XXXII. The Indian in the Nineteenth Century…

XXXII. The Indian in the Nineteenth Century

[=The Relation of Whites and Indians=]

The relation of the American people to the Indians, since the first settlement of this country, has been one of conflict, which has been almost incessant in some sections of the land. By the opening of the nineteenth century the red men had been driven back in great measure from the thirteen original states, but the tribes in the west were still frequently hostile, and stood sternly in the way of our progress westward. We propose in this chapter to describe the various relations, both peaceful and warlike, which have existed between the whites and the red men during the century with which we are here concerned.

[=Harrison and Tecumseh=]

The close of the Revolutionary War brought only a partial cessation of the Indian warfare. The red man was by no means disposed to give up his country without a struggle, and throughout the interior, in what is now Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and along the Ohio River, there were constant outbreaks, and battles of great severity. The conflict in Indiana brought forward the services of a young lieutenant, William Henry Harrison, who for many years had much to do with Indians, both as military officer and as governor of the Indian territory. In 1811 appeared one of those great Indian chiefs whose abilities and influence are well worth attention and study. Tecumseh, a mighty warrior of mixed Creek and Shawnee blood, was one who dreamt the dream of freeing his people. With eloquence and courage he urged them on, by skill he combined the tribes in a new alliance, and, encouraged by British influence, he looked forward to a great success. While he was seeking to draw the Southern Indians into his scheme, his brother rashly joined battle with General Harrison, and was utterly defeated in the fight which gained for Harrison the title of Old Tippecanoe. Disappointed and disheartened at this destruction of his life-work, Tecumseh threw all his great influence on the British side in the War of 1812, in which he dealt much destruction to the United States troops. At Sandusky and Detroit and Chicago, and at other less important forts, the Indian power was severely felt; but at Terre Haute the young captain Zachary Taylor met the savages with such courage and readiness of resources that they were finally repulsed. But rarely did a similar good fortune befall our troops; and it was not until after Commodore Perry won victory for us at Lake Erie, that Tecumseh himself was killed, and the twenty-five hundred Indians of his force were finally scattered, in the great fight of the Thames River, where our troops were commanded by William Henry Harrison and Richard M. Johnson, afterward President and Vice-President of the United States. For a little time the Northwest had peace. But in the South the warfare was not over. Tecumseh had stirred up the Creeks and Seminoles against the whites, and throughout Alabama, Georgia, and Northern Florida the Creek War raged with all its horrid accompaniments until 1814; even the redoubtable Andrew Jackson could not conquer the brave Creeks until they were almost exterminated, and then a small remnant remained in the swamps of Florida to be heard of at a later time.

[=National Period=]

[=Government Policy=]

Before the new government of the United States was fully upon its feet it recognized the necessity and duty of caring for its Indian population. In 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress divided the Indians into three departments, northern, middle and southern, each under the care of three or more commissioners, among whom we find no less personages than Oliver Wolcott, Philip Schuyler, Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin. As early as 1832 the young nation found itself confronted with a serious Indian problem, created a separate bureau for the charge of the red men, and inaugurated a definite policy of treatment. Speaking in general, we have altered this policy three times. As a matter of fact, we have altered its details, changed its plans, and adopted new methods of management as often as changing administrations have changed the administrators of our Indian affairs. But in the large, there have been three great steps in our Indian policy, and these have to some extent grown out of our changing conditions. The first plan was that of the reservations. Under that system, as the Indian land was wanted by the white population, the red man was removed across the Mississippi and pushed step by step still further west; and as time went on and the population followed hard after, he was eventually confined to designated tracts. Yet despite the fact that these tracts were absolutely guaranteed to him, he was driven off them again and again as the farmer or the miner demanded the land. In time a new policy was attempted, or rather an old policy was revived, that of concentrating the whole body of Indians into one state or territory, but the obvious impossibility of that scheme soon brought it to an end. Less than thirty years ago the present plan took its place, that of education and eventual absorption.

[=Removal of the Southern Tribes=]

[=War with the Seminoles=]

In 1830 the country seemed to stretch beyond any possible need of the young nation, lusty as it was, and the wide wilderness of the Rocky Mountains promised to furnish hunting grounds for all time. The Mississippi Valley and the Northwest were still unsettled, but in the South the Five Nations were greatly in the way of their white neighbors, and the work of the removal of the latter beyond the Mississippi was begun. Under President Monroe several treaties were made with those tribes--the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles--by which, one after another, they ceded their lands to the government, and took in exchange the country now known as the Indian Territory. They were already somewhat advanced in civilization, with leaders combining in blood and brain the Indian astuteness and the white man's experience and education. John Ross, a half-breed chief of the Cherokees, of unusual ability, brought about the removal under conditions more favorable than often occurred. He was bitterly opposed by full half the Indians, and it was not without sufferings and losses of more than one kind that the great southern league was removed to the fair and fertile land set aside for them in the far-off West. It was owing to the sagacity of John Ross and his associates that this land was secured to them, in a way in which no other land has ever been secured to an Indian tribe. They hold it to-day by patent, as secure in the sight of the law as an old Dutch manor house or a Virginia plantation, and all the learning of the highest tribunals has not yet found the way to evade or disregard these solemn obligations. To these men, too, and to the missionaries who long taught their tribes, do they owe an effective form of civilization, and a governmental polity which preserves for them alone, among all the red men, the title and the state of nations. The Seminoles, who were of the Creek blood, were divided, some of them going west with their brethren, the larger number of them remaining in Florida. With these--about 4,000 in all--under their young and able chief, Osceola, the government fought a seven years' war, costing many lives and forty millions in money, and did not then succeed in removing all the Seminoles from their much-loved home.

