, I put the 
 proposition to him. "Certainly," he said, "it is 
 true." 
 
 The next day, in a letter to the Courier- Journal, 
 I reduced what I had heard to writing. Reading 
 this over it seemed so sensational that I added a 
 [168] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 closing paragi'aph, meant to qualify what I had 
 written and to imply that I had not gone quite daft. 
 
 "These things," I wrote, "may sound queer to the 
 ear of the country. They may have visited me in 
 my dreams ; they may, indeed, have come to me be- 
 twixt the sherry and the champagne, but neverthe- 
 less I do aver that they are buzzing about here in 
 the minds of many very serious and not unimpor- 
 tant persons." 
 
 Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated 
 and ridiculed as I, never a simple news gatherer so 
 discredited. Democratic and Republican newspa- 
 pers vied with one another which could say crossest 
 things and laugh loudest. One sentence especially 
 caught the newspaper risibilities of the time, and it 
 was many a year before the phrase "between the 
 sherry and the champagne" ceased to pursue me. 
 That any patriotic American, twice elevated to the 
 presidency, could want a third term, could have the 
 hardihood to seek one was inconceivable. My let- 
 ter was an insult to General Grant and proof of 
 my own lack of intelligence and restraint. They 
 lammed me, laughed at me, good and strong. On 
 each successive occasion of recurrence I have en- 
 countered the same criticism. 
 
 [169 
 
CHAPTER THE TWEXTY-THIRD 
 
 THE ACTOR AND THE JOURNALIST — THE NEWSPAPER 
 AND THE STAGE JOSEPH JEFFERSON HIS PER- 
 SONAL AND ARTISTIC CAREER MODEST CHAR- 
 ACTER AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF 
 
 THE journalist and the player have some 
 things in common. Each turns night into 
 day. I have known rather intimately all the emi- 
 nent Enghsh-speaking actors of my time from 
 Henry Irving and Charles W3^ndham to Edwin 
 Booth and Joseph Jefferson, from Charlotte Cush- 
 man to Helena JNIodjeska. No people are quite so 
 interesting as stage people. 
 
 During nearly fifty years my life and the life 
 of Joseph Jeff'erson ran close upon parallel lines. 
 He was eleven years my senior; but after the des- 
 ultory acquaintance of a man and a boy we came 
 together under circumstances which obliterated the 
 [170] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 disparity of age and established between us a last- 
 ing bond of affection. His wife, Margaret, had 
 died, and he was passing through Washington with 
 the little brood of children she had left him. 
 
 It made the saddest spectacle I had ever seen. 
 As I recall it after more than sixty years, the scene 
 of silent grief, of unutterable helplessness, has still 
 a haunting power over me, the oldest lad not eight 
 years of age, the youngest a girl baby in arms, the 
 young father aghast before the sudden tragedy 
 which had come upon him. There must have been 
 something in my sympathy which drew him toward 
 me, for on his return a few months later he sought 
 me out and we fell into the easy intercourse of es- 
 tablished relations. 
 
 I was recovering from an illness, and every day 
 he would come and read by my bedside. I had not 
 then lost the action of one of my hands, putting an 
 end to a course of musical study I had hoped to 
 develop into a career. He was infinitely fond of 
 music and sufficiently familiar with the old masters 
 to understand and enjoy them. He was an artist 
 through and through, possessing a sweet nor yet an 
 uncultivated voice — a blend between a low tenor 
 and a high baritone — I was almost about to write 
 
 [171] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 a "contralto," it was so soft and liquid. Its tones 
 in speech retained to the last their charm. Who 
 that heard them shall ever forget them? 
 
 Early in 1861 my friend Jefferson came to me 
 and said: "There is going to be a war of the sec- 
 tions. I am not a warrior. I am neither a North- 
 erner nor a Southerner. I cannot bring myself to 
 engage in bloodshed, or to take sides. I have near 
 and dear ones North and South. I am going away 
 and I shall stay away until the storm blows over. 
 It may seem to you unpatriotic, and it is, I know, 
 unlieroic. I am not a hero; I am, I hope, an artist. 
 My world is the world of art, and I must be true 
 to that; it is my patriotism, my religion. I can do 
 no manner of good here, and I am going away." 
 
 II 
 
 At that moment statesmen were hopefully esti- 
 mating the chances of a peaceful adjustment and 
 solution of the sectional controversy. With the 
 prophet instinct of the artist he Imew better. 
 Though at no time taking an active interest in poli- 
 tics or giving expression to party bias of any kind, 
 his personal associations led him into a familiar 
 knowledge of the trend of poHtical opinion and the 
 [172] 
 
"MARSE HEXRY" 
 
 portent of public affairs, and I can truly say that 
 during the fifty years that passed thereafter I never 
 discussed any topic of current interest or moment 
 with him that he did not throw upon it the side 
 lights of a luminous understanding, and at the same 
 time an impartial and intelligent judgment. 
 
 His mind was both reflective and radiating. His 
 humor though perennial was subdued ; his wit keen 
 and spontaneous, never acrid or wounding. His 
 speech abounded with unconscious epigram. He 
 had his beliefs and stood by them ; but he was never 
 aggressive. Cleaner speech never fell from the lips 
 of man. I never heard him use a profanity. We 
 once agreed between ourselves to draw a line across 
 the salacious stories so much in vogue during our 
 day; the wit must exceed the dirt; where the dirt 
 exceeded the wit we would none of it. 
 
 He was a singularly self-respecting man; genu- 
 inely a modest man. The actor is supposed to be 
 so familiar with the pubic as to be proof against 
 surprises. Before his audience he must be master 
 of himself, holding the situation and his art by the 
 firmest grip. He must simulate, not experience 
 emotion, the effect referable to the seeming, never 
 to the actuality involving the reahzation. 
 
 [173] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Mr. Jefferson held to this doctrine and applied 
 it rigorously. On a certain occasion he was playing 
 Caleb Plurmner. In the scene between the old toy- 
 maker and his blind daughter, when the father dis- 
 covers the dreadful result of his dissimulation — an 
 awkward hitch ; and, the climax quite thwarted, the 
 curtain came down. I w^as standing at the wings. 
 
 "Did you see that?" he said as he brushed by me, 
 going to his dressing-room. 
 
 "No," said I, following him. "What was it?" 
 
 He turned, his eyes still wet and his voice choked. 
 "I broke down," said he; "completely broke down. 
 I turned away from the audience to recover my- 
 self. But I failed and had the curtain rung." 
 
 The scene had been spoiled because the actor had 
 been overcome by a sudden flood of real feeling, 
 whereas he was to render by his art the feeling of a 
 fictitious character and so to conmiunicate this to 
 his audience. Caleb's cue was tears, but not Jef- 
 ferson's. 
 
 On another occasion I saw his self-possession 
 tried in a different way. We were dining with a 
 gentleman who had overpartaken of his own hos- 
 pitality. Mr. Murat Halstead was of the company. 
 There was also a German of distinction, whose 
 [174] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 knowledge of English was limited. The Rip Van 
 Winkle craze was at its height. After sufficiently 
 impressing the German with the rare opportunity 
 he was having in meeting a man so famous as Mr. 
 Jefferson, our host, encouraged by ]Mr. Halstead, 
 and I am afraid not discouraged by me, began to 
 urge Mr. Jefferson to give us, as he said, "a touch 
 of his mettle," and failing to draw the great come- 
 dian out he undertook himself to give a few de- 
 scriptive passages from the drama which was carry- 
 ing the town by storm. Poor Jefferson! He sat 
 like an awkward boy, helpless and blushing, the 
 German wholly unconscious of the fun or even com- 
 prehending just what was happening — Halstead 
 and I maliciously, mercilessly enjoying it. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I never heard ]Mr. Jefferson make a recitation 
 or, except in the singing of a song before his voice 
 began to break, make himself a part of any private 
 entertainment other than that of a spectator and 
 guest. 
 
 He shrank from personal displays of every sort. 
 Even in his younger days he rarely "gagged," or 
 interpolated, upon the stage. Yet he did not lack 
 
 [173] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 for a ready wit. One time during the final act of 
 Rip Van Winkle, a young countryman in the gal- 
 lery was so carried away that he quite lost his bear- 
 ings and seemed to be about to climb over the outer 
 railing. The audience, spellbound by the actor, 
 nevertheless saw the rustic, and its attention was 
 being divided between the two when Jefferson 
 reached that point in the action of the piece where 
 Rip is amazed by the docility of his wife under the 
 ill usage of her second husband. He took in the 
 situation at a glance. 
 
 Casting his eye directly upon the youth in the 
 gallery, he uttered the lines as if addressing them 
 directly to him, "Well, I would never have believed 
 it if I had not seen it." 
 
 The poor fellow, startled, drew back from his 
 perilous position, and the audience broke into a 
 storm of applause. 
 
 Joseph Jefferson was a Swedenborgian in his re- 
 ligious belief. At one time too extreme a behef in 
 spiritualism threatened to cloud his sound, whole- 
 some understanding. As he grew older and hap- 
 pier and passed out from the shadow of his early 
 tragedy he fell away from the more sinister influ- 
 ence the supernatural had attained over his imagi- 
 [176] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 nation. One time in Washington I had him to 
 breakfast to meet the Chief Justice and Mr. Jus- 
 tice JNIatthews and Mr. CarHsle, the newly-elected 
 Speaker of the House. It was a rainy Sunday, and 
 it was in my mind to warn him that our company 
 was made up of hard-headed lawyers not apt to be 
 impressed by fairy tales and ghost stories, and to 
 suggest that he cut the spirituahsm in case the con- 
 versation fell, as was likely, into the speculative. 
 I forgot, or something hindered, and, sure enough, 
 the question of second sight and mind reading came 
 up, and I said to myself: "Lord, now we'll have it." 
 But it was my kinsman, Stanley Matthews, who 
 led off mth a clairvoyant experience in his law prac- 
 tice. I began to be reassured. Mr. Carlisle fol- 
 lowed with a most mathematical account of some 
 hobgoblins he had encountered in his law practice. 
 Finally the Chief Justice, Mr. Waite, related a 
 series of incidents so fantastic and incredible, yet 
 detailed with the precision and lucidity of a master 
 of plain statement, as fairly to stagger the most 
 beheving ghostseer. Then I said to myself again: 
 "Let her go, Joe, no matter what you tell now you 
 will fall below the standard set by these professional 
 perfecters of pure reason, and are safe to do your 
 
 [177] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 best, or your worst." I think he held his own, how- 
 ever. 
 
 IV 
 
 Joseph Jefferson came to his artistic spurs slowly 
 but surely, being nearly thirty years of age when 
 he got his chance, and therefore wholly equal to it 
 and prepared for it. 
 
 William E. Burton stood and had stood for 
 twenty-five years the recognized, the reigning king 
 of comedy in America. He was a master of his 
 craft as well as a leader in society and letters. To 
 look at him when he came upon the stage was to 
 laugh; yet he commanded tears almost as readily 
 as laughter. In New York City particularly he 
 ruled the roost, and could and did do that which 
 had cost another his place. He began to take too 
 many liberties with the public favor and, truth to 
 say, was beginning to be both coarse and careless. 
 People were growing restive under ministrations 
 which were at times little less than impositions upon 
 their forbearance. They wanted something if pos- 
 sible as strong, but more refined, and in the per- 
 son of the leading comedy man of Laura Keene's 
 company, a young actor by the name of Jefferson, 
 they got it. 
 [178] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Both Mr. Sothern and Mr. Jefferson have told 
 the story of Tom Taylor's extravaganza, "Our 
 American Cousin," in which the one as Dundreary, 
 the other as Asa Trenchard, rose to almost instant 
 popularity and fame. I shall not repeat it except 
 to say that Jefferson's Asa Trenchard was unlike 
 any other the English or American stage has 
 known. He played the raw Yankee boy, not in 
 low comedy at all, but made him innocent and igno- 
 rant as a well-born Green Mountain lad might be, 
 never a bumpkin; and in the scene when Asa tells 
 his sweetheart the bear story and whilst pretending 
 to light his cigar burns the will, he left not a dry 
 eye in the house. 
 
 New York had never witnessed, never divined 
 anything in pathos and humor so exquisite. Bur- 
 ton and his friends struggled for a season, but Jef- 
 ferson completely knocked them out. Even had 
 Burton lived, and had there been no diverting war 
 of sections to drown all else, Jefferson would have 
 come to his growth and taken his place as the first 
 serio-comic actor of his time. 
 
 Rip Van Winkle was an evolution. Jefferson's 
 half-brother, Charles Burke, had put together a 
 sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played in 
 
 [179] 
 
"MARSE HENRY'* 
 
 it, was playing in it when he died. After his 
 Trenchard, Jefferson turned himself loose in all 
 sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a famous 
 burlesque, which he did to a turn, imitating the 
 mock heroics of the feminine horse marines, so pop- 
 ular in the equestrian drama of the period, Adah 
 Isaacs IMenken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their 
 head. Then he produced a version of Nicholas 
 Nickleby, in which his Newman Noggs took a more 
 ambitious flight. These, however, were but the 
 avant-couriers of the immortal Rip. 
 
 Charles Burke's piece held close to the lines of 
 Irving's legend. When the vagabond returns 
 from the mountains after the twenty years' sleep 
 Gretchen is dead. The apex is reached when the 
 old man, sitting dazed at a table in front of the 
 tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks after 
 Derrick Van Beekman and Nick Vedder and other 
 of his cronies. At last, half twinkle of humor and 
 half glimmer of dread, he gets himself to the point 
 of asking after Dame Van Winkle, and is told that 
 she has been dead these ten years. Then like a 
 flash came that wonderful Jeffersonian change of 
 facial expression, and as the white head drops upon 
 the arms stretched before him on the table he says: 
 [180] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 "Well, she led me a hard life, a hard life, but she 
 was the wife of my bosom, she was meine frau!" 
 
 I did not see the revised, or rather the newly- 
 created and written, Rip Van Winkle until JNIr. 
 Jefferson brought it to America and was playing 
 it at Niblo's Garden in Xew York. Between him- 
 self and Dion Boucicault a drama carrying all the 
 possibilities, all the lights and shadows of his genius 
 had been constructed. In the first act he sang a 
 drinking song to a wing accompaniment delight- 
 fully, adding much to the tone and color of the sit- 
 uation. The exact reversal of the Lear suggestion 
 in the last act was an inspiration, his own and not 
 Boucicault's. The weird scene in the mountains 
 fell in admirably with a certain weird note in the 
 Jefferson genius, and supplied the needed element 
 of variety. 
 
 I always thought it a good acting play under 
 any circumstances, but, in his hands, matchless. He 
 thought himself that the piece, as a piece, and re- 
 gardless of his own acting, deserved better of the 
 critics than they were always wilhng to give it. As- 
 suredly, no drama that ever was written, as he 
 played it, ever took such a hold upon the pubHc. 
 He rendered it to three generations, and to a rising, 
 
 [181] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 not a falling, popularity, drawing to the very last 
 undiminished audiences. 
 
 Because of this unexampled run he was some- 
 times described by unthinking people as a one-part 
 actor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. 
 He possessed uncommon versatility. That after 
 twenty years of the new Rip Van Winkle, when he 
 was past fifty years of age, he could come back to 
 such parts as Caleb Plummer and Acres is proof 
 of this. He need not have done so at all. Carry- 
 ing a pension roll of dependents aggregating fifteen 
 or twenty thousand a year for more than a quarter 
 of a century. Rip would still have sufficed his re- 
 quirements. It was his love for his art that took 
 him to The Cricket and The Rivals, and at no in- 
 considerable cost to himself. 
 
 I have heard ill-natured persons, some of them 
 envious actors, say that he did nothing for the stage. 
 
 He certainly did not make many contributions 
 to its upholstery. He was in no position to emu- 
 late Sir Henry Irving in forcing and directing the 
 public taste. But he did in America quite as much 
 as Sir Charles Wyndham and Sir Henry Irving in 
 England to elevate the personality, the social and 
 intellectual standing of the actor and the stage, 
 [182] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 effecting in a lifetime a revolution in the attitude 
 of the people and the clergy of both countries to 
 the theater and all things in it. This was surely 
 enough for one man in any craft or country. 
 
 He was always a good stage speaker. Late in 
 life he began to speak elsewhere, and finally to 
 lecture. His success pleased him immensely. The 
 night of the Sunday afternoon charity for the 
 Newsboys' Home in Louisville, when the promise 
 of a talk from him had filled the house to over- 
 flowing, he was like a boy who had come off from a 
 college occasion with all the honors. Indeed, the 
 degrees of Harvard and Yale, which had reached 
 him both unexpectedly and unsolicited, gave him a 
 pleasure quite apart from the vanity they might 
 have gratified in another; he regarded them, and 
 justly, as the recognition at once of his profession 
 and of his personal character. 
 
 I never knew a man whose moral sensibilities 
 were more acute. He loved the respectable. He 
 detested the unclean. He was just as attractive off 
 the stage as upon it, because he was as unaffected 
 and real in his personality as he was sincere and 
 conscientious in his public representations, his 
 lovely nature showing through his art in spite of 
 
 [183] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 him. His purpose was to fill the scene and forget 
 
 himself. 
 
 V 
 
 The English newspapers accompanied the tid- 
 ings of Mr. Jefferson's death with rather sparing 
 estimates of his eminence and his genius, though 
 his success in London, where he was well known, 
 had been unequivocal. Indeed, himself, alone with 
 Edwin Booth and Mary Anderson, may be said to 
 complete the list of those Americans who have at- 
 tained any real recognition in the British metrop- 
 olis. The Times spoke of him as "an able if not a 
 great actor." If Joseph Jefferson was not a great 
 actor I should like some competent person to tell 
 me what actor of our time could be so described. 
 
 Two or three of the journals of Paris referred 
 to him as "the American Coquehn." It had been 
 apter to describe Coquelin as the French Jefferson. 
 I never saw Frederic Lemaitre. But, him apart, 
 I have seen all the eccentric comedians, the char- 
 acter actors of the last fifty years, and, in spell 
 power, in precision and deftness of touch, in acute, 
 penetrating, all-embracing and all-embodying in- 
 telligence and grasp, I should place Joseph Jeffer- 
 son easily at their head. 
 [184] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Shakespeare was his Bible. The stage had been 
 his cradle. He continued all his days a student. 
 In him met the meditative and the observing facul- 
 ties. In his love of fishing, his love of painting, 
 his love of music we see the brooding, contemplative 
 spirit joined to the alert in mental force and fore- 
 sight when he addressed himself to the activities 
 and the objectives of the theater. He was a thor- 
 ough stage manager, skillful, patient and upright. 
 His company was his family. He was not gentler 
 with the children and grandchildren he ultimately 
 drew about him than he had been with the young 
 men and young women who had preceded them in 
 his employment and instruction. 
 
 He was nowise ashamed of his calling. On the 
 contrary, he was proud of it. His mother had 
 lived and died an actress. He preferred that his 
 progeny should follow in the footsteps of their 
 forebears even as he had done. It is beside the 
 purpose to inquire, as was often done, what might 
 have happened had he undertaken the highest 
 flights of tragedy; one might as well discuss the 
 relation of a Dickens to a Shakespeare. Sir Henry 
 Irving and Sir Charles Wyndham in England, M. 
 Coquelin in France, his contemporaries — each had 
 
 [185] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 his metier. They were perfect in their art and un- 
 ahke in their art. No comparison between them 
 can be justly drawn. I was witness to the rise of 
 all three of them, and have followed them in their 
 greatest parts throughout their most brilliant and 
 eminent and successful careers, and can say of each 
 as of Mr. Jefferson: 
 
 3Iore than King can no man be — Whether he 
 rule in Cyprus or in Dreams. 
 
