Chapter III: Part 3

I have crossed the Atlantic so often that the recollections of this first trip to Europe are, at this writing, merely general. I think the most terrific impression I received was my first sight of the ocean the morning after we sailed, the most instructive were the ruins of church and abbey and palaces. I walked up and down the stairs of Holyrood Palace, once upon a time considered one of the wonders of the world, and I marvelled that so little was left of such a wonderful place. Ruins should be rebuilt.

The most spiritual impression I received was from the music of church organs in the old world.

I stopped one nightfall at Freyburg, Switzerland, to hear the organ of world-wide celebrity in that place. I went into the cathedral at nightfall. All the accessories were favourable. There was only one light in all the cathedral, and that a faint taper on the altar. I looked up into the venerable arches and saw the shadows of centuries; and when the organ awoke the cathedral awoke, and all the arches seemed to lift and quiver as the music came under them. That instrument did not seem to be made out of wood and metal, but out of human hearts, so wonderfully did it pulsate with every emotion; now laughing like a child, now sobbing like a tempest. At one moment the music would die away until you could hear the cricket chirp outside the wall, and then it would roll up until it seemed as if the surge of the sea and the crash of an avalanche had struck the organ-pipes at the same moment. At one time that night it seemed as if a squadron of saddened spirits going up from earth had met a squadron of descending angels whose glory beat back the woe.

In Edinburgh I met Dr. John Brown, author of the celebrated "Rab and his Friends." That one treatise gave him immortality and fame, and yet he was taken at his own request to the insane asylum and died insane.

"What are you writing now, Dr. Brown?" I said to him in his study in Edinburgh.

"Oh, nothing," he replied, "I never could write. I shall never try again."

I saw on his face and heard in his voice that melancholy that so often unhorsed him.

I went to Paris for the first time in this summer of 1870. It was during the Franco-German war. I stood studying the exquisite sculpturing of the gate of the Tuileries. Lost in admiration of the wonderful art of that gate I knew not that I was exciting suspicion. Lowering my eyes to the crowds of people I found myself being closely inspected by government officials, who from my complexion judged me to be a German, and that for some belligerent purpose I might be examining the gates of the palace. My explanations in very poor French did not satisfy them, and they followed me long distances until I reached my hotel, and were not satisfied until from my landlord they found that I was only an inoffensive American. Inoffensive Americans were quite as welcome in Europe in 1870 as they are now. I was not curious of the signs I found anywhere about me of aristocratic grandeur, of the deference paid to lineage and ancient family name. I know in America some people look back on the family line, and they are proud to see that they are descended from the Puritans or the Huguenots, and they rejoice in that as though their ancestors had accomplished a great thing to repudiate a Catholic aristocracy.

I look back on my family line, and I see there such a mingling and mixture of the blood of all nationalities that I feel akin to all the world. I returned from my first visit to Europe more thankful than ever for the mercy of having been born in America. The trip did me immeasurable good. It strengthened my faith in the breadth and simplicity of a broadminded religion. We must take care how we extend our invitation to the Church, that it be understandable to everyone. People don't want the scientific study of religion.

On Sunday morning, September 25, 1870, the new Tabernacle erected on Schemerhorn Street was dedicated to the worship of Almighty God. It was to my mind a common-sense church, as I had planned it to be. In many of our churches we want more light, more room, more ventilation, more comfort. Vast sums of money are expended on ecclesiastical structures, and men sit down in them, and you ask a man how he likes the church: he says, "I like it very well, but I can't hear." The voice of the preacher dashes against the pillars. Men sit down under the shadows of the Gothic arches and shiver, and feel they must be getting religion, or something else, they feel so uncomfortable.

We want more common sense in the rearing of churches. There is no excuse for lack of light when the heavens are full of it, no excuse for lack of fresh air when the world swims in it. It ought to be an expression, not only of our spiritual happiness, but of our physical comfort, when we say: "How amiable are Thy tabernacles, O Lord God of Hosts! A day in Thy courts is better than a thousand."

My dedication sermon was from Luke xiv. 23, "And the Lord said unto the servants, go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in that my house may be filled." The Rev. T.G. Butter, D.D., offered the dedicatory prayer. Other clergymen, whose names I do not recall, were present and assisted at the services. The congregation in attendance was very large, and at the close of the services a subscription and collection were taken up amounting to $13,000, towards defraying the expenses and cost of the church.

In less than a year later the congregation had grown so large and the attendance of strangers so pressing that the new church was enlarged again, and on September 10, 1871, the Tabernacle was rededicated with impressive services. The sermon was preached by my friend the Rev. Stephen H. Tyng, D.D. He was a great worker, and suffered, as many of us in the pulpit do, from insomnia. He was the consecrated champion of everything good, a constant sufferer from the lash of active work. He often told me that the only encouragement he had to think he would sleep at night was the fact that he had not slept the night before. Insomnia may be only a big word for those who do not understand its effect. It has stimulated intellectuality, and exhausted it. One of the greatest English clergymen had a gas jet on each side of his bed, so that he might read at nights when he could not sleep. Horace Greeley told me he had not had a sound sleep in fifteen years. Charles Dickens understood London by night better than any other writer, because not being able to sleep he spent that time in exploring the city.