[=Hostilities with Northern Tribes=]

A similar state of affairs attended the removals in the north. The savages bitterly opposed giving up their native soil, there being in every case two parties in the tribe, one that sorrowfully yielded to the necessity of submission, and one that indulged in the hopeless dream of successful resistance. Thus the Sac and Fox tribe of Wisconsin was divided, and although Keokuk and one band went peaceably to their new home among the Iowas, Black Hawk and his followers were slow to depart, and were removed by force. The Indian Department failed to furnish corn enough for the new settlement, and, going to seek it among the Winnebagoes, the Indians came into collision with the government. Thereafter ensued a series of misunderstandings, and consequent fights, resulting in great alarm among the whites and destruction to the Indians. The story is the same story, almost to details, that has been frequently seen since that time. After the fashion above described all the removals have proceeded, the cause ever the same, the white man's greed and the ferocity of the wronged and infuriated savage.

[=Treatment of the Western Indians=]

It is useless and impossible to give the details of all the various tribes that have been pushed about in the manner described. In 1830 the East was already crowding toward the West, and every succeeding decade saw the frontier moved onward with giant strides. Everywhere the Indian was an undesirable neighbor, and when, in 1849, the discovery of gold began to create a new nation on the Pacific slope, a pressure began from that side also, and the intervening deserts became a thoroughfare for the pilgrims of fortune and the lovers of adventure. From year to year the United States made fresh treaties with the tribes; those in the East were gone already, those in the interior were following fast, and there had arisen the new necessity of dealing with those in the far West. One tribe after another would be planted on a reservation millions of acres in extent and apparently far beyond the home of civilization, and almost in a twelvemonth the settler would be upon its border, demanding its broad acres. The reservations were altered, reduced, taken away altogether, at the pleasure of the government, with little regard to the rights or wishes of the Indian. Usually this brought about fighting, and it produced a state of permanent discontent that wrought harm for both settler and savage. The Indian grew daily more and more treacherous and constantly more cruel. The white settler was daily in greater danger, and constantly more eager for revenge.

[=General "To-morrow"=]

A new complication entered into the problem. The game was fast disappearing, and with it the subsistence of the Indian. It became necessary for the government to furnish rations and clothes, lest he should starve and freeze. Cheating was the rule and deception the every-day experience of these savages. In 1795 General Wayne gained the nickname of General To-morrow, so slow was the government to fulfill his promises; and thus for more than a hundred years it was to-morrow for the Indian. Exasperated beyond endurance, he was ever ready to retaliate, and the horrors of an Indian war constantly hung over the pioneer. During all this period we treated the Indian tribes as if they were foreign nations, and made solemn treaties with them, agreeing to furnish them rations or marking the reservation bounds. We have made more than a thousand of these treaties, and General Sherman is the authority for the statement that we have broken every one of them. Day by day the gluttonous idleness, the loss of hope, the sense of wrong, and the bitter feeling of contempt united to degrade the red man as well as to madden him.

[=The Sioux War of 1862=]

The fighting did not cease, for all the promises or the threats of the government. But always, it is credibly declared, the first cause of an Indian outbreak was a wrong inflicted upon some tribe. And always, in the latter days as in the earlier period, it has meant one more effort on the part of the old warriors to regain the power they saw slipping away so fast. Both these causes entered into the awful Sioux War in Minnesota in 1862. Suffering from piled-up wrongs, smarting under the loss of power, and conscious that the Civil War was their opportunity, a party of one hundred and fifty Sioux began the most horrid massacre known for fifty years; the beginning of a struggle which lasted more than a year, and which was remarkable for the steadfast fidelity of the Christian Indians, to whose help and succor whole bodies of white men owed their lives. Four years later, in 1866, the discovery of gold in Montana caused the invasion of the Sioux reservation, and Red Cloud set about defending it. Scarcely more than thirty years old, but no mean warrior, he fought the white man long and desperately and with the cunning of his race.

[=Massacre of General Custer's Command=]

This outbreak was scarcely quieted when another occurred. As was its wont, the government forgot the promises of its treaty of peace, and a small band of the Cheyennes retaliated with a raid upon their white neighbors. General Sheridan made this the occasion he was seeking for a war of extermination, and in November, 1868, Lieutenant Custer fell upon Black Kettle's village and after a severe fight destroyed the village, killing more than a hundred warriors and capturing half as many women and children. The next year General Sheridan ordered the Sioux and Cheyennes off the hunting grounds the treaty had reserved to them, but these were the strongest and bravest of the tribes and they resisted the order. A number of Civil War heroes, Crook, Terry, Custer, Miles and McKenzie, led our troops, and among the chiefs whom they met in a long and desperate struggle were Crazy Horse and Spotted Tail, notable warriors both. At the battle of the Big Horn, by some misunderstanding or mismanagement, General Custer was left with only five companies to meet nearly three thousand savage Sioux. He fought desperately until the last, but he was killed and his command so utterly destroyed that not a single man was left alive. The attempt to remove the Modocs from California to Oregon in 1872 was the signal for a new war; and a year or two afterwards similar results followed when it was attempted to push the Nez Perces from the homes they had sought in Oregon to a new reservation in Idaho. This tribe, under its famous leader, Chief Joseph, was hard to conquer. The military organization, the civilized method of warfare, and the courage and skill of the tribe were publicly complimented by Generals Sherman, Howard and Gibbons, who declared Chief Joseph to be one of the greatest of modern warriors.

[=Barbarous Treatment of the Cheyennes=]

In 1877, discouraged by the failure of our efforts to hold the Indians in check, it was determined by Secretary Schurz, then in charge of the Department of the Interior, to remove them all to the western part of the Indian Territory, where the tribes in possession agreed to cede the necessary land. It was hoped to create there an Indian commonwealth, but trouble arose from the attempt to carry out the well-meant effort. A single story, the story of the Northern Cheyennes, will illustrate the wrongs the Indian suffered, as well as those he inflicted. The Cheyennes, as has been seen, were a tribe of valiant warriors, some of them at home in the hills of the North, some residing in the hills of the South. The Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas and Comanches were banded together in a close and common bond, and, at first the friends of the government, had become frequently its enemies, by reason of broken faith, cruel treatment, injustice, and downright wrong. That chronicle of misery, "A Century of Dishonor," contains forty pages of facts taken from the government records, which relate the inexcusable and indefensible treatment of the Cheyenne tribe by the government, and their vain endurance of wrongs, interspersed with savage outbreaks, when human nature could endure no longer. It includes the account of a massacre of helpless Indian women and children under a flag of truce; a war begun over ponies stolen from the Indians, and sold in the open market by the whites in a land where the horse thief counts with the murderer; another incited by a rage against a trader who paid one dollar bills for ten dollar bills; and tells of whole tracts of land seized without compensation by the United States itself.

