Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

While there is but one species of sword-fish which occurs in the tropical and temperate parts of the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, about New Zealand, and in the eastern Pacific from Cape Horn to California there are several kinds of sail-fishes, and at least eight species of spear-fish. The naturalists of the United States Fish Commission have recently discovered that we have along our Atlantic coast a fine species of sail-fish, and one or two of spear-fishes, in addition to the true sword-fish, which has been known to exist here since the days of the Spanish explorers.

It seems somewhat strange that no reference to the sword-fish is to be found in the narratives of the voyages of Columbus. The earliest allusion in American literature occurs in Josselyn’s “Account of two Voyages to New England,” printed in 1674, in the following passage:

“The twentieth day we saw a great number of sea-bats or owles, called also flying-fish; they are about the bigness of a whiting, with four tinsel wings, with which they fly as long as they are wet, when pursued by other fishes. In the afternoon we saw a great fish called the Vehuella, or Sword-fish, having a long, strong and sharp fin like a sword-blade on the top of his head, with which he pierced our ship, and broke it off with striving to get loose; one of our sailors dived and brought it aboard.”

Although sword-fish were sold in the New York fish market as early as 1817, it was not until 1839 that the writers in ichthyology consented to consider it an American fish.

The sword-fish comes into our waters in pursuit of food. At least this is the most probable explanation of their movements, since the duties of reproduction appear to be performed elsewhere. Like the horse-mackerel, the bonito, the blue-fish and the squeteagus, they pursue and prey upon the schools of menhaden and mackerel which are so abundant in the summer months. “When you see sword-fish, you may know that mackerel are about!” said one old fisherman to the writer. “Where you see the fin-back whale, following food,” said another, “there you find sword-fish.” They feed chiefly upon fish which swim crowded together in close schools, rising among them from beneath and striking to the right and left with their swords until they have killed a number, which they then proceed to devour. An old fisherman described to the writer a sword-fish in the act of feeding in a dense school of herring, rising perpendicularly out of the water until its sword, with a large portion of its body, was exposed, then falling flat over on its side, striking many fish as it fell, and leaving a bushel of dead ones floating at the surface.

They are most abundant in the region of Cape Cod, or between Montaulk Point and the eastern part of George’s Banks, and during July and August, though some make their appearance in the latter part of May, and a few linger until snow falls. They are seen at the surface only on quiet summer days, in the morning before ten or eleven, and in the afternoon after four o’clock. Old fishermen say that they rise when the mackerel rise, and follow them down when they go.

A sword-fish, when swimming near the surface, usually allows its dorsal fin and the upper lobe of its caudal fin to be visible, projecting out of the water several inches. It is this habit which enables the fishermen to detect the presence of the fish in the vicinity of their vessel. It moves slowly along, and the schooner, even with a light breeze, finds no difficulty in overtaking it. When excited its movements are very rapid and nervous. Sword-fish are sometimes seen to leap entirely out of the water. Early writers attributed this habit to the tormenting presence of parasites, but such a theory seems unnecessary. The pointed head, the fins of the back and abdomen snugly fitting into grooves, the long, lithe, muscular body, with contour sloping slowly from shoulders to tail, fit it for the most rapid and forcible movement through the water. Prof. Richard Owen, the celebrated English anatomist, testifying in court in regard to its power, said: “It strikes with the accumulated force of fifteen double-handed hammers. Its velocity is equal to that of a swivel shot, and is as dangerous in its effects as a heavy artillery projectile.”

Many very curious instances are recorded of their encounters with other fishes, or of their attacks upon ships. It is hard to surmise what may be the inducement to attack objects so much larger than themselves. Every one knows the couplet from Oppian:

“Nature her bounty to his mouth confined,
Gave him a sword, but left unarmed his mind.”

It surely seems as if the fish sometimes become possessed with temporary insanity. It is not strange that when harpooned they retaliate upon their assailants. There are, however, numerous instances of entirely unprovoked assaults upon vessels at sea, both by the sword-fish, and still more frequently by the spear-fish (known to American sailors by the name of “boohoo,” apparently a corruption of “Guebucu,” a word apparently of Indian origin, applied to the same fish in Brazil). The writer’s note-book contains notes upon scores of such instances. The ship “Priscilla,” from Pernambuco to London had eighteen inches of sword thrust through her planking; the English ship “Queensbury,” in 1871, was penetrated to a depth of thirty inches, necessitating the discharge of the cargo; the “Dreadnought,” in 1864, when off Colombo, had a round hole, an inch in diameter, bored through the copper sheeting and planking; the schooner “Wyoming,” of Gloucester, in 1875, was attacked in the night time by a sword-fish, which pushed his snout two feet into her planking, and then escaped by breaking it off.

One of the traditions of the sea, time honored, believed by all mariners, handed down in varied phrases in a hundred books of ocean travel, relates to the terrific combats between the whale and the sword-fish, aided by the thrasher shark. The sword-fish was said to attack from below, goading his mighty adversary to the surface with his sharp beak, while the shark, at the top of the water, belabors him with strokes of his long lithe tail. Thus wrote a would-be naturalist from Bermuda in 1609: “The swoard-fish swimmes under the whale and pricketh him upward. The threasher keepeth above him, and with a mighty great thing like unto a flaile, hee so bangeth the whale that hee will roare as though it thundered, and doth give him such blows with his weapon that you would think it to be a crake of great shot.”

