Chapter VI: Part I (1)

When any portion of the earth is colonized by civilized man, an era of change and readjustment at once begins. The untilled plain, the primeval forest, the bridgeless river, the malaria-breathing swamp, and the jungle—lurking place for beasts of prey—are all obstructions which must be removed from the highway of social and industrial progress. Until a new environment had been created, the colonists of Virginia and New England were like helpless children, compared with the Indians whom they had come to disinherit. The hills were soon cleared, and the water-courses dried up, swamps were drained, and lakes were made in the valleys, the plains were plowed and planted with exotic vegetation, and great regions of land were entirely changed in character by irrigation and the use of manure. The New World has in two centuries become in very truth a new world, for its physical features have been entirely reconstructed. The aboriginal man retreated before the advancing strides of civilization, and has now been practically exterminated, at least east of the Mississippi River.

The manner in which the man of European descent has eliminated and replaced the son of the soil is fairly typical of changes which have occurred in the animal and vegetable life of the continent. Bear, moose, caribou, deer, wolf, beaver, and all other large animals have been entirely destroyed in many parts of the country, and the time is not far remote when they will exist among us only in a state of partial or entire domestication. The prairie chicken once reared its brood in Massachusetts, but is now never seen east of the Alleghenies. The alligator is fast being exterminated in Florida and Mississippi, and the buffalo is now rarely to be seen except in captivity. The sea cow of the north Pacific, the great auk of New England and Newfoundland stand with the dodo, the moa, and the zebra in the list of animals which have become extinct within the memory of man, and the list will continue to increase. A similar story might be told for birds, reptiles, and plants. The rattlesnake is retreating to the mountain tops, the turkey, the pigeon, the woodpecker and hosts of others are disappearing, the medicinal plant ginseng, once so important in the Alleghenies, is almost a rarity to botanists.

The aboriginal animals and plants go. They are replaced by others, which in that struggle for existence which plays so important a part in determining careers for plants and animals, have become particularly well fitted to be man’s companions. The clover, the ox-eye daisy, the buttercup, the thistle, the mullein, the dandelion, followed the European to America, and with them the broad-leaved plantain, which, as every one knows, the Indians called “the white man’s foot,” because it sprung up at once in every meadow where the soles of his shoes had touched. With these came the European mouse, the rat, the cat, the dog. The browsing herds of deer and buffalo were replaced by oxen, horses and sheep, and the greedy, quarrelsome, impertinent sparrow was permitted to drive out the native birds which many of us would have been glad to keep as relics of the old dispensation.

Not less important in many regions have been the changes in the life in the waters. In many of our streams and lakes the fish, formerly abundant, have been entirely exterminated. Sometimes, perhaps we may charitably say usually, this has been the result of ignorance, but often, I fear, it may be ascribed to recklessness or cupidity.

Fishes may be grouped, according to their habits, into two classes—resident and migratory. Representatives of each of these classes may be found both in fresh water and in the sea. Among resident fresh water fishes may be mentioned the perch, the catfish, suckers and dace, the pike and pickerel, the black bass. Resident sea fishes are typified by the flounders, cod, sheepshead, blackfish and sea bass, which are found near the shore in winter as well as summer. In cold climates, resident fishes always retreat in winter into deeper water to avoid the cold, and if they can not get beyond its reach they subside into a state of torpidity or hibernation, in which all the vital functions are more or less inert. The carp, and many other kinds of fish, at this time, burrow into “kettles” or holes in the mud in the bottom of the pond, where they remain for months. A hybernating fish may be frozen solid in the middle of a cake of ice, and emerge when thawed out, unharmed.

Migratory fishes, on the other hand, are those which wander extensively from season to season. There are migrating fish in the sea, which, like the mackerel, the bluefish, the menhaden and the porgy come near our northern coasts only in the summer, and in winter retreat to regions either in the south or far out at sea unknown; others, like the smelt and the sea herring, which retreat northward in summer and only appear in quantity on the Atlantic coast of the United States in the colder months of the year.

Then there are migratory fishes which live part of the year in the rivers. Such are the shad and the river-herrings or alewives, which leave the sea in the spring and ascend to the river heads to spawn, and the salmon, which does likewise, to spawn in the brooklets in November and December. Still more remarkable is the eel, which breeds in the sea, where the male eels always remain, while the young females, when as large as darning needles, ascend in the spring to inland lakes and streams, there to remain, until, after three or four years, they are grown to maturity, when they descend to salt water, to reproduce their kind and die.

There are also migratory fish in fresh water, like the white fish, the salmon, trout, and the siscowet, which live in the abyssal depths of the great lakes and swim up into the shallows and creeks in winter to spawn their eggs, and the brook trout and dace, which for a similar purpose ascend from the pools and quiet meadow stretches to the pebble-paved ripplets near the spring sources of the brooks in which they live.