I preached at the evening service from the text in Luke xvi. 5: "How much owest thou unto my Lord?" It was a wonderful day for us all. Enough money was taken in by collections and subscriptions at the morning and evening services to pay the floating debt of the church. We received that one day $21,000.

I quote the following resolution made at a meeting in my study the next Thursday evening of the Session, from the records of the Tabernacle:

"In regard to the payment of the floating debt of this church and congregation, the Session adopted the following resolution, viz.:--

"In view of the manifest instance that God has heard the supplications of this people regarding the floating debt of the Church, and so directed their hearts as to accomplish the object, it is therefore resolved that we set apart next Wednesday evening as a special season of religious thanksgiving to God for his great goodness to us as a Church, in granting unto us this deliverance."

I reverently and solemnly believe the new Tabernacle was built by prayer.

My congregation with great munificence provided for all my wants, and so I can speak without any embarrassment on the subject while I denounce the niggardliness of many of the churches of Jesus Christ, keeping some men, who are very apostles for piety and consecration, in circumstances where they are always apologetic, and have not that courage which they would have could they stand in the presence of people whom they knew were faithful in the discharge of their financial duties to the Christian Church. Alas, for those men of whom the world is not worthy! In the United States to-day the salary of ministers averages less than six hundred dollars, and when you consider that some of the salaries are very large, see to what straits many of God's noblest servants are this day reduced! A live church will look after all its financial interests and be as prompt in the meeting of those obligations as any bank in any city.

My church in Brooklyn prospered because it was a soul-saving church. It has always been the ambition of my own church that it should be a soul-saving church. Pardon for all sin! Comfort for all trouble! Eternal life for all the dead!

Moral conditions in the cities of New York and Brooklyn were deplorably bad during the first few years I went there to preach. There was an onslaught of bad literature and stage immorality. For instance, there was a lady who came forth as an authoress under the assumed name of George Sand. She smoked cigars. She dressed like a man. She wrote in style ardent and eloquent, mighty in its gloom, terrible in its unchastity, vivid in its portraiture, damnable in its influence, putting forth an evil which has never relaxed, but has hundreds of copyists. Yet so much worse were many French books that came to America than anything George Sand ever wrote, that if she were alive now she might be thought almost a reformer. What an importation of unclean theatrical stuff was brought to our shores at that time! And yet professors of religion patronised such things. I remember particularly the arrival of a foreign actress of base morals. She came intending to make a tour of the States, but the remaining decency of our cities rose up and cancelled her contracts, and drove her back from the American stage, a woman fit for neither continent. I hope I was instrumental to some degree in her banishment. We were crude in our morals then. I hope we are not merely civilised in them to-day. I hope we understand how to live better than we did then.

Scarcely a year after the final dedication of our Tabernacle in 1871 it was completely burned, just before a morning Sabbath service in December, 1872.

I remember that Sabbath morning. I was coming to the church, when I saw the smoke against the sky. I was living in an outlying section of the city. I had been absent for three weeks, and, as I saw that smoke, I said to my wife: "I should not wonder if that is the Tabernacle"; at the same time, this was said in pleasantry and not in earnest. As we came on nearer where the church stood, I said quite seriously: "I shouldn't wonder if it is the Tabernacle."

When I came within a few blocks, and I saw a good many people in distress running across the street, I said: "It is the Tabernacle"; and when we stood together in front of the burning house of God, it was an awfully sad time. We had stood together through all the crises of suffering, and we must needs build a church in the very hardest of times.

To put up a structure in those days, and so large a structure and so firm a structure as we needed, was a very great demand upon our energies. The fact that we had to make that struggle in the worst financial period was doubly hard.

It was a merciful providence that none of the congregation was in the church at the time. It was an appalling situation. In spite of the best efforts of the fire department, the building was in ruins in a few hours. My congregation was in despair, but, in the face of trial, God has always given me all but superhuman strength. In a thousand ways I had been blessed; the Gospel I had preached could not stop then, I knew, and while my people were completely discouraged I immediately planned for a newer, larger, more complete Tabernacle. We needed more room for the increasing attendance, and I realised that opportunity again was mine.

We continued our services in the Academy of Music, in Brooklyn, while the new Tabernacle was being built. Not for a minute did I relax my energies to keep up the work of a practical religion. There were 300,000 people in Brooklyn who had never heard the Gospel preached, an army worthy of Christian interest. There was room for these 300,000 people in the churches of the city.

There was plenty of room in heaven for them.