Skeptical modern science is not satisfied with this interpretation of any combat at sea seen at a distance. It recognizes the improbability of aggressive partnership between two animals so different as the sword-fish and a shark, and explains the turbulent encounters occasionally seen at sea by ascribing them to the attacks of the killer whale, _Orca_, upon larger species of the same order.

There can be little doubt that sword-fish sometimes attack whales just as they do ships. This habit is mentioned by Pliny, and furnishes a motive for all of Edmund Spenser’s “Visions of the World.”

“Toward the sea turning my troubled eye
I saw the fish (if fish I may it cleepe)
That makes the sea before his face to flye
And with his flaggie finnes doth seeme to sweepe
The fomie waves out of the dreadfull deep.
The huge Leviathan, dame Nature’s wonder,
Making his sport, that manie makes to weep:
A Sword-fish small, him from the rest did sunder,
That, in his throat him pricking softly under,
His wide abysse him forced forth to spewe,
That all the sea did roare like heavens thunder,
And all the waves were stained with filthie hewe.
Hereby I learned have not to despise
Whatever thing seems small in common eyes.”

Baron Sahartur, in a letter from Quebec in 1783, described a conflict between a whale and a sword-fish which took place within gun shot of his frigate. He remarks: “We were perfectly charmed when we saw the sword-fish jump out of the water in order to dart its spear into the body of the whale when obliged to take breath. This entertaining show lasted at least two hours, sometimes to the starboard and sometimes to the larboard of the ship. The sailors, among whom superstition prevails as much as among the Egyptians, took this for a presage of some mighty storm.”

There are two great sword-fisheries in the world, one on the coast of New England, and the other in the waters about Sicily. The former gives employment, in different years, to from twenty to forty vessels, and from sixty to one hundred and twenty men; the latter to over three hundred boats and seventeen hundred men. In Italy the annual product of the fishery amounts to about 320,000 pounds, while in New England, counting the fish taken incidentally by halibut and mackerel vessels, the yield is at least 1,000,000 pounds.

The apparatus used in killing sword-fish is very simple. It consists of the “pulpit” or “cresembo,” a frame for the support of the harpooneer as he stands upon the end of the bow-sprit, the “lily iron” or “Indian dart,” which is attached by a long line to a keg serving as a buoy, and is thrust into the fish by means of a pole about sixteen feet in length. As the vessel cruises over the schooling grounds a lookout is stationed at the masthead, whose keen eye descries the tell-tale dorsal fins at a distance of two or three miles. By voice and gesture he directs the course of the vessel until the skipper can see the fish from his station in the pulpit. There is no difficulty in approaching the fish with a large vessel, although they will not suffer a small boat to come near them. When the fish is from six to ten feet in front of the vessel, it is struck. The harpoon is never thrown, the pole being too long. The dart penetrates the back of the fish, close to the side of the high dorsal fin, and immediately detaches itself from the pole, which is withdrawn. The dart having been fastened, the line is allowed to run out as far as the fish will carry it, and is then passed into a small boat, which is towing at the stern. Two men jump into this and pull in upon the line until the fish is brought in alongside.

The pursuit of the sword-fish is much more exciting than ordinary fishing, for it resembles the pursuit of large animals upon land. There is no slow and careful baiting and patient waiting, and no disappointment caused by the capture of worthless “bait-stealers.” The game is seen and followed, outwitted by wary tactics, and killed by strength of arm and skill. The sword-fish sometimes proves a powerful antagonist, and sends his pursuers’ vessel into harbor, leaking and almost sinking from injuries which he has inflicted. I have known a vessel to be struck by wounded sword-fish as many as twenty times in one season. There is even the spice of personal danger to give savor to the chase. One of the crew of a Connecticut schooner was severely wounded by a beak thrust through the oak floor of the boat in which he was standing, and penetrating two inches into his naked heel. A strange fascination draws men to this pursuit when they have once learned its charm. An old sword-fisherman, with an experience of twenty years, told me that when he was on the fishing ground he fished all night in his dreams, and that many a time he had bruised his hands and rubbed the skin off his knuckles by striking them against the ceiling of his bunk when he raised his arms to thrust the harpoon into imaginary monster sword-fishes.

* * * * *

The home and its apartments should not be treated as a dead thing, where we make best arrangement of its fittings, and there leave it. It must grow in range and in expression with our necessities, and diverging, and developing tastes. The best of decorators can not put that last finish which must come from home hands. It is a great canvas always on the easel before us—growing in its power to interest every day and year—never getting its last touches—never quite ready to be taken down and parted with. No home should so far out-top the tastes of its inmates that they can not somewhere and somehow deck it with the record of their love and culture. It is an awful thing to live in a house where no new nail can be driven in the wall, and no tray of wild flowers, or of wood-mosses be set upon a window sill. The ways are endless, in short, in which a house can be endowed with that home atmosphere which shall be redolent of the tastes of its inmates.—_Donald G. Mitchell._

ECCENTRIC AMERICANS.