 There shall be Kings of Thule after kings are gone. 
 The actor dies and leaves no copy; his deeds are 
 writ in water, only his name survives upon tradi- 
 tion's tongue, and yet, from Betterton and Garrick 
 to Irving, from Macklin and Quin to Wyndham 
 and Jefferson, how fewl 
 
 [186] 
 
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH 
 
 THE WRITING OF MEMOIRS — SOME CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 OF CARL SCHURZ SAM BOWLES — HORACE 
 
 WHITE AND THE MUGWUMPS 
 
 TALLEYRAND was so impressed by the 
 world-compelling character of the memoirs 
 he had prepared for posterity that he fixed an in- 
 terdict of more than fifty years upon the date set 
 for their publication, and when at last the bulky 
 tomes made their aj^pearance, they excited no espe- 
 cial interest — certainly created no sensation — and 
 lie for the most part dusty upon the shelves of the 
 libraries that contain them. For a different reason, 
 Henry Ward Beecher put a time limit upon the 
 volume, or volumes, which will tell us, among other 
 things, all about one of the greatest scandals of 
 modern times; and yet how few people now recall 
 it or care anything about the dramatis personam and 
 
 [187] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 the actual facts! Metternich, next after Napoleon 
 and Talleyrand, was an important figure in a stir- 
 ring epoch. He, too, indicted an autobiography, 
 which is equally neglected among the books that 
 are sometimes quoted and extolled, but rarely read. 
 Rousseau, the half insane, and Barras, the wholly 
 vicious, have twenty readers where Talleyrand and 
 Metternich have one. 
 
 From this point of view, the writing of memoirs, 
 excepting those of the trivial French School or gos- 
 siping letters and diaries of the Pepys-Walpole 
 variety, would seem an unprofitable task for a great 
 man's undertaking. Boswell certainly did for 
 Johnson what the thunderous old doctor could not 
 have done for himself. Nevertheless, from the days 
 of Csesar to the days of Sherman and Lee, the cap- 
 tains of mihtar}^ and senatorial and literary indus- 
 try have regaled themselves, if they have not edified 
 the pubHc, by the narration of their own stories; 
 and, I dare say, to the end of time, interest in one's 
 self, and the mortal desire to linger yet a little 
 longer on the scene — now and again, as in the case 
 of General Grant, the assurance of honorable remu- 
 neration making needful provision for others — ^will 
 [188] 
 
,r" 
 
 "MARSE HENRY 
 
 move those who have cut some figure in the world 
 to follow the wandering Celt in the wistful hope — 
 
 Around my fire an evening group to draw. 
 And tell of all I felt and all I saw. 
 
 Something like this occurs to me upon a reperusal 
 of the unfinished memoirs of my old and deiar 
 friend, Carl Schurz. Assuredly few men had bet- 
 ter warrant for writing about themselves or a live- 
 lier tale to tell than the famous .German- American, 
 who died leaving that tale unfinished. No man in 
 life was more misunderstood and maligned. There 
 was nothing either erratic or conceited about 
 Schurz, nor was he more pragmatic than is com- 
 mon to the possessor of positive opinions along with 
 the power to make their expression effectual. 
 
 The actual facts of his public life do not any- 
 where show that his politics shifted with his own 
 interests. On the contrary, he was singularly re- 
 gardless of his interests where his convictions in- 
 terposed. Though an alien, and always an ahen, 
 he possessed none of the shifty traits of the soldier 
 of fortune. Never in his career did he crook the 
 pregnant hinges of the knee before any worldly 
 
 [189] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 throne of grace or flatter any mob that place might 
 follow fawning. His great talents had only to lend 
 themselves to party uses to get their full requital. 
 He refused them equally to Grant in the White 
 House and the multitude in ^Missouri, going his own 
 gait, which could be called erratic only by the con- 
 ventional, to whom regularity is everything and in- 
 dividuality nothing. 
 
 Schurz was first of all and above all an orator. 
 His achievements on the platform and in the Sen- 
 ate were undeniable. He was unsurpassed in de- 
 bate. He had no need to exploit himself. The 
 single chapter in his life on which light was desir- 
 able was the military episode. The cruel and false 
 saying, "I fight mit Sigel und runs mit Schurz," 
 obviously the offspring of malignity, did mislead 
 many people, reenforced by the knowledge that 
 Schurz was not an educated soldier. How thor- 
 oughly he disposes of this calumny his memoirs 
 attest. Fuller, more convincing vindication could 
 not be asked of any man; albeit by those familiar 
 with the man himself it could not be doubted that 
 he had both courage and aptitude for military em- 
 ployment. 
 
 [190] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 II 
 
 A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by 
 circumstance into the vortex of affairs. Except 
 for the stirring events of 1848, he might have hved 
 and died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If 
 he had pm-sued his musical studies at Leipsic he 
 must have become a master of the piano keyboard. 
 As it was, he played Schumann and Chopin credit- 
 ahly. The rescue of Kinkel, the flight from the 
 fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing in Paris and 
 London awakened within him the spirit of action 
 rather than of adventure. 
 
 There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; 
 too reflective and too accomplished. His early mar- 
 riage attests a domestic trend, from which he never 
 departed; though an idealist in his public aspira- 
 tions and aims he was a sentimentalist in his home 
 life and affections. Genial in temperament and 
 disposition, his personal habit was moderation 
 itself. 
 
 He was a German. Never did a man live so long 
 in a foreign country and take on so fcAV of its 
 thoughts and ways. He threw himself into the 
 anti-slavery movement upon the crest of the wave ; 
 
 [191] 
 
*'MAIISE HENRY" 
 
 the flowing sea carried him quickly from one dis- 
 tinction to another; the ehb tide, which found him 
 in the Senate of the United States, revealed to his 
 startled senses the creeping, crawling things be- 
 neath the surface; partyism rampant, tyrannous 
 and corrupt; a self-willed soldier in the White 
 House; a Blaine, a Butler and a Garfield leading 
 the Representatives, a Cameron and a Conkhng 
 leading the Senate; single-minded disinterestedness, 
 pure unadulterated conviction, nowhere. 
 
 Jobs and jobbing flourished on every side. An 
 impossible scheme of reconstruction was trailing its 
 slow, putrescent length along. The revenue service 
 was thick with thieves, the committees of Congress 
 were packed with mercenaries. Money-making in 
 high places had become the order of the day. Was 
 it for this that oceans of patriotism, of treasure and 
 of blood had been poured out? Was it for this that 
 he had fought with tongue and pen and sword? 
 
 There was Sumner — the great Sumner — who had 
 quarreled with Grant and Fish, to keep him com- 
 pany and urge him on. There was the Tribune, 
 the puissant Tribune — two of them, one in New 
 York and the other in Chicago — to give him counte- 
 nance. There was need of liberalizing and loosen- 
 [192] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ing things in INIissouri, for which he sat in the Sen- 
 ate — they could not go on forever half the best 
 elements in the State disfranchised. 
 
 Thus the Liberal JNIovement of 1872. 
 
 Schurz went to Cincinnati elate with hope. He 
 was an idealist — not quite yet a philosopher. He 
 had his friends about him. Sam Bowles — the first 
 newspaper pohtician of his day, with none of the 
 handicaps carried by Raymond and Forney — a man 
 keen of insight and foresight, fertile of resources, 
 and not afraid — stood foremost among them. Next 
 came Horace White. Doric in his simplicity like a 
 marble shaft, and to the outer eye as cold as marble, 
 but below a man of feeling, conviction and tenacity, 
 a working journalist and a doughty doctrinaire. A 
 little group of such men formed itself about Schurz 
 — then only forty-three years old — to what end? 
 Why, Greeley, Horace Greeley, the bellwether of 
 abolitionism, the king bee of protectionism, the man 
 of fads and isms and the famous "old w^hite hat." 
 
 To some of us it was laughable. To Schurz it 
 was tragical. A bridge had to be constructed for 
 him to pass — for retrace his steps he could not — 
 and, as it were, blindfolded, he had to be backed 
 upon this hke a mule aboard a train of cars. I 
 
 [193] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 sometimes wonder what might have happened if 
 Schurz had then and there resigned his seat in the 
 Senate, got his brood together and returned to Ger- 
 many. I dare say he would have been welcomed 
 by Bismarck. 
 
 Certainly there was no lodgment for him thence- 
 forward in American politics. The exigencies of 
 1876-77 made him a provisional place in the Hayes 
 Administration ; but, precisely as the Democrats of 
 Missouri could put such a man to no use, the Re- 
 publicans at large could find no use for him. He 
 seemed a bull in a china shop to the pohtical organ- 
 ization he honored with a preference wholly intel- 
 lectual, and having no stomach for either extreme, 
 he became a Mugwump. 
 
 Ill 
 
 He was a German. He was an artist. By na- 
 ture a doctrinaire, he had become a philosopher. 
 He could never wholly adjust himself to his en- 
 vironment. He lectured Lincoln, and Lincoln, per- 
 ceiving his earnest truthfulness and genuine quali- 
 ties, forgave him his impertinence, nor ceased to 
 regard him with the enduring affection one might 
 have for an ardent, aspiring and lovable boy. He 
 [194] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 was repellant to Grant, who could not and perHapS 
 did not desire to understand him. ... To him the 
 Southerners were always the red-faced, swash- 
 buckling slave-drivers he had fancied and pictured 
 them in the days of his abolition oratory. More 
 and more he lived in a rut of his own fancies, wise 
 in books and counsels, gentle in his relations with 
 the few who enjoyed his confidence; to the last a 
 most captivating personality. 
 
 Though fastidious, Schurz was not intolerant. 
 Yet he was hard to convince — tenacious of his opin- 
 ions — courteous but insistent in debate. He was a 
 German; a German Herr Doktor of Music, of 
 Letters and of Common Law. During an intimacy 
 of more than thirty years we scarcely ever wholly 
 agreed about any public matter; differing about 
 even the civil service and the tariff. But I admired 
 him hugely and loved him heartily. 
 
 I had once a rather amusing encounter with him. 
 There was a dinner at Delmonico's, from whose 
 program of post-prandial oratory I had purposely 
 caused my own name to be omitted. Indeed, I had 
 had with a lady a wager I very much wished to win 
 that I would not speak. General Grant and I went 
 in together, and during the repast he said that the 
 
 [195] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 only five human beings in the world whom he de- 
 tested were actually here at table. 
 
 Of course, Schurz was one of these. He was the 
 last on the list of speakers and, curiously enough — 
 the occasion being the consideration of certain ways 
 and means for the development of the South — and 
 many leading Southerners present — he composed 
 his speech out of an editorial tour de force he was 
 making in the Evening Post on The Homicidal 
 Side of Southern Life. Before he had proceeded 
 half through General Grant, who knew of my 
 wager, said, "You'll lose your bet," and, it being 
 one o'clock in the morning, I thought so too, and 
 did not care whether I won or lost it. When he 
 finished, the call on me was spontaneous and uni- 
 versal. "Now give it to him good," said General 
 Grant. 
 
 And I did; I declared — the reporters were long 
 since gone — that there had not been a man killed 
 amiss in Kentucky since the war; that where one 
 had been killed tv/o should have been; and, amid 
 roars of laughter which gave me time to frame 
 some fresh absurdity, I delivered a prose peean to 
 murder. 
 
 Nobody seemed more pleased than Schurz him- 
 £196] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 self, and as we came away — General Grant having 
 disappeared — he put his arm about me like a school- 
 boy and said : "Well, well, I had no idea you were 
 so bloody-minded." 
 
 [197] 
 
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH 
 
 EVERY TRADE HAS ITS TRICKS — I PLAY ONE ON 
 
 WILLIAM MC KINLEY FAR AWAY PARTY 
 
 POLITICS AND POLITICAL ISSUES 
 
 THERE are tricks in every trade. The tariff 
 being the paramount issue of the day, I re- 
 ceived a tempting money offer from Philadelphia to 
 present my side of the question, but when the time 
 fixed was about to arrive I found myself billed for 
 a debate with no less an adversary than William 
 McKinley, protectionist leader in the Lower House 
 of Congress. We were the best of friends and I 
 much objected to a joint meeting. The parties-, 
 however, would take no denial, and it was arranged 
 that we should be given alternate dates. Then it 
 appeared that the designated thesis read: "WTiich 
 political party offers for the workingman the best 
 solution of the tariff problem?" 
 [198] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Here was a poser. It required special prepara- 
 tion, for which I had not the leisure. I wanted the 
 stipend, but was not willing — scarcely able — to pay 
 so much for it. I was about to throw the engage- 
 ment over when a lucky thought struck me. I had 
 a cast-off lecture entitled Money and Morals. It 
 had been rather popular. Why might I not put 
 a head and tail to this — a foreword and a few 
 words in conclusion — and make it meet the purpose 
 and serve the occasion? 
 
 When the evening arrived there was a great audi- 
 ence. Half of the people had come to applaud, the 
 other half to antagonize. I was received, however, 
 with what seemed a united acclaim. When the 
 cheering had ceased, with the blandest air I began: 
 
 "In that chapter of the history of Ireland which 
 was reserved for the consideration of snakes, the 
 historian, true to the solecism as well as the brevity 
 of Irish wit, informs us that 'there are no snakes in 
 Ireland.' 
 
 "I am afraid that on the present occasion I shall 
 have to emulate this flight of the Celtic imagination. 
 I find myself billed to speak from a Democratic 
 standpoint as to which party offers the best practi- 
 cal means for the benefit of the workingmen of the 
 
 [199] 
 
"MARSE HENRY'' 
 
 country. If I am to discharge with fidelity the duty 
 thus assigned me, I must begin by repudiating the 
 text in toto, because the Democratic Party recog- 
 nizes no political agency for one class which is not 
 equally open to all classes. The bulwark and 
 belltower of its faith, the source and resource of its 
 strength are laid in the declaration, 'Freedom for 
 all, special privileges to none,' which applied to 
 practical affairs would deny to self-styled working- 
 men, organized into a cooperative society, any 
 political means not enjoyed by every other organ- 
 ized cooperative society, and by each and every 
 citizen, individually, to himself and his heirs and as- 
 signs, forever. 
 
 "But in a country like ours, what right has any 
 body of men to get together and, labelling them- 
 selves workingmen, to talk about political means 
 and practical ends exclusive to themselves? Who 
 among us has the single right to claim for himself, 
 and the likes of him, the divine title of a working- 
 man? We are all workingmen, the earnest plod- 
 ding scholar in his library, surrounded by the 
 luxury and comfort which his learning and his 
 labor have earned for him, no less than the poor 
 collier in the mine, with darkness and squalor clos- 
 [200] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ing him round about, and want maybe staring him 
 in the face, yet — if he be a true man — with a httle 
 bird singing ever in his heart the song of hope and 
 cheer which cradled the genius of Stephenson and 
 Arkwright and the long procession of inventors, 
 lowly born, to whom the world owes the glorious 
 achievements of this, the greatest of che centuries. 
 We are all workingmen — the banker, the minister, 
 the lawyer, the doctor — toiling from day to day, 
 and it may be we are well paid for our toil, to repre- 
 sent and to minister to the wants of the time no less 
 than the farmer and the farmer's boy, rising with 
 the lark to drive the team afield, and to dally with 
 land so rich it needs to be but tickled with a hoe to 
 laugh a harvest. 
 
 "Having somewhat of an audacious fancy, I have 
 sometimes in moments of exuberance ventured upon 
 the conceit that our Jupiter Tonans, the American 
 editor, seated upon his three-legged throne and 
 enveloped by the majesty and the mystery of his 
 pretentious 'we,' is a workingman no less than the 
 poor reporter, who year in and year out braves the 
 perils of the midnight rounds through the slums of 
 the city, yea in the more perilous temptations of 
 the town, yet carries with him into the darkest dens 
 
 [201] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 the love of work, the hope of reward and the fear 
 only of dishonor. 
 
 "Why, the poor officeseeker at Washington 
 begging a bit of that pie, which, having got his own 
 slice, a cruel, hard-hearted President would elimi- 
 nate from the bill of fare, he likewise is a working- 
 man, and I can tell you a very hard-working man 
 with a tough job of work, and were better brealdng 
 rock upon a turnpike in Dixie or splitting rails on 
 a quarter section out in the wild and woolly West. 
 
 "It is true that, as stated on the program, I am a 
 Democrat — as Artemus Ward once said of the 
 horses in his panorama, I can conceal it no longer 
 — at least I am as good a Democrat as they have 
 nowadaj^s. But first of all, I am an American, and 
 in America every man who is not a policeman or a 
 dude is a workingman. So, by your leave, my 
 friends, instead of sticking very closely to the text, 
 and treating it from a purely party point of view, 
 I propose to take a ramble through the highways 
 and byways of life and thought in our beloved coun- 
 try and to cast a balance if I can from an American 
 point of view. * 
 
 "I want to say in the beginning that no party can 
 save any man or any set of men from the daily toil 
 [202] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 by which all of us live and move and have our 
 being." 
 
 Then I vi^orked in my old lecture. 
 
 It went like hot cakes. When next I met Wil- 
 liam McKinley he said jocosely: "You are a mean 
 man, Henry Watterson!" 
 
 "How so?" I asked. 
 
 "I accepted the invitation to answer you because 
 I wanted and needed the money. Of course I had 
 no time to prepare a special address. ]My idea was 
 to make my fee by ripping you up the back. But 
 when I read the verbatim report which had been 
 prepared for me there was not a word with which I 
 could take issue, and that completely threw me out." 
 
 Then I told him how it had happened and we had 
 a hearty laugh. He was the most lovable of men. 
 That such a man should have fallen a victim to the 
 blow of an assassin defies explanation, as did the 
 murders of Lincoln and Garfield, like McKinley, 
 amiable, kindly men giving never cause of personal 
 
 offense. 
 
 II 
 
 The murderer is past finding out. In one way 
 and another I fancy that I am well acquainted with 
 the assassins of history. Of those who slew Caesar 
 
 [203] 
 
"MAUSE HENRY" 
 
 I learned in my schooldays, and between Ravaillac, 
 who did the business for Hem-y of Navarre, and 
 Booth and Guiteau, my familiar knowledge seems 
 almost at first hand. One night at Chamberlin's, 
 in Washington, George Corkhill, the district at- 
 torney who was prosecuting the murderer of Gar- 
 field, said to me: "You will never fully understand 
 this case until you have sat by me through one day's 
 proceedings in court." Next day I did this. 
 
 Never have I passed five hours in a theater so 
 filled with thrills. I occupied a seat betwixt Cork- 
 hill and Scoville, Guiteau's brother-in-law and vol- 
 untary attorney. I say "voluntary" because from 
 the first Guiteau rejected him and vilely abused 
 him, vociferously insisting upon being his own law- 
 yer. 
 
 From the moment Guiteau entered the trial room 
 it was a theatrical extravaganza. He was in irons, 
 sandwiched between tvvo deputy sheriffs, came in 
 shouting like a madman, and began at once railing 
 at the judge, the jury and the audience. A very 
 necessary rule had been established that when he 
 interposed, whatever was being said or done auto- 
 matically stopped. Then, when he ceased, the case 
 went on again as if nothing had happened. 
 [204] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Only Scoville intervened between me and 
 Guiteau and I had an excellent opportunity to see, 
 hear and size him up. In visage and voice he was 
 the meanest creature I have, either in life or in 
 dreams, encountered. He had the face and intona- 
 tions of a demon. Everything about him was loath- 
 some. I cannot doubt that his criminal colleagues 
 of history were of the same description. 
 