[=How the Cheyennes were Subdued=]

The Northern Cheyennes had been taken by force to the Indian Territory, and in its severe heat, with scant and poor rations, a pestilence came upon them. Two thousand were sick at once, and many died because there was not medicine enough. At last three hundred braves, old men and young, with their women and children, broke away and, making a raid through Western Kansas, sought their Nebraska home. This was not a mild and peaceable tribe. It was fierce and savage beyond most, and its people were wild with long endured injustice and frantic with a nameless terror. Three times they drove back the troops who were sent to face them, and, living by plunder, they made a red trail all through Kansas, until they were finally captured in Nebraska in December. They refused to go back to the Indian Territory, and the department ordered them to be starved into submission. Food and fuel were taken from the imprisoned Indians. Four days they had neither food nor fire--and the mercury froze at Fort Robinson in that month! And when at last two chiefs came out under a flag of truce, they were seized and imprisoned. Then pandemonium broke loose inside. The Indians broke up the useless stoves, and fought with the twisted iron. They brought out a few hidden arms, and, howling like devils, they rushed out into the night and the snow. Seven days later they were shot down like dogs.

[=President Grant Adopts a New System=]

Experiences like this soon ended the attempt to gather together all our Indian wards, and we returned to the old plan of the reservations, but with little more certainty of peace than before. Again and again starvation was followed by fighting, nameless outrages upon the Indian by cruel outrages upon the white man. Whether Apaches under Geronimo in New Mexico, or Sioux in Dakota, it was the old story over again. Thus, with constant danger menacing the white settler from the infuriated savage Indian, and constant outrage upon the red man by rapacious and cruel whites, the government found a new policy necessary. This policy was inaugurated by a strange and unusual sequence of events. In 1869 a sharp difference arose between the two Houses of Congress over the appropriations to pay for eleven treaties then just negotiated, and the session closed with no appropriation for the Indian service. The necessity for some measure was extreme; the plan was devised of a bill which was passed at an extra session, putting two millions of dollars in the hands of President Grant, to be used as he saw fit for the civilization and protection of the Indian. He immediately called to his aid a commission composed of nine philanthropic gentlemen to overlook the affairs of the Indian and advise him thereupon. This commission served without salary and continues to this day its beneficent work. Another valuable measure followed. At the next Congress a law was enacted forbidding any more treaties with Indians, and thenceforth they became our wards; not foreigners and rivals, as practically the case before.

[=Captain Pratt and his Captives=]

The war of 1877 had indirectly another beneficent result, most far-reaching in its consequences. Among the brave men who had fought the Cheyennes and Kiowas and Comanches, was Captain Richard H. Pratt, who was put in charge of the prisoners who had been sent to Fort Marion, Florida, as a punishment worse than death. They were the wildest and fiercest warriors, who had fought long and desperately. On their way East they killed their guard, and repeatedly tried, one and another, to kill themselves. But Captain Pratt was a man of wonderful executive ability, of splendid courage and great faith in God and man. By firmness and patience and wondrous tact he gradually taught the savages to read and to work, and when after three years the government offered to return them to their homes, twenty-three of them refused to go. Captain Pratt appealed to the government to continue their education, and General Armstrong, with his undying faith in human beings as children of one Father and his sublime enthusiasm for humanity, received most of them at Hampton Institute, the rest being sent to the North under the care of Bishop Huntington, of New York. In the end these men returned to their tribes Christian men, and, with the seventy who returned directly from Florida, they became a power for peace and industry in their tribe. Out of this small beginning grew the great policy of Indian education, and the long story of death and destruction began to change to the bright chronicle of peace and education.

[=How the Indians Live=]

What, then, is the condition of the Indian to-day? In number there are scarcely more than two hundred and forty thousand in the whole country. Of these less than one-fifth depend upon the government for support. All told, they are fewer than the inhabitants of Buffalo or Cleveland or Pittsburg, yet they are not dying out, but rather steadily increasing. They are divided and subdivided into many tribes of different characteristics and widely different degrees of civilization. Some are Sioux--these are brave and able and intelligent; they live in wigwams or tepees, and are dangerous and often hostile. Some are Zunis, who live in houses and make beautiful pottery, and are mild and peaceable, and do not question the ways of the Great Father at Washington. Some are roving bands of Shoshones, dirty, ignorant, and shiftless--the tramps of their race--who are on every man's side at once. Some are Chilcats or Klinkas, whose Alaskan homes offer new problems of new kinds for every day we know them. And some are Cherokees, living in fine houses, dressed in the latest fashion, and spending their winters in Washington or Saint Louis.

Yet these, and many of other kinds, are all alike Indians. They have their own governments, their own unwritten laws, their own customs. As a race they are neither worthless nor degraded. The Indian is not only brave, strong, and able by inheritance and practice to endure, but he is patient under wrong, ready and eager to learn, and willing to undergo much privation for that end; usually affectionate in his family relations, grateful to a degree, pure and careful of the honor of his wife and daughter; and he is also patriotic to a fault. He has a genius for government, and an unusual interest in it. He is full of manly honor, and he is strongly religious. His history and traditions have only recently been traced, to the delight and surprise of scientific students. His daily life is a thing of elaborate ceremonial, and his national existence is as carefully regulated as our own, and by an intricate code. It is true that our failure to comprehend his character and our neglect to study his customs have bred many faults in him and have fostered much evil. Our treatment of him, moreover, has produced and increased a hostility which has been manifested in savage methods for which we have had little mercy.