By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.

IX.—A PIONEER ECCENTRIC WOMAN.

This artificial arrangement called society seems to be possible only upon unreal standards of truth and morality; it has a system of “white lies”—as if any lie _could_ be white and true. It is because children haven’t learned the difference between real truth and the “play truth” of the world that they are such a holy terror in society. We have to squelch their questionings and hide our blushes. Children and fools—distinguished puritans!—always tell the truth, we say, and confess our false lives in the saying; but occasionally one who is not a fool, but who preserves a child’s truth, comes into this masquerade of life and insists on recognizing the real persons behind the masks. Heavens, what a disturbance! Put him out! He’s an Eccentric.

Give one of these uncomfortable persons the clairvoyant insight into character and motives and the clear-speaking tongue or pen; put him on a higher moral plane than society about him travels, and two things will likely come to pass, viz.: martyrdom for himself and an uplift for his neighbors. Such a touch for truth, such a power to convey it, such a purpose had Jane Grey Swisshelm, and it’s safe to say that she has put more people to bed with uncomfortable bed-fellows in the shape of smarting consciences than any other woman of her time.

She was a rare combination of feminine and masculine qualities. Timid and courageous; yielding to kindness, hard as steel on questions of principle; domestic in all her tastes, public in all her life; slight of form and sickly by heredity, for fifty years she “endured hardship as a good soldier.” To a fanatical religious nature and a wonderfully analytical mind, she brought that childlikeness of conscience, and with a rare command of language for a weapon, she became a moral blizzard in a half century of upheaval in our political elements.

No one, I think, can read her autobiography without the conviction that this life of controversy was foreign to her nature, that the pugnacious pen was forced into her hand when it would have preferred to wield the pencil of the artist, or even the distaff in a happy home. She was thus forced aside from her natural course by an incompatible theology and an incompatible marriage. Benevolence was her mastering trait, but her hard theology gave no exercise to it. Perhaps better to say in her own words, she “obeyed the higher law of kindness under protest of her Calvinistic conscience.” Her religion taught her that everything that she liked to do and enjoyed in the doing, was, by that token, sinful; and her husband and his family by thwarting her in all such enjoyments, unconsciously executing her theology against herself, set her upon expiating her sinfulness by engaging in the most disagreeable and trying work that she could find. Men and women before her have sought “in the world’s broad field of battle” relief from disappointment of the heart’s wishes, but few have put on the armor to punish themselves for not enjoying that disappointment. It is, therefore, to the crucial tenets of her Calvanistic faith and the exorbitant demands of her conscience that we owe the great work Mrs. Swisshelm did in the cause of humanity. What it cost her only God and herself know; but we are not without evidence that she got some recompense as she went along, in achievements which must have been grateful to the heroic side of her nature.

For in the veins of this slight girl ran the blood of a race of heroes and martyrs—a family which fetched its line direct from signers of The Solemn League and Covenant. “My kith and kin,” she says, “had died at the stake, bearing testimony against popery and prelacy; had fought on those fields where Scotchmen charged in solid columns, singing psalms.” She hated the devil of her theology, because she considered him a sneak, “but I never was afraid of him,” she says—a statement we can well believe of one who at the age of six watched an alleged haunted place by night to catch a ghost. She never knew the time when she did not believe the cast-iron creed of her ancestors; read her Bible, understood all of Dr. Black’s metaphysical sermons, and was converted before her third year, and completed her theological education before she completed her twelfth year. Truly she “had no childhood,” as she says.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1815, she married at the age of sixteen a too-well-to-do farmer, and spent most of her life in the country. “I spent my best years cooking cabbage,” she says. She taught school much of the first ten years of her married life. She found her pen-power and her work in 1844, at the age of twenty-nine. Mrs. Swisshelm was one of the first, if not the very first, American woman to enter the field of political journalism. At this day, when all the avenues of literature throng with gifted women, when no considerable daily paper is without female contributors and staff writers, and some of our best magazines are conducted by women, it is hard to appreciate what it cost a timid, devout woman like Mrs. Swisshelm to take that step in 1844; it was in her mind voluntary consecration to martyrdom. This call came to her during an illness brought on by an attack on her by her husband and his mother, so outrageous that she had fled wildly to the woods, and been taken up and cared for by kindly neighbors. Her afflictions came to her as chastisements for not remembering those in bonds as bound with them; specifically for assisting to build a church for the “Black-gagites.” She wrote her first attack in an anti-slavery cause, propped up in bed, and it was in verse. She states the situation:

No woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold
up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which would be
brought upon me. But what matter? I had no children to disgrace,
and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one
could be spared better than I. No Western Pennsylvania woman
had ever broken out of woman’s sphere. All lived in the very
center of that sacred inclosure, making fires by which husbands,
brothers and sons sat reading the news; each one knowing that she
had a soul, because the preacher who made his bread and butter
by saving it had been careful to inform her of its existence as
preliminary to her knowledge of the indispensable nature of his
services.