Having, in a general way, classified fish according to their habits, we are in a position to consider the manner in which man has succeeded in exterminating them. As a general rule, fish deposit their eggs in shallow water, and the time of egg-laying is very closely dependent upon the temperature of the water. The eggs of a fish are, as every one knows, enclosed in two sacs, or ovaries, which are situated close to the walls of the abdominal cavity, and separated from the water by thin walls of skin and flesh, rarely, even in the largest fish, more than a sixteenth of an inch in thickness. Experiment has shown that the temperature of the blood in the abdomen of a fish deviates very little from that of the water in which it is floating. Experiment has also shown that as soon as the water has reached a certain degree of warmth, variable with each kind of fish, the eggs are sure to be laid within a very few hours. This being the case, it usually happens that great schools of fish always congregate together at one time upon the spawning grounds. Since the spawning grounds of many kinds of fish are in shallow water, and the fish are at that time most easily caught, it happens that many of the most extensive fisheries are carried on in the spawning season. The delicious little smelts which our neighbors in Maine and New Brunswick send us by the hundred car-loads each winter, packed in little boxes of snow, are always full of eggs—so are the lake white fish, when they are caught, and the shad, and the Potomac herrings, and the cod, and the mullet, and the herring, and in early spring the mackerel.

Now consider how easy it is, taking these fish so much at a disadvantage, to diminish their numbers, simply by catching them. The man who catches a spawning cod destroys anywhere from 5,000,000 to 7,000,000 of eggs, a spawning halibut at least 2,000,000, a shad from 50,000 to 2,000,000. Is not the American breakfasting on broiled shad roe a modern representative of him who killed the goose which laid the golden egg? When we consider that the yearly catch of mother-fish along the New England coast does not fall short of ten to fifteen millions of individuals, we may gain an adequate idea of the destruction of fish life by the fisheries.

Still it is not necessary to be alarmed at these figures. They are presented simply in illustration of the immense possibilities of destruction when the fisheries are carried on at the spawning season. As a matter of fact, cod are just as abundant along our coasts as they ever were, and it has not yet been demonstrated that any kind of sea fish has ever been diminished in numbers by hook and line fishing or by netting them at a distance from the shore.

Some kinds of fishes, however, enter narrow bays and estuaries to spawn, and if they are there recklessly destroyed, the local supply at least may be permanently interfered with. This has apparently been the case with certain species in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. For instance, the scuppaug or porgy has been seriously diminished in numbers in certain seasons, years ago; the supply will probably be replenished from adjoining waters by the reparative tendencies of nature, if this indeed has not already been done. So, too, the halibut has been exterminated in Massachusetts, where it was once so abundant as to be regarded as a nuisance by the fishermen. It is in the inland or freshwater fisheries, however, that the work of extermination has been thorough, and here, from the nature of the case, the work once accomplished, it is beyond the power of nature to remedy the damage. If I could take the reader with me next May to one of the many little streamlets of Cape Cod, flowing southward into Nantucket Sound, I could show him a scene which he would never forget. The little rill has been encased at bottom and sides with planks, so that it flows for a mile or two, down to its junction with the sea, in a straight trough not over fifteen inches wide, and a foot in depth. At a convenient level place a shed has been built over the trough, and in the floor is a kind of cistern, through which the waters of the brook flow as it goes on its course. In the shed stand two men, each with a great scoop of netting, with which they labor, dipping the fish out of the cistern as they fill it, swimming up the trough from the sea. Several barrels are taken out every day, and in some of these streams one or two thousand barrels always reward a season’s work, the brook being the property of the township, and the privilege of fishing being sold at auction for the benefit of the public. Dip! dip! dip it is all day long, and as the little alewives are tumbled into barrels and carts, the eye of the practiced observer notes the plump sides and the brilliant iridescent coloring of the silvery scales, which indicate that the fish are loaded with a precious burden of eggs, to deposit which in the pond at the head of the stream is the motive which leads them to press forward so blindly into the trap men have set for them.

In these enlightened days the town laws generally require that the brooks shall be unobstructed for one or two days each week, and so a few fish get by the barriers and are allowed to perpetuate their kind. In the past, however, many excellent “herring brooks” have been completely deprived of their fish.

This illustrates how completely man has the destinies of river fish under his control. Suppose that instead of a fish house with movable barriers, an impassable dam had been built. Of course the fish would have been locked out, and their kind exterminated in that immediate region. This is precisely what has happened in almost every river and stream on the Atlantic coast of the United States. Shad and salmon were formerly abundant in every river of New England—and shad and alewives in every considerable stream south to Florida. Now, they are excluded, either entirely or in great part from the waters in which they once swarmed in great schools. Take, for instance, the Connecticut River. In colonial days, salmon were there in immense numbers. All summer long they were swimming up from the sea to the headwaters of the river, to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, where they deposited their eggs in the cool, clear rapids of the main river and its tributaries. They were so abundant that the shad fishermen used to require their customers to take one salmon with every shad, and, as the hackneyed old story goes, the apprentices were accustomed to stipulate in their papers that they should not be required to eat salmon above three times a week. In 1798 a dam was built across the river at Miller’s Falls. Next year many salmon were seen at the base of the dam, the following year a smaller number, and in less than ten years salmon had entirely disappeared from the Connecticut. Not a salmon was seen in those waters until seventy years later, when, in 1871, a single artificially bred fish was caught at Saybrook. I could show you a map prepared by an associate of mine, in which the present and former limits of the shad are shown, and you would see how they once ranged clear up into the mountains, far up the Susquehanna into New York State, up the Connecticut into New Hampshire and Vermont, and how now, in many rivers, they are confined to very restrictive stretches at the river mouths.