[=Indian Character and Habits=]

[=The Indian Agencies=]

But we have not always given the same admiration to warlike virtues when our enemy was an Indian that we have showered without stint upon ancient Gaul or modern German. The popular idea of the Indian not only misconceives his character, but to a large degree his habits also. Even the wildest tribes live for the most part in huts or cabins made of logs, with two windows and a door. In the middle is a fire, sometimes with a stovepipe and sometimes without. Here the food is cooked, mostly stewed, in a kettle hung gypsy-fashion, or laid on stones over the fire. Around the fire, each in a particular place of his own, lies or sits the whole family. Sometimes the cooking is done out of doors, and in summer the close cabin is exchanged for a tepee or tent. Here they live, night and day. At night a blanket is hung up, partitioning the tent for the younger women, and if the family is very large, there are often two tents, in the smaller of which sleep the young girls in charge of an old woman. These tents or cabins are clustered close together, and their inhabitants spend their days smoking, talking, eating, or quarreling, as the case may be. Sometimes near them, sometimes miles away, is the agent's house and the government buildings. These are usually a commissary building where the food for the Indians is kept, a blacksmith shop, the store of the trader, school buildings, and perhaps a saw-mill. To this place the Indians come week by week for their food. The amount and nature of the rations called for by treaties vary greatly among different tribes. But everywhere the Indian has come into some sort of contact with the whites, and usually he makes some shift to adopt the white man's ways. A few are rich, some own houses, and almost universally, at present, government schools teach the children something of the elements of learning as well as the indispensable English.

[=The Indian Rights Association=]

The immediate control of the reservation Indian is in the hands of the agent, whose power is almost absolute, and, like all despotisms, may be very good or intolerably bad according to the character of the man. The agencies are visited from time to time by inspectors, who report directly to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs,--an officer of the Interior Department and responsible to the secretary, who is, of course, amenable to the President. In each house of Congress is a committee having charge of all legislation relating to Indian affairs. Besides these officials there is the Indian Commission already mentioned. The National Indian Rights Association and the Women's National Indian Association are the unofficial and voluntary guardians of the Indian work. It is their task to spread correct information, to create intelligent interest, to set in motion public and private forces which will bring about legislation, and by public meetings and private labors to prevent wrongs against the Indian, and to further good work of many kinds. While the Indian Rights Association does the most public and official work for the race and has large influence over legislation, the Women's Indian Association concerns itself more largely with various philanthropic efforts in behalf of the individual, and thus the two bodies supplement each other.

[=Appropriations for Education=]

Hopeless and impossible as it seemed to many when this effort began to absorb the Indian, to-day we see the process well under way and in some cases half accomplished; and in this work the government, philanthropy, education and religion have all had their share, and so closely have these worked together that neither can be set above nor before the others. We began to realize, it is true, that our duty and our safety alike lay in educating the Indians as early as 1819, when Congress appropriated $10,000 for that purpose, and still earlier President Washington declared to a deputation of Indians his belief that industrial education was their greatest need; but it is only within recent years that determined efforts have been made or adequate provision afforded. Beginning with $10,000 in 1819, we had reached only $20,000 in 1877; but the appropriation for Indian education is now over $2,500,000. With this money we support great industrial training schools established at various convenient points. In them several thousand children are learning not only books, but all manner of industries, and are adding to study the training of character. There are more than 150 boarding schools on the various reservations teaching and training these children of the hills and plains, and many gather daily at the three hundred little day schools which dot the prairies, some of them appearing to the uninitiated to be miles away from any habitation. This does not include the mission schools of the various churches. But all together it is hoped that in the excellent government schools now provided, in the splendid missionary seminaries, and in the great centres of light like Hampton and Carlisle and Haskell Institute, we shall soon do something for the education of nearly or quite all the Indian children who can be reached with schools. At present the daily school attendance is over 20,000.

[=Hampton and Carlisle Indian Schools=]

The two great training schools at the East, Hampton and Carlisle, have proved object lessons for the white man as well as the Indian, and the opposition they constantly encounter from those who do not believe that the red man can ever receive civilization is in some sort a proof of their value. In the main, they and all their kind have one end--the thorough and careful training in books and work and home life of the Indian boy and girl--and their methods are much alike. Once a year the superintendents or teachers of these schools go out among the Indians and bring back as many boys and girls as they can persuade the fathers and mothers to send. At first these children came in dirt and filth, and with little or no ideas of any regular or useful life, but of late many of them have gained some beginnings of civilization in the day schools. They are taught English first, and by degrees to make bread and sew and cook and wash and keep house if they are girls; the trade of a printer, a blacksmith, a carpenter, etc., if they are boys. They study books, the boys are drilled, and from kind, strong men and gentle, patient women they learn to respect work and even to love it, to turn their hands to any needed effort, to adapt themselves to new situations.

[=The Effect of Education=]

It is charged that the Indian educated in these schools does not remain civilized, but shortly returns to his habits and customs. A detailed examination into the lives of three hundred and eighteen Indian students who have gone out from Hampton Institute has shown that only thirty-five have in any way disappointed the expectations of their friends and teachers, and only twelve have failed altogether; and the extraordinary test of the last Sioux war, in which only one of these students, and he a son-in-law of Sitting Bull, joined the hostiles, may well settle the question. A recent statement says that 76 per cent. of the school graduates prove "good average men and women, capable of taking their place in the great body politic of our country."

[=The Severalty Act=]

In 1887 a new step was taken for the advancement of the Indian, in the passage of the Severalty Act, by which homesteads of 160 acres were set aside for each head of a family willing to accept the proffer, and smaller homesteads for other members of the family. These were to be free from taxation and could not be sold for twenty-five years. They might be selected on the reservation of the tribe or anywhere else on the public domain. This allotment of land carried with it all the rights, privileges and immunities of American citizenship. In case the Indian should not care to take up a homestead, he could still become a citizen if he took up his residence apart from the tribe and adopted civilized habits. The purpose was to break up the tribal organization which had stood so greatly in the way of the beneficent purposes of the government, and to convert each Indian into an individual citizen of the United States.