 Charlotte Corday was surely a lunatic. Wilkes 
 Booth I knew. He was drunk, had been drunk all 
 that winter, completely muddled and perverted by 
 brandy, the inheritant of mad blood. Czolgosz, the 
 slayer of McKinley, and the assassin of the Empress 
 Elizabeth were clearly insane. 
 
 Ill 
 
 McKinley and Protectionism, Cleveland, Carlisle 
 and Free Trade — how far away they seem ! 
 
 With the passing of the old issues that divided 
 parties new issues have come upon the scene. The 
 ahgnment of the future will turn upon these. But 
 underlying all issues of all time are fundamental 
 ideas which live forever and aye, and may not be 
 forgotten or ignored. 
 
 [205] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 It used to be claimed by the followers of Jeffer- 
 son that Democracy was a fixed quantity, rising out 
 of the bedrock of the Constitution, while Federal- 
 ism, Whiggism and Republicanism were but the 
 chimeras of some prevailing fancy drawing their 
 sustenance rather from temporizing expediency and 
 current sentiment than from basic principles and 
 profound conviction. To make haste slowly, to look 
 before leaping, to take counsel of experience — ^were 
 Democratic axioms. Thus the fathers of Democ- 
 racy, while fullj^ conceiving the imperfections of 
 government and meeting as events required the 
 need alike of movement and reform, put the vision- 
 ary and experimental behind them to aim at things 
 visible, attainable, tangible, the written Constitution 
 the one safe precedent, the morning star and the 
 evening star of their faith and hope. 
 
 What havoc the parties and the politicians have 
 made of all these lofty pretenses ! Where must an 
 old-line Democrat go to find himself? Two issues, 
 however, have come upon the scene which for the 
 time being are paramount and which seem organic. 
 They are set for the determination of the twentieth 
 century: The sex question and the drink question. 
 
 I wonder if it be possible to consider them in a 
 [206] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 catholic spirit from a philosophic standpoint. I can 
 truly say that the enactment of prohibition laws, 
 state or national, is personally nothing to me. I 
 long ago reached an age when the convivialism of 
 life ceased to cut any figure in the equation of my 
 desires and habits. It is the never-failing recourse 
 of the intolerant, however, to ascribe an individual, 
 and, of course, an unworthy, motive to contrariwise 
 opinions, and I have not escaped that kind of 
 criticism. 
 
 The challenge underlying prohibition is twofold: 
 Does prohibition prohibit, and, if it does, may it not 
 generate evils peculiarly its own? 
 
 The question hinges on what are called "sumptu- 
 ary laws" ; that is, statutes regulating the food and 
 drink, the habits and apparel of the individual citi- 
 zen. This in turn harks back to the issue of paternal 
 government. That, once admitted and established, 
 becomes in time all-embracing. 
 
 Bigotry is a disease. The bigot pursuing his 
 narrow round is like the bedridden possessed by his 
 disordered fancy. Bigotry sees nothing but itself, 
 which it mistakes for wisdom and virtue. But Big- 
 otry begets hypocrisy. When this spreads over a 
 sufficient area and counts a voting majority it sends 
 
 [207] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 its agents abroad, and thus we acquire canting 
 apostles and legislators at once corrupt and des- 
 potic. 
 
 They are now largely in evidence in the national 
 capital and in the various state capitals, where the 
 poor-dog, professional politicians most do congre- 
 gate and disport themselves. 
 
 The worst of it is that there seems nowhere any 
 popular realization — certainly any popular outcry. 
 Do the people grow degenerate? Are they will- 
 fully dense? 
 
 [208] 
 
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH 
 
 A LIBEL ON MR. CLEVELAND HIS FONDNESS FOR 
 
 CARDS — SOME POKER STORIES THE "SENATE 
 
 game" TOM OCHILTREE, SENATOR ALLISON AND 
 
 GENERAL SCHENCK 
 
 N^'OT long after Mr. Cleveland's marriage, be- 
 ing in Washington, I made a box party em- 
 bracing Mrs. Cleveland, and the Speaker and Mrs. 
 Carlisle, at one of the theaters where Madame 
 Modjeska was appearing. The ladies expressing a 
 desire to meet the famous Polish actress who had 
 so charmed them, I took them after the play behind 
 the scenes. Thereafter we returned to the White 
 House where supper was awaiting us, the Presi- 
 dent amused and pleased when told of the agree- 
 able incident. 
 
 The next day there began to buzz reports to the 
 contrary. At first covert, they gained in volume 
 
 [209] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and currency until a distinguished Republican 
 party leader put his imprint upon them in an 
 after-dinner speech, going the length of saying the 
 newly-wedded Chief JNIagistrate had actually struck 
 his wife and forbidden me the Executive Mansion, 
 though I had been there every day during the week 
 that followed. 
 
 JNIr. Cleveland believed the matter too preposter- 
 ous to be given any credence and took it rather 
 stoically. But naturally Mrs. Cleveland was 
 shocked and outraged, and I made haste to stigma- 
 tize it as a lie out of whole cloth. Yet though this 
 was sent away by the Associated Press and pub- 
 lished broadcast I have occasionally seen it referred 
 to by persons over eager to assail a man incapable 
 of an act of rudeness to a woman. 
 
 II 
 
 Mr. Cleveland was fond — not overfond — of 
 cards. He liked to play the noble game at, say, a 
 dollar limit — even once in a while for a little more 
 — but not much more. And as Dr. Norvin Green 
 was wont to observe of Commodore Vanderbilt, "he 
 held them exceeding close to his boo-som." 
 
 Mr. Whitney, Secretary of the Navy in his first 
 [210] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 administration, equally rich and hospitable, had 
 often "the road gang," as a certain group, mainly 
 senators, was called, to dine, with the inevitable 
 after-dinner soiree or seance. I was, when in 
 Washington, invited to these parties. At one of 
 them I chanced to sit between the President and 
 Senator Don Cameron. Mr. Carlisle, at the time 
 Speaker of the House — who handled his cards like 
 a child and, as we all knew, couldn't play a little — 
 was seated on the opposite side of the table. 
 
 After a while Mr. Cameron and I began "bluff- 
 ing" the game — I recall that the limit was five dol- 
 lars — that is, raising and back-raising each other, 
 and whoever else happened to be in, without much 
 or any regard to the cards we held. 
 
 It chanced on a deal that I picked up a pat flush, 
 Mr. Cleveland a pat full. The Pennsylvania sena- 
 tor and I went to the extreme, the President of 
 course willing enough for us to play his hand for 
 him. But the Speaker of the House persistently 
 stayed with us and could not be driven out. 
 
 When it came to a draw Senator Cameron drew 
 one card. Mr. Cleveland and I stood pat. But 
 Mr. Carlisle drew four cards. At length, after 
 much banter and betting, it reached a show-down 
 
 [211] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and, mirabile dictu, the Speaker held four kings! 
 
 "Take the money, Carhsle ; take the money," ex- 
 claimed the President. "If ever I am President 
 again you shall be Secretary of the Treasury. But 
 don't you make that four-card draw too often." 
 
 He was President again, and JNIr. Carlisle was 
 Secretary of the Treasury. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There had arisen a disagreeable misunderstand- 
 ing between General Schenck and myself during 
 the period when the general was Minister at the 
 Court of St. James. In consequence of this we did 
 not personally meet. One evening at Chamberlin's 
 years after, a party of us — mainly the Ohio states- 
 man's old colleagues in Congress — were playing 
 poker. He came in and joined us. Neither of us 
 knew the other even by sight and there was no 
 presentation when he sat in. 
 
 At length a direct play between the newcomer 
 and me arose. There was a moment's pause. 
 Obviously we were strangers. Then it was that 
 Senator Allison, of Iowa, who had in his goodness 
 of heart purposely brought about this very situa- 
 tion, introduced us. The general reddened. I was 
 [212] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 taken aback. But there was no escape, and carry- 
 ing it off amiably we shook hands. It is needless to 
 say that then and there we dropped our groundless 
 feud and remained the rest of his life very good 
 friends. 
 
 In this connection still another poker story. Sam 
 Bugg, the Nashville gambler, was on a INIississippi 
 steamer bound for New Orleans. He came upon a 
 party of Tennesseeans whom a famous card sharp 
 had inveigled and was flagrantly robbing. Sam 
 went away, obtained a pack of cards, and stacked 
 them to give the gambler four kings and the bright- 
 est one of the Nashville boys four aces. After two 
 or three failures to bring the cold deck into action 
 Sam Bugg brushed a spider — an imaginary spider, 
 of course — from the gambler's coat collar, for an 
 instant distracting his attention — and in the mo- 
 mentary confusion the stacked cards were duly dealt 
 and the betting began, the gambler confident and 
 aggi'essive. Finally, all the money up, the four 
 aces beat the four kings, and for a greater amount 
 than the Nashvillians had lost and the gambler had 
 won. Whereupon, without change of muscle, the 
 gambler drawled: "Mr. Bugg, the next time you 
 see a spider biting me let him bite on!" 
 
 [213] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 I was told that the Senate Game had been played 
 during the War of Sections and directly after for 
 large sums. With the arrival of the rebel brigadiers 
 it was perforce reduced to a reasonable limit. 
 
 The "road gang" was not unknown at the White 
 House. Sometimes it assembled at private houses, 
 but its accustomed place of meeting was first 
 Welcker's and then Chamberlin's. I do not know 
 whether it continues to have abiding place or even 
 an existence. In spite of the reputation given me 
 by the pert paragraphers I have not been on a race 
 course or seen a horse race or played for other than 
 immaterial stakes for more than thirty years. 
 
 IV 
 
 As an all-round newspaper writer and reporter 
 many sorts of people, high and low, little and big, 
 queer and commonplace, fell in my way ; statesmen 
 and politicians, artists and athletes, circus riders 
 and prize fighters; the riffraff and the elite; the 
 professional and dilettante of the world poHte and 
 the underworld. 
 
 I knew Mike Walsh and Tim Campbell. I knew 
 John Morrissey. I have seen Heenan — one of 
 the handsomest men of his time — and likewise Adah 
 [214] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Isaacs Menken, his inamorata — many said his wife 
 — who went into mourning for him and thereafter 
 hied away to Paris, where she lived under the pro- 
 tection of Alexandre Dumas, the elder, who buried 
 her in Pere Lachaise under a handsome monument 
 bearing two words, "Thou knowest," beneath a 
 carved hand pointed to heaven. 
 
 I did draw the line, however, at Cora Pearl and 
 Marcus Cicero Stanley. 
 
 The Parisian courtesan was at the zenith of her 
 extraordinary celebrity when I became a rustic 
 boulevardier. She could be seen everywhere and 
 on all occasions. Her gowns were the showiest, her 
 equipage the smartest ; her entourage, loud though 
 it was and vulgar, yet in its way was undeniable. 
 She reigned for a long time the recognized queen 
 of the demi-monde. I have beheld her in her glory 
 on her throne — her two thrones, for she had two — 
 one on the south side of the river, the other at the 
 east end — not to mention the race course — sur- 
 rounded by a retinue of the disreputable. She did 
 not awaken in me the least curiosity, and I declined 
 many opportunities to meet her. 
 
 Marcus Cicero Stanley was sprung from an 
 aristocratic, even a distinguished, North Carolina 
 
 [215] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 family. He came to New York and set up for a 
 swell. How he lived I never cared to find out, 
 though he was believed to be what the police call 
 a "fence." He seemed a cross between a "con" 
 and a "beat." Yet for a while he flourished at Del- 
 monico's, which he made his headquarters, and cut a 
 kind of dash with the unknowing. He was a hand- 
 some, mannerly brute who knew how to dress and 
 carry himself like a gentleman. 
 
 Later there came to New York another South- 
 erner — a Far Southerner of a very different quality 
 — who attracted no little attention. This was Tom 
 Ochiltree. He, too, was well born, his father an 
 eminent jurist of Texas; he, himself, a wit, hon 
 homme and raconteur. Travers once said: "We 
 have three professional liars in America — Tom 
 Ochiltree is one and George Alfred Townsend is 
 the other two." 
 
 The stories told of Tom would fill a book. He 
 denied none, however preposterous — was indeed 
 the author of many of the most amusing — of how, 
 when the old judge proposed to take him into law 
 partnership he caused to be painted an office sign: 
 Thomas P. Ochiltree and Father; of his reply to 
 General Grant, who had made him United States 
 [216] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Marshal of Texas, and later suggested that it 
 would be well for Tom to pay less attention to the 
 race course: "Why, ]Mr. President, all that turf 
 publicity relates to a horse named after me, not 
 to me," it being that the horse of the day had been 
 so called; and of General Grant's reply: "Neverthe- 
 less, it would be well, Tom, for you to look in upon 
 Texas once in a while" — in short, of his many say- 
 ings and exploits while a member of Congress from 
 the Galveston district ; among the rest, that having 
 brought in a resolution tendering sympathy to the 
 German Empire on the death of Herr Laska, the 
 most advanced and distinguished of Radical Social- 
 ists, which became for the moment a cause celebre. 
 Tom remarked, "Not that I care a damn about it, 
 except for the prominence it gives to Bismarck." 
 
 He lived when in Washington at Chamberlin's. 
 He and John Chamberlin were close friends. Once 
 when he was breakfasting with John a mutual 
 friend came in. He was in doubt what to order. 
 Tom suggested beefsteak and onions. 
 
 "But," objected the newcomer, "I am about to 
 call on some ladies, and the smell of onions on my 
 breath, you know!" 
 
 "Don't let that trouble you," said Tom; "you 
 
 [217] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 have the steak and onions and when you get your 
 bill that will take your breath away !" 
 
 Under an unpromising exterior — a stocky build 
 and fiery red head — there glowed a brave, generous 
 and tender spirit. The man was a preux chevalier. 
 He was a knight-errant. All women — especially 
 all good and discerning women who knew him and 
 who could intuitively read beneath that clumsy per- 
 sonahty his fine sense of respect — even of adoration 
 — loved Tom Ochiltree. 
 
 The equivocal celebrity he enjoyed was largely 
 fostered by himself, his stories mostly at his own 
 expense. His education had been but casual. But 
 he had a great deal of it and a varied assortment. 
 He knew everybody on both sides of the Atlantic, 
 his friends ranging from the Prince of Wales, after- 
 ward Edward VII, Gladstone and Disraeli, Gam- 
 betta and Thiers, to the bucks of the jockey clubs. 
 There were two of Tom — Tom the noisy on ex- 
 hibition, and Tom the courtier in society. 
 
 How he lived when out of office was the subject 
 of unflattering conjecture. Many thought him the 
 stipendiary of JMr. Mackay, the multimillionaire, 
 with whom he was intimate, who told me he could 
 never induce Tom to take money except for service 
 [218] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 rendered. Among his familiars was Colonel North, 
 the English money magnate, who said the same 
 thing. He had a widowed sister in Texas to whom 
 he regularly sent an income sufficient for herself 
 and family. And when he died, to the surprise of 
 every one, he left his sister quite an accumulation. 
 He had never been wholly a spendthrift. Though 
 he Hved well at Chamberlin's in Washington and 
 the Waldorf in New York he was careful of his 
 credit and his money. I dare say he was not unfor- 
 tunate in the stock market. He never maiTied and 
 when he died, still a youngish man as modern ages 
 go, all sorts of stories were told of him, and the 
 space writers, having a congenial subject, disported 
 themselves voluminously. Inevitably most of their 
 stories were apocryphal. 
 
 I wonder shall we ever get any real truth out of 
 what is called history? There are so many sides to 
 it and such a confusing din of voices. How much 
 does old Sam Johnson owe of the fine figure he cuts 
 to Boswell, and, minus Boswell, how much would 
 be left of him? For nearly a century the Empress 
 Josephine was pictured as the effigy of the faithful 
 and suffering wife sacrificed upon the altar of un- 
 principled and selfish ambition — lovelorn, deserted, 
 
 [219] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 heartbroken. It was Napoleon, not Josephine, ex- 
 cept in her pride, who suffered. Who shall tell us 
 the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 
 truth, about Hamilton; about Burr; about Csesar, 
 Caligula and Cleopatra? Did Washington, when 
 he was angry, swear like a trooper ? What was the 
 matter with Nero? 
 
 IV 
 
 One evening Edward King and I were dining in 
 the Champs Elysees when he said: "There is a 
 new coon — a literary coon — come to town. He is 
 a Scotchman and his name is Robert Louis Steven- 
 son." Then he told me of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
 Hyde. At that moment the subject of our talk 
 was living in a kind of self-imposed penury not half 
 a mile away. Had we known this we could have 
 ended the poor fellow's struggle with his pride and 
 ambition then and there; have put him in the way 
 of sure work and plenty of it ; perhaps have length- 
 ened, certainly have sweetened, his daj^s, unless it 
 be true that he was one of the impossibles, as he 
 may easily be conceived to have been from reading 
 his wayward biography and voluminous corre- 
 spondence. 
 [220] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 To a young Kentuckian, one of "my boys," was 
 given the opportunity to see the last of him and to 
 bury him in far-away Samoa, whither he had taken 
 himself for the final adventure and where he died, 
 having attained some measure of the dreams he had 
 cherished, and, let us hope, happy in the conscious- 
 ness of the achievement. 
 
 I rather think Stevenson should be placed at the 
 head of the latter-day fictionists. But fashions in 
 literature as in dress are ever changing. Washing- 
 ton Irving was the first of our men of letters to ob- 
 tain foreign recognition. While the fires of hate 
 between Great Britain and America were still burn- 
 ing he wrote kindly and elegantly of England and 
 the English, and was accepted on both sides of the 
 ocean. Taking his style from Addison and Gold- 
 smith, he emulated their charity and humor; he 
 went to Spain and in the same deft way he pictured 
 the then unknown byways of the land of dreams; 
 and coming home again he peopled the region of the 
 Hudson with the beings of legend and fancy which 
 are dear to us. 
 
 He became our national man of letters. He stood 
 quite at the head of our literature, giving the lie 
 to the scornful query, "Who reads an American 
 
 [221] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 book?" As a pioneer he will always be considered; 
 as a simple and vivid writer of things familiar and 
 entertaining he will probably always be read; but 
 as an originator literary history will hardly place 
 him very high. There Bret Harte surely led him. 
 The Tales of the Argonauts as works of creative 
 fancy exceed the Sketches of Washington Irving 
 alike in wealth of color and humor, in pathos and 
 dramatic action. 
 
 Some writers make an exception of the famous 
 Sleepy Hollow story. But they have in mind the 
 Rip Van Winkle of Jefferson and Boucicault, not 
 the rather attenuated story of Irving, which — as far 
 as the twenty years of sleep went — was borrowed 
 from an old German legend. 
 
 Mark Twain and Bret Harte, however, will al- 
 ways be bracketed with Washington Irving. Of 
 the three I incline to the opinion that IMark Twain 
 did the broadest and strongest work. His imagi- 
 nation had wider reach than Irving's. There is no- 
 where, as there is in Harte, the suspicion either of 
 insincerity or of artificiality. Irving's humor was 
 the humor of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar 
 of Wakefield. It is old English. Mark Twain's is 
 his own — American through and through to the 
 [222] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 bone. I am not unmindful of Cooper and Haw- 
 thorne, of Longfellow, of Lowell and of Poe, but 
 speak of Irving as the pioneer American man of 
 letters, and of ^lark Twain and Bret Harte as 
 American literature's most conspicuous and origi- 
 nal modern examples. 
 
 [223] 
 
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SEVENTH 
 
 THE PROFESSION OF JOURNALISM — NEWSPAPERS AND 
 
 EDITORS IN AMERICA BENNETT, GREELEY AND 
 
 RAYMOND — FORNEY AND DANA — THE EDUCA- 
 TION OF A JOURNALIST. 
 