Her articles created a sensation, and no wonder that they did. For, although she had but little literary culture, she had simplicity and intensity. Her style was modeled on the English of the Bible (which she says was for years the only book that she allowed herself to read, in her dread of becoming wiser than her plodding husband), and on this sturdy stem she grafted the simple, homely, direct illustrations of the rural folk around her. Thus, it arrested the attention of learned and unlettered alike. But there was more than phraseology in her power. She was as intensely in earnest as if she were herself in bonds—that is what “remembering them as bound with them” means. She was one of a few who _meant it_; one of the kind of “fools” that “hear His word and _do_ it.” McDuffee, when he heard that Andrew Jackson had sworn to hang the first seceder, said: “Yes, and he’s just dashed fool enough to do it.” She felt that two races, the white and the black, were to be rescued from the curse of slavery; and for such a cause it was with her as “Hosea Bigelow” says, “P’izen-mad, pig-headed fightin’.” She had been reared an abolitionist, and that which was bred in the bone had been converted into a clear, blazing passion by a year’s residence in Kentucky (1832), where she witnessed scenes, the narration of which make that awful chapter in her biography entitled “Habitations of Horrible Cruelty.” She says:

For years there had run through my head the words: “Open thy
mouth for the dumb, plead the cause of the poor and needy.” From
first to last my articles were as direct and personal as Nathan’s
reproof to David. Every man who went to the war (_i. e._, against
Mexico), or induced others to go, I held as the principal in the
whole list of crimes of which slavery was a synonym. Each one
seemed to stand before me, his innermost soul made bare and his
idiosyncrasy I was sure to strike with sarcasm, ridicule, odium,
solemn denunciation, old truths from the Bible and history, and
the opinions of good men. I had a reckless abandon, for had I not
thrown myself into the breach to die there, and would I not sell
my life at its full value?

I think this keen sense for the weak places in men’s character and reasoning, and her reckless assaults thereon were what made her so formidable. She always struck for the heart, and rarely missed her aim. “Exposing the weak part of an argument soon came to be my recognized forte,” she says. With what disregard of everything she rode after the oriflamme of humanity let her tell:

Hon. Gabriel Adams had taken me by the hand at father’s funeral,
led me to a stranger and introduced me as: “The child I told you
of, but eight years old, her father’s nurse and comforter.” He
had smoothed my hair and told me not to cry; God would bless me
for being a good child. He was a member of the session when I
joined the church; his voice in prayer had smoothed mother’s hard
journey through the dark valley; and now, as mayor of the city he
had ordered it illuminated in honor of the battle of Buena Vista,
and this, too, on Saturday evening, when the unholy glorification
extended into the Sabbath. Measured by the standard of his
profession as an elder in the church whose highest judicatory
had pronounced slavery and Christianity incompatible, no one was
more vulnerable than he, and of none was I so unsparing, yet as I
wrote, the letter was blistered with tears; but his oft repeated
comment was: “Jane is right,” and he went out of his way to take
my hand and say: “You were right.”

Samuel Black, a son of my pastor, dropped his place as leader
of the Pittsburgh bar and rushed to the war. My comments were
thought severe, even for me; yet the first intimation I had
that I had not been cast aside as a monster, came from his
sister, who sent me a message that her father, her husband
and herself, approved my criticism. Samuel returned with a
colonel’s commission, and one day I was about to pass him without
recognition, where he stood on the pavement talking to two other
lawyers, when he stepped before me and held out his hand. I drew
back, and he said:

“Is it possible you will not take my hand?”

I looked at it, then into his manly, handsome face, and answered:

“_There is blood on it!_ The blood of women and children slain
at their own altars, on their own hearthstones, that you might
spread the glorious American institution of woman whipping and
baby stealing.”

“Oh,” he exclaimed, “This is too bad! I swear to you I never
killed a woman or a child.”

“Then you did not fight in Mexico, did not help to bombard Buena
Vista.”

His friends joined him and insisted that I did the Colonel great
wrong, when he looked squarely into my face, and, holding out his
hand, said:

“For the sake of the old church, for the sake of the old man, for
the sake of the old times, give me your hand.”

I laid it in his, and hurried away, unable to speak, for he was
the most eloquent man in Pennsylvania. He fell at last at the
head of his regiment, while fighting in the battle of Fair Oaks,
for the freedom he had betrayed in Mexico.

Her destructive attack on the private character of Daniel Webster, in 1850, also illustrates her reckless courage and her sagacity. She was in Washington pending the fugitive slave bill. Webster was supporting the measure—a damaging defection from the anti-slavery side, because of his supposed moral as well as intellectual greatness. Mrs. S. discovered “that his whole panoply of moral power was a shell—that his life was full of rottenness. Then I knew why I had come to Washington.” She put the facts into one short paragraph, and published it in her own paper, against the advice of all her friends, and even of such stanch anti-slavery men as Giddings, Julian, and Dr. Snodgrass. They said it was true, and no one would dare to deny it; yet no one had dared to make it public; the publication would ruin her and her influence. She said: “The cause of the slave hangs on the issue in Congress, and Mr. Webster’s influence is against him; his influence would be less if the public knew just what he is. I will publish it and let God take care of the consequences.” Eccentric conduct, surely! It was published, and it did bring ruin—but on Daniel Webster, instead of Jane Grey Swisshelm. It killed Webster’s influence with the conscientious part of the Whig party, and probably gave the _coup de grace_ to his presidential prospects. She was long known as “the woman who killed Webster.”