[=The Homestead Indians=]

The effort has been attended with highly encouraging success. Within twelve years after the law was passed 55,467 Indians had taken up homesteads, aggregating in all 6,708,628 acres. Of these agriculturists, more than 15,000 were heads of families, around whose farms were gathered the smaller ones of the other members of the family. The change to the independence and responsibilities of United States citizenship was so sudden as to prove a severe strain to the Indian, accustomed to consider himself a fraction of a tribe and lacking the full sense of individuality. Yet the failures have been very few, and we begin to see our way clear to a final disposal of the long-existing Indian question.

As regards the effect of religious training upon the Indians, it may be said to be quite encouraging. Of the 33,000 Sioux, for instance, 8,000 are now church members. The Presbyterian Church numbers nearly 5,000 Indian members and 4,000 Sunday-school pupils; while the total number of church communicants among the Indians is nearly 30,000.

[=The Outcome of Indian Policy.=]

Thus, with the close of the nineteenth century, there is good reason to hope for the end of a serious difficulty that has confronted the whites since their first settlement in this country nearly three hundred years ago. War, slaughter, injustice, wrongs innumerable have attended its attempted solution, which long seemed as if it would be reached only when all the red men had been exterminated. Fortunately it was justice, not slaughter, that was needed, and the moment our government awoke fully to this fact and began to practice justice the difficulty began to disappear. To-day just treatment, education, religious training are rapidly overcoming the assumed ineradicable savageness of the Indian, while the breaking up of the tribal system promises before many years to do away with the political aggregation of the Indians, and distribute them among the other citizens of our country as members of the general body politic. Thus has the nineteenth century happily disposed of an awkward problem that threatened seriously the successful development of our nation a century ago.

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XXXIII. The Development of the American Navy

[=Development in Naval Architecture=]

In scarcely any department of human industry are the changes produced by the progress of civilization more strikingly seen than in the navy. When America was discovered the galleon and the caravel were the standard warships of the world--clumsy wooden tubs, towering high in the air, propelled by sails and even oars, with a large number of small cannons, and men armed with muskets and cross-bows. Such was the kind of vessels that made up the famous Armada, "that great fleet invincible," which was vanquished by the smaller and lighter crafts of Britain. Three hundred years have passed, and what is the warship of to-day? A low-lying hulk of iron and steel; armed with a few big guns, each one of which throws a heavier shot than a galleon's whole broadside; driven resistlessly through the water by mighty steam engines; lighted and steered by electric apparatus, and using an electric search-light that makes midnight as bright as day. All the triumphs of science and mechanic arts have contributed to the perfection of these dreadful sea monsters, a single one of which could have destroyed the whole Armada in an hour, and laughed to scorn the might of Nelson at Trafalgar.

[=American Sailors and Their Doings=]

And in the development of this modern warship no other nation on earth has won as much credit as the United States, the whole career of which upon the sea has been one of glory and success, while its inventors and engineers have gained as much renown as its admirals and sailors, in their development of new ideas in naval architecture and warfare. Of all ocean exploits in history that of John Paul Jones in the Bon Homme Richard ranks first. Lord Nelson himself scarcely showed such indomitable pluck and intrepidity. And in the war of 1812 American ships and sailors took from Great Britain the credit of being the mistress of the seas, winning gallantly in every conflict where the forces engaged were at all near equality.

[=American Marksmanship=]

This good work of the sailors was aided by that of the shipwrights, the Americans winning battles largely because they had better ships than their opponents. But their success was also in great measure due to the superiority of their ordnance and the better service of their guns. It was to the careful sighting of the pieces that our sailors owed much of their victorious career. While most of the British shot were wasted on the sea and in the air, nearly all the American balls went home, carrying death to the British crews and destruction to their hulls and spars, while the American ships and sailors escaped in great measure unharmed.

As regards the work of our naval inventors, it will suffice to say, that the Americans, while not the first to plate vessels with iron, were the first to do so effectively and to prove the superiority of the ironclad in naval warfare. The memorable contest in Hampton Roads between the Monitor and the Merrimac made useless in a day all the fleets of all the nations of the world, and caused such a revolution in naval architecture and warfare as the world had never known.

[=The Early American Navy=]

[=The Naval War with France=]

The fleet with which the United States entered the nineteenth century was due to the depredations on American ships and commerce of the war vessels of France and Great Britain. This roused great indignation, particularly against France. While England contented herself with stopping American ships on the high seas and impressing sailors claimed to be of British birth, France seized our ships themselves, under the pretext that they had British goods on board, and if she found an American seaman on a British ship--even if impressed--she treated him as a pirate instead of as a prisoner of war. Protection was felt to be necessary, and preparations for war were made. The small navy of the Revolution had practically disappeared, and a new one was built. In July, 1798, the three famous frigates, the Constellation, the United States, and the Constitution--the renowned Old Ironsides--were completed and sent to sea, and others were ordered to be built. Actual hostilities soon began. French piratical cruisers were captured, and an American squadron sailed for the West Indies to deal with the French privateers that abounded there, in which work it was generally successful. In January, 1799, Congress voted a million dollars, for building six ships of the line and six sloops. Soon after, on February 9, occurred the first engagement between vessels of the American and French navies. The Constellation, Captain Truxton, overhauled L'Insurgente at St. Kitts, in the West Indies, and after a fight of an hour and a quarter forced her to surrender. The Constellation had three men killed and one wounded; L'Insurgente twenty killed and forty-six wounded.

Again, on February 1, 1800, Truxton with the Constellation came up, at Guadeloupe, with the French Frigate La Vengeance. After chasing her two days he brought on an action. The two ships fought all night. In the morning, La Vengeance, completely silenced and greatly shattered, drew away and escaped to Curaçoa, where she was condemned as unfit for further service. The Constellation was little injured save in her rigging. For his gallantry, Truxton received a gold medal from Congress. Later in that year there were some minor engagements, in which the American vessels were successful.