The dams operate in still another way. We have considered hitherto only their influence upon the sea fish which ascend the rivers to spawn. Their effect upon the resident fish is quite as baneful. As the suckers, and the bass, and the cat fish, and dace, and trout, grow large, they naturally go down stream in search of deeper water and wider pools, where they get more room and better food. If they luckily escape the baskets and traps set for them in every dam, they never can get back. The streams are gradually sifted out and left tenantless.

Little need be said of the manner in which ponds are drained dry in order to get all the fish in them, in which immense seines are hauled in little lakes, clearing out everything, great and small, of the use of explosives, lime, or _cocculus indicus_, in the work of wholesale destruction. The fact stands undisputed and undisputable, that in many parts of the United States the native fish are actually exterminated, and the mud turtles, muskrats and fresh water clams left as sole occupants. Even the harmonious bull-frog has been devoured by man, and only his diminutive cousins, the cricket frogs and hylas left—the aquatic choir can henceforth perform only soprano and contralto songs, unless the fish culturist finds some way of bringing back the basso whose obligatos we once admired.

Oysters, scallops, and lobsters are going the same way. Although they live in free waters, they are stationary in their habits, and wholesale gathering will soon complete the work of extermination so recklessly begun. The forthcoming census reports on the fisheries will show conclusively the need of immediate protection.

What is the remedy for these great evils? One hundred thousand men are actively engaged in the fisheries of the United States, and at least one fiftieth of the entire population of the country are, to a large extent, dependent on the fishery industry. Fish is the poor man’s food, for unlike any other food product it may be had for the taking. A fish swimming in the water has cost no man labor. There floats four pounds of savory shad, fifty pounds of nutritious sturgeon, a hundred barrels of whale oil; there lies a bushel of oysters, or a barrel of sponges. They are God’s gift, and man has only to gather them in, and possibly submit them to a very simple process of preparation, to be the possessor of a valuable piece of property. If the matter can be properly regulated, good fish ought to be sold in every town and village for two thirds or half the price of beef and pork. As it is, poor fish often cost more than beef and pork, and in many localities good fish can not be had at any price. It is a great problem in political economy, and one which we are, as yet, far from thoroughly understanding.

We are confronted with the question, What can be done to neutralize these destructive tendencies?

There are evidently three things to do.

1. To preserve fish waters, especially those inland, as nearly as possible in their normal condition.

2. To prohibit wasteful or immoderate fishing.

3. To employ the art of fish breeding.

_a._ To aid in maintaining a natural supply;

_b._ To repair the effects of past improvidence, and

_c._ To increase the supply beyond its natural limits, rapidly
enough to meet the necessities of a constantly increasing
population.

The preservation of normal conditions in inland waters is comparatively simple. A reasonable system of forestry and water purification is all that is required, and this is needed not only by the fish in the streams, but by the people living on the banks. It has been shown that a river which is too foul for fish to live in is not fit to flow near the habitations of man. Obstructions, such as dams, may, in most instances, be overcome by fish ladders. The salmon has profited much by these devices in Europe, and the immense dams in American rivers will doubtless be passable, even for shad and alewives, if the new system of fish-way construction devised by Col. McDonald, and now being applied on the Savannah, James, and Potomac, and other large rivers, fulfills its present promises of success.

Up to the present time, however, although much ingenuity and expense have been lavished upon fish-ways by the various state fish commissions of this country, there has been little practical outcome from their use. Our dams are too high, and the shad and alewives, which we are especially desirous to carry over these obstructions, do not seem to take kindly to the narrow, tortuous defiles of the fish ladders.

The protection of fish by law is what legislators have been trying to effect for many centuries, and we are bound to admit that the success of their efforts has been very slight indeed. Protective legislation rarely succeeds. The statute books of each state are crowded with laws which no one understands, least of all the men who made them, and which the state governments are powerless to enforce. Every one remembers Whittier’s grand old hero, Abraham Davenport, the Connecticut statesman, who, “on a May day of that far old year 1780,” when the earth was shrouded in darkness, and he and all his colleagues in the State Assembly felt that the judgment day had come, stood up, “albeit with trembling hands and shaking voice, and read an act to amend an act to regulate the shad and alewife fisheries”—and then went on to rebuke those around for their fearfulness and desire to leave the post of duty. Connecticut is as much at a loss now as then to know how to regulate her shad and alewife fisheries. Under a republican form of government, restrictive laws are not popular, and money would never be voted to enforce such laws, which, without an extensive police force, would be powerless. Some one has sagely remarked that the salmon is an aristocratic fish, which can only thrive under the shadow of a throne. Many states now have laws protecting fresh water fish in the breeding season, and numerous game protective associations are laboring with some success for their enforcement. Sales of fish out of season are also successfully prevented in certain city markets.