It was in 1847 that Mrs. Swisshelm took the decisive plunge by founding the Pittsburgh _Saturday Visiter_. The sensation created by this unprecedented appearance of politics in petticoats she characteristically describes:

It was quite an insignificant looking sheet, but no sooner did
the American eagle catch sight of it than he swooned and fell off
his perch. Democratic roosters straightened out their necks and
ran screaming with terror. Whig ’coons scampered up trees and
barked furiously. The world was falling, and every one had “heard
it, saw it, and felt it.”

It appeared that on some inauspicious morning each one of
three-fourths of the secular editors from Maine to Georgia had
gone to his office suspecting nothing, when from some corner of
his exchange list there sprang upon him such a horror as he had
little thought to see. A woman had started a political paper! A
woman! Could he believe his eyes? A woman! Instantly he sprang to
his feet and clutched his pantaloons, shouted to the assistant
editor, when he, too, read and grasped frantically at his
cassimeres, called to the reporters and press-men and typos and
devils, who all rushed in, heard the news, seized their nether
garments and joined the general chorus, “My breeches! oh, my
breeches!” Here was a woman resolved to steal their pantaloons,
their trousers, and when these were gone they might cry, “Ye have
taken away my gods, and what have I more?” The imminence of the
peril called for prompt action, and with one accord they shouted,
“On to the breach, in defense of our breeches! Repel the invader
or fill the trenches with our noble dead!”

“That woman shall not have _my_ pantaloons,” cried the editor
of the big city daily; “nor my pantaloons,” said the editor of
the dignified weekly; “nor my pantaloons,” said he who issued
manifestoes but once a month; “nor mine,” “nor mine,” “nor mine,”
chimed in the small fry of the country towns.

Even the religious press could not get past the tailor shop, and
“Pantaloons” was the watchword all along the line. George D.
Prentice took up the cry, and gave the world a two-third column
leader on it, stating explicitly, “She is a man all but the
pantaloons.” I wrote to him, asking a copy of the article, but
received no answer, when I replied in rhyme to suit his case:

“Perhaps you have been busy
Horsewhipping Sal or Lizzie,
Stealing some poor man’s baby,
Selling its mother, may be.
You say—and you are witty—
That I—and ’tis a pity—
Of manhood lack but dress;
But you lack manliness,
A body clean and new,
A soul within it, too.
Nature must change her plan
Ere you can be a man.”

Mrs. Swisshelm was scourged into the woman’s rights agitation as she had been into the anti-slavery struggle, by her own troubles, brought on her again by her husband.

The house left to her by her parents she wished to sell. Under the laws of Pennsylvania a wife could not alone give title, and her husband in this case refused to sign the deed unless the purchase money were given to him to be put into improvements on his mother’s estate, where all his wife’s earnings had so far been put out of her reach. Upon the death of her mother, whom she idolized and had nursed tenderly for some weeks against the opposition of her husband, the latter filed a claim against the mother’s estate for his wife’s wages as nurse. Of these applications of the law she writes:

I do not know why I should have been so utterly overwhelmed by
this proposal to execute a law passed by Christian legislators
for the government of a Christian people, a law which had never
been questioned by any nation or state or church, and was in
full force all over the world. Why should the discovery of its
existence curdle my blood, stop my heart-beats, and send a flush
of burning shame from forehead to finger-tips? Why blame him for
acting in harmony with the canons of every Christian church? Was
it any fault of his that “all that she (the wife) can acquire
by her labor, service, or act during coverture belongs to the
husband?” Certainly not!

It occurred to me that all the advances made by humanity had
been through the pressure of injustice, and that the screws had
been turned on me that I might do something to right the great
wrong which forbade married women to own property. So, instead of
spending my strength quarreling with the hand, I would strike for
the heart of that great tyranny. I studied the laws under which
I lived and began a series of letters on the subject of married
women’s rights to hold property.

The result of the agitation thus begun was an amendment to the statute in 1848, securing to married women the right to hold property. The predictions of evils to follow from this introduction of “an apple of discord into every family,” made by sage and serious men then, sound marvellously like some of the warnings we hear from objectors to woman suffrage now. But Mrs. Swisshelm refused to join the organized suffrage movement, and had many hot debates with its organs as to method, not as to principles; she herself, curiously enough, predicted evils to flow from woman suffrage, similar to those her critics had predicted would flow from granting property rights.

She opposed the Washingtonian temperance movement, scornfully rejecting the plan of reforming drunkards by coddling them; waged warfare against the encroachments of the Church of Rome; and on more than one occasion successfully resisted the tyranny of trade unions. To defeat the latter she herself learned and taught other women the art typographic, and became independent. It is a notable fact that she was driven into this contention, also, by her own troubles with union printers. She seems to have been generally a conscript, not often a volunteer to fight, but the result always was to advance the interests of oppressed classes more than her own interests. It was to establish a precedent in behalf of other female correspondents that she applied for and secured a seat in the reporter’s gallery in the Capitol, Washington, being the first woman who ever sat there. She was then (1850), as for many years before and after, a correspondent of the New York _Tribune_.