An ingenious statistician, taking the statement made in Revelation xxi. that the heavenly Jerusalem was measured and found to be twelve thousand furlongs, and that the length and height and breadth of it are equal, says that would make heaven in size nine hundred and forty-eight sextillion, nine hundred and eighty-eight quintillion cubic feet; and then reserving a certain portion for the court of heaven and the streets, and estimating that the world may last a hundred thousand years, he ciphers out that there are over five trillion rooms, each room seventeen feet long, sixteen feet wide, fifteen feet high. But I have no faith in the accuracy of that calculation. He makes the rooms too small. From all I can read the rooms will be palatial, and those who have not had enough room in this world will have plenty of room at the last. The fact is that most people in this world are crowded, and though out on a vast prairie or in a mountain district people may have more room than they want, in most cases it is house built close to house, and the streets are crowded, and the cradle is crowded by other cradles, and the graves crowded in the cemetery by other graves; and one of the richest luxuries of many people in getting out of this world will be the gaining of unhindered and uncramped room. And I should not wonder if, instead of the room that the statistician ciphered out as only seventeen feet by sixteen, it should be larger than any of the rooms at Berlin, St. James, or Winter Palace.

So we built an exceedingly large church. The new Tabernacle seated comfortably 5,000 people. It was open on February 22, 1874, for worship, and completed a few months later.

THE FIFTH MILESTONE

1877-1879

Without boast it may be said that I was among those men who with eager and persistent vigilance made the heart of Brooklyn feel the Christian purpose of the pulpit, and the utility of religion in everyday life. The fifteen years following the dedication of the new Tabernacle in 1872 mark the most active milestone of my career as a preacher.

A minister's recollections are confined to his interpretation of the life about him; the men he knows, the events he sees, the good and the bad of his environment and his period become the loose leaves that litter his study table.

I was in the prime of life, just forty years of age. From my private note-books and other sources I begin recollections of the most significant years in Brooklyn, preceding the local elections in 1877. New York and Brooklyn were playmates then, seeming rivals, but by predestined fate bound to grow closer together. I said then that we need not wait for the three bridges which would certainly bind them together. The ferry-boat then touching either side was only the thump of one great municipal heart. It was plain to me that this greater Metropolis, standing at the gate of this continent, would have to decide the moral and political destinies of the whole country.

Prior to the November Elections in 1877, the only cheering phase of politics in Brooklyn and New York was that there were no lower political depths to reach.

There was in New York at that time political infamy greater than the height of Trinity Church steeple, more stupendous in finance than the $10,000,000 spent in building their new Court House. It was a fact that the most notorious gambler in the United States was to get the nomination for the high office of State Senator. Both Democrats and Republicans struggled for his election--John Morrisey, hailed as a reformer! On behalf of all the respectable homes of Brooklyn and New York I protested against his election. He had been indicted for burglary, indicted for assault and battery with intent to kill, indicted eighteen times for maintaining gambling places in different parts of the country. He almost made gambling respectable. Tweed trafficked in contracts, Morrisey in the bodies and souls of young men. The District Attorney of New York advocated him, and prominent Democrats talked themselves hoarse for him. This nomination was a determined effort of the slums of New York to get representation in the State Government. It was argued that he had _reformed_. The police of New York knew better.

In Brooklyn the highest local offices in 1877, those of the Collector, Police Commissioners, Fire Commission, Treasurer, and the City Works Commissioners, were under the control of one Patrick Shannon, owner of two gin mills. Wearing the mask of reformers the most astute and villainous politicians piloted themselves into power. They were all elected, and it was necessary. It was necessary that New York should elect the foremost gambler of the United States for State Senator, before the people of New York could realise the depths of degradation to which the politics of that time could sink. If Tweed had stolen only half as much as he did, investigation and discovery and reform would have been impossible. The re-election of Morrisey was necessary. He was elected not by the vote of his old partisans alone, but by Republicans. Hamilton Fish, General Grant's secretary, voted for him. Peter Cooper, the friend of education and the founder of a great institute, voted for him. The brown-stone-fronts voted for him. The Fifth Avenue equipage voted for him. Murray Hill voted for him. Meanwhile gambling was made honourable. And so the law-breaker became the law-maker.

Among a large and genteel community in Brooklyn there was a feeling that they were independent of politics. No one can be so. It was felt in the home and in the business offices. It was an influence that poisoned all the foundations of public and private virtue in Brooklyn and New York. The conditions of municipal immorality and wickedness were the worst at this time that ever confronted the pulpits of the City of Churches, as Brooklyn was called.

There was one bright spot in the dark horizon of life around me then, however, which I greeted with much pleasure and amusement.

In the early part of November, 1877, President Hayes offered to Colonel Robert Ingersoll the appointment of Minister to Germany. The President was a Methodist, and perhaps he thought that was a grand solution of Ingersollism. It was a mirthful event of the hour--the joke of the administration. Germany was the birthplace of what was then modern infidelity, Colonel Ingersoll had been filling the land with belated infidelism.

On the stage of the Academy of Music in Brooklyn he had attacked the memory of Tom Paine, assaulted the character of Rev. Dr. Prime, one of my neighbours, the Nestor of religious journalism, and on that same stage expressed his opinion that God was a great Ghost. This action of President Hayes kept me smiling for a week--I appreciated the joke among others.