The attempts to regulate the fisheries at the mouths of rivers, so that spawning fish may be allowed free passage for a few hours, generally from Saturday evening to Monday morning, are meeting with but little success.

Maryland and Virginia attempt to some extent the protection of their oyster beds, and the former state keeps up an expensive police organization. The oyster law is founded in ignorance, however, and the chief effort being to keep away fishermen from other states, for the benefit of their own, there are small results except frequent quarrels and occasional bloodshed.

Connecticut is making the experiment of giving to individuals personal title to submerged land, to be used in oyster culture, and this, perhaps, is the wisest step taken. Oyster production must soon cease to be a free grabbing enterprise, and be placed upon the same footing as agriculture, or the United States will lose its beloved oyster crop, and in this country, as in England, a fresh oyster will be worth as much as a new-laid egg. Great Britain has, at present, two schools of fishery economists, the one headed by Professor Huxley, opposed to legislation, save for the preservation of fish in inland waters, the other, of which Dr. Francis Day is the chief leader, advocating a most strenuous legal regulation of the sea fisheries. Continental Europe is by tradition and belief committed to the last named policy. In the United States, on the contrary, public opinion is generally antagonistic to fishery legislation, and our Commissioner of Fisheries, after carrying on for fourteen years investigations upon this very question, has not yet become satisfied that laws are necessary for the perpetuation of the sea fisheries, nor has he ever recommended to Congress enactment of any description. Just here we meet the test problem in fish culture. Many of the most important commercial fisheries of the world, the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the sardine fishery, the shad and alewife fishery, the mullet fishery, the salmon fishery, the whitefish fishery, the smelt fishery, and many others, owe their existence to the fact that once a year these fishes gather together in closely swimming schools, to spawn in shallow water, on shoals, or in estuaries and rivers. There is a large school of _quasi_ economists, who clamor for the complete prohibition of fishing during spawning time. This demand demonstrates their ignorance. Deer, game birds, and other land animals may easily be protected in the breeding season, so may trout and other fishes of strictly local habits. Not so the anadromous and pelagic fishes. If they are not caught in the spawning season, they can not be caught at all. I heard a prominent fish culturist recently advocating before a committee of the United States Senate, the view that shad should not be caught in the rivers, because they came into the rivers to spawn. When asked what would become of our immense shad fisheries if this were done, he said that doubtless some ingenious person would invent a means of catching them at sea.

The fallacy in the argument of these men lies in the supposition that it is more destructive to the progeny of a given fish to kill it when its eggs are nearly ripe, than to kill the same fish eight or ten months earlier.

We must not, however, ignore the counter argument. Such is the mortality among fish that only an infinitesimal percentage attain to maturity. Möbius has shown that for every grown oyster upon the beds of Schleswig-Holstein, 1,045,000 have died. Only a very small percentage, perhaps not greater than this, of the shad or the smelt ever come upon the breeding grounds. Some consideration, then, ought to be shown to the individuals which have escaped from their enemies and have come up to deposit the precious burden of eggs. How much must they be protected?

Here the fish culturist comes in with the proposition “_that it is cheaper to make fish so plenty by artificial means that every fisherman may take all he can catch, than to enforce a code of protective laws_.”

The salmon rivers of the Pacific slope, and the shad rivers of the east, and the whitefish fisheries of the lakes, are now so thoroughly under control by the fish culturist, that it is doubtful if any one will venture to contradict his assertion. The question now is, whether he can extend his domain to other species.

Legislation and fish-ways, then, are, as yet, of little practical importance. Actually, they repeat the proverbial act of the clown who locked the stable door after his horse had been stolen. No one makes laws or builds fish-ways until he is of the decided opinion that the fish are pretty nearly gone.

Artificial fish culture seems to offer the only remedy for the evils which have been described.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT.

There is now and then a biography so written that the reader is able to become intimately acquainted with the subject, to feel after reading that he has had a personal contact, and has formed a friendship which is warm and living. Such “Lives” are rare. Most works of this kind are so biased by the interpretations of the author, so full of facts and opinions that the reader loses all feeling of companionship in reading; he closes the book, knowing much about the subject, but rarely understanding him. A book which presents a man or woman in that personal way which makes a friendship through the medium of the book possible, confers a great gift upon the reading public.