By the spring of 1801, friendly relations with France were restored. The President was accordingly authorized to dispose of all the navy, save thirteen ships, six of which were to be kept constantly in commission, and to dismiss from the service all officers save nine captains, thirty-six lieutenants, and one hundred and fifty midshipmen. At about this time ground was purchased and navy-yards were established at Portsmouth, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Norfolk, and half a million dollars were appropriated for the completion of six seventy-four gun ships.

[=The Opening up of Japan=]

Nothing needs to be said here concerning our conflicts with the pirates of the Mediterranean or of the remarkable exploits of the small American navy in the second war with Great Britain. These have already been dealt with in chapters xxv. and xxvi. In the interval between that period and the Civil War there was little demand upon the American navy. The naval operations during the Mexican war were of no great importance. Some vessels were used in scientific exploration, and the dignity of America had to be asserted on some occasions, but the most important service rendered by the navy was the opening up of Japan to the commerce of the world. After some fruitless efforts at intercourse with the island realm, Commodore Perry was sent thither in 1852, and by a resolute show of force he succeeded in obtaining a treaty of commerce from Japan. That treaty opened Japan to the world, and was the first step in its remarkable recent career.

At the beginning of the Civil War the United States was very poorly provided with ships of war. There were only forty-two vessels in commission, nearly all of which were absent in distant parts of the world. Others were destroyed in southern ports, and for a time there was actually only one serviceable warship on the North Atlantic coast. This difficulty was soon overcome by buying and building, and by the end of 1861 there were 264 vessels in commission, and all the ports in the South were under blockade. These vessels were a motley set,--ferry boats, freight steamers, every sort of craft--but they served to tide over the emergency.

[Illustration: REAR-ADMIRAL WILLIAM T. SAMPSON. REAR-ADMIRAL GEORGE DEWEY. COMMODORE JOHN CRITTENDEN WATSON. REAR-ADMIRAL WINFIELD SCOTT SCHLEY.

LEADING NAVAL COMMANDERS OF THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR.

With all this we are not particularly concerned, but must turn our attention to the great naval events of the war, those conflicts which served as turning points in nineteenth century warfare. And first and greatest among these was the remarkable naval battle in Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862.

[=The Idea of Ironplating of American Origin=]

[=Early Ironclads of Great Britain and France=]

The use of iron for plating the hulls of ships was not first adopted in American war. This device was employed by England and France in the Crimean war in attacks on the Turkish forts. The idea, however, was American. As early as 1813 Colonel John Stevens, of New York, made plans for an ironclad ship somewhat resembling the Monitor in type. His son Edwin afterwards performed experiments with cannon balls against iron plate, and in 1844 Robert L. Stevens began the construction of a vessel to be plated with 4¼-inch iron for the government. It was never finished, though in all nearly $2,000,000 were spent upon it. New invention rendered it obsolete before it could be completed, yet to it belongs the credit of inaugurating the era of the ironclad navy. After the Crimean war France and England both built ironclad ships, the French La Gloire being the first ironclad ever constructed. It was followed by the British Warrior, launched in January, 1861. Yet despite this enterprise, the fact remains that the first conception of an ironclad ship belongs to the United States, and the first hostile meeting of two ironclads took place in American waters.

[=The Ironclad "Manassas"=]

At the opening of the American Civil War this idea was in the air, and it was soon made evident that the era of wooden warships was near its end. It is interesting to learn that the Confederates were the first to adopt the new idea, the earliest ironclad of the war being produced by them on the lower Mississippi. A large double-screw tugboat was employed, whose deck was covered with a rounded roof, plated with bar iron one and a half inches thick. This craft--named the Manassas after the first Confederate victory--made its appearance at the mouth of the Mississippi on the night of October 31, 1861, and created a complete panic in the blockading fleet at that point. The Manassas wrecked one of her engines in attempting to ram the flagship Richmond, and crept slowly back, at the same time as the alarmed fleet was hastening away with all speed over the waters of the gulf.

[=The Plating of the "Merrimac"=]

While this event was taking place, two ironclads of more formidable description were being built elsewhere, the meeting of which subsequently was the most startling revelation to the nations of the earth ever shown in naval warfare. The United States steam frigate Merrimac had been set on fire at the Gosport Navy Yard, when hastily abandoned by the Federal navy officers at the outbreak of the war. It was burned to the water's edge and sunk, but soon after the Confederates raised the hull, which was seriously damaged--its engines being in reasonably good condition--and they hurriedly undertook the work of converting it into an ironclad. A powerful prow of cast iron was attached to its stem, a few feet under water and projecting sufficiently to enable it to break in the side of any wooden vessel. A low wooden roof two feet thick was built at an incline of about 36 degrees, and this was plated with double iron armor, making a four-inch iron plating. Under this protection were mounted two broadside batteries of four guns each, and a gun at the stem and stern. The government was soon advised of the raising of the hull of the Merrimac, and without having detailed information on the subject, knew that a powerful ironclad was being constructed. A board of naval officers had been selected by the government to consider the various suggestions for the construction of ironclad vessels, and although, as a rule, naval officers had little faith in the experiment, Congress coerced them into action by the appropriation of half a million dollars for the work. The Naval Board recommended a trial of three of the most acceptable plans presented, and ships on these plans were put under contract.