 THE American newspaper has had, even in 
 my time, three separate and distinct epochs; 
 the thick-and-thin, more or less servile party or- 
 gan; the personal, one-man-controlled, rather 
 blatant and would-be independent; and the timor- 
 ous, corporation, or family-owned billboard of 
 such news as the ever-increasing censorship of a 
 constantly centralizing Federal Government will 
 allow. 
 
 This latter appears to be its present state. 
 
 Neither its individuality nor its self-exploitation, 
 
 scarcely its grandiose pretension, remains. There 
 
 continues to be printed in large type an amount of 
 
 [224] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 shallow stuff that would not be missed if it were 
 omitted altogether. But, except as a bulletin of 
 yesterday's doings, limited, the daily newspaper 
 counts for little, the single advantage of the editor 
 — in case there is an editor — that is, one clothed 
 with supervising authority who "edits" — being that 
 he reaches the public with his lucubrations 'first, 
 the sanctity that once hedged the editorial "we" 
 long since departed. 
 
 The editor dies, even as the actor, and leaves no 
 copy. Editorial reputations have been as ephem- 
 eral as the publications which gave them contem- 
 porary importance. Without going as far back 
 as the Freneaus and the Callenders, who recalls 
 the names of Mordecai Mannasseh Noah, of Ed- 
 win Crosswell and of James Watson Webb? In 
 their day and generation they were influential and 
 distinguished journalists. There are dozens of 
 other names once famous but now forgotten; 
 George Wilkins Kendall; Gerard Hallock; Eras- 
 tus Brooks; Alexander Bullitt; Barnwell Rhett; 
 JMorton McMichael; George William Childs, even 
 Thomas Ritchie, Duff Green and Amos Kendall. 
 "Gales and Seaton" sounds like a trade-mark; but 
 it stood for not a little and lasted a long time in 
 
 [225] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 the National Capital, where newspaper vassalage 
 and the public printing went hand-in-hand. 
 
 For a time the duello flourished. There were 
 frequent "affairs of honor" — notably about Rich- 
 mond in Virginia and Charleston in South Caro- 
 lina — sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of 
 John H. Pleasants and one of the sons of Thomas 
 Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed, and the yet 
 more celebrated affair between Graves, of Ken- 
 tucky, and Cilley, of Maine, in which Cilley was 
 killed; Bladensburg the scene, and the refusal of 
 Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the oc- 
 casion. 
 
 I once had an intimate account of this duel with 
 all the cruel incidents from Henry A. Wise, a party 
 to it, and a blood-curdling narrative it made. They 
 fought with rifles at thirty paces, and Cilley fell 
 on the third fire. It did much to discredit duelling 
 in the South. The story, however, that Graves 
 was so much affected that thereafter he could never 
 sleep in a darkened chamber had no foundation 
 whatever, a fact I learned from my associate in 
 the old Louisville Journal and later in The Courier- 
 Journal, JMr. I sham Henderson, who was a broth- 
 er-in-law of Mr. Graves, his sister, Mrs. Graves, 
 [226] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" ^^ 
 
 being still alive. The duello died at length. There 
 was never sufficient reason for its being. It was 
 both a vanity and a fad. In Hopkinson Smith's 
 "Col. Carter of Cartersville," its real character is 
 hit off to the life. 
 
 II 
 
 When very early, rather too early, I found my- 
 self in the saddle, Bennett and Greeley and Ray- 
 mond in Xew York, and ^ledill and Storey in Chi- 
 cago, were yet alive and conspicuous figures in the 
 newspaper life of the time. John Bigelow, who 
 had retired from the New York Evening Post, was 
 Minister to France. Halstead was coming on, but, 
 except as a correspondent, Whitelaw Reid had not 
 "arrived." The like w^as true of "Joe" McCul- 
 lagh, who, in the same character, divided the news- 
 paper reading attention of the country with George 
 Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt. Joseph ^le- 
 dill was withdrawing from the Chicago Tribune in 
 favor of Horace White, presently to return and die 
 in harness — a man of sterling^ intellect and character 
 — and Wilbur F. Storey, his local rival, who was 
 beginning to show signs of the mental malady that, 
 developed into monomania, ultimately ended his life 
 
 [227] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 in gloom and despair, wrecking one of the finest 
 newspaper properties outside of ISTew York. Wil- 
 liam R. Nelson, who was to establish a really great 
 newspaper in Kansas City, was still a citizen of Ft. 
 Wayne. 
 
 James Gordon Bennett, the elder, seemed then 
 to me, and has always seemed, the real founder of 
 the modern newspaper as a vehicle of popular infor- 
 mation, and, in point of apprehension, at least, 
 James Gordon Bennett, the younger, did not fall 
 behind his father. What was, and might have been 
 regarded and dismissed as a trivial slander drove 
 him out of New York and made him the greater 
 part of his life a resident of Paris, where I was 
 wont to meet and know much of him. 
 
 The New York Herald, under father and son, 
 attained enormous prosperity, prestige and real 
 power. It suffered chiefly from what they call in 
 Ireland "absentee landlordism." Its "proprietor," 
 for he never described himself as its "editor," was 
 a man of exquisite sensibilities — a "despot" of 
 course — whom nature created for a good citizen, a 
 good husband and the head of a happy domestic 
 fabric. He should have married the woman of his 
 choice, for he was deeply in love with her and never 
 [228] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ceased to love her, forty years later leaving her in 
 his will a handsome legacy. 
 
 Crossing the ocean with the "Commodore," as he 
 was called by his familiars, not long after he had 
 taken up his residence abroad, naturally we fell oc- 
 casionally into shop talk. "What would you do," 
 he once said, "if you owned the Herald?" "Why," 
 I answered, "I would stay in New York and edit 
 it;" and then I proceeded, "but you mean to ask me 
 what I think you ought to do with it?" "Yes," he 
 said, "that is about the size of it." 
 
 "Well, Commodore," I answered, "if I were you, 
 when we get in I would send for John Cockerill and 
 make him managing editor, and for John Young, 
 and put him in charge of the editorial page, and 
 then I would go and lose myself in the wilds of 
 Africa." 
 
 He adopted the first two of these suggestions. 
 John A. Cockerill was still under contract with Jo- 
 seph Pulitzer and could not accept for a year or 
 more. He finally did accept and died in the Ben- 
 nett service. John Russell Young took the edi- 
 torial page and was making it "hum" when a most 
 unaccountable thing hapioened. I was amazed to 
 receive an invitation to a dinner he had tendered 
 
 [229] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and was about to give to the quondam Virginian 
 and just elected New York Justice Roger A. 
 Pryor. "Is Young gone mad," I said to myself, 
 "or can he have forgotten that the one man of all 
 the world whom the House of Bennett can never 
 forget, or forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?" 
 
 The Bennett-Pryor quarrel had been a cause 
 celehre when John Young was night editor of the 
 Philadelphia Press and I was one of its Washing- 
 ton correspondents. Nothing so virulent had ever 
 passed between an editor and a Congressman. In 
 one of his speeches Pryor had actually gone the 
 length of rudely referring to Mrs. James Gordon 
 Bennett. 
 
 The dinner was duly given. But it ended John's 
 connection with the Herald and his friendly rela- 
 tions with the owner of the Herald. The incident 
 might be cited as among "The Curiosities of Jour- 
 nalism," if ever a book with that title is written. 
 John's "break" was so bad that I never had the 
 heart to ask him how he could have perpetrated it. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The making of an editor is a complex affair. 
 Poets and painters are said to be born. Editors 
 [230] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and orators are made. Many essential elements 
 enter into the editorial fabrication; need to be con- 
 centrated upon and embodied by a single individual, 
 and even, with these, environment is left to supply 
 the opportunity and give the final touch. 
 
 Aptitude, as the first ingredient, goes without 
 saying of every line of human endeavor. We have 
 the authority of the adage for the belief that it is 
 not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. 
 Yet have I known some unpromising tyros mature 
 into very capable workmen. 
 
 The modern newspaper, as we know it, may be 
 fairly said to have been the invention of James 
 Gordon Bennett, the elder. Before him there were 
 journals, not newspapers. When he died he had 
 developed the news scheme in kind, though not in 
 the degree that we see so elaborate and re- 
 splendent in New York and other of the leading 
 centers of population. ISlr. Bennett had led a 
 vagrant and varied life when he started the Herald. 
 He had been many things by turns, including a 
 writer of verses and stories, but nothing veiy suc- 
 cessful nor very long. At length he struck a cen- 
 tral idea — a really great, original idea — the idea of 
 printing the news of the day, comprising the His- 
 
 [231] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 tory of Yesterday, fully and fairly, without fear 
 or favor. He was followed by Greeley and Ray- 
 mond — making a curious and very dissimilar trium- 
 virate — and, at longer range, by Prentice and For- 
 ney, by Bowles and Dana, Storey, Medill and Hal- 
 stead. All were marked men ; Greeley a writer and 
 propagandist; Raymond a writer, declaimer and 
 politician; Prentice a wit and partisan; Dana a 
 scholar and an organizer; Bowles a man both of 
 letters and affairs. The others were men of all 
 w^ork, writing and fighting their way to the front, 
 but possessing the "nose for news," using the Ben- 
 nett formula and rescript as the basis of their seri- 
 ous efforts, and never losing sight of it. Forney 
 had been a printer. Medill and Storey were caught 
 young by the lure of printer's ink. Bowles was 
 born and reared in the office of the Springfield Re- 
 publican, founded by his father, and Halstead, a 
 cross betwixt a pack horse and a race horse, was 
 broken to harness before he was out of his teens. 
 
 Assuming journalism, equally with medicine and 
 law, to be a profession, it is the only profession in 
 which versatility is not a disadvantage. Specialism 
 at the bar, or by the bedside, leads to perfection 
 and attains results. The great doctor is the great 
 [232] 
 
HENRY WATTEUSOX HiOJl A I'AINTIXG 1!Y LOUIS aiARK 
 
 IN HIE IMAXIIATTAX CLUB, XEW YUliK 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 surgeon or the great prescriptionist — ^he cannot be 
 great in both — and the great lawyer is rarely great, 
 if ever, as counselor and orator. 
 
 The great editor is by no means the great writer. 
 But he ought to be able to write and must be a 
 judge of writing. The newspaper office is a httle 
 kingdom. The great editor needs to know and does 
 know every range of it between the editorial room, 
 the composing room and the pressroom. He must 
 hold well in hand everybody and every function, 
 having risen, as it were, step-by-step from the 
 ground floor to the roof. He should be level- 
 headed, yet impressionable; sympathetic, yet self- 
 possessed ; able quickly to sift, detect and discrimi- 
 nate; of various knowledge, experience and inter- 
 est; the cackle of the adjacent barnyard the noise 
 of the world to his eager mind and pliant ear. 
 Nothing too small for liim to tackle, nothing too 
 great, he should keep to the middle of the road and 
 well in rear of the moving columns; loving his art 
 — for such it is — for art's sake; getting his suffi- 
 ciency, along with its independence, in the public 
 approval and patronage, seeking never anything 
 further for himself. Disinterestedness being the 
 soul of successful journalism, unselfish devotion to 
 
 [233] 
 
"MARSE HENRY'' 
 
 every noble purpose in public and private life, he 
 should say to preferment, as to bribers, "get behind 
 me, Satan." Whitelaw Reid, to take a ready and 
 conspicuous example, was a great journalist, but 
 rather early in life he abandoned journalism for 
 office and became a figure in politics and diplomacy 
 so that, as in the case of Franklin, whose example 
 and footsteps in the main he followed, he will be 
 remembered rather as the Ambassador than as the 
 Editor. 
 
 More and more must these requirements be ful- 
 filled by the aspiring journalist. As the world 
 passes from the Rule of Force — force of prowess, 
 force of habit, force of convention — to the Rule 
 of Numbers, the daily journal is destined, if it sur- 
 vives as a power, to become the teacher — the very 
 Bible — of the people. The people are already be- 
 ginning to distinguish between the wholesome and 
 the meretricious in their newspapers. Newspaper 
 owners, likewise, are beginning to realize the value 
 of character. Instances might be cited where the 
 public, discerning some sinister but unseen power 
 behind its press, has slowly yet surely withdrawn 
 its confidence and support. Plowever impersonal it 
 pretends to be, with whatever of mystery it affects 
 [234] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 to envelop itself, the public insists upon some visible 
 presence. In some States the law requires it. Thus 
 ^'personal journalism" cannot be escaped, and 
 whether the "one-man power" emanates from the 
 Counting Room or the Editorial Room, as they are 
 called, it must be clear and answerable, responsive 
 to the common weal, and, above all, trustworthy. 
 
 IV 
 
 John Weiss Forney was among the most con- 
 spicuous men of his time. He was likewise one of 
 the handsomest. By nature and training a jour- 
 naHst, he played an active, not to say an equivocal, 
 part in pubhc life — at the outset a Democratic and 
 then a Republican leader. 
 
 Born in the little town of Lancaster, it was his 
 mischance to have attached himself early in life to 
 the fortunes of ^Ir. Buchanan, whom he long served 
 with fidelity and effect. But when Mr. Buchanan 
 came to the Presidency, Forney, who aspired first 
 to a place in the Cabinet, which was denied him, 
 and then to a seat in the Senate, for which he was 
 beaten — through flagrant bribery, as the story ran 
 — ^was left out in the cold. Thereafter he became 
 something of a political adventurer. 
 
 [235] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 The daj^s of the newspaper "organ" aproached 
 their end. Forney's occupation, like Othello's, was 
 gone, for he was nothing if not an organ grinder. 
 Facile with pen and tongue, he seemed a born cour- 
 tier — a veritable Dalgetty, whose loyal devotion to 
 his knight-at-arms deserved better recognition than 
 the cold and wary Pennsylvania chieftain was will- 
 ing to give. It is only fair to say that Forney's 
 character furnished reasonable excuse for this neg- 
 lect and apparent ingratitude. The row between 
 them, however, was party splitting. As the friend 
 and backer of Douglas, and later along a brilliant 
 journalistic soldier of fortune, Forney did as much 
 as any other man to lay the Democratic party low. 
 
 I can speak of him with a certain familiarity and 
 authority, for I was one of his "boys." I admired 
 him greatly and loved him dearly. Most of the 
 young newspai)er men about Philadelphia and 
 Washington did so. He was an all-around modern 
 journalist of the first class. Both as a newspaper 
 writer and creator and manager, he stood upon the 
 front line, rating with Bennett and Greeley and 
 Raymond. He first entertained and then cultivated 
 the thirst for office, which proved the undoing of 
 Greeley and Raymond, and it proved his undoing. 
 [236] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 He had a passion for politics. He would shine in 
 public life. If he could not play first fiddle he 
 would take any other instrument. Thus failing of 
 a Senatorship, he was glad to get the Secretary- 
 ship of the Senate, having been Clerk of the House. 
 
 He was bound to be in the orchestra. In those 
 days newspaper independence was httle known. 
 Mr. Greeley was willing to play bottle-holder to 
 Mr. Seward, Mr. Prentice to Mr. Clay. James 
 Gordon Bennett, the elder, and later his son, James 
 Gordon Bennett, the younger, challenged this kind 
 of servility. The Herald stood at the outset of its 
 career manfully in the face of unspeakable obloquy 
 against it. The public understood it and rose to it. 
 The time came when the elder Bennett was to at- 
 tain official as well as popular recognition. Mr. 
 Lincoln offered him the French mission and Mr. 
 Bennett declined it. He was rich and famous, 
 and to another it might have seemed a kind of 
 crowning glory. To him it seemed only a coming 
 down — a badge of servitude — a lowering of the flag 
 of independent journalism under which, and under 
 which alone, he had fought all his life. 
 
 Charles A. Dana was not far behind the Ben- 
 netts in his independence. He well knew what par- 
 
 [237] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ties and politicians are. The most scholarly and 
 accomplished of American journalists, he made the 
 Sun "shine for all," and, during the years of his 
 active management, a most prosperous property. It 
 happened that whilst I was penny-a-lining in New 
 York I took a piece of space work — not very com- 
 mon in those days — to the Tribune and received a 
 few dollars for it. Ten years later, meeting Mr. 
 Dana at dinner, I recalled the circumstance, and 
 thenceforward we became the best of friends. 
 Tv/ice indeed we had runabouts together in foreign 
 lands. His house in town, and the island home 
 called Dorsoris, which he had made for himself, 
 might not inaptly be described as very shrines of 
 hospitality and art, the master of the house a vir- 
 tuoso in music and painting no less than in letters. 
 One might meet under his roof the most diverse 
 people, but always interesting and agreeable peo- 
 ple. Perhaps at times he carried his aversions a 
 little too far. But he had reasons for them, and a 
 man of robust temperament and habit, it was not 
 in him to sit down under an injury, or fancied in- 
 jury. I never knew a more efficient journalist. 
 What he did not know about a newspaper, was 
 scarcely worth knowing. 
 [238] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 In my day Journalism has made great strides. It 
 has become a recognized profession. Schools of 
 special training are springing up here and there. 
 Several of the universities have each its College of 
 Journalism. The tendency to discredit these, which 
 was general and pronounced at the start, lowers its 
 tone and grows less confident. 
 
 Assuredly there is room for special training to- 
 ward the making of an editor. Too often the news- 
 paper subaltern obtaining promotion through apti- 
 tudes peculiarly his own, has failed to acquire even 
 the most rudimentary knowledge of his art. He has 
 been too busy seeking "scoops" and doing "stunts" 
 to concern himself about perspectives, principles, 
 causes and effects, probable impressions and conse- 
 quences, or even to master the technical details 
 which make such a difference in the preparation 
 of matter intended for publication and popular 
 perusal. The School of Journalism may not be al- 
 ways able to give him the needful instruction. But 
 it can set him in the right direction and better pre- 
 pare him to think and act for himself. 
 
 [239] 
 
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-EIGHTH 
 
 BULLIES AND BRAGGARTS — SOME KENTUCKY ILLUS- 
 TRATIONS THE OLD HOUSE THE THROCKMOR- 
 
 TONS — A EAMOUS SURGEON — '^OLD HELL'S 
 DELIGHT." 
 
 I DO not believe that the bully and braggart is 
 more in evidence in Kentucky and Texas than 
 in other Commonwealths of the Union, except that 
 each is by the space writers made the favorite arena 
 of his exploits and adopted as the scene of the comic 
 stories told at his expense. The son-of-a-gun from 
 Bitter Creek, like the "elegant gentleman" from 
 the Dark and Bloody Ground, represents a certain 
 type to be found more or less developed in each and 
 every State of the Union. He is not always a 
 coward. Driven, as it were, to the wall, he will 
 often make good. 
 
 He is as a rule in quest of adventures. He enters 
 [240] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 the village from the countryside and approaches the 
 melee. "Is it a free fight?" says he. Assured that 
 it is, "Count me in," says he. Ten minutes later, 
 "Is it still a free fight?" he says, and, again assured 
 in the affirmative, says he, "Count me out." 
 
 Once the greatest of bullies provoked old Aaron 
 Pennington, "the strongest man in the world," who 
 struck out from the shoulder and landed his victim 
 in the middle of the street. Here he lay in a help- 
 less heap until they carted him off to the hospital, 
 where for a day or two he flickered between life and 
 death. "Foh God," said Pennington, "I barely 
 teched him." 
 