The peculiar fitness of Mr. Cross’s “Life of George Eliot”[B] for giving us a new friend, must be attributed to the really remarkable taste and skill of his editing. The work bears the mark of a reverential hand. It is an _In Memoriam_ whose only object has been to lay before the world a memory too strong and precious to be kept secret. But no such a biography could have been given the world had it not been for the peculiar nature of George Eliot herself. The material for this “Life” grew out of two strong elements in her character: the affectionate and persistent friendship which led her to reveal herself so fully to those she loved in her letters, and that constant introspection which made her journal often a mirror of her inner life. These materials make up the book, which is largely a study of her character, and, too, of her character as she understood it. She has verily written her own life. The interpretation remains for the readers.

It would have been possible for Mr. Cross to have given much information about her character which he has withheld, her opinions and much of her conversation; but he has wisely given the world only what she herself chose to reveal to her friends.

The story begins early. The first revelations in character are the strongest; the happiness and misery of the future life are revealed in the childhood traits. The earliest revelations which we find in George Eliot’s life are of affection and ambition; either, if strong enough to become a passion, drives its possessor along a thorny path until it is itself mastered, and where both exist in a nature, continual collision must occur between them. Before each is satisfied there must be a life struggle of the keenest sort. Such a struggle was presaged for Marian Evans very early. She herself tells how, when she was but four years of age, she played on the piano, of which she did not know a note, in order to impress the servant with a proper notion of her acquirements and generally distinguished position. As eager, too, she was for love as for recognition. In her reminiscences of her early life most vividly she portrays her earliest passion—one very common among affectionate girls—her love for her brother. “She used always to be at his heels, insisting on doing everything that he did.” When his first boyish craze took possession of him in shape of a pony, and she found it was separating them, she was nearly heart broken. Impressible, eager for work and ambitious for knowledge, she began life under an emotional pressure, which drove her into incessant distress lest those she loved should fail her, and which brought her devotion to her loved ones in constant collision with her ambition. At twenty-one, writing to a very intimate friend, she said: “I do not mean to be so sinful as to say that I have not friends most undeservedly kind and tender, and disposed to form a far too favorable estimate of me, but I mean I have no one who enters into my pleasures and griefs, no one with whom I can pour out my soul.” Eight years after this, having lost her father, she went abroad for a few months’ residence, and her letters home were full of eager longing for their sympathy and restless fear lest they should forget her. No change in her life diminished this feeling. She became an editor of the _Westminster Review_, and while overwhelmed with manuscripts and proofs she wrote: “You must know that I am not a little desponding now and then, and think that old friends will die off, and I shall be left with no power to make new ones again.” Undoubtedly this feeling tended to make her morbid in her younger days, and consequently dwarf her power. It is an important study of her life to trace the gradual melting of this disposition, and the final growth into a healthy happiness. When quite past the heyday of her life, she wrote a friend of her girlhood: “I am one of those, perhaps, exceptional people whose early childish dreams were much less happy than the outcome of life,” and again, but four years before her death: “I have completely lost my _personal_ melancholy. I often, of course, have melancholy thoughts about the destinies of my fellow creatures, but I am never in the mood of sadness, which used to be my frequent visitant, even in the midst of external happiness; and this, notwithstanding a very vivid sense that life is declining, and death close at hand.” This release from morbidness had two causes. She had taught her strong, affectional nature to find satisfaction in that commonplace, but little understood duty, loving her neighbors, and she had learned to enjoy things on their own account. The first article in this creed of happiness became George Eliot’s religion. She had abandoned her belief in the Christian religion when twenty-one years of age. She could not believe fully, and she was too independent and too reliant upon her own mind to conform to a religion she did not believe. The steps she took did not destroy the religious sense in her life. The earnestness which led her to write at nineteen, “May the Lord give me such an insight into what is truly good, that I may not rest contented with making Christianity a mere addendum to my pursuits, or with tacking it as a fringe to my garments;” which induced her to consider the novel and even oratorio as dangerous to spiritual development still remained, though without form. She was intensely in earnest, but it was many years before her love for mankind became a religion to her. A less strong character would have become flippant or scornful under this loss; hers only became more serious. She seems never to have forgotten what she had abandoned.

Though radically differing from most of her friends on religious questions, she never was uncharitable. “Of all intolerance, the intolerance calling itself philosophical is the most odious to me,” she wrote, and she lived out this opinion, in no way allowing the widest diversity to separate her from her friends. Her sympathy and charity indeed seem to increase, even if the breach in their opinion widened.

This habit of thought and feeling resulted in much personal moral benefit. “My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.”