During this month the American Stage suffered the loss of three celebrities: Edwin Adams, George L. Fox, and E.L. Davenport. While the Theatre never interested me, and I never entered one, I cannot criticise the dead. Four years before in the Tabernacle I preached a sermon against the Theatre. I saw there these men, sitting in pews in front of me, and that was the only time. They were taking notes of my discourse, to which they made public replies on the stage of the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, and on other stages at the close of their performances. Whatever they may have said of me, I stood uncovered in the presence of the dead, while the curtain of the great future went up on them. My sympathy was with the destitute households left behind. Public benefits relieved this. I would to God clergymen were as liberal to the families of deceased clergymen as play-actors to the families of dead play-actors. What a toilsome life, the play-actor's! On the 25th of March, 1833, Edmund Kean, sick and exhausted, trembled on to the English stage for the last time, when he acted in the character of Othello. The audience rose and cheered, and the waving of hats and handkerchiefs was bewildering, and when he came to the expression, "Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone!" his chin fell on his breast, and he turned to his son and said: "O God, I am dying! speak to them Charles," and the audience in sympathy cried, "Take him off! take him off!" and he was carried away to die. Poor Edmund Kean! When Schiller, the famous comedian, was tormented with toothache, some one offered to draw the tooth. "No," said he, "but on the 10th of June, when the house closes, you may draw the tooth, for then I shall have nothing to eat with it." The impersonation of character is often the means of destroying health. Molière, the comedian, acted the sick man until it proved fatal to him. Madame Clarion accounts for her premature old age by the fact that she had been obliged so often on the stage to enact the griefs and distresses of others. Mr. Bond threw so much earnestness into the tragedy of "Zarah," that he fainted and died. The life of the actor and actress is wearing and full of privation and annoyance, as is any life that depends upon the whims of the public for success.

One of the events in Church matters, towards the close of this year, was a pastoral letter of the Episcopal Bishops against Church fairs. So many churches were holding fairs then, they were a recognised social attribute of the Church family. This letter aroused the question as to whether it was right or wrong to have Church fairs, and the newspapers became very fretful about it. I defended the Church fairs, because I felt that if they were conducted on Christian principles they were the means of an universal sociality and spiritual strength. So far as I had been acquainted with them, they had made the Church purer, better. Some fairs may end in a fight; they are badly managed, perhaps. A Church fair, officered by Christian women, held within Christian hours, conducted on Christian plans, I approved, the pastoral letter of the Episcopal Bishops notwithstanding.

Just when we were in the midst of this religious tempest of small finances, the will of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt came up in the court for discussion. The whole world was anxious then to know if the Vanderbilt will could be broken. After battling half a century with diseases enough to kill ten men, Mr. Vanderbilt died, an octogenarian, leaving over $100,000,000--$95,000,000 to his eldest son--$5,000,000 to his wife, and the remainder to his other children and relations, with here and there a slight recognition of some humane or religious institution. I said then that the will could not be broken, because $95,000,000 in this country seemed too mighty for $5,000,000. It was a strange will, and if Mr. Vanderbilt had been his own executor of it, without lawyers' interference, I believe it would have been different. It suggests a comparison with George Peabody, who executed the distribution of his property without legal talent. Peabody gave $250,000 for a library in his own town in Massachusetts, and in his will left $10,000 to the Baltimore Institute, $20,000 to the poor of London, $10,000 to Harvard, $150,000 to Yale, $50,000 to Salem, Massachusetts, and $3,000,000 to the education of the people of the South in this country. No wonder he refused a baronetcy which the Queen of England offered him, he was a king--the king of human benefaction. That Vanderbilt will was the seven days wonder of its time.

It made way only for the President's message issued the first week in December, 1877. It was, in fact, Mr. Hayes's repudiation of a dishonest measure prepared by members of Congress to pay off our national debt in silver instead of in gold as had been promised.

The newspapers received the President's message with indifferent opinion. "It is disappointing," said one. "As a piece of composition it is terse and well written," said another. "The President used a good many big words to say very little," said another. "President Hayes will secure a respectful hearing by the ability and character of this document," said another. "Leaving out his bragging over his policy of pacification and concerning things he claims to have done, the space remaining will be very small," said another.

But all who read the message carefully realised that in it the President promised the people to put an end to the dishonour of thieving politics. There was something in the air in Washington that seemed to afflict the men who went there with moral distemper. I was told that Coates Ames was almost a Christian in Massachusetts, while in Washington, from his house, was born that monster--The Credit Mobilier. Congressmen who in their own homes would insist upon paying their private obligations, dollar for dollar, forgot this standard of business honour when they advocated a swindling policy for the Government of the United States. In its day of trouble the Government was glad to promise gold to the people who had confidence in them, and just as gladly the Government proposed to swindle them by a silver falsehood in 1877. But the Nation was just recovering from a four years' drunk; Mr. Hayes undertook to steady us, during the aftereffects of our war-spree. Why should we neglect to pay in full the price of our four years' unrighteousness? As a nation we had so often been relieved from financial depression up to that time, but, we were just entering a period of unlicensed ethics, not merely in public life, but in all our private standards of morality.