 This same bully threatened that when a certain 
 mountain man came to town he would "finish him." 
 The mountain man came. He was enveloped in an 
 old-fashioned cloak, presumably concealing his 
 armament, and walked about ostentatiously in the 
 proximity of his boastful foeman, who remained as 
 passive as a lamb. When, having failed to provoke 
 a fight, he had taken himself off, an onlooker said: 
 "Bill, I thought you were going to do him up?" 
 
 "But," says Bill, "did you see him?" 
 
 "Yes, I saw him. What of that?" 
 
 [241] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 "Why," exclaimed the bully, "that man was a 
 walking arsenal." 
 
 Aaron Pennington, the strong man just men- 
 tioned, was, in his younger days, a river pilot. Billy 
 Hite, a mite of a man, was clerk. They had a dis- 
 agreement, when Aaron told Billy that if he caught 
 him on "the harrican deck," he would pitch him 
 overboard. The next day Billy appeared whilst 
 Aaron, off duty, was strolling up and down outside 
 the pilot-house, and strolled offensively in his wake. 
 Never a hostile glance or a word from Aaron. At 
 last, tired of dumb show, Billy broke forth with a 
 torrent of imprecation closing with "When are you 
 going to pitch me off the boat, you blankety-blank 
 son-of-a-gun and coward?" 
 
 Aaron Pennington was a brave man. He was 
 both fearless and self-possessed. He paused, gazed 
 quizzically at his little tormentor, and says he: 
 "Billy, you got a pistol, and you want to get a pre- 
 text to shoot me, and I ain't going to give it to you." 
 
 II 
 
 Among the hostels of Christendom the Gait 
 House, of Louisville, for a long time occupied a 
 foremost place and held its own. It was burned 
 [242] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 to the ground fifty years ago and a new Gait House 
 was erected, not upon the original site, but upon 
 the same street, a block above, and, although one of 
 the most imposing buildings in the world, it could 
 never be made to thrive. It stands now a rather 
 useless encumbrance — a whited sepulchre — a mar- 
 ble memorial of the Solid South and the Kentucky 
 that was, on whose portal might truthfully appear 
 the legend: 
 
 "A jolly place it was in days of old. 
 But something ails it now" 
 
 Aris Throckmorton, its manager in the Thirties, 
 the Forties and the Fifties, was a personality and 
 a personage. The handsomest of men and the most 
 illiterate, he exemplified the characteristics and pe- 
 culiarities of the days of the river steamer and the 
 stage coach, when "mine host" felt it his duty to 
 make the individual acquaintance of his'patrons and 
 each and severally to look after their comfort. 
 Many stories are told at his expense; of how he 
 made a formal call upon Dickens — it was, in point 
 of fact, Marryatt — in his apartment, to be coolly 
 told that when its occupant wanted him he would 
 
 [243] 
 
''MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ring for him; and of how, investiagting a strange 
 box which had newly arrived from Florida, the pre- 
 vailing opinion being that the live animal within 
 was an alligator, he exclaimed, "Alligator, hell; it's 
 a scorponicum." He died at length, to be succeeded 
 by his son John, a very different character. And 
 thereby hangs a tale. 
 
 John Throckmorton, like Aris, his father, was 
 one of the handsomest of men. Perhaps because 
 he was so he became the victim of one of the 
 strangest of feminine whimsies and human freaks. 
 There was a young girl in Louisville, named Ellen 
 Godwin. ]\Ieeting him at a public ball she fell 
 violently in love with him. As Throckmorton did 
 not reciprocate this, and refused to pursue the ac- 
 quaintance, she began to dog his footsteps. She 
 di'essed herself in deep black and took up a position 
 in front of the Gait House, and when he came out 
 and wherever he went she followed him. No matter 
 how long he stayed, when he reappeared she was on 
 the spot and watch. He took himself away to San 
 Francisco. It was but the matter of a few weeks 
 when she was there, too. He hied him thence to 
 Liverpool, and as he stepped upon the dock there 
 [2M] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 she was. She had got wind of his going and, having 
 caught an earlier steamer, preceded him. 
 
 Finally the War of Sections arrived. John 
 Throckmorton became a Confederate officer, and, 
 being able to keep her out of the lines, he had a rest 
 of four years. But, when after the war he returned 
 to Louisville, the quarry began again. 
 
 He was wont to call her "Old Hell's Delight." 
 Finally, one night, as he was passing the market, 
 she rushed out and rained upon him blow after blow 
 with a frozen rabbit. 
 
 Then the authorities took a hand. She was ar- 
 raigned for disorderly conduct and brought before 
 the Court of Police. Then the town, which knew 
 nothing of the case and accepted her goings on as 
 proof of wrong, rose ; and she had a veritable ova- 
 tion, coming away with flying colors. This, how- 
 ever, served to satisfy her. Thenceforward she de- 
 sisted and left poor John Throckmorton in peace. 
 
 I knew her well. She used once in a while to 
 come and see me, having some story or other to tell. 
 On one occasion I said to her: "Ellen, why do you 
 pursue this man in this cruel way? What possible 
 good can it do you?" She looked me straight in the 
 eye and slowly replied: "Because I love him." 
 
 [245] 
 
"MARSS HENRY" 
 
 I investigated the case closely and thoroughly 
 and was assured, as he had assured me, that he had 
 never done her the slightest wrong. She had, on 
 occasion, told me the same thing, and this I fully 
 believed. 
 
 He was a man, every inch of him, and a gentle- 
 man through and through — the very soul of honor 
 in his transactions of every sort — most highly re- 
 spected and esteemed wherever he was known — yet 
 his hfe was made half a failure and wholly unhappy 
 by this "crazy Jane," the general pubhc taking ap- 
 pearances for granted and willing to believe noth- 
 ing good of one who, albeit proud and honorable, 
 held defiantly aloof, disdaining self-defense. 
 
 On the whole I have not known many men more 
 unfortunate than John Throckmorton, who, but for 
 "Old Hell's Delight," would have encountered Httle 
 obstacle to the pursuit of prosperity and happiness. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Another interesting Kentuckian of this period 
 was John Thompson Gray. He was a Harvard 
 man — a wit, a scholar, and, according to old South- 
 em standards, a chevaher. Handsome and gifted, 
 he had the disastrous misfortune just after leaving 
 [246] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 college to kill his friend in a duel — a mortal affair 
 growing, as was usual in those days, out of a trivial 
 cause — and this not only saddened his life, but, in 
 its ambitious aims, shadowed and defeated it. His 
 university comrades had fully counted on his mak- 
 ing a great career. Being a man of fortune, he was 
 able to live like a gentleman without public prefer- 
 ment, and this he did, except to his familiars aloof 
 and sensitive to the last. 
 
 William Preston, the whilom Minister to Spain 
 and Confederate General, and David Yandell, the 
 eminent surgeon, were his devoted friends, and a 
 notable trio they made. Stoddard Johnston, Boyd 
 Winchester and I — very much younger men — sat 
 at their feet and immensely enjoyed their brilliant 
 conversation. 
 
 Dr. Yandell was not only as proclaimed by Dr. 
 Gross and Dr. Sayre the ablest surgeon of his day, 
 but he was also a gentleman of varied experience 
 and great social distinction. He had studied long 
 in Paris and was the pal of John Howard Payne, 
 the familiar friend of Lamartine, Dumas and Le- 
 maitre. He knew Beranger, Hugo and Balzac. It 
 would be hard to find three Kentuckians less pro- 
 vincial, more unaffected, scintillant and worldly 
 
 [247] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 wise than he and William Preston and John 
 Thompson Gray. 
 
 Indeed the list of my acquaintances — ^many of 
 them intimates — some of them friends — would be, 
 if recounted, a long one, not mentioning the foreign- 
 ers, embracing a diverse company all the way from 
 Chunkey Towles to Grover Cleveland, from Wake 
 Holman to John Pierpont Morgan, from John 
 Chamberlin to Thomas Edison. I once served as 
 honorary pall-bearer to a professional gambler who 
 was given a public funeral; a man who had 
 been a gallant Confederate soldier; whom nature 
 intended for an artist, and circumstance diverted 
 into a sport ; but who retained to the last the poetic 
 fancy and the spirit of the gallant, leaving behind 
 him, when he died, like a veritable cavalier, chiefly 
 debts and friends. He was not a bad sort in busi- 
 ness, as the English say, nor in conviviahty. But 
 in fighting he w^as "a dandy." The goody-goody 
 philosophy of the namby-pamby takes an extreme 
 and unreal view of life. It flies to extremes. There 
 are middle men. Travers used to describe one of 
 these, whom he did not wish particularly to 
 emphasize, as "a fairly clever son-of-a-gun." 
 
 [248] 
 
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-NINTH 
 
 ABOUT POLITICAL CONVENTIONS^ STATE AND NA- 
 TIONAL "old ben butler" HIS APPEARANCE 
 
 AS A TROUBLE-MAKER IN THE DEMOCRATIC NA- 
 TIONAL CONVENTION OF 1892 TARIFA AND THE 
 
 TARIFF — SPAIN AS A FRIGHTFUL EXAMPLE. 
 
 1HAVE had a liberal education in party con- 
 vocations, State and national. In those of 1860 
 I served as an all-around newspaper reporter. A 
 member of each National Democratic Convention 
 from 1876 to 1892, presiding over the first, and in 
 those of 1880 and 1888 chosen chairman of the 
 Resolutions Committee, I wrote many of the plat- 
 forms and had a decisive voice in all of them. 
 
 In 1880 I had stood for the renomination of "the 
 Old Ticket," that is, Tilden and Hendricks, mak- 
 ing the eight-to-seven action of the Electoral Tri- 
 bunal of 1877 in favor of Hayes and Wheeler the 
 
 [249] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 paramount issue. It seems strange now that any 
 one should have contested this. Yet it was stoutly 
 contested. ^Ir. Tilden settled all dispute by send- 
 ing a letter to the convention declining to be a can- 
 didate. In answer to this I prepared a resolution 
 of regret to be incorporated in the platform. It 
 raised stubborn opposition. David A. Wells and 
 Joseph Pulitzer, who were fellow members of the 
 committee, were with me in my contention, but the 
 objection to making it a part of the platform grew 
 so pronounced that they thought I had best not 
 insist upon it. 
 
 The day wore on and the latent opposition 
 seemed to increase. I had been named chairman 
 of the committee and had at a single sitting that 
 morning written a completed platform. Each 
 plank of this was severally and closely scrutinized. 
 It was well into the afternoon before we reached the 
 plank I chiefly cared about. When I read this the 
 storm broke. Half the committee rose against it. 
 At the close, with more heat than was either cour- 
 teous or tactful, I said: "Gentlemen. I wish to do 
 no more than bid farewell to a Ic'der who four 
 years ago took the Democratic pa* y at its lowest 
 fortunes and made it a power again. He is well 
 [250] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 on his way to the grave. I M^ould place a wreath 
 of flowers on that grave. I ask only this of you. 
 Refuse me, and by God, I will go to that mob 
 yonder and, dead or alive, nominate him, and you 
 will be powerless to prevent!" 
 
 Mr. Barksdale, of ^lississippi, a suave gentle- 
 man, who had led the dissenters, said, "We do not 
 refuse you. But you say that we 'regret' Mr. Til- 
 den's withdrawal. Now I do not regret it, nor do 
 those who agree with me. Could you not substi- 
 tute some other expression?" 
 
 "I don't stand on words," I answered. "What 
 would you suggest?" 
 
 Mr. Barksdale said: "Would not the words 'We 
 have received with the deepest sensibility Mr. Til- 
 den's letter of withdrawal,' answer your purpose?" 
 
 "Certainly," said I, and the plank in the plat- 
 form, as it was amended, was adopted unanimously. 
 
 Mr. Tilden did not die. He outlived all his im- 
 mediate rivals. Four years later, in 1884, his party 
 stood ready again to put him at its head. In nomi- 
 nating JNIr. Cleveland it thought it was accepting 
 his dictation reenforced by the enormous majority 
 — nearly 200,000 — by which IMr. Cleveland, as can- 
 didate for Governor, had carried New York in the 
 
 [251] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 preceding State election. Yet, when the votes in 
 the presidential election came to be counted, he 
 carried it, if indeed he carried it at all, by less than 
 1,100 majority, the result hanging in the balance 
 for nearly a week. 
 
 II 
 
 In the convention of 1884, which met at Chicago, 
 we had a veritable monkey-and-parrot time. It 
 was next after the schism in Congi'ess between the 
 Democratic factions led respectively by Carlisle 
 and Randall, Carlisle having been chosen Speaker ji 
 of the House over Randall. 
 
 Converse, of Ohio, appeared in the Platform 
 Committee representing Randall, and Morrison, of 
 Illinois, and myself, representing Carlisle. I was 
 bent upon making Morrison chairman of the com- 
 mittee. But it was agreed that the chairmanship 
 should be held in abeyance until the platform had 
 been formulated and adopted. The subcommittee 
 to whom the task was delegated sat fifty-one hours 
 without a break before its work was completed. 
 Then JMorrison was named chairman. It was ar- 
 ranged thereafter between Converse, Morrison and 
 myself that when the agreed report was made. Con- 
 verse and I should have each what time he required 
 [252] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 to say what was desired in explanation, I to close 
 the debate and move the previous question. At this 
 point General Butler sidled up. *'Where do I come 
 in?" he asked. 
 
 "You don't get in at all, you blasted old sinner," 
 said Morrison. 
 
 "I have scriptural warrant," General Butler said. 
 "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth the 
 corn." 
 
 "All right, old man," said IMorrison, good-hu- 
 moredly, "take all the time you want." 
 
 In his speech before the convention General But- 
 ler was not at his happiest, and in closing he gave 
 me a particularly good opening. "If you adopt 
 this platform of my friend Watterson," he said, 
 "God may help you, but I can't." 
 
 I was standing by his side, and, it being my turn, 
 he made way for me, and I said: "During the last 
 few days and nights of agreeable, though rather 
 irksome, intercourse, I have learned to love General 
 Butler, but I must declare that in an option be- 
 tween him and the Almighty I have a prejudice in 
 favor of God." 
 
 In his personal intercourse, General Butler was 
 the most genial of men. The subcommittee in 
 
 [253] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 charge of the preparation of a platform held its 
 meetings in the drawing-room of his hotel apart- 
 ment, and he had constituted himself our host as 
 well as our colleague. I had not previously met 
 him. It was not long after we came together be- 
 fore he began to call me by my Christian name. At 
 one stage of the proceedings when by substituting 
 one word for another it looked as though we might 
 reach an agreement, he said to me: "Henry, what 
 is the difference between 'exclusively for public 
 purposes' and 'a tariff for revenue only'?" 
 
 "I know of none," I answered. 
 
 "Do you think that the committee have found 
 you out?" 
 
 "No, I scarcely think so." 
 
 "Then I will see that they do," and he proceeded 
 in his peculiarly subtle way to undo all that we 
 had done, prolonging the session twenty-four hours. 
 
 He was an able man and a lovable man. The 
 missing ingredient was serious belief. Just after 
 the nomination of the Breckinridge and Lane Pres- 
 idential ticket in 1860, I heard him make an ultra- 
 Southern speech from Mr. Breckinridge's door- 
 way. "What do you think of that?" I asked Andrew 
 Johnson, who stood by me, and Johnson answered 
 [254] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 sharply, with an oath: "I never like a man to be 
 for me more than I am for myself." I have been 
 told that even at home General Butler could never 
 acquire the public confidence. In spite of his con- 
 ceded mentality and manliness he gave the impres- 
 sion of being something of an intellectual sharper. 
 He was charitable, generous and amiable. The 
 famous New Orleans order which had made him 
 odious to the women of the South he had issued to 
 warn bad women and protect good women. As- 
 suredly he did not foresee the interpretation that 
 would be put upon it. He was personally popular 
 in Congress. When he came to Washington he 
 dispensed a lavish hospitality. Such radical Dem- 
 ocrats as Beck and Knott did not disdain his com- 
 pany, became, indeed, his familiars. Yet, curious 
 to relate, a Kentucky Congressman of the period 
 lost his seat because it was charged and proven that 
 he had ridden in a carriage to the White House 
 with the Yankee Boanerges on a public occasion. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Mere party issues never counted with me. I have 
 read too much and seen too much. At my present 
 time of life they count not at all. I used to think 
 
 [255] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 that there was a principle involved between the dog- 
 mas of Free Trade and Protection as they were 
 preached by their respective attorneys. Yet what 
 was either except the ancient, everlasting scheme — 
 
 — "The good old role — the simple plan. 
 That they should take who have the power 
 And they should keep who can" 
 
 How little wisdom one man may get from an- 
 other man's counsels, one nation may get from 
 another nation's history, can be partly computed 
 when we reflect how often our personal experience 
 has failed in warning admonition. 
 
 Temperament and circumstance do indeed cut a 
 prodigious figure in life. Traversing the older 
 countries, especially Spain, the most illustrative, 
 the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not 
 merely the logic of events, but the common law 
 of the inevitable. The Latin of the Sixteenth cen- 
 tury was a recrudescence of the Roman of the First. 
 He had not, like the JNIongolian, lived long enough 
 to become a stoic. He was mainly a cjmic and an 
 adventurer. Thence he flowered into a sybarite. 
 Coming to great wealth with the discoveries of 
 [256] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Columbus and the conquests of Pizarro and Cortes, 
 he proceeded to enjoy its fruits according to his 
 fancy and the fashion of the times. 
 
 He erected massive shrines to his deities. He 
 reared noble palaces. He built about his cathedrals 
 and his castles what were then thought to be great 
 cities, walled and fortified. He was, for all his 
 self-sufficiency and pride, short-sighted; and yet, 
 until they arrived, how could he foresee the develop- 
 ments of artillery? They were as hidden from him 
 as three centuries later the wonders of electricity 
 were hidden from us. 
 
 I was never a Free Trader. I stood for a tariff 
 for revenue as the least oppressive and safest sup- 
 port of Government. The protective system in the 
 United States, responsible for our unequal distri- 
 bution of wealth, took at least its name from Spain, 
 and the Robber Barons, as I used to call the Pro- 
 tectionists of Pennsylvania, were not of immediate 
 German origin. 
 
 Truth to say, both on land and water Spain has 
 made a deal of history, and the front betwixt Gi- 
 braltar and the Isle of San Fernando — Tangier on 
 one side and the Straits of Tarifa on the other — 
 Cape Trafalgar, where Nelson fought the famous 
 
 [257] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 battle, midway between them — has had its share. 
 
 Tarifa! What memories it invokes! In the 
 olden and golden days of primitive man, before cor- 
 poration lawyers had learned how to frame pillag- 
 ing statutes, and rascally politicians to bamboozle 
 confiding constituencies — thus I used to put it — 
 the gentle pirates of Tarifa laid broad and deep the 
 foundations for the Protective System in the 
 United States. 
 
 It was a fruitful as well as a congenial theme, 
 and I rang all the changes on it. To take by law 
 from one man what is his and give it to another 
 man who has not earned it and has no right to it, 
 I showed to be an invention of the Moors, copied 
 by the Spaniards and elevated thence into political 
 economy by the Americans. Tarifa took its name 
 from Tarif-Ben-Malik, the most enterprising Rob- 
 ber Baron of his day, and thus the Lords of Tarifa 
 w^ere the progenitors of the Robber Barons of the 
 Black Forest, New England and Pittsburgh. 
 Tribute was the name the I\Ioors gave their rob- 
 bery, w^hich was open and aboveboard. The Coal 
 Kings, the Steel Kings and the Oil Kings of the 
 modern world have contrived to hide the process; 
 but in Spain the palaces of their forefathers rise in 
 [258] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 lonely and solemn grandeur just as a thousand 
 years hence the palaces upon the Fifth Avenue side 
 of Central Park and along Riverside Drive, not to 
 mention those of the Schuylkill and the Delaware, 
 may become but roosts for bats and owls, and the 
 chronicler of the Anthropophagi, "whose heads do 
 reach the skies," may tell how the voters of the 
 Great Republic were bought and sold with their 
 own money, until "Heaven released the legions 
 north of the North Pole, and they swooped down 
 and crushed the pulpy mass beneath their aveng- 
 ing snowshoes." 
 