As she grew older, she comforted herself with the thought that “with that renunciation of self which age inevitably brings we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others.” She tried for “a religion which must express less care for personal consolation and a more deeply awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with that which of all things is most certainly known to us, the difficulty of the human lot.” This was the great lesson in her growth toward happiness. A secondary step was her appreciation of the value of things in themselves. It is a serious obstacle to the happiness of women, that in the main they care for exterior life only as it is of value in the personal life. A book is dear because a friend has read or recommended it. This verse is fine from association; this strain of music because they heard it in a certain connection. Take the _personal_ out of Art and Nature, and too often women care little for them. George Eliot learned to appreciate and love things for their own value. Music, to which she was from childhood deeply susceptible, she cultivated thoroughly, and no fine rendering of _good_ music ever was missed by her. She took the true, high view of life, which declares that from every good all possible enjoyment should be gained. Art was very dear to her, and we find in these quotations from her journal, notes on all the leading galleries of Europe, but in the very midst of her art studies she drops this comment, after noting a sight she had had of the snow covered Alps: “Sight more to me than all the art in Munich, though I love the _art_ nevertheless. The great, wide-stretching earth, and the all-embracing sky—the birthright of us all—are what I care most to look at.”

But it would have been impossible for even her deep love for mankind, her fine enjoyment of the good and beautiful, to have completed her life. These things satisfied her affections, but there was another quality we have mentioned as prominent in her life: it was her ambition. At twenty she wrote despondently: “I feel that my besetting sin is the one of all others most destroying, as it is the faithful parent of them all—ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow-creatures.” Whatever she did, was done with all her might. Her mother died early, and she became housekeeper. Her struggles with the knotty questions of housewifery kept her in a constant worry, but she would do things right—whether it be currant jelly or a German translation. The same perfection marked her novels. Her progress was soon marked; it recommended her to people of standing, and gradually she had a circle of friends—people of strong minds and much culture—about her. Eager to do something, a way opened to her in 1844, when she was twenty-five years old. It was to translate into English a work of the German philosopher, Strauss. She did it, and what was better, did it well. Five years later she writes: “The only ardent hope I have for my future life is to have given me some woman’s duty.” The ambition to excel is already bending to the stronger emotion of affection. For a long time she worked, eager and anxious, but nothing seemed to open. In 1851 she went to London as assistant editor of _Westminster Review_, and here most satisfactory opportunities for culture opened. She formed lasting friendships with Herbert Spenser, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, and indeed with all the people worth knowing, who filled London in the ’fifties. But her editing left no opportunity to do that special work to which she was looking, and which she did not understand. She wrote many reviews and essays. This writing was a sort of safety valve for her intellect, but it was not until September, 1856, that the new era began in her life. It was when she began to write fiction. The popular idea of fiction as stories which will do to kill time, but which for serious reading are quite useless, was not the idea of George Eliot. A nature so intensely serious, so anxious for noble work, could not content itself with trivial story telling; she did not aim at that, but at studies of life. As she finely writes to Mr. John Blackwood, who became her publisher: “My artistic bent is directed not all to the presentation of irreproachable character, but to the presentation of mixed human beings, in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy. And I can not step aside from what I _feel_ to be _true_ in character.” And again: “I should like to touch every heart among my readers with nothing but loving humor, with tenderness, with belief in goodness.” The story of her great success is familiar—her books are well known. In rapid succession she sent out “Scenes of Clerical Life,” “Adam Bede,” “The Mill on the Floss,” “Silas Marner,” “Romola,” “Felix Holt,” “The Spanish Gypsy,” “Middlemarch,” “Daniel Deronda,” and “Theophrastus Such.” Her convictions about how she should work were intense. She wrote and _lived_ her story, and once when urged to re-write a tale, replied that she could no more re-write a book than she could live over a year in her own life. Her novels are the embodiment of what she had felt, written that they might strengthen others. The conscientiousness with which she labored made her work sometimes most painful to her. Despondency lest she should fail, fear lest she had misinterpreted a character, depression lest this chapter should fall below a preceding in merit, tortured her in succession, but she worked because she believed she had found her place, and to do her best for mankind was her religion. The slow-growing nature struggling with eager desire for human love, and with a mastering ambition, not often reaches so ripe a stage as did hers. The rigid system of self-culture which she pursued through her life was the outgrowth of her ambition and of her intense interest in things, an interest which we have noticed as being one of the leading elements in her happiness. Reading, study, conversation, observation, writing, travel, were in turns employed in her course of self-discipline. She read incessantly, and _thoroughly_. Notice this list of books, the work of one month, and that when she was nearly fifty years of age: First book of “Lucretius;” sixth book of the “Iliad;” “Samson Agonistes;” Warton’s “History of English Poetry;” “Grote,” second volume; “Marcus Aurelius;” “Vita Nuova,” vol. iv; chapter one of the “Politique Positive;” Guest on “English Rhythms;” Maunce’s “Lectures on Casuistry.” Few months fell below this in reading, and this, too, while she was writing, seeing people, conversing, and suffering, for she had the misfortune to know, as she says, that “one thing is needful: a good digestion.”