It seems to me, as I recall the character of Brooklyn life at this time, there never was a period in its history when it was so intolerably wicked. And yet, we had 276 churches. One night about Christmas time, in 1877, Brooklyn Heights was startled by a pistol shot that set everyone in New York and Brooklyn to moralising. It was the Johnson tragedy. A young husband shot his young wife, with intent to kill. She was seriously wounded. He went to prison. There was a child, and for the sake of that child, who is now probably grown up, I will not relate the details. In all my experience of life I have heard many stories of domestic failure, but there are always two sides. Those who moralised about it said, "That's what comes of marrying too young!" Others, moralising too, said, "That's what comes of not controlling one's temper." Who does control his temper, always?

To my mind the chief lesson was in the fact that the young men of Brooklyn had taken too much of a notion to carry firearms. There was a puppyism sprang up in Brooklyn that felt they couldn't live unless they were armed. Young boys went about their daily occupations armed to the teeth, as if Fulton Street were an ambush for Indians. I mention this, because it was a singular phase of the social restlessness and tremor of the times.

In commercial evolution there was the same indistinctness of standards. The case of Dr. Lambert--the Life Insurance fraud--had no sooner been disposed of, and Lambert sent to Sing-Sing, than the sudden failure of Bonner & Co., brokers in Wall Street, presented us with the problem of business "rehypothecation."

In my opinion a man has as much right to fail in business as he has to get sick and die. In most cases it is more honourable to fail than to go on. Every insolvent is not necessarily a scoundrel. The greatest crime is to fail rich. John Bonner & Co., as brokers, had loaned money on deposited collaterals, and then borrowed still larger sums on the same collaterals. Their creditors were duped to the extent of from one to three millions of dollars. It was the first crime of "rehypothecation." It was not a Wall Street theft; it was a new use for an almost unknown word in Noah Webster's dictionary. It was a new word in the rogue's vocabulary. It was one of the first attempts made, in my knowledge, to soften the aspect of crime by baptising it in that way. Crime in this country will always be excused in proportion to how great it is. But even in the face of Wall Street tricksters there were signs that the days were gone when the Jay Goulds and the Jim Fisks could hold the nation at their mercy.

The comedy of life is sometimes quite as instructive as a tragedy. There was a flagrant disposition in America, in the late 'seventies, to display family affairs in the newspapers. It became an epidemic of notoriety. What a delicious literature it was! The private affairs of the household printed by the million copies. Chief among these novelettes of family life was the Hicks-Lord case. The world was informed one morning in February, 1878, that a Mr. Lord, a millionaire, had united his fortune with a Mrs. Hicks. The children of the former were offended at the second marriage of the latter, more especially so as the new reunion might change the direction of the property. The father was accused of being insane by his children, and incapable of managing his own affairs. The Courts were invoked. One thing was made plain to all the world, though, that Mr. Lord at eighty knew more than his children did at thirty or forty. The happy pair were compelled to remain in long seclusion because of murderous threats against them, the children having proposed a corpse instead of a bride. The absorbing question of weeks, "Where is Mr. Lord?" was answered. He was in the newspapers--and the children? they were across the old man's knee, where they belonged. Mr. Lord was right. Mrs. Hicks was right. It was nobody's business but their own. Brooklyn and New York were exceeding busy-bodies in the late 'seventies. It was a relief to turn one's back upon them occasionally, in the pulpit, and search the furthest horizon of Europe.

Scarcely had Victor Emmanuel been entombed when on Feb. 7th a tired old man, eighty-four years of age, died in the Vatican, Pius IX., a kind and forgiving man. His trust was not wholly in the crucifix, but something beyond the crucifix; and yet, how small a man is when measured by the length of his coffin! Events in Europe marshalled themselves into a formula of new problems at the beginning of 1878. The complete defeat of Turkey by the Russians left England and the United States--allies in the great causes of civilisation and Christianity--aghast. It was the most intense political movement in Europe of my lifetime. I was glad the Turkish Empire had perished, but I had no admiration then for Russia, once one of the world's greatest oppressors.

My deepest sympathies at that time were with England. When England is humiliated the Christian standards of the world are humiliated. Her throne during Queen Victoria's reign was the purest throne in all the world. Remember the girl Victoria, kneeling with her ecclesiastical adviser in prayer the night before her coronation, making religious vows, not one of which were broken. I urged then that all our American churches throughout the land unite with the cathedrals and churches in England in shouting "God Save the Queen." England held the balance of the world's power for Christianity in this crisis abroad.