[=Ericsson and the "Monitor"=]

Among those who pressed the adoption of light ironclads, capable of penetrating our shallow harbors, rivers, and bayous, was John Ericsson. He was a Swede by birth, but had long been an American citizen, and exhibited uncommon genius and scientific attainments in engineering. The vessel he proposed to build was to be only 127 feet in length, 27 feet in width, and 12 feet deep, to be covered by a flat deck rising only one or two feet above water. The only armament of the vessel was to be a revolving turret, about 20 feet in diameter and nine feet high, made of plated wrought iron aggregating eight inches in thickness, with two eleven-inch Dahlgren guns. The guns were so constructed that they could be fired as the turret revolved, and the port-hole would be closed immediately after firing. The size of the Merrimac was well known to the government to be quite double the length and breadth of the Monitor, but it had the disadvantage of requiring nearly double the depth of water in which to manoeuvre it. Various sensational reports were received from time to time of the progress made on the Merrimac, the name of which was changed by the Confederates to Virginia, and as there were only wooden hulls at Fortress Monroe to resist it, great solicitude was felt for the safety of the fleet and the maintenance of the blockade. While the government hurried the construction of the new ironclads to the utmost, little faith was felt that so fragile a vessel as the Monitor could cope with so powerful an engine of war as the Merrimac. The most formidable vessels of the navy, including the Minnesota, the twin ship of the original Merrimac, the St. Lawrence, the Roanoke, the Congress and the Cumberland, were all in Hampton Roads waiting the advent of the Merrimac.

[=The Coming of the "Merrimac"=]

[=The Fate of the "Congress" and the "Cumberland"=]

On Saturday, the 8th of March, the Merrimac appeared at the mouth of the Elizabeth River and steamed directly for the Federal fleet. All the vessels slipped cable and started to enter the conflict, but the heavier ships soon ran aground and became helpless. The Merrimac hurried on, and, after firing a broadside at the Congress, crashed into the sides of the Cumberland, whose brave men fired broadside after broadside at their assailant only to see their balls glance from its mailed roof. An immense hole had been broken into the hull by the prow of the Merrimac, and in a very few minutes the Cumberland sank in fifty feet of water, her last gun being fired when the water had reached its muzzle, while the whole gallant crew went to the bottom with their flag still flying from the masthead. The Merrimac then turned upon the Congress, which was compelled to flee from such a hopeless struggle, and was finally grounded near the shore; but the Merrimac selected a position where her guns could rake her antagonist, and, after a bloody fight of more than an hour, with the commander killed and the ship on fire, the Congress struck her flag, and was soon blown up by the explosion of her magazine. Most fortunately for the Federal fleet, the Merrimac had not started out on its work of destruction until after midday. Its iron prow was broken in breaching the Cumberland, and, after the fierce broadsides it had received from the Congress and the Cumberland, with the other vessels firing repeatedly during the hand-to-hand conflict, the Merrimac's captain was content to withdraw for the day, and anchor for the night under the Confederate shore batteries on Sewall's Point.

[=The Monitor in Hampton Roads=]

The night of March 8th was one of the gloomiest periods of the war. The Merrimac was sure to resume its work on the following day, and, with the fleet destroyed and the blockade raised, Washington, and even New York, might be at the mercy of this terrible engine of war. But deliverance was at hand. The building of the Monitor had been hurried with all speed, and this little vessel,--"a cheese box on a raft," as it was contemptuously termed--was afloat and steaming in all haste to Hampton Roads. It entered there that night, and took up a position near the helpless Minnesota in bold challenge to the Merrimac. On Sunday morning, March 9th, the Confederate ironclad came out to finish its work of destruction, preparatory to a cruise against the northern ports.

[=The First Battle of Ironclads=]

The little Monitor steamed boldly out to meet it. The history of that conflict need not be repeated. To the amazement of the commander of the Merrimac, the Monitor was impervious to its terrible broadsides, while its lightness and shallow draft enabled it to out-manoeuvre its antagonist at every turn; and while it did not fire one gun to ten from its adversary, its aim was precise and the Merrimac was materially worsted in the conflict. After three hours of desperate battle the defiant and invincible conqueror of the day before found it advisable to give up the contest and retreat to Norfolk.

[=Fate of the First Ironclads=]

It was this naval conflict, and the signal triumph of the little Monitor, that revolutionized the whole naval warfare of the world in a single day, and from that time until the present the study of all nations in aggressive or defensive warfare has looked to the perfection of the ironclad. To the people of the present time the ironclad is so familiar, and its discussion so common, that few recall the fact that less than fifty years ago it was almost undreamed of as an important implement of war. It is notable that neither of those vessels which inaugurated ironclad warfare, and made it at once the accepted method for naval combat for the world, ever afterward engaged in battle during the three years of war which continued. The Merrimac was feared as likely to make a new incursion against our fleet, but her commander did not again venture to lock horns with the Monitor. Early in May the capture of Norfolk by General Wool placed the Merrimac in a position of such peril that on the 11th of that month she was fired by her commander and crew and abandoned, and soon after was made a hopeless wreck by the explosion of her magazine. The fate of the Monitor was even more tragic. The following December, when being towed off Cape Hatteras, she foundered in a gale and went to the bottom with part of her officers and men; but she had taught the practicability of ironclads in naval warfare, and when she went down a whole fleet was under construction after her own model, and some vessels already in active service.

While these events were taking place in the waters of the coast, a fleet of ironclad boats was being built for service on the rivers of the West, seven of these being begun in August, 1861, by James B. Eads, the famous engineer of later times. These were light-draught, stern paddle-wheel river steamers, plated with 2½-inch iron on their sloping sides and ends. These, and those that followed them, saw much service in the western rivers, bombarding Forts Henry and Donelson, running through the fire of the forts on Island No. 10, and daring the terrible bombardment from the Vicksburg batteries.

[=Farragut on the Mississippi=]

But the most famous event in river warfare during the conflict was the exploit of the daring Farragut in running past Forts St. Philip and Jackson on the Mississippi with his fleet of wooden vessels, breaking their iron chain, dispersing their gun-boats, and driving ashore the ironclad Manassas. The Confederates had also an ironclad battery, the Louisiana, but it proved of little service, and Farragut sailed triumphantly through the hail of fire of the forts, and on the same afternoon reached the wharves of New Orleans.