As a life of earnest purpose, of continued struggle for a high living, of deepest desire to make the most of everything, and for everybody, there is none more marked than that of George Eliot. Non-conformity to the religion and the law in which we believe, must sadden her life for all, but an honest student of her character must, after reading this “Life,” accord to her what she herself never failed to give to the erring—charity.

FOOTNOTES

[B] George Eliot’s Life, as related in her Letters and Journals. Arranged and edited by her husband, J. W. Cross. In three volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers.

ARBOR DAY.

BY THE HON. B. G. NORTHROP, LL.D.

Recent spring floods and the diminished flow of rivers in summer have called public attention to the cause and the remedy as never before. At the opening of the last session of Congress, its attention was called to the subject of Forestry, for the first time in any presidential message. Bills for the protection and extension of forests are now before Congress, and before many state legislatures. The last census presents striking facts which prove this to be a question of both state and national importance. The recent action of the national government shows a new appreciation of forestry. The marvel now is, that the general government did not earlier seek to protect its magnificent forests, once the best and most extensive in the world. Their importance to the nation was little understood. Even after a century of reckless waste, the United States government still owns 85,000,000 acres of timber—a mere fraction of what has been cut, or burned, without a thought of reproduction. The Forestry Division of the United States Department of Agriculture, though organized but six years ago, has already spread much valuable information before the country by its reports and by those of its special agents, commissioned to investigate the forests of the country and the means of their protection and extension. Ex-Governor R. W. Furnas, of Nebraska, for example, investigated the forests of California, Oregon, Washington Territory, and the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. His official reports on the stealing and reckless destruction of those timber lands, and also in regard to the new and extensive timber growing on the treeless plains of Nebraska, were of great public interest. The reports of Dr. F. B. Hough of New York, and F. B. Baker, of Kansas—also agents of the United States Forestry Division—have been extensively circulated and still more widely summarized in the press.

The National Forestry Congress is another index of the growth of popular interest on this subject. A large volume of the proceedings of that association at its meeting in Montreal was officially published by the Dominion of Canada. The best papers given at its three subsequent meetings have been published by the United States Department of Agriculture. The subject has been ably discussed in State Agricultural Reports, and many state and local associations have been formed to further this interest. The passage of the Timber Culture Act has greatly increased the area of planted woodland.

But of all these agencies no one has awakened so general an interest in agriculture as the appointment of Arbor Day, by governors of states, by legislatures, and by state, county and town superintendents of schools. The plan of Arbor Day is simple and inexpensive, and hence the more readily adopted and widely effective. In some states the work has been well done without any legislation. The best results, however, are secured when an act is passed requesting the Governor, each spring, to recommend the observance of Arbor Day, by a special message. The chief magistrate of the state thus most effectually calls the attention of all the people to its importance, and secures general and concerted action. _How_ forests conserve the water supplies and lessen floods is aside from the topic of this paper. While the fact of the increase of spring freshets is everywhere admitted, and scientists agree as to the cause, the popular disbelief of the true theory is the great hindrance to remedial action. The bills for the protection of the Adirondack forests, in the legislature of New York, in 1884, failed by reason of the opposition of the lumbermen, and the common doubt and denial of the benefits of forests in the conservation of the rainfall. I often met the same skepticism in the Ohio valley, even among the sufferers from the flood disasters. They were attributed to the extensive use of tile drains. But both in 1883 and 1884, these floods occurred when the ground was frozen deep, and the drains were therefore inoperative.

That so simple a cause as forest denudation should produce such disastrous results seems at first incredible. It is only when the vast areas contributing to a single river are considered, that the proof of the forest theory seems clear. Take the Ohio River, for illustration. The area drained by it is 214,000 square miles, or twenty-two times as much as that which in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut is drained by the Connecticut River; an area which includes portions of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The length of the Ohio is about 1,000 miles, and that of its ten leading tributaries nearly 4,000, and that of the many minor affluents as much more. The smallest influences working over such immense regions, and ultimately combining in one stream, may enormously swell its volume. As the destruction of forests has been going on for centuries, the remedy must be the work of time, for it must include slow processes and agencies, each _separately_ minute, which become important when multiplied by myriads and extended over broad areas. Arbor Day has proved such an agency.

A brief history of Arbor Day will show its aims. The surprising results already accomplished promise a still broader influence in the near future. The plan originated with ex-Governor J. Sterling Morton, the pioneer tree-planter of Nebraska. He secured the coöperation of the State Board of Agriculture, some thirteen years ago, when the Governor was induced to appoint the second Wednesday in April as a day to be devoted to economic tree-planting. By pen and tongue, as editor and lecturer, with arguments from theory and facts from his own practice, Mr. Morton succeeded in awakening popular enthusiasm in this work, in which he was ably seconded by Ex-Governor Furnas, of Nebraska, who has long served as Forest Commissioner for the United States Department of Agriculture.