About this time, in February, 1878, Senator Pierce presented a Bill before the Legislature in Albany for a new city charter for Brooklyn. In its reform movement it meant that in three years at the most Brooklyn and New York would be legally married. Instead of Brooklyn being depressed by New York, New York was to be elevated by Brooklyn. Already we felt at that time, in the light of Senator Pierce's efforts, that Brooklyn would become a reformed New York; it would be--New York with its cares set aside, New York with its arms folded at rest, New York playing with the children, New York at the tea table, New York gone to prayer-meeting. Nine-tenths of the Brooklynites then were spending their days in New York, and their nights in Brooklyn. In the year 1877, 80,000,000 of people crossed the Brooklyn ferries. Paris is France, London is England, why not New York the United States?

The new charter recommended by Senator Pierce urged other reforms in a local government that was too costly by far. Under right administration who could tell what our beloved city is to be? Prospect Park, the geographical centre, a beautiful picture set in a great frame of architectural affluence. The boulevards reaching to the sea, their sides lined the whole distance with luxurious homes and academies of art. Our united city a hundred Brightons in one, and the inland populations coming down here to summer and battle in the surf. The great American London built by a continent on which all the people are free; her vast populations redeemed; her churches thronged with worshipful auditories! Before that time we may have fallen asleep amid the long grass of the valleys, but our children will enjoy the brightness and the honour of residence in the great Christian city of the continent and of the world.

It was this era of optimism in the civic life of Brooklyn that helped to defeat the Lafayette Avenue railroad.

It was a scheme of New York speculators to deface one of the finest avenues in Brooklyn. The most profitable business activity in this country is to invest other people's money. It seemed to me that the Lafayette railroad deal was only a sort of blackmailing institution to compel the property holders to pay for the discontinuance of the enterprise, or the company would sell out to some other company; and as the original company paid nothing all they get is clear gain; and whether the railroad is built or not, the people for years, all along the beautiful route, would be kept in suspense. There was no more need of a car track along Lafayette avenue than there was need of one from the top of Trinity Church steeple to the moon! The greater facility of travel, the greater prosperity! But I am opposed to all railroads, the depot for which is an unprincipled speculator's pocket.

It was only a few weeks later that I had to condemn a much greater matter, a national event.

On March 1, 1878, the Silver Bill was passed in Washington, notwithstanding the President's veto. The House passed it by a vote of 196 against 73, and the Senate agreed with a vote of 46 against 10. It would be asking too much to expect anyone to believe that the 196 men in Congress were bought up. So far as I knew the men, they were as honest on one side of the vote as on the other. Senator Conkling, that giant of integrity, opposed it. Alexander H. Stephens voted for it. I talked with Mr. Stephens about it, and he said to me at the time, "Unless the Silver Bill pass, in the next six months there will not be two hundred business houses in New York able to stand." Still, the Silver Bill seemed like the first step towards repudiation of our national obligation, but I believe that at least 190 out of those 196 men who voted for it would have sacrificed their lives rather than repudiate our national debt.

I had an opportunity to comprehend the political explosion of the passage of this Bill all over the country, for it so happened I made a lecturing trip through the South and South-west during the month of March, 1878.

There is one word that described the whole feeling in the South at this time, and that was "hope." The most cheerful city, I found, was New Orleans. She was rejoicing in the release from years of unrighteous government. Just how the State of Louisiana had been badgered, and her every idea of self-government insulted, can be appreciated only by those who come face to face with the facts. While some of the best patriots of the North went down with the right motives to mingle in the reconstruction of the State governments of the South, many of these pilgrimists were the cast-off and thieving politicians of the North, who, after being stoned out of Northern waters, crawled up on the beach at the South to sun themselves. The Southern States had enough dishonest men of their own without any importation. The day of trouble passed. Louisiana and South Carolina for the most part are free. Governor Nichols of the one, and Governor Wade Hampton of the other, had the confidence of the great masses of the people.

It was my opinion then that the largest fortunes were yet to be made in the South, because there was more room to make them there. During my two weeks in the South, at that time, mingling with all classes of people, I never heard an unkind word against the North, and that only a little over ten years since the close of the war. Congressional politicians were still enlarging upon the belligerency of the South, but they had personal designs at President making. There was no more use for Federal military in New Orleans than there was need of them in Brooklyn. I was the guest in New Orleans of the Hon. E.J. Ellis, many years in Congress, and I had a taste of real Southern hospitality. It was everywhere. The spirit of fraternity was in the South long before it reached the North. Up to this time I had echoed Horace Greeley's advice, "Go West." For years afterwards I changed it. In my advice to young men I said to all, "Go South."

In the spring of 1878, however, things in Brooklyn began to look more promising for young men and young women. I remember after closely examining Mayor Howell's report and the Police Commissioner's report I was much pleased. Mayor Howell was one of the most courteous and genial men I ever knew, and Superintendent Campbell was a good police officer. These two men, by their individual interest in Brooklyn reforms, had gained the confidence of our tax-payers and our philanthropists. The police force was too small for a city of 5,000,000 people. The taxes were not big enough to afford an adequate equipment. There was a constant depreciation of our police and excise officials in the churches. City officials should not be caricatured--they should be respected, or dismissed. It was about this time a mounted police department was started in Brooklyn, and though small it was needed. What the miscreant community of Brooklyn most needed at this time was not sermons or lessons in the common schools, but a police club--and they got it.