In 1847, after twenty years of vain efforts to “live up to the lights” of her mother-in-law, Mrs. Swisshelm and her husband parted, she taking their only child and going to Minnesota to live with her sister.

Her Minnesota experience was almost tragic. Before reaching there she was informed that Governor Lowrie allowed no abolition sentiments in St. Cloud. “Then there is not room there for General Lowrie and me,” stoutly replied the little crusader. General Lowrie was the territorial governor under Buchanan’s administration; he was a Mississippian who kept slaves in Minnesota, and ruled the territory with so high a hand that he was called dictator. When Mrs. Swisshelm started the St. Cloud _Visiter_ she invited the governor, among others, to subscribe, and received from him a letter promising it “a support second to that of no paper in the territory, if it will support Buchanan’s administration.” To the confusion of her friends, Mrs. Swisshelm accepted the terms, and frankly announced in the paper that General Lowrie owned everybody in Minnesota, and so she had sold herself and the paper to him and would support Buchanan’s administration—its object being, as she understood it, the subversion of all freedom in the United States, and the placing of a master over every northern “mud-sill” as over the Southern blacks; that Governor Lowrie had promised to support the paper in great power and glory for this, and she was determined to earn her money. It was simply the unconventional, blunt truth-telling of a child applied to a lying system of politics, and it cut like a knife.

Lowrie swore vengeance. “Let her alone, for God’s sake!” said one who knew her career. “Let her alone, or she will kill you. She has killed every man she ever touched. Let her alone.” He did not, and she did kill him with the truth. To his threats she returned the promise that she should continue to support Buchanan until she had broken him down in everlasting infamy. Her office was sacked one night and a notice left that if she revived the paper she would be tied to a log and cast into the Mississippi. The issue could not be avoided. An indignation meeting was called, and Mrs. Swisshelm said “I will attend and speak.” She made her will, settled her business, wrote a history of the trouble to testify if she could not, and employed a fighting man to attend the meeting by her side, and shoot her square through the brain if there were no other way to prevent her falling into the hands of the mob. Mrs. Sterns, a Yankee woman, held her arm, saying, “We will go into the river together; they can’t separate us.” So this descendant of the old Covenanter martyrs made her first speech to the, to her, doubtless, sweet music of a howling mob, stones and pistol shots.

The _Visiter_ was reëstablished on new type, by a stock company, and the first issue brought down on them a libel suit from Governor Lowrie, to compromise which Mrs. Swisshelm published a retraction, which released the owners from $10,000 bonds. She then bought the material, suspended the bonded _Visiter_, and issued the St. Cloud _Democrat_. Its first issue rang the death-knell of Governor Lowrie and border ruffianism in Minnesota. It was useless to sue her for libel, and she was too well protected to fear force. The state election in 1859, when Governor Lowrie was a candidate for Lieutenant-Governor, turned on the policy of border ruffianism, press-breaking, and woman mobbing. “The large man who instituted a mob to suppress a woman of my size [_i. e._, 100 lbs.], and then failed, was not a suitable leader for American men,” and Lowrie was snowed under, and not long after was taken to an insane asylum. The next year Mrs. Swisshelm felt honored at being burned in effigy in St. Paul by her enemies, as “the mother of the Republican party in Minnesota.” She afterward lectured two years in the northwest.

Then came the terrible civil war. Mrs. Swisshelm engaged in hospital work, bringing to it the consecration, indomitable energy and eccentric gumption that she displayed in politics and business. She walked through the red tape and professional etiquette which were killing more than bullets were, as she had through conventional chains. She says: “It was often so easy to save a life, where there were the means of living, that a little courage or common sense seemed like a miraculous gift to people whose mental powers had been turned in other directions.” In one hospital she found gangrene, and to her call for lemons, specific for it, she was gravely told by the surgeon that he had made a requisition a week before for them, and could not get them. She telegraphed the _Tribune_:

Hospital gangrene has broken out in Washington, and we want
_lemons!_ LEMONS! LEMONS! No man or woman in health has a right
to a glass of lemonade till these men have all they need. Send us
lemons!

The next day lemons began to pour into Washington, and soon into every hospital in the country. Governor Andrew sent two hundred boxes, and at one time she had twenty ladies with ambulances distributing lemons. Gangrene disappeared.

She felt about equal anger and contempt for masculine indifference and the mushy inefficiency of women who flocked to Washington to nurse in the hospitals. She sarcastically says the vast majority of the women who succeeded in getting into hospitals were much more willing to “kiss him for his mother” than to render the soldier any solid service; they “were capable of any heroism save wearing a dress suitable for hospital work. The very, very few who laid aside their hoops—those instruments of dread and torture—generally donned bloomers and gave offense by airs of independence.”

Mrs. S. was one of three women who followed Grant’s advance upon the Wilderness. Her courage, endurance and good sense never showed to better advantage than during the Petersburg battles.