In Nebraska a remarkable interest was awakened in the observance of her first Arbor Day, and over 12,000,000 trees were planted on that day. That enthusiasm was not a temporary effervescence. Each successive Governor has annually appointed such a day by an official proclamation, and the interest has been sustained and even increased from year to year. The State Board of Agriculture annually awards liberal prizes to encourage tree-planting. Hence Nebraska is the banner state of America in this work, having, according to official reports, as I am informed by ex-Governor Furnas, 244,353 acres of cultivated woodland, or more than twice that of any other state. The originator of Arbor Day is now recognized as a public benefactor, and hence, during the last campaign, as a candidate for Governor, ran some three thousand ahead of his party ticket. Though at first aiming at economic tree-planting, Nebraska now observes Arbor Day in schools. The example of Nebraska was soon followed by Kansas, which had over 120,000 acres of planted woodland. The Governor of that state issues an annual proclamation for Arbor Day, and it is observed by teachers and scholars and parents, in adorning both school and home grounds.

Four years ago the legislature of Michigan requested the Governor to appoint an Arbor Day. Such an appointment has been repeated each succeeding April. For the last three years a similar day has been appointed by the Governor of Ohio. Many schools, especially those of Cincinnati and Columbus, fitly kept the designated day. No man in this country has had a better opportunity of observing the influence of Arbor Day in schools than Superintendent Peaslee, who, after a trial of three years, says: “The observance of Arbor Day is the most impressive means of interesting the young in this subject. Should this celebration become general, such a public sentiment would lead to the beautifying by trees of every city, town, and village, as well as the public highways, church, and school grounds, and the homes of the people. If but the youth of Ohio could be led to plant their two trees each, how, by the children alone, would the state be enriched and beautified within the next fifty years. By our Arbor Day observance the importance of forestry was impressed upon the minds of thousands of children who then learned to care for and protect trees. Not one of those 20,000 children in Eden Park on Arbor Day injured a single tree.”

West Virginia furnishes another illustration of the influence of observing Arbor Day in schools. In the face of many difficulties, State School Superintendent Butcher appointed an Arbor Day in schools in April, 1883. Without waiting for any legislative or gubernatorial sanction, solely on his own responsibility, he invited the school officers, teachers, parents, and pupils on the designated day to plant trees on the grounds of their schools and homes. He made the April number of his _School Journal_ an “Arbor” number, and circulated it gratuitously over the State. The results exceeded his expectations. It started good influences on _minds_ as well as grounds. This great success prompted a similar observance last April, for which greater preparations were made, with still better results. When called to advocate this measure In various parts of West Virginia last spring, I found the people and the press most responsive in encouraging this practical movement. On the day after the celebration, the papers of Wheeling, for example, commended the work in such terms as the following: “Arbor Day was gloriously celebrated yesterday, and was a splendid success. All—the oldest and the youngest—evinced the liveliest interest. Arbor Day will be one of the institutions of our schools.”

At the annual meeting of the State Teachers’ Association of Indiana, held in December, 1883, a kindred plan was recommended and unanimously adopted, and an efficient committee appointed to carry it out. The State Board of Horticulture heartily endorsed the measure. After a statement of the plan, the State Board of Agriculture invited me to prepare a resolution in its favor, which they promptly adopted. Governor Porter received my suggestions with special interest, and said the measure should have his cordial support. He soon after gave it his official sanction, and issued a proclamation to the teachers and people of the state, in which he predicted that the appointed day would be a memorable one, and “the beginning of a movement for a much more extended system of tree-culture, and the restoration of the varieties of trees, useful and beautiful, which have been so recklessly sacrificed that nature cries aloud for redress,” closing by calling on “the teachers to do all in their power to make Arbor Day a day of the most ardent and inspiring interest.” State School Superintendent Holcombe gave his personal and official influence heartily to this work. The lectures given by his invitation on this subject were fully reported by the press, for the newspapers of Indiana cordially coöperated in this movement. These combined influences secured the general observance of the appointed day, and the results were most gratifying. Such combined agencies in nearly every state of the Union would promise similar results.

At the last annual Convention of the State Teachers’ Association of Wisconsin, the presentation of Arbor Day in schools led to the adoption of a resolution in favor of such an observance, and to the appointment of an efficient committee to carry out the plan. At the National Educational Association held in Madison, Wisconsin, with an attendance of over five thousand, a resolution recommending the observance of Arbor Day in schools in all our states was unanimously adopted. Such a day has been observed with great interest in some of the provinces of Canada.

The American Forestry Congress, which includes the leading arborists of Canada and the United States, adopted, at my suggestion, the following resolution: “In view of the wide-spread results of the observance of Arbor Day in many states, this Congress recommends the appointment of such a day in all our states and in the provinces of the dominion of Canada,” and appointed a committee, consisting of the Chief of the Forestry Division of the United States Department of Agriculture, the State Superintendent of Schools of West Virginia, and myself to secure the general adoption of this plan, and especially Arbor Day in schools. As chairman of that committee, I have already presented this subject to the Governors of many states, and the proposition has met a favorable response.