There was a political avarice in Brooklyn in the management of our public taxes which handicapped the local government. For a long while I had been thinking about some way of presenting this sin to my people, when one day a woman, Barbara Allen by name, dropping in fatal illness, was picked up at the Fulton Ferry House, and died in the ambulance. On her arm was a basket of cold victuals she had lugged from house to house. In the rags of her clothing were found deposit slips in the savings banks of Brooklyn--for $20,000. The case was unique at that time, because in those days great wealth was unknown, even in New York, and the houses in Brooklyn were homes--not museums. Twenty thousand dollars was a fortune. It was a precedent that established miserliness as an actual sin, a dissipation just as deadly as that of the spendthrift. It was a tragic scene from the drama of life, and its surprise was avarice. The whole country read about Barbara Allen, and wondered what new strange disease this was that could scourge a human soul with a madness for accumulating money without spending it. The people of the United States suffered from quite a different idea of money. They were just beginning to feel the great American fever for spending more of it than they could get. This was a serious phase of social conditions then, and I remember how keenly I felt the menace of it at the time. Those who couldn't get enough to spend became envious, jealous, hateful of those who could and these envious ones were the American masses.

In the spring of 1878, in May, there was a tiger sprang out of this jungle of discontent, and, crouching, threatened to spring upon American Society.

It was--Communism. Its theory was that what could not be obtained lawfully, under the pressure of circumstances, you could take anyhow. Communism meant no individual rights in property. If wages were not adequate to the luxurious appetite, then the wage-earner claimed the right to knock his employer down and take what he wanted. "Bread or blood" was the motto. It all came from across the Atlantic, and it spread rapidly. In Brooklyn, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, it was evident that Communism was organising, that its executive desperadoes met in rooms, formed lodges, invented grips and pass-words.

In the eighth ward of New York an organisation was unearthed at this time, consisting of 800 men, all armed with muskets and revolvers. These organisations described themselves as working-men's parties, and so tried to ally themselves with the interests of trade unions.

Twenty American newspapers advocated this shocking creed. Tens of thousands adopted this theory. I said then, in response to the opinion that Communism was impossible in this country, that there were just as many cut-throats along the East River and the Hudson as there were along the Seine or the Thames. There was only one thing that prevented revolution in our cities in this memorable spring of 1878, and that was the police and the military guard.

Through dissatisfaction about wages, or from any cause, men have a right to stop work, and to stop in bands and bodies until their labour shall be appreciated; but when by violence, as in the summer of 1877, they compel others to stop, or hinder substitutes from taking the places, then the act is Communistic, and ought to be riven of the lightnings of public condemnation. What was the matter in Pittsburg that summer? What fired the long line of cars that made night hideous? What lifted the wild howl in Chicago? Why, coming toward that city, were we obliged to dismount from the cars and take carriages through the back streets? Why, when one night the Michigan Central train left Chicago, were there but three passengers on board a train of eight cars? What forced three rail trains from the tracks and shot down engineers with their hands on the valves? Communism. For hundreds of miles along the track leading from the great West I saw stretched out and coiled up the great reptile which, after crushing the free locomotive of passengers and trade, would have twisted itself around our republican institutions, and left them in strangulation and blood along the pathway of nations. The governors of States and the President of the United States did well in planting the loaded cannon at the head of streets blocked up by desperadoes. I felt the inspiration of giving warning, and I did.

But the summer came, August came, and after a lecture tour through the far West I was amazed and delighted to find there a tremendous harvest in the grain fields. I had seen immense crops there about to start on their way to the Eastern sea-boundary of our continent. I saw then that our prosperity as a nation would depend upon our agriculture. It didn't make any difference what the Greenback party, or the Republican and Democratic parties, or the Communists were croaking about; the immense harvests of the West indicated that nothing was the matter. What we needed in the fall of 1878 was some cheerful talk.

During this summer two of the world's celebrities died: Charles Mathews, the famous comedian, and the great American poet, William Cullen Bryant. Charles Mathews was an illustrious actor. He was born to make the world laugh, but he had a sad life of struggle.

While Charles Mathews was performing in London before immense audiences, one day a worn-out and gloomy man came into a doctor's shop, saying, "Doctor, what can you do for me?" The doctor examined his case and said, "My advice is that you go and see Charles Mathews." "Alas! Alas!" said the man, "I myself am Charles Mathews."

In the loss of William Cullen Bryant I felt it as a personal bereavement of a close friend. Nowhere have I seen the following incident of his life recorded, an incident which I still remember as one of the great events in my life.