Mrs. Swisshelm’s marital experience was but an episode to her true career—the counter-irritant that brought out her character. Its unhappiness was due to four causes: 1. Religious differences. Both sides were fanatical, and her husband’s people felt a call to give her no rest till they had got her “converted and saved” by their theological scales. 2. It was a sad case of mother-in-law, on the husband’s side. 3. The brains, character and courage were all on one side. No woman had a higher reverence for strong manly character, and she was married to a male shrew and weakling. But above all she belonged to the last half of the nineteenth century in her ideas of woman’s sphere, and he to the last half of the eighteenth, in his. Aside from this, they loved each other, and after their separation each bore high testimony to the right intention and purity of the other.

Few women of this day appreciate how much of their freedom to work and think they owe to such pioneers as Jane Grey Swisshelm. Few men can be made to see how much of the great advance of American life is due to the nobler, broader womanhood made possible by the self-immolation of such pioneers. They made their impression on the point most needing change and strength, if our society and government were to become pure, strong and enduring. For it has become a law of sociology that the condition of its women is the measure of the civilization and possible growth of any people. Mrs. Swisshelm did more than her share to lengthen that measure for this people, and, happily, lived to see the fruits of her work. But it was a desolate life for a woman, for all that.

THE IMPERIAL COLLEGE IN PEKING.

By REV. GEO. W. SMYTH, President of Fouchow College.

Among the many interesting places to be seen in the old and strange city of Peking, that which must claim the chief attention of every visitor intent on noting the changes which the last twenty-five years have wrought in this ancient empire is the Túng Wên Kuan, or College of United Literatures. It is an imperial college in which Chinese students are taught the principal languages and literatures of modern Europe. Their studies are in Chinese and in one or other of the western languages, and hence doubtless its high-sounding but significant name. The students are government cadets, paid from the public treasury, and preparing to enter the consular and diplomatic service of their country in foreign lands. A short account of the origin, purpose and methods of this school may not be uninteresting, as showing how great a change has come over the high official mind of this country in the last quarter of a century. The change, indeed, was the result of necessity, but it is not on that account any the less real, and the movement it inaugurated can not now be stopped.

The war of 1860, which so nearly destroyed the present dynasty, and showed the ruling classes at Peking the greatly superior power of the West, necessitated a great change in the foreign policy of the empire. Hitherto they had complacently looked upon foreigners, subjects and sovereigns alike, as uncouth barbarians, who were to be excluded from the capital, or allowed to enter it only on admitting their subjection and vassalage to the Celestial ruler. But the war which came so near overthrowing the dynasty and bringing down the whole fabric of government crashing about their ears, convinced even the proudest of the mandarins that further resistance would be destruction, and that China, whether she would or not, must step out of her seclusion, and take an open place among the nations of the world. She must henceforth enter into treaty relations with the kingdoms of the West, treat them as equals, trade with them on reasonable terms, receive their ambassadors, and submit herself to the public laws of the civilized world. New methods had to be devised to meet these unusual conditions, and the first thing done was to establish the Tsungli Yamên, or office for the transaction of Foreign Affairs. In the following year a school was opened for the training of interpreters, and out of this grew in time the well equipped Imperial College of to-day. In 1865 this school was raised to the rank of a college by adding a scientific department. With this view new buildings were erected, and steps taken toward engaging the services of a competent corps of foreign professors. In a memorial to the throne presented by Prince Kung in 1866, that enlightened statesman thus declares the scope and motives of this undertaking: “What we desire,” he says, “is that students shall go to the bottom of these subjects (that is, the astronomical and mathematical sciences), for we are firmly convinced that if we are able to master the mysteries of mathematical calculation, physical investigation, astronomical observation, the construction of engines, the engineering of water courses, this, and this only, will assure the steady growth and power of the empire.” The prince had to meet many objections, and after stating that the nations of the West learn from each other, daily producing something new, and that even Japan has recently sent men to England to acquire the language and science of that country, he adds: “Now, when a small nation like Japan knows how to enter on a career of progress, what could be a greater disgrace than for China to adhere to her old traditions, and never think of waking up?”

It was some time before the college was thoroughly organized. W. A. P. Martin, D.D., once a missionary of the American Presbyterian Church at Ningpo, was appointed president. Other appointments followed as speedily as the fitting men could be found, till the plan contemplated was realized.

This, then, is the Imperial College at Peking. What does it do? What is taught there, and what are the influences of its training? While in Peking this summer I was fortunate enough to visit it, to see something of its working, and to gain some familiarity with its purposes and plans. The learned president, Dr. Martin, courteously showed me over the buildings, and told me of the work they were doing. The college buildings adjoin the foreign office or Tsungli Yamên. They are in no sense imposing, being ordinary Chinese structures of one story, without attempt at adornment or splendor of any sort whatever. The rooms are small and plain, containing nothing that is not needed for the immediate work of teaching. The room of the president is a very plain one for so high an officer. The departments of chemistry and physics are well supplied with the instruments and chemicals needed for their work. The professor of astronomy, who is also professor of mathematics, showed me a fine equatorial telescope just arrived from Grubb, one of the most celebrated makers in Europe. The rooms of the language professors are in keeping with the rest, small and bare, but sufficiently well adapted for the purposes to which they are put. The languages taught are four, English, French, German, and Russian, the English receiving far more attention than the others. The full course extends over a period of eight years, and in that time the students are led from “reading, writing and speaking,” through all the intermediate departments to “astronomy, geology and mineralogy, political economy and the translation of books.” After completing the course, those so disposed may remain in the college or be sent abroad, at the option of the government, for the pursuit of special studies, with a view to professional use. Many so remain. Last year one man left who had been in attendance for eighteen years.