The most famous exploit of Farragut was the passing of the forts at Mobile. It is worth a brief relation, for in this the resources of ironclad warfare, as then developed, were fully employed, while the bottom of the channel was thickly sown with torpedoes, a mechanism in naval warfare to become of great importance in the following years. Farragut's main fleet, indeed, was of wooden ships, but he had four monitors; while the Confederates, in addition to their forts and gunboats, had the ironclad ram Tennessee, the most powerful floating battery ever built by them. This formidable craft--for that period--was plated with six inch iron armor in front and five inch elsewhere; and, while carrying only six guns, these were 6- and 8-inch rifled cannon.

[=Farragut and the Torpedoes=]

The torpedoes, of which no fewer than 180 were sown in the channel, were not quite ineffective, since one of them exploded under the monitor Tecumseh, and she went down head first with nearly all her crew. The Brooklyn, following in her track, halted as this disaster was seen, her recoil checking all the vessels in her rear. Farragut had taken his famous stand in the shrouds, just under the maintop, and hailed the Brooklyn as he came up in the Hartford. "What is the matter?" he demanded. "Torpedoes," came back the reply. "Damn the torpedoes!" cried Farragut, in a burst of noble anger. "Follow me." As the Hartford passed on the percussion caps of the torpedoes were heard snapping under her keel. Fortunately they were badly made, and no other explosion took place.

The story of the battle we may briefly complete. The ships dashed almost unharmed through the fire of the forts, driving the Confederate gunners from their pieces with a shower of grape and canister; and the contest ended with an attack upon the Tennessee, whose stern-port shutters were jammed and her steering gear shot away. Rendered helpless, she was forced to surrender, and the fight was at an end.

[=Lieutenant Cushing and the "Albemarle"=]

The Confederates were singularly unfortunate with their ironclads. With the exception of the temporary advantage gained by the Merrimac, all their labor and expense proved of no avail. The last of these war-monsters, the Albemarle, built in Roanoke River, and causing some alarm in the blockading fleet on the coast, was sent to the bottom by a daring young officer, Lieutenant Cushing, in one of the most gallant exploits of the war. He and a few men, in a steam launch carrying a large torpedo, sailed up the stream at night to where the ironclad lay in her dock at Plymouth. A protecting raft of logs guarded the Albemarle, but Cushing daringly drove his launch up on the slimy logs, exploded the torpedo as it touched the sides of the ship, and leaped with his men into the stream. The Albemarle sank to a muddy bed in the river's bottom, and Cushing escaped to the blockading fleet, after a series of thrilling adventures.

[=The Type of the New Navies=]

But the most important thing achieved in this war was the entire transformation effected in naval science. Previously the warship had been of the type of an armed merchantship, propelled by sails or, latterly, by steam, and carrying a large number of small guns. Modern inventiveness made it, after the duel of the Monitor and Merrimac, a floating fortress of iron or steel, carrying a few enormously heavy guns. The glory of the old line-of-battle ship, with three or four tiers of guns on each side and a big cloud of canvas overhead, firing rattling broadsides, and manoeuvring to get and hold the weather-gauge of the enemy--all that was relegated to the past forever. In its place came the engine of war, with little pomp and circumstance, but with all the resources of science shut within its ugly, black iron hull.

John Paul Jones, with his Bon Homme Richard, struck the blow that made universal the law of neutrals' rights. Hull, with the Constitution, sending a British frigate to the bottom, showed what Yankee ingenuity in sighting guns could do. Ericsson and Worden, with the Monitor, sent wooden navies to the hulk-yard and ushered in the era of iron and steel fighting-engines. These were the great naval events of a century.

[=Beginning of the Modern American Fleet=]

Yet the American navy was greatly neglected in the years succeeding the Civil War, while foreign nations, quick to learn the lesson taught at Hampton Roads, were straining every nerve to build powerful fleets of iron and steelclad ships, and to develop the breech-loading rifled cannon into an implement of war capable of piercing through many inches of solid steel. It was not until after 1880 that our government awoke to the need of a navy on the new lines, and began to take advantage of the lessons that had been learned abroad. It is not our purpose to speak in detail of the results. The steelclad battleship and cruiser, the armor-piercing breech-loader, the quick-firing gun, the machine gun, the submarine torpedo-boat, the anchored mine, the automobile torpedo, and other devices have come to make the naval warfare of our day a wonderfully different thing from that of the past.

[=The "Columbia" and the "Minneapolis"=]

The United States began late to build a modern navy, but has made highly encouraging progress, and while still far in the rear of Great Britain and France in the number of her ships, possesses some of the finest examples of naval architecture now afloat upon the waters. Among commerce-destroyers the Columbia and the Minneapolis, with their respective trial speeds of 22.81 and 23.07 knots, stand beyond any rivals to-day in the navies of Europe, while the inventive naval engineering of the Americans is exemplified in the double turrets of the Kearsarge and Kentucky, two additions to our navy of original formation, and likely to give an excellent account of themselves should any new war occur.

[=The Powerful Fleet of Great Britain=]

Of modern fleets, however, far the most powerful one is that of Great Britain, the government of which island shows a fixed determination to keep its naval force beyond rivalry. This stupendous fleet forms the most striking example of naval destructiveness the world has ever seen, and the nations of the world are entering the twentieth century with powers of warfare developed enormously beyond those with which they entered the nineteenth. We can only hope that this vast development both in army and navy may prove to exert a peace-compelling influence, and that every new discovery in the art of killing and destroying may be a nail in the coffin of Mars, the god of war.

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XXXIV. America's Conflict With Spain

[=A War in the Cause of Humanity=]

A third of a century passed after the great struggle of the United States for the existence of the Union, and then, in almost the closing year of the nineteenth century, came another war, this time fought in the interests of humanity. It was not a war for gain or conquest; the thought of territorial acquisition did not enter into the motives leading to it, despite the fact that this country gained new territory as one of its results; in its inception humane feeling, the sentiment of sympathy with the oppressed and starving people of Cuba, alone prevailed, and the nineteenth century fitly reached its end with a war entered into for humanity's sake alone, it being one of the very few instances in the history of the world in which a nation has gone to war from purely philanthropic motives.

It is not necessary here to repeat the story of Spain's tyranny in Cuba. It is too well