 The gold that was gathered by the Spaniards 
 and fought over so valiantly is scattered to the four 
 ends of the earth. It may be as potent to-day as 
 then ; but it does not seem nearly so heroic. A good 
 deal of it has found its way to London, which a 
 short century and a half ago "had not," according 
 to Adam Smith, "sufficient wealth to compete with 
 Cadiz." We have had our full share without fight- 
 ing for it. Thus all things come to him who con- 
 trives and waits. 
 
 Meanwhile, there are "groups" and "rings." 
 And, likewise, "leaders" and "bosses." What do 
 they know or care about the origins of wealth ; about 
 
 [259] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" | 
 
 Venice; about Cadiz; about what is said of Wall ^ 
 Street? The Spanish Main was long ago stripped V 
 of its pillage. The buccaneers took themselves off [ 
 to keep company with the Vikings. Yet, away 
 down in those money chests, once filled with what 
 were pieces of eight and ducats and doubloons, who | 
 shall say that spirits may not lurk and ghosts walk, j 
 one old freebooter wheezing to another old free- \ 
 hooter: "They order these things better in the 
 'States.' " 
 
 IV 
 
 I have enjoyed hugely my several sojourns in 
 Spain. The Spaniard is unlike any other Euro- 
 pean. He may not make you love him. But you 
 are bound to respect him. 
 
 There is a mansion in Seville known as The 
 House of Pontius Pilate because part of the re- 
 mains of the abode of the F^oman Governor was 
 brought from Jerusalem and used in a building 
 suited to the dignity of a Spanish grandee who was 
 also a Lord of Tarifa. The Duke of Medina Celi, 
 its present owner, is a lineal scion of the old pirati- 
 cal crew. The mansion is filled with the fruits of 
 many a foray. There are plunder from Naples, 
 where one ancestor was Viceroy, and treasures from 
 [260] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 the temples of the Aztecs and the Incas, where two 
 other ancestors ruled. Every coping stone and 
 pillar cost some mariner of the Tarifa Straits a 
 pot of money. 
 
 Its owner is a pauper. A carekeeper shows it 
 for a peseta a head. To such base uses may we 
 come at last. Yet Seville basks in the sun and 
 smiles on the flashing waters of the Guadalquivir, 
 and Cadiz sits serene upon the green hillsides of 
 San Sebastian, just as if nothing had ever hap- 
 pened; neither the Barber and Carmen, nor Nelson 
 and Byi'on; the past but a phantom; the present 
 the prosiest of prose-poems. 
 
 There are canny Spaniards even as there are 
 canny Scots, who grow rich and prosper; but there 
 is never a Spaniard who does not regard the politi- 
 cal fabric, and the laws, as fair game, the rule be- 
 ing always "devil take the hindmost," community 
 of interests nowhere. "The good old vices of 
 Spain," that is, the robbing of the lesser rogue by 
 the gi'eater in regulated gradations all the way 
 from the King to the beggar, are as prevalent and 
 as vital as ever they were. Curiously enough, a 
 tiny stream of Hebraic blood and JNIoorish blood 
 still trickles through the Spanish coast towns. It 
 
 [201] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 may be traced through the nomenclature in spite of 
 its Castilian prefigurations and appendices, which 
 would account for some of the enterprise and ac- 
 tivity that show themselves, albeit only by fits and 
 starts. 
 
 [262] 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRTIETH 
 
 THE MAKERS OF THE REPUBLIC — LINCOLN, JEFFER- 
 SON^ CLAY AND WEBSTER — THE PROPOSED 
 LEAGUE OF NATIONS — THE WILSONIAN INCER- 
 TITUDE — THE "new freedom." 
 
 THE makers of the American Republic range 
 themselves in two groups — Washington, 
 Franklin and Jefferson — Clay, Webster and 
 Lincoln — each of whom, having a genius peculiarly 
 his own, gave himself and his best to the cause of 
 national unity and independence. 
 
 In a general way it maj^ be said that Washington 
 created and Lincoln saved the Union. But along 
 with Washington and Lincoln, Clay makes a good 
 historic third, for it was the masterful Kentuckian 
 who, joining rare foresight to surpassing eloquence 
 and leading many eminent men, including Webster, 
 was able to hold the legions of unrest at bay during 
 the formative period. 
 
 There are those who call these great men "back 
 
 [263] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 numbers," who tell us we have left the past behind 
 us and entered an epoch of more enlightened prog- 
 ress — who would displace the example of the sim- 
 ple lives they led and the homely truths they told, 
 to set up a school of philosophy which had made 
 Athens stare and Rome howl, and, I dare say, is 
 causing the Old Continentals to turn over in their 
 graves. The self-exploiting spectacle and bizarre 
 teaching of this school passes the wit of man to 
 fathom. Professing the ideal and proposing to re- 
 create the Universe, the New Freedom, as it calls 
 itself, would standardize it. The effect of that would 
 be to desiccate the human species in human conceit. 
 It would cheapen the very harps and halos in 
 Heaven and convert the Day of Judgment into a 
 moving picture show. 
 
 I protest that I am not of its kidney. In point 
 of fact, its platitudes "stick in my gizzard." I 
 belong the rather to those old-fashioned ones — 
 
 "Who love their land because it is their own, 
 And scorn to give aught other reason why; 
 Who'd shake hands with a king upon his 
 
 throne, 
 And think it kindness to his majesty." 
 [264] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 I have many rights — birthrights — to speak of 
 Kentucky as a Kentuckian, beside that of more 
 than fifty years' service upon what may be fairly 
 called the battle-line of the Dark and Bloody 
 Ground. 
 
 My grandmother's father, William ]\Iitchell 
 Morrison, had raised a company of riflemen in the 
 War of the Revolution, and, after the War, 
 marched it westward. He commanded the troops 
 in the old fort at Harrodsburg, where my grand- 
 mother was born in 178-1. He died a general. uNIy 
 grandfather, James Black's father, the Rev. James 
 Black, was chaplain of the fort. He remembered 
 the birth of the baby girl who was to become his 
 wife. He was a noble stalwart — a perfect type of 
 the hunters of Kentucky — who could bring down a 
 squirrel from the highest bough and hit a bull's 
 eye at a hundred yards after he was three score 
 and ten. 
 
 It was he who delighted my childhood with bear 
 stories and properly lurid narrations of the braves 
 in buckskin and the bucks in paint and feathers, 
 with now and then a red-coat to give pungency and 
 variety to the tale. He would sing me to sleep with 
 hunting songs. He would take me with him afield 
 
 [265] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 to carry the game bag, and I was the only one of 
 many grandchildren to be named in his will. In my 
 thoughts and in my dreams he has been with me all 
 my life, a memory and an example, and an ever 
 glorious inspiration. 
 
 Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton were among 
 my earliest heroes. 
 
 II 
 
 Born in a Democratic camp, and growing to 
 manhood on the Democratic side of a political 
 battlefield, I did not accept, as I came later to 
 realize, the transcendent personal merit and pub- 
 lic service of Henry Clay. Being of Tennessee 
 parentage, perhaps the figure of Andrew Jackson 
 came between ; perhaps the rhetoric of Daniel Web- 
 ster. Once hearing me make some slighting re- 
 mark of the Great Commoner, my father, a life-long 
 Democrat, who, on opposing sides, had served in 
 Congress with Mr. Clay, gently rebuked me. ''Do 
 not express such opinions, my son," he said, ''they 
 discredit yourself. Mr. Clay was a very great man 
 — a born leader of men." 
 
 It was certainly he, more than any other man, 
 who held the Union together until the time arrived 
 for Lincoln to save it. 
 [266] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 I made no such mistake, however, with respect to 
 Abraham Lincoln. From the first he appeared to 
 me a great man, a born leader of men. His death 
 proved a blow to the whole country — most of all to 
 the Southern section of it. If he had lived there 
 would have been no Era of Reconstruction, with 
 its repressive agencies and oppressive legislation; 
 there would have been wanting to the extremism of 
 the time the bloody cue of his taking off to mount 
 the steeds and spur the flanks of vengeance. For 
 Lincoln entertained, with respect to the rehabilita- 
 tion of the Union, the single wish that the South- 
 ern States — to use his homely phraseology — 
 "should come back home and behave themselves," 
 and if he had lived he would have made this wish 
 effectual as he made everything else effectual to 
 which he addressed himself. 
 
 His was the genius of common sense. Of 
 perfect intellectual acuteness and aplomb, he 
 sprang from a Virginia pedigree and was born 
 in Kentucky. He knew all about the South, 
 its institutions, its traditions and its peculiar- 
 ities. He was an old-line Whig of the school of 
 Henry Clay, with strong Emancipation leaning, 
 never an Abolitionist. "If slavery be not wrong," 
 
 [267] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 he said, "nothing is wrong," but he also said and 
 reiterated it time and again, "I have no prejudice 
 against the Southern people. They are just what 
 we would be in their situation. If slavery did not 
 now exist among them they would not introduce it. 
 If it did now exist among us, we would not instant- 
 ly give it up." 
 
 From first to last throughout the angry debates 
 preceding the War of Sections, amid the passions 
 of the War itself, not one vindictive, proscriptive 
 word fell from his tongue or pen, whilst during its 
 progress there was scarcely a day when he did not 
 project his great personality between some South- 
 ern man or woman and danger. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There has been much discussion about what did 
 and what did not occur at the famous Hampton 
 Roads Conference. That Mr. Lincoln met and con- 
 ferred with the official representatives of the Con- 
 federate Government, led by the Vice President of 
 the Confederate States, when it must have been 
 known to him that the Confederacy was nearing the 
 end of its resources, is sufficient proof of the breadth 
 both of his humanity and his patriotism. Yet he 
 [268] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 went to Fortress Monroe prepared not only to make 
 whatever concessions toward the restoration of 
 Union and Peace he had the lawful authority to 
 make, but to offer some concessions which could in 
 the nature of the case go no further at that time 
 than his personal assurance. His constitutional 
 powers were limited. But he was in himself the em- 
 bodiment of great moral power. 
 
 The story that he offered payment for the slaves 
 — so often affirmed and denied — is in either case 
 but a quibble with the actual facts. He could not 
 have made such an offer except tentatively, lack- 
 ing the means to carry it out. He was not given 
 the opportunity to make it, because the Confederate 
 Commissioners were under instructions to treat 
 solely on the basis of the recognition of the 
 independence of the Confederacy. The confer- 
 ence came to nought. It ended where it began. 
 But there is ample evidence that he went to 
 Hampton Roads resolved to commit himself to that 
 proposition. He did, according to the official re- 
 ports, refer to it in specific terms, having already 
 formulated a plan of procedure. This plan exists 
 and may be seen in his own handwriting. It em- 
 braced a joint resolution to be submitted by the 
 
 [2G9] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 President to the two Houses of Congress appro- 
 priating $400,000,000 to be distributed among the 
 Southern States on the basis of the slave population 
 of each according to the Census of 1860, and a 
 proclamation to be issued by himself, as President, 
 when the joint resolution had been passed by Con- 
 gress. 
 
 There can be no controversy among honest stu- 
 dents of history on this point. That Mr. Lincoln 
 said to Mr. Stephens, "Let me write Union at the 
 top of this page and you may write below it what- 
 ever else you please," is referable to Mr. Stephens' 
 statement made to many friends and attested by a 
 number of reliable persons. But that he medi- 
 tated the most liberal terms, including payment for 
 the slaves, rests neither upon conjecture nor hear- 
 say, but on documentary proof. It may be argued 
 that he could not have secured the adoption of any 
 such plan; but of his purpose, and its genuineness, 
 there can be no question and there ought to be no 
 equivocation. 
 
 Indeed, payment for the slaves had been all 
 
 along in his mind. He believed the North equally 
 
 guilty with the South for the original existence of 
 
 slavery. He clearly understood that the Irrepres- 
 
 [270] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 sible Conflict was a Conflict of systems, not a merely 
 sectional and partisan quarrel. He was a just man, 
 abhorring proscription: an old Conscience Whig, 
 indeed, who stood in awe of the Constitution and 
 his oath of office. He wanted to leave the South 
 no right to claim that the North, finding slave labor 
 unremunerative, had sold its negroes to the South 
 and then turned about and by force of arms con- 
 fiscated what it had unloaded at a profit. He fully 
 recognized slavery as property. The Proclamation 
 of Emancipation was issued as a war measure. In 
 his message to Congress of December, 1862, he pro- 
 posed payment for the slaves, elaborating a scheme 
 in detail and urging it with copious and cogent 
 argument. "The people of the South," said he, ad- 
 dressing a Congi-ess at that moment in the throes 
 of a bloody war with the South, "are not more re- 
 sponsible for the original introduction of this prop- 
 erty than are the people of the North, and, when it 
 is remembered how unhesitatingly we all use cotton 
 and sugar and share the profits of dealing in them, 
 it may not be quite safe to say that the South has 
 been more responsible than the North for its con- 
 tinuance." 
 
 [271] 
 
"MARSE HENRY' 
 
 IV 
 
 It has been my rule, aim and effort in my news- 
 paper career to print nothing of a man which I 
 would not say to his face; to print nothing of a 
 man in malice ; to look well and think twice before 
 consigning a suspect to the ruin of printer's ink; 
 to respect the old and defend the weak; and, lastty, 
 at work and at play, daytime and nighttime, to be 
 good to the girls and square with the boj^s, for hath 
 it not been written of such is the kingdom of 
 Heaven? 
 
 There will always be in a democracy two or more 
 sets of rival leaders to two or more differing groups 
 of followers. Hitherto history has classified these 
 as conservatives and radicals. But as society has 
 become more and more complex the groups have 
 had their subdivisions. As a consequence specula- 
 tive doctrinaries and adventurous poHticians are en- 
 abled to get in their work of confusing the issues 
 and exploiting themselves. 
 
 " 'What are these fireworks for?' asks the rustic 
 in the parable. 'To blind the eyes of the people,' 
 answers the cynic." 
 
 I would not say aught in a spirit of hostihty to the 
 [272] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 President of the United States. Woodrow Wilson 
 is a clever speaker and writer. Yet the usual trend 
 and phrase of his observations seem to be those of 
 a special pleader, rather than those of a statesman. 
 Every man, each of the nations, is for peace as an 
 abstract proposition. That much goes without say- 
 ing. But Mr. Wilson proposes to bind the hands 
 of a giant and take lottery chances on the future. 
 This, I think, the country w^ill contest. 
 
 He is obsessed by the idea of a League of Na- 
 tions. If not his own discovery he has yet made 
 himself its leader. He talks flippantly about 
 "American ideals" that have won the war against 
 Germany, as if there were no English ideals and 
 French ideals. 
 
 *Tn all that he does we can descry the school- 
 master who arrived at the front rather late in life. 
 One needs only to go over the record and mark 
 how often he has reversed himself to detect a cer- 
 tain mental and temperamental instability clearly 
 indicating a lack of fixed or resolute intellectual 
 purpose. This is characteristic of an excess in edu- 
 cation; of the half baked mind overtrained. The 
 overeducated mind fancies himself a doctrinaire 
 when he is in point of fact only a disciple." 
 
 [273] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Woodrow Wilson was born to the rather sophis- 
 ticated culture of the too, too solid South. Had 
 he grown up in England a hundred years ago he 
 would have been a follower of the Delia Cruscans. 
 He has what is called a facile pen, though it some- 
 times runs away with him. It seems to have done 
 so in the matter of the League of Nations. In- 
 evitably such a scheme would catch the fancy of one 
 ever on the alert for the fanciful. 
 
 I cannot too often repeat that the world we in- 
 habit is a world of sin, disease and death. ]Men will 
 fight whenever they want to fight, and no artificial 
 scheme or process is likely to restrain them. It 
 is mainly the costliness of war that makes most 
 against it. But, as we have seen the last four years, 
 it will not quell the passions of men or dull national 
 and racial ambitions. 
 
 All that ]Mr. Wilson and his proposed League of 
 Nations can do will be to revamp, and maybe for 
 a while to reimpress the minds of the rank and file, 
 until the bellowing followers of Bellona are ready 
 to spring. 
 
 Eternal peace, universal peace, was not the pur- 
 pose of the Deity in the creation of the universe. 
 
 Nevertheless, it would seem to be the duty of 
 [274] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 men in great place, as of us all, to proclaim the 
 gospel of good will and cultivate the arts of fra- 
 ternity. I have no quarrel with the President on 
 this score. What I contest is the self -exploitation 
 to which he is prone, so lacking in dignity and open 
 to animadversion. 
 
 Thus it was that instant upon the appearance 
 of the proposed League of Nations I made bold 
 to challenge it, as but a pretty conceit having no 
 real value, a serious assault upon our national 
 sovereignty. 
 
 Its argument seemed to me full of copybook 
 maxims, easier recited than applied. As what I 
 wrote preceded the debates and events of the last 
 six months, I may not improperly make the follow- 
 ing quotation from a screed of mine appearing in 
 The Courier- Journal of the 5th of March, 1919: 
 
 "The League of Nations is a fad. Politics, like 
 society and letters, has its fads. In society they 
 call them fashion and in literature originality. Pol- 
 itics gives the name of 'issues' to its fads. A tak- 
 ing issue is as a stunning gown, or 'a best seller.' 
 The President's mind wears a coat of many colors, 
 
 [275] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and he can change it at will, his mood being the 
 objective point, not always too far ahead, or clear 
 of vision. Carl Schurz was wont to speak of Gratz 
 Brown as 'a man of thoughts rather than of ideas.' 
 I wonder if that can be justly said of the Presi- 
 dent? 'Gentlemen will please not shoot at the pian- 
 iste,' adjured the superscription over the music 
 stand in the Dakota dive; 'she is doing the best 
 that she knows how.' 
 
 "Already it is being proclaimed that Woodrow 
 Wilson can have a third nomination for the presi- 
 dency if he wants it, and nobody seems shocked by 
 it, which proves that the people grow degenerate 
 and foreshadows that one of these nights some fool 
 with a spyglass will break into Mars and let loose 
 the myriads of warlike gyascutes who inhabit that 
 freak luminary, thence to slide down the willing 
 moonbeam and swallow us every one! 
 
 "In a sense the Monroe Doctrine was a fad. 
 Oblivious to Canada, and British Columbia and the 
 Spanish provinces, it warned the despots of Europe 
 off the grass in America. We actually went to 
 war with IMexico, having enjoyed two wars with 
 England, and again and again we threatened to 
 [276] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 annex the Dominion. Ever}i;liing betwixt hell and 
 Halifax was Yankee preempted. 
 
 "Truth to say, your Uncle Samuel was ever a 
 jingo. But your Cousin Woodrow, enlarging on 
 the original plan, would stretch our spiritual bound- 
 aries to the ends of the earth aiid make of us the 
 moral custodian of the universe. This much, no 
 less, he got of the school of sweetness and light in 
 which he grew up. 
 
 "I am a jingo myself. But a wicked material 
 jingo, who wants facts, not theories. If I thought 
 it possible and that it would pay, I would annex the 
 North Pole and colonize the Equator. It is, after 
 the manner of the lady in the play, that the Presi- 
 dent 'doth protest too much,' which displeases me 
 and where, in point of fact, I 'get off the reserva- 
 tion.' 
 