The work done is as thorough as it can be. It can not be said that the students make as much progress as foreign students would make in much less time, but the slowness is due not more to the difficulties of a foreign language than to the utter strangeness of the subjects pursued. I was fortunate in being there on Wednesday, when the students of the higher English classes read essays of their own before the president and the English professor. Some of those I heard were very creditable, especially one on the subject of currency. He seemed to have thought for himself, to have a fair understanding of the subject, and would have delighted the fiscal reformers of America by the soundness of his hard money principles. He expressed great dissatisfaction with the currency of China, and hoped for a speedy and thorough reform. So does every man who travels in this strange country. Inside the walls of Peking there is one way of reckoning money, outside there is another; a few miles off one may find a third, and so on, _ad infinitum_. The currency of China is the most bewildering subject on the face of the earth. The rest of the essays did not impress me so much by the thoughts they expressed (indeed, there was little originality in any of them), as by their fair command of English style. The writers had evidently some mastery of the intricacies of the English idiom. I confess some of the themes disappointed me. They were taken from somewhere or other in the ancient classics, instead of being characteristic of the subjects they were studying. But it is hard to avoid this. The students know very little of the literature of the languages they are studying, and it is almost impossible, I am told, to induce them to take the great foreign works from the library and attempt to read them for themselves. They have not yet reached the state of intelligent enthusiasm which refuses to think a language known before a fair acquaintance is made with its literature. But this, too, will come in time. As to the students personally, a few of them impressed me as intelligent men, and as anxious to do their work well. The great trouble with them, the one which must seriously interfere with their studies, since it can not but narrow and distort their intellectual sympathies, is their seemingly invincible pride. I was told that scarce any but the Cantonese students care to take the slightest notice of their professors when they meet them on the street. Think of the difficulties of teaching such men! They probably look upon their instructors as far beneath themselves, and possibly think of the languages they are studying as the speech of barbarians. With such material, and with such dull and sullen prejudices to fight against, the professors must be regarded as having accomplished much. They could do more were their students men of liberal minds, eager to acquire knowledge for its own sake, and pursuing it with a generous enthusiasm. It is not easy to do your best work where you fail to rouse the sympathies of the student and make him feel something of the ardor which a liberal mind ever feels in the acquisition of knowledge. The Chinese are not an enthusiastic people, and except in a very few cases, it is impossible to make them such in learning of foreign things. They like to know as much as suits their imperative needs, and but few care enough about more to study with eager diligence. This struck me as being true of many of the students of this Peking college.

Beside teaching there is here another department of the first importance—that of translating and publishing foreign books. Several important works have already been translated by the professors of the college, or by the students under their supervision. Wheaton’s “Elements of International Law,” Woolsey’s “International Law,” Faucett’s “Political Economy,” Bluntschli’s “Droit International Codifié,” the “Code Napoleon,” Kerl’s “English Grammar,” and Tytler’s “Universal History;” these are the chief works hitherto translated. In addition, several compilations have been made, such as “Natural Philosophy,” “Chemical Analysis,” “Mathematical Exercises,” and “Mathematical Physics.”

The printing office is a commodious building, with several presses, several fonts of movable Chinese, and one of English type. When I was there one great book had just been finished, and another was just being printed. No more remarkable books have ever been issued from the government press, and if they are prophetic of the near future we may look for its coming with no little hope.

The book just published is a report on education in the West, by Dr. Martin. It is the result of a recent examination of the chief schools of learning in America and Europe. The report is quite full, giving an account of the principal classes of schools, elementary and professional, of the two continents, and closing with an exhibit of the present state of our own Michigan University. I wish there were space to speak of it at length, but the mere catalogue of some of the titles of its chapters will show its scope and purpose as well as the most elaborate description. Among the principal headings are such as these: “Elements Common to the Education of all Western Nations;” “Classification of Schools;” “Primary Schools;” “Education of Women;” “Education of the Blind and Deaf;” “Literary and Scientific Associations;” “The Nations Learning from Each Other;” “Rise and Progress of Science;” “Educational Statistics.” Beside these there is an account of professional schools of all classes. These will give some conception of the character of this most significant work. It is published with a preface by one of the ministers, by order of the Council for Foreign Affairs.

Who may estimate the influence of such a work as this, published and sanctioned by such high authority? The educational system of the West could have no more favorable introduction, as no foreigner in the empire is more highly esteemed than the learned author. It was fitting that such a book should come from the pen of Dr. Martin. In his translations of Woolsey’s and Wheaton’s treatises on international law, he had already shown the Chinese the public law of the nations of the West, and in this he describes the educational system on which their intellectual life is based. Others, it is true, have already taught the Chinese much, but it is scarcely injustice to say that from no one could this work come with such weighty authority as from the president of their own highest western school. It may be regarded as destined to play no unimportant part in shaping the intellectual life of the China of the future.