In the days of my boyhood I attended a meeting at Tripler Hall, held as a memorial of Fenimore Cooper, who at that time had just died. Washington Irving stepped out on the speaker's platform first, trembling, and in evident misery. After stammering and blushing and bowing, he completely broke down in his effort to make a speech, and briefly introduced the presiding officer of the meeting, Daniel Webster. Rising like a huge mountain from a plain this great orator introduced another orator--the orator of the day--William Cullen Bryant. In that memorable oration, lasting an hour and a half, the speaker told lovingly the story of the life and death of the author of "Leather Stocking" and "The Last of the Mohicans."

George W. Bethune followed him, thundering out in that marvellous flow of ideas, with an eloquence that made him the pulpit orator of his generation in the South. Bryant's hair was then just touched with grey. The last time I saw him was in my house on Oxford Street, two years ago, in a company of literary people. I said: "Mr. Bryant, will you read for us 'Thanatopsis'?" He blushed like a girl, and put his hands over his face and said: "I would rather read anything than my own production; but if it will give you pleasure I will do anything you say." Then at 82 years of age, and without spectacles, he stood up and with most pathetic tenderness read the famous poem of his boyhood days, and from a score of lips burst forth the exclamation, "What a wonderful old man!" What made all the land and all the world feel so badly when William Cullen Bryant was laid down at Roslyn? Because he was a great poet who had died? No; there have been greater poets. Because he was so able an editor? No; there have been abler editors. Because he was so very old? No; some have attained more years. It was because a spotless and noble character irradiated all he wrote and said and did.

These great men of America, how much they were to me, in their example of doing and living!

Probably there are many still living who remember what a disorderly place Brooklyn once was. Gangs of loafers hung around our street corners, insulting and threatening men and women. Carriages were held up in the streets, the occupants robbed, and the vehicles stolen. Kidnapping was known. Behind all this outrage of civil rights was political outrage. The politicians were afraid to offend the criminals, because they might need their votes in future elections. They were immune, because they were useful material in case of a new governor or President. It was a reign of terror that spread also in other large cities. The farmers of Ohio and Pennsylvania were threatened if they did not stop buying labour-saving machinery. They were not the threats of the working-man, but of the lazy, criminal loafers of the country. It is worth mentioning, because it was a convulsion of an American period, a national growing pain, which I then saw and talked about. The nation was under the cloud of political ambition and office-seeking that unsettled business conditions. Every one was occupied in President-making, although we were two years from the Presidential election. There was plenty of money, but people held on to it.

The yellow fever scourge came down upon the South during the late summer of 1878, and softened the hearts of some. There was some money contributed from the North, but not as much as there ought to have been. In the Brooklyn Tabernacle we did the best we could; New York city had been ravaged by yellow fever in 1832, the year I was born, but the memory of that horror was not keen enough to influence the collection plate. What with this suffering of our neighbours in the South, and the troubles of political jealousies local and national, there were cares enough for our church to consider. Still, the summer of 1878 was almost through, and many predictions of disaster had failed. We had been threatened with general riots. It was predicted that on June 27 all the cars and railroad stations would be burned, because of a general strike order. We were threatened with a fruit famine. It was said that the Maryland and New Jersey peach crop was a failure. I never saw or ate so many peaches any summer before.

Then there was the Patten investigation committee, determined to send Mr. Tilden down to Washington to drive the President out of the White House. None of these things happened, yet it is interesting to recall this phase of American nerves in 1878.

There was one event that aroused my disgust, however, much more than the croakers had done--Ben Butler was nominated for Governor of Massachusetts. That was when politics touched bottom. There was no lower depths of infamy for them to reach. Ben Butler was the chief demagogue of the land. The Republican party was to be congratulated that it got rid of him. His election was a cross put upon the State of Massachusetts for something it had done we knew not of. Fortunately there were men like Roscoe Conkling in politics to counterbalance other kinds.

Backed up by unscrupulous politicians, the equally irresponsible railroad promoter began his invasion of city streets with his noisy scheme. I opposed him, but the problem of transportation then was not as it is now. Just as the year 1879 had begun, a gigantic political promoting scheme for an elevated railroad in Brooklyn was attempted. From Boston came the promoters with a proposition to build the road, without paying a cent of indemnity to property holders. I suggested that an appeal be made to Brooklynites to subscribe to a company for the agricultural improvements of Boston Common. It was a parallel absurdity. Mayor Howell, of Brooklyn, courageously opposed an elevated road franchise, unless property holders were paid according to the damage to the property. This was one of many inspired grafts of political Brooklyn, years ago.

A great event in the world was the announcement in November, 1878, that Professor Thomas Edison had applied for a patent for the discovery of the incandescent electric light. He harnessed the flame of a thunderbolt to fit in a candlestick. I hope he made millions of dollars out of it. In direct contradiction to this progress in daily life there came, at the same time, from the Philadelphia clergy a protest against printing their sermons in the secular press. It was an injustice to them, they declared, because the sermons were not always fully reported. I did not share these opinions. If a minister's gospel is not fit for fifty thousand people, then it is not fit for the few hundred members of his congregation. My own sermons were being published in the secular press then, as they had been when I was in Philadelphia.