 "That, being a politician and maybe a candidate, 
 he is keenly alive to votes goes without saying. On 
 the surface this League of Nations having the word 
 'peace' in big letters emblazoned both upon its fore- 
 head and the seat of its trousers — or, should I say, 
 woven into the hem of its petticoat? — seems an ap- 
 peal for votes. I do not believe it will bear dis- 
 cussion. In a way, it tickles the ear without con- 
 
 [277] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 vincing the sense. There is nothing sentimental 
 about the actualities of Government, much as public 
 men seek to profit by arousing the passions of the 
 people. Government is a hard and fast and dry- 
 reality. At best statesmanship can only half do 
 the things it would. Its aims are most assured when 
 tending a little landward; its footing safest on its 
 native heath. We have plenty to do on our own 
 continent without seeking to right things on other 
 continents. Too many of us — the President among 
 the rest, I fear — miscalculate the distance between 
 contingency and desire. 
 
 " 'We figure to ourselves 
 The thing we like: and then we build it up: 
 As chance will have it on the rock or sand — 
 When thought grows tired of wandering o'er the 
 
 world. 
 And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.' " 
 
 I am sorry to see the New York World fly off 
 at a tangent about this latest of the Wilsonian 
 hobbies. Frank Irving Cobb, the editor of the 
 World, is, as I have often said, the strongest writer 
 on the New York press since Horace Greeley. But 
 [278] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 he can hardly be called a sentimentalist, as Greeley 
 was, and there is nothing but sentiment — gush and 
 gammon — in the proposed League of Nations. 
 
 It may be all right for England. There are cer- 
 tainly no flies on it for France. But we don't need 
 it. Its effects can only be to tie our hands, not keep 
 the dogs away, and even at the worst, in stress of 
 weather, we are strong enough to keep the dogs 
 away ourselves. 
 
 We should say to Europe: "Shinny on your 
 own side of the water and we will shinny on our 
 side." It may be that Napoleon's opinion will come 
 true that ultimately Europe will be "all Cossack or 
 all repubhcan." Part of it has come true already, 
 ^leanwhile it looks as though the United States, 
 having exhausted the reasonable possibilities of de- 
 mocracy, is beginning to turn crank. Look at wo- 
 man suffrage by Federal edict ; look at ^prohibition 
 by act of Congress and constitutional amendment; 
 tobacco next to walk on the plank; and then! — 
 Lord, how glad I feel that I am nearly a hundred 
 years old and shall not live to see it ! 
 
 [279] 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIRST 
 
 THE AGE OF MIRACLES A STORY OF FRANKLIN 
 
 PIERCE SIMON SUGGS AND BILLY SUNDAY 
 
 JEFFERSON DAVIS AND AARON BURR CERTAIN 
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL SHORTCOMINGS. 
 
 THE years intervening between 1865 and 1919 
 may be accounted the most momentous in all 
 the cycles of the ages. The bells that something 
 more than half a century ago rang forth to welcome 
 peace in America have been from that day to this 
 jangled out of tune and harsh with the sounding 
 of war's alarms in every other part of the world. 
 We flatter ourselves with the thought that our trag- 
 edy lies behind us. Whether this be true or not, 
 the tragedy of Europe is at hand and ahead. The 
 miracles of modern invention, surpassing those of 
 old, have made for strife, not for peace. Civiliza- 
 tion has gone backward, not forward. Rulers, in- 
 [280] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 toxicated by the lust of power and conquest, have 
 lost their reason, and nations, following after, like 
 cattle led to slaughter, seem as the bereft of Heaven 
 "that knew not God." 
 
 We read the story of our yesterdays as it unfolds 
 itself in the current chronicle; the ascent to the 
 bank-house, the descent to the mad-house, and, over 
 the glittering paraphernalia that follows to the 
 tomb, we reflect upon the money-zealot's progress ; 
 the dizzy height, the dazzling array, the craze for 
 more and more and more ; then the temptation and 
 fall, millions gone, honor gone, reason gone — the 
 innocent and the gentle, with the guilty, dragged 
 through the mire of the prison, and the court — and 
 we draw back aghast. Yet, if we speak of these 
 things we are called pessimists. 
 
 I have always counted myself an optimist. I 
 know that I do not lie awake nights musing on the 
 ingratitude either of my stars or my countrymen. 
 I pity the man who does. Looking backward, I 
 have sincere compassion for Webster and for Clay! 
 What boots it to them, now that they lie beneath 
 the mold, and that the drums and tramplings of 
 nearly seventy years of the world's strifes and 
 follies and sordid ambitions and mean repinings, 
 
 [281] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and longings, and laughter, and tears, have passed 
 over their graves, what boots it to them, now, that 
 they failed to get all they wanted? There is indeed 
 snug lying in the churchyard; but the flowers 
 smell as sweet and the birds sing as merry, and the 
 stars look do^\^l as loving upon the God-hallowed 
 mounds of the lowly and the poor, as upon the 
 man-bedecked monuments of the Kings of men. 
 All of us, the least with the greatest, let us hope and 
 believe shall attain immortal life at last. What 
 was there for Webster, what was there for Clay to 
 quibble about? I read with a kind of wonder, and 
 a sickening sense of the littleness of great things, 
 those passages in the story of their lives where it 
 is told how they stormed and swore, when tidings 
 reached them that they had been balked of their 
 desires. 
 
 Yet they might have been so happy; so happy 
 in their daily toil, with its lofty aims and fair sur- 
 roundings; so happy in the sense of duty done; so 
 happy, above all, in their own Heaven-sent genius, 
 with its noble opportunities and splendid achieve- 
 ments. They should have emulated the satisfac- 
 tion told of Franklin Pierce. It is related that an 
 enemy was inveighing against him, when an alleged 
 [282] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 friend spoke up and said: "You should not talk 
 so about the President, I assure you that he is not 
 at all the man you describe him to be. On the con- 
 trary, he is a man of the rarest gifts and virtues. 
 He has long been regarded as the greatest orator 
 in New England, and the greatest lawyer in New 
 England, and surely no one of his predecessors 
 ever sent such state papers to Congress." 
 
 "How are you going to prove it," angrily re- 
 torted the first speaker. 
 
 "I don't need to prove it," coolly replied the 
 second. "He admits it." 
 
 I cannot tell just how I should feel if I were 
 President, though, on the whole, I fancy fairly com- 
 fortable, but I am quite certain that I would not 
 exchange places with any of the men who have been 
 President, and I have known quite a number of 
 them. 
 
 II 
 
 I am myself accused sometimes of being a "pessi- 
 mist." Assuredly I am no optimist of the Billy 
 Sunday sort, who fancies the adoption of the pro- 
 hibition amendment the coming of "de jubilo." 
 Early in life, while yet a recognized baseball au- 
 
 [283] 
 
^'MARSE HENRY" 
 
 thority, Mr. Sunday discovered "pay dirt" in what 
 Col. Mulberry Sellers called "piousness." He 
 made it an asset and began to issue celestial notes, 
 countersigned by himself and made redeemable in 
 Heaven. From that day to this he has been follow- 
 ing the lead of the renowned Simon Suggs, who, 
 having in true camp meeting style acquired "the 
 grace of God," turned loose as an exhorter shout- 
 ing "Step up to the mourner's bench, my brether- 
 ing, step up lively, and be saved ! I come in on na 
 'er par, an' see what I draw'd! Religion's the only 
 game whar you can't lose. Him that trusts the 
 Lord holds fo' aces!" 
 
 The Billy Sunday game has made Billy Sunday 
 rich. Having exhausted Hell-fire-and-brimstone, 
 the evangel turns to the Demon Rum. Satan, 
 with hide and horns, has had his day. Prohibition 
 is now the trick card. 
 
 The fanatic is never either very discriminating 
 or very particular. As a rule, for him any taking 
 "ism" will suffice. To-day, it happens to be 
 "whisky." To-morrow it will be tobacco. Finally, 
 having established the spy system and made house- 
 to-house espionage a rule of conventicle, it will be- 
 come a misdemeanor for a man to kiss his wife. 
 [284] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 From fakers who have cards up their sleeves, 
 not to mention snakes in their boots, we hear a 
 great deal about "the people," pronounced by them 
 as if it were spelled "pee-pul." It is the unfail- 
 ing recourse of the professional politician in quest 
 of place. Yet scarcely any reference, or referee, 
 were faultier. 
 
 The people en masse constitute what we call the 
 mob. INIobs have rarely been right — never except 
 when capably led. It was the mob of Jerusalem 
 that did the unoffending Jesus of Nazareth to 
 death. It was the mob in Paris that made the 
 Reign of Terror. Mobs have seldom been tempted, 
 even had a chance to go wrong, that they have not 
 gone wrong. 
 
 The "people" is a fetish. It was the people, 
 misled, who precipitated the South into the madness 
 of secession and the ruin of a hopelessly unequal 
 war of sections. It was the people backing if not 
 compelling the Kaiser, who committed hari-kari for 
 themselves and their empire in Germany. It is 
 the people leaderless who are making havoc in 
 Russia. Throughout the length and breadth of 
 Christendom, in all lands and ages, the people, 
 when turned loose, have raised every inch of hell 
 
 [285] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 to the square foot they were able to raise, often 
 upon the slightest pretext, or no pretext at all. 
 
 This is merely to note the mortal fallibility of 
 man, most fallible when herded in groups and prone 
 to do in the aggregate what he would hesitate to 
 do when left to himself and his individual account- 
 ability. 
 
 Under a wise dispensation of power, despotism, 
 we are told embodies the best of all government. 
 The trouble is that despotism is seldom, if ever, 
 wise. It is its nature to be inconsiderate, being es- 
 sentially selfish, grasping and tyrannous. As a 
 rule therefore revolution — usually of force — has 
 been required to change or reform it. Perfect- 
 ibility was not designed for mortal man. That in- 
 deed furnishes the strongest argument in favor of 
 the immortality of the soul, life on earth but the 
 ante-chamber of eternal life. It would be a cruel 
 Deity that condemned man to the brief and vexed 
 span of human existence with nothing beyond the 
 grave. 
 
 We know not whence we came, or whither we 
 go ; but it is a fair guess that we shall in the end get 
 better than we have known. 
 
 [286] 
 
'MARSE HENRY" 
 
 ni 
 
 Historic democracy is dead. 
 
 This is not to say that a Democratic party organ- 
 ization has ceased to exist. Nor does it mean that 
 there are no more Democrats and that the Demo- 
 cratic party is dead in the sense that the Federalist 
 party is dead or the Whig party is dead, or the 
 Greenback party is dead, or the PopuHst party is 
 dead. That which has died is the Democratic party 
 of Jefferson and Jackson and Tilden. The princi- 
 ples of government which they laid down and ad- 
 vocated have been for the most part obliterated. 
 What slavery and secession were unable to accom- 
 plish has been brought about by nationalizing sump- 
 tuary laws and suffrage. 
 
 The death-blow to Jeffersonian democracy was 
 delivered by the Democratic Senators and Repre- 
 sentatives from the South and West who carried 
 through the prohibition amendment. The cowp de 
 grace was administered by a President of the 
 United States elected as a Democrat when he ap- 
 proved the Federal suffrage amendment to the Con- 
 stitution. 
 
 The kind of government for which the Jeffer- 
 
 [287] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 sonlan democracy successfully battled for more than 
 a century was thus repudiated; centralization was 
 invited; State rights were assassinated in the very 
 citadel of State rights. The charter of local self- 
 government become a scrap of paper, the way is 
 open for the obliteration of the States in all their 
 essential functions and the erection of a Federal 
 Government more powerful than anything of which 
 Alexander Hamilton dared to di-eam. 
 
 When the history of these times comes to be 
 written it may be said of Woodrow Wilson: he 
 rose to world celebrity by circumstance rather than 
 by character. He was favored of the gods. He 
 possessed a bright, forceful mind. His achieve- 
 ments were thrust upon him. Though it some- 
 times ran away with him, his pen possessed extraor- 
 dinary facihty. Thus he was ever able to put his 
 best foot foremost. Never in the larger sense a 
 leader of men as were Chatham and Fox, as were 
 Washington, Clay and Lincoln; nor of ideas as were 
 Rousseau, Voltaire and Franklin, he had the subtle 
 tenacity of Louis the Eleventh of France, the keen 
 foresight of Richelieu with a talent for the sur- 
 prising which would have raised him to eminence 
 [288] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 in journalism. In short he was an opportunist void 
 of conviction and indifferent to consistency. 
 
 The pen is mightier than the sword onlj^ when 
 it has behind it a heart as well as a brain. He who 
 wields it must be brave, upright and steadfast. We 
 are gi^dng our Chief Executive enormous powers. 
 As a rule his wishes prevail. His name becomes 
 the sjTiibol of party loyalty. Yet it is after all a 
 figure of speech not a personality that appeals to 
 our sense of duty without necessarily engaging our 
 affection. 
 
 Historic Republicanism is likewise dead, as dead 
 as historic Democracy, only in both cases the labels 
 surviving. 
 
 IV 
 
 We are told by Herbert Spencer that the politi- 
 cal superstition of the past having been the divine 
 right of kings, the pohtical superstition of the pres- 
 ent is the divine right of parliaments and he might 
 have said of peoples. The oil of anointing seems 
 unawares, he thinks, to have dripped from the head 
 of the one upon the heads of the many, and given 
 sacredness to them also, and to their decrees. 
 
 That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People 
 are on the way seems plain enough. How far they 
 
 [289] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 will go, and where they will end, is not so clear. 
 With a kind of education — most men taught to 
 read, very few to think — the masses are likely to de- 
 mand yet more and more for themselves. They will 
 continue strenuously and effectively to resent the 
 startling contrasts of fortune which aptitude and 
 opportunity have created in a social and political 
 structure claiming to rest upon the formula "equal- 
 ity for all, special privilege for none." 
 
 The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers. 
 Socialism, disappointed of its Utopia, may then re- 
 peat the familiar lesson and reproduce the man-on- 
 horseback, or the world may drop into another 
 abyss, and, after the ensuing "dark ages," like those 
 that swallowed Babyl n and Tyre, Greece and 
 Rome, emerge with a r vv civilization and religion. 
 
 "Man never is, but vays to be blessed." We 
 know not whence we ca. , or whither we go. Hope 
 that springs eternal in 'e human breast tells us 
 nothing. History seemt; s Napoleon said, a series 
 of lies agreed upon, yet t without dispute. 
 
 I read in an ultra-sectional non-partisan diatribe 
 that "Jefferson Davis made Aaron Burr respect- 
 [290] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 able," a sentence which clearly indicates that the 
 writer knew nothing either of Jefferson Davis or 
 Aaron Burr. 
 
 Both have been subjected to unmeasured abuse. 
 They are variously misunderstood. Their chief sin 
 was failure ; the one to establish an impossible con- 
 federacy laid in human slavery, the other to achieve 
 certain vague schemes of empire in Mexico and the 
 far Southwest, which, if not visionary, were pre- 
 mature. 
 
 The final collapse of the Southern Confederacy 
 can be laid at the door of no man. It was doomed 
 the day of its birth. The wonder is that sane lead- 
 ers could invoke such odds against them and that 
 a sane people could be irduced to follow. The 
 single glory of the SoutV is that it was able to 
 stand out so long against -ich odds. 
 
 Jefferson Davis was V high-minded and well- 
 intentioned man. He wVv chosen to lead the South 
 because he was, in addi ^^n, an accomplished sol- 
 dier. As one who con^' r.ently opposed him in his 
 public policies, I can ^ jecify no act to the dis- 
 credit of his character, his one serious mistake be- 
 ing his failiure to secure the peace offered by 
 
 [291] 
 
"MAKSE HENPtY" 
 
 Abraham Lincoln two short months before Appo- 
 mattox. 
 
 Taking account of their personalities and the 
 lives they led, there is little to suggest comparison, 
 except that they were soldiers and Senators, who, 
 each in his day, filled a foremost place in public 
 affairs. 
 
 Aaron Burr, though well born and highly edu- 
 cated, was perhaps a rudely-minded man. But he 
 was no traitor. If the lovely woman, Theodosia 
 Prevost, whom he married, had lived, there is rea- 
 son to believe that the whole course and tenor of 
 his career would have been altered. Her death was 
 an irreparable blow, as it were, a prelude to the 
 series of mischances that followed. The death of 
 their daughter, the lovely Theodosia Alston, com- 
 pleted the tragedy of his checkered life. 
 
 Born a gentleman and attaining soldierly dis- 
 tinction and high place, he fell a victim to the lure 
 of a soaring ambition and the devious experience 
 of a man about town. 
 
 The object of political proscription for all his 
 intellectual and personal resources, he could not suc- 
 cessfully meet and stand against it. There was 
 nothing in the aif air with Hamilton actually to 
 [292] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 damn and ruin him. Neither morally nor politi- 
 cally was Hamilton the better man of the two. 
 Nor was there treason in his Mexican scheme. He 
 meant no more with universal acclaim than Houston 
 did three decades later. To couple his name with 
 that of Benedict Arnold is historic sacrilege. 
 
 Jefferson pursued him relentlessly. But even 
 Jefferson could not have destroyed him. When, 
 after an absence of four years abroad, he returned 
 to America, there was still a future for him had he 
 stood up like a man, but, instead, like one con- 
 fessing defeat, he sank down, whilst the wave of 
 obloquy rolled over him. 
 
 His is one of the few pathetic figures in our na- 
 tional history. Mr. Davis has had plenty of de- 
 fenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an apologist. 
 His offense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. 
 Even the War of Sections begins to fade into the 
 mist and become di-eamhke even to those who bore 
 an actual part in it. 
 
 The years are gliding swiftly by. Only a little 
 while, and there shall not be one man living who 
 saw service on either side of that great struggle of 
 systems and ideas. Its passions long ago vanished 
 from manly bosoms. That has come to pass within 
 
 [293] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 a single generation in America which in Europe re- 
 quired ages to accompHsh. 
 
 There is no disputing the verdict of events. Let 
 us relate them truly and interpret them fairly. If 
 the South would have the North do justice to its 
 heroes, the South must do justice to the heroes of 
 the North. Each must render unto Ceesar the 
 things that are Ceesar's even as each would render 
 unto God the things that are God's. As living men, 
 standing erect in the presence of Heaven and the 
 world, the men of the South have grown gray with- 
 out being ashamed ; and they need not fear that His- 
 tory will fail to vindicate their integrity. 
 
 When those are gone that fought the battle, and 
 Posterity comes to strike the balance, it will be 
 shown that the makers of the Constitution left the 
 relation of the States to the Federal Government 
 and of the Federal Government to the States open 
 to a double construction. It will be told how the 
 mistaken notion that slave labor was requisite to 
 the profitable cultivation of sugar, rice and cotton, 
 raised a paramount property interest in the South- 
 ern section of the Union, whilst in the Northern sec- 
 tion, responding to the trend of modern thought 
 and the outer movements of mankind, there arose 
 [294] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 a great moral sentiment against slavery. The con- 
 flict thus established, gradually but surely section- 
 alizing party lines, was as inevitable as it was ir- 
 repressible. It was fought out to its bitter and 
 logical conclusion at Appomattox. It found us 
 a huddle of petty sovereignties, held together by 
 a rope of sand. It made and it left us a Nation. 
 
 [295] 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRTY-SECOND 
 
 A WAR EPISODE — I 3MEET MY FATE — I MARRY AND 
 MAKE A HOME — THE UPS AND DOWNS OF LIFE 
 LEAD TO A HAPPY OLD AGE. 
 
 IN bringing these desultory — perhaps too frag- 
 mentary — recollections to a close the writer may 
 not be denied his final word. This shall neither be 
 self-confident nor overstated; the rather a confes- 
 sion of faith somewhat in rejection of political and 
 religious pragmatism. In both his experience has 
 been ample if not exhaustive. During the period 
 of their serial publication he has received many let- 
 ters — suggestive, informatory and critical — now 
 and again querulous — which he has not failed to 
 consider, and, where occasion seemed to require, to 
 pursue to original sources in quest of accuracy. In 
 no instance has he found any essential error in his 
 narrative. Sometimes he has been charged with 
 [296] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 omissions — as if he were writing a history of his 
 own times — whereas he has been only, and he fears, 
 most imperfectly, relating his immediate personal 
 experience. 
 
 I was born in the Presbyterian Church, baptized 
 in the Roman Catholic Church, educated in the 
 Church of England in America and man'ied into 
 the Church of the Disciples. The Roman Catholic 
 baptism happened in this way: It was my second 
 sunmier; my parents were sojourning in the house- 
 hold of a devout Catholic family; my nurse was a 
 fond, affectionate Irish Catholic; the little life was 
 almost despaired of, so one sunny day, to rescue 
 me from that form of theologic controversy known 
 as infant damnation, the baby carriage was trun- 
 dled round the corner to Saint JNIatthew's Church 
 — ^it was in the national capital — and the baby brow 
 was touched with holy water out of a font blessed 
 of the Virgin ]Mary. Surely I have never felt or 
 been the worse for it. 
 
 "Whilst I was yet too young to understand I 
 witnessed an old-fashioned baptism of the country- 
 side. A person who had borne a very bad char- 
 acter in the neighborhood was being immersed. 
 Some one, more humorous than reverent, standing 
 
 [297] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 near me, said as the man came to the surface, 
 "There go his sins, men and brethren, there go his 
 sins"; and having but poor eyesight I thought I 
 saw them passing down the stream never to trouble 
 him, or anybodj^ more. I can see them still float- 
 ing, floating down the stream, out and away from 
 the sight of men. Does this make me a Baptist, I 
 wonder? 
 
 I fear not, I fear not ; because I am unable to rid 
 myself of the impression that there are many roads 
 leading to heaven, and I have never believed in what 
 is called close communion. I have not hated and 
 am unable to hate any man because either in politi- 
 cal or in religious opinion he differs from me and 
 insists upon voting his party ticket and worshiping 
 his Creator according to his conscience. Perfect 
 freedom of conscience and thought has been my 
 lifelong contention. 
 
 I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. 
 Pursuing the story of the dark ages when men were 
 burnt at the stake for the heresy of refusing to 
 bow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice 
 of the Protestant or the Catholic that issues from 
 the flames and reaches my heart, but the cry of suf- 
 fering man, my brother. To me a saint is a saint 
 [298] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 whether he wears wooden shoes or goes barefoot, 
 whether he gets his baptism silently out of a font 
 of consecrated water or comes dripping from the 
 depths of the nearest brook, shouting, "Glory hal- 
 lelujah!" From my boyhood the persecution of 
 man for opinion's sake — and no matter for what 
 opinion's sake — has roused within me the only devil 
 I have ever personally known. 
 
 My reading has embraced not a few works which 
 seek or which affect to deal with the mystery of life 
 and death. Each and every one of them leaves a 
 mystery still. For all their learning and research 
 — their positivity and contradiction — none of the 
 writers know more than I think I know myself, 
 and all that I think I know myself may be abridged 
 to the simple rescript, I know nothing. The wis- 
 est of us reck not whence we came or whither we 
 go ; the human mind is unable to conceive the eternal 
 in either direction; the soul of man inscrutable 
 even to himself. 
 
 The night has a thousand eyes. 
 
 The day hut one; 
 Yet the light of the bright world dies 
 
 With the dying sun. 
 
 [299] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 The mind has a thousand eyes. 
 
 The heart but one; 
 Yet the light of a whole life dies 
 
 When love is done. 
 
 All that there is to religion, therefore, is faith; 
 not much more in politics. We are variously told 
 that the church is losing its hold upon men. If it 
 be true it is either that it gives itself over to the- 
 ology — the pride of opinion — or yields itself to the 
 celebration of the mammon of unrighteousness. 
 
 I do not beheve that it is true. Never in the his- 
 tory of the world was Jesus of Nazareth so inter- 
 esting and predominant. Between Buddha, teach- 
 ing the blessing of eternal sleep, and Christ, teach- 
 ing the blessing of eternal life, mankind has been 
 long divided, but slowly, surely, the influence of the 
 Christ has overtaken that of the Buddha until that 
 portion of the world which has advanced most by 
 process of evolution from the primal state of man 
 now worships at the shrine of Christ and him risen 
 from the dead, not at the sign of Buddha and total 
 oblivion. 
 
 The blessed birthright from God, the glory of 
 heaven, the teaching and example of the Prince of 
 [300] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 Peace — have been engulfed beneath oceans of igno- 
 rance and superstition through two thousand years 
 of embittered controversy. During the dark ages 
 coming down even to our own time the very hght 
 of truth was shut out from the eyes and hearts and 
 minds of men. The blood of the martyrs we were 
 assured in those early days was the seed of the 
 church. The blood of the martyrs was the blood 
 of man — weak, cruel, fallible man, who, whether he 
 got his inspiration from the Tiber or the Rhine, 
 from Geneva, from Edinburgh or from Rome, did 
 equally the devil's work in God's name. None of 
 the viceregents of heaven, as they claimed to be, 
 knew much or seemed to care much about the word 
 of the Gentle One of Bethlehem, whom they had 
 adopted as their titular divinity much as men in 
 commerce adopt a trade -mark. 
 
 II 
 
 It was knock-down and drag-out theologj^, the 
 ruthless machinery of organized churchism — the 
 rank materialism of things temporal — not the teach- 
 ings of Christ and the spirit of the Christian re- 
 ligion — which so long filled the world with blood 
 and tears. 
 
 [301] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 I have often in talking with intelligent Jews ex- 
 pressed a wonder that they should stigmatize the 
 most illustrious Jew as an impostor, saying to them : 
 "What matters it whether Jesus was of divine or 
 human parentage — a human being or an inmiortal 
 spirit? He was a Jew: a glorious, unoffending 
 Jew, done to death by a mob of hoodlums in Jeru- 
 salem. Why should not you and I call him Master 
 and kneel together in love and pity at his feet?" 
 
 Never have I received any satisfying answer. 
 Partyism — churchism — will ever stick to its fetish. 
 Too many churches — or, shall I say, church fabrics 
 — breeding controversy where there should be 
 agreement, each sect and subdivision fighting phan- 
 toms of its fancy. In the city that once proclaimed 
 itself eternal there is war between the Quirinal and 
 the Vatican, the government of Italy and the papal 
 hierarchy. In France the government of the re- 
 public and the Church of Rome are at daggers- 
 drawn. Before the world-war England and Ger- 
 many — each claiming to be Protestant — were look- 
 ing on askance, irresolute, not as to which side 
 might be right and which wrong, but on which side 
 "is my bread to be buttered?" In America, where 
 it was said by the witty Frenchmen we have fifty 
 [302] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 religions and only one soup, there are people who 
 think we should begin to organize to stop the threat- 
 ened coming of the Pope, and such like! "O Lib- 
 erty," cried Madame Roland, "how many crimes 
 are committed in thy name!" "O Churchism," may 
 I not say, "how much nonsense is trolled off in thy 
 name!" 
 
 I would think twice before trusting the wisest 
 and best of men with absolute power ; but I would 
 trust never any body of men — never any San- 
 hedrim, consistory, church congress or party con- 
 vention — with absolute power. Honest men are 
 often led to do or to assent, in association, what they 
 would disdain upon their conscience and respon- 
 sibility as individuals. En masse extremism gener- 
 ally prevails, and extremism is always wrong; it is 
 the more wrong and the more dangerous because 
 it is rarely wanting for plausible sophistries, fur- 
 nishing congenial and convincing argument to the 
 mind of the unthinking for whatever it has to pro- 
 pose. 
 
 ni 
 
 Too many churches and too much partyism ! It 
 is love — love through grace of God — truth where 
 we can find it — which shall irradiate the life that is. 
 
 [303] 
 
"MARSE HENHY" 
 
 If when we have prepared ourselves for the life to 
 come love be wanting, nothing else is much worth 
 while. Not alone the love of man for woman, but 
 the love of woman for woman and of man for man ; 
 the divine fraternity taught us by the Sermon on 
 the Mount; the rehgion of giving, not of getting; 
 of whole-hearted giving; of joy in the love and the 
 joy of others. 
 
 Who giveth himself with his alms feeds three — 
 Himself, his hungering neighbor and Me. 
 
 For myself I can truthfully subscribe to the for- 
 mula: "I believe in God the Father Almighty; 
 Maker of heaven and earth. And Jesus Christ, 
 his only Son, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, 
 born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius 
 Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; He de- 
 scended into hell, the third day He rose again from 
 the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at 
 the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from 
 thence He shall come to judge the quick and the 
 dead." 
 
 That is my faith. It is my religion. It was my 
 cradle song. It may not be, dear ones of contrari- 
 [304] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 wise beliefs, your cradle song or your belief, or your 
 religion. What boots it? Can you discover an- 
 other in word and deed, in luminous, far-reaching 
 power of speech and example, to walk by the side 
 of this the Anointed One of your race and of my 
 belief? 
 
 As the Irish priest said to the British prelate 
 touching the doctrine of purgatory: "You may go 
 further and fare worse, my lord," so may I say to 
 my Jewish friends — "Though the stars in their 
 courses lied to the Wise IMen of the desert, the 
 bloody history of your Judea, altogether equal in 
 atrocity to the bloody history of our Christendom, 
 has yet to fulfill the promise of a Messiah — and 
 were it not well for those who proclaim themselves 
 God's people to pause and ask, 'Has He not arisen 
 abeady?' " 
 
 I would not inveigh against either the church or 
 its ministry; I would not stigmatize temporal 
 preaching; I would have ministers of religion as 
 free to discuss the things of this world as the states- 
 men and the journalists; but with this difference: 
 That the objective point with them shall be the re- 
 generation of man through grace of God and not 
 the winning of office or the exploitation of parties 
 
 [305] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 and newspapers. Journalism is yet too unripe to do 
 more than guess at truth from a single side. The 
 statesman stands mainly for political organism. 
 Until he dies he is suspect. The pulpit remains 
 therefore still the moral hope of the universe and 
 the spiritual light of mankind. 
 
 It must be nonpartisan. It must be nonprofes- 
 sional. It must be manly and independent. But 
 it must also be worldy-wise, not artificial, sym- 
 pathetic, broad-minded and many-sided, equally 
 ready to smite wrong in high places and to kneel 
 by the bedside of the lowly and the poor. 
 
 I have so found most of the clergymen I have 
 known, the exceptions too few to remember. In 
 spite of the opulence we see about us let us not 
 take to ourselves too much conceit. May every 
 pastor emulate the virtues of that village preacher 
 of whom it was written that : 
 
 Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway. 
 And fools who came to scoff, remained to pray. 
 • ••••••• 
 
 A man he was to all the country dear. 
 
 And passing rich with forty pounds a year. 
 
 [306] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 His house was known to all the vagrant train. 
 He chid their wanderings, hut relieved their pain; 
 The long-rememhered beggar was his guest. 
 Whose heard descending swept his aged hreast; 
 The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud. 
 Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed; 
 The broken soldier, kindly hade to stay. 
 Sate by the fire, and talked the night away; 
 Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done. 
 Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were 
 
 won. 
 Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to 
 
 glow. 
 And quite forgot their vices in their woe; 
 Careless their merits or their faults to scan. 
 His pity gave ere charity began. 
 
 I have lived a long life — rather a happy and a 
 busy than a merry one — enjoying where I might, 
 but, let me hope I may fairly claim, shirking no 
 needful labor or duty. The result is some accre- 
 tions to my credit. It were, however, ingratitude 
 and vanity in me to set up exclusive ownership of 
 
 [307] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 these. They are the joint products and property 
 of my dear wife and myself. 
 
 I do not know just what had befallen if love had 
 failed me, for as far back as I can remember love 
 has been to me the bedrock of all that is worth 
 living for, stri^ang for or possessing in this cross- 
 patch of a world of ours. 
 
 I had realized the meaning of it in the beautiful 
 concert of affection between my father and mother, 
 who lived to celebrate their golden wedding. ^My 
 wife and I have enjoyed now the like conjugal 
 felicity fifty-four — counted to include two years of 
 betrothal, fifty-six years. Never was a young fel- 
 low more in love than I — never has love been more 
 richly rewarded — yet not without some heartbreak- 
 ing bereavements. 
 
 I met the woman who was to become my wife 
 during the War of Sections — amid its turmoil and 
 peril — and when at its close we were married, at 
 Nashville, Tennessee, all about us was in mourn- 
 ing, the future an adventure. It was at Chatta- 
 nooga, the winter of 1862-63, that fate brought us 
 together and riveted our destinies. She had a fine 
 contralto voice and led the church choir. Doctor 
 Palmer, of New Orleans, was on a certain Sunday 
 [308] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 well into the long prayer of the Presbyterian serv- 
 ice. Bragg's army was still in middle Tennessee. 
 There was no thought of an attack. Bang! Bang! 
 Then the bursting of a shell too close for comfort. 
 Bang! Bang! Then the rattle of shell fragments 
 on the roof. On the other side of the river the 
 Yankees were upon us. 
 
 The man of God gave no sign that anything 
 unusual was hapx^ening. He did not hurry. He 
 did not vary the tones of his voice. He kept on 
 pra\^ng. Nor was there panic in the congregation, 
 which did not budge. 
 
 That was the longest long prayer I ever heard. 
 When it was finally ended, and still without chang- 
 ing a note the preacher delivered the benediction, 
 the crowded church in the most orderly manner 
 moved to the several doorways. 
 
 I was quick to go for my girl. By the time we 
 reached the street the firing had become general. 
 We had to traverse quite half a mile of it before 
 attaining a place of safety. Two weeks later we 
 were separated for nearly two years, when, the war 
 over, we found ourselves at home again. 
 
 In the meantime her father had fallen in the fight, 
 and in the far South I had buried him. He was 
 
 [309] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 one of the most eminent and distinguished and al- 
 together the best beloved of the Tennesseeans of his 
 day, Andrew Ewing, who, though a Democrat, had 
 in high party times represented the Whig Nashville 
 district in Congress and in the face of assured elec- 
 tion declined the Democratic nomination for gov- 
 ernor of the state. A foremost Union leader in the 
 antecedent debate, upon the advent of actual war 
 he had reluctantly but resolutely gone with his state 
 and section. 
 
 T 
 
 The intractable Abolitionists of the North and 
 the radical Secessionists of the South have much 
 historically to answer for. The racial warp and 
 woof in the United States were at the outset of 
 our national being substantially homogeneous. 
 That the country should have been geographically 
 divided and sectionally set by the ears over the 
 institution of African slavery was the work of agi- 
 tation that might have attained its ends by less 
 costly agencies. 
 
 How often human nature seeking its bent pre- 
 fers the crooked to the straight way ahead! The 
 North, having in its ships brought the negroes from 
 Africa and sold them to the planters of the South, 
 [310] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 putting the money it got for them in its pocket, 
 turned philanthropist. The South, having bought 
 its slaves from the slave traders of the North under 
 the belief that slave labor was requisite to the profit- 
 able production of sugar, rice and cotton, stood by 
 property-rights lawfully acquired, recognized and 
 guaranteed by the Constitution. Thence arose an 
 irrepressible conflict of economic forces and moral 
 ideas whose doubtful adjustment was scarcely 
 worth what it cost the two sections in treasure and 
 blood. 
 
 On the Northern side the issue was made 
 to read freedom, on the Southern side, self-defense. 
 Neither side had any sure law to coerce the other. 
 Upon the simple right and wrong of it each was 
 able to establish a case convincing to itself. Thus 
 the War of Sections, fought to a finish so gallantly 
 by the soldiers of both sides, was in its origination 
 largely a game of party politics. 
 
 The extremists and doctrinaires who started the 
 agitation that brought it about w^ere relatively few 
 in number. The South w^as at least defending its 
 own. That what it considered its rights in the 
 Union and the Territories being assailed it should 
 fight for aggressively lay in the nature of the situa- 
 
 [311] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 tion and the character of the people. Aggression 
 begot aggression, the unoffending negro, the pro- 
 voking cause, a passive agent. Slavery is gone. 
 The negro we still have with us. To what end? 
 
 Life indeed is a mystery — a hopelessly unsolved 
 problem. Could there be a stronger argument in 
 favor of a world to come than may be found in the 
 brevity and incertitude of the world that is? Where 
 this side of heaven shall we look for the court of 
 last resort ? Who this side of the grave shall be sure 
 of anything? 
 
 At this moment the world having reached what 
 seems the apex of human achievement is topsy- 
 turvy and all agog. Yet have we the record of any 
 moment when it was not so? That to keep what 
 we call the middle of the road is safest most of us 
 believe. But which among us keeps or has ever 
 kept the middle of the road? What else and what 
 next? It is with nations as with men. Are we on 
 the way to another terrestrial collapse, and so on 
 ad infinitum to the end of time ? 
 
 VI 
 
 The home which I pictured in my dreams and 
 projected in my hopes came to me at last. It ar- 
 [312] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 rived with my man-iage. Then children to bless 
 it. But it was not made complete and final — a 
 veritable Kentucky home — until the all-round, all- 
 night work which had kept my nose to the grind- 
 stone had been shifted to younger shoulders I was 
 able to buy a few acres of arable land far out in the 
 county — the County of Jefferson! — and some an- 
 cient brick walls, which the feminine genius to which 
 I owe so much could convert to itself and tear apart 
 and make over again. Here "the sun shines bright" 
 as in the song, and 
 
 The corn tops ripe and the meadows in the bloom 
 The birds muke music all the day. 
 
 They waken with the dawn — a feathered or- 
 chestra — incessant, fearless — for each of its pieces 
 — from the sweet trombone of the dove to the slu'ill 
 clarionet of the jay — ^knows that it is safe. There 
 are no guns about. We have with us, and have 
 had for five and twenty years, a family of colored 
 people who know our ways and meet them intelli- 
 gently and faithfully. When we go away — as we 
 do each winter and sometimes during the other sea- 
 sons — and come again — dinner is on the table, and 
 everybody — even to Tigue and Bijou, the dogs — 
 
 [313] 
 
"MARSE HENRY" 
 
 is glad to see us. Could mortal ask for more? And 
 so let me close with the wish of my father's old song 
 come true — the words sufficiently descriptive of the 
 reality : 
 
 In the downhill of life when I find I'm declimng. 
 
 May my fate no less fortunate he 
 Than a snug elbow chair can afford for reclining 
 
 And a cot that overlooks the wide sea — 
 A cow for my dairy, a dog for my game. 
 
 And a purse when my friend needs to borrow; 
 I'll envy no nabob his riches, nor fame. 
 
 Nor the honors that wait him to-morrow. 
 
 And when at the close I throw off this frail covering 
 Which rve worn for three-score years and 
 ten — 
 On the brink of the grave Til not seek to keep 
 hov'ring 
 Nor my thread wish to spin o'er again. 
 But my face in the glass Fll serenely survey, 
 '^ And with smiles cownt each wrinkle and fur- 
 row — 
 That this worn-out old stuff which is thread-bare 
 to-day 
 Shall become everlasting to-morrow. 
 [314] 
 
 3ii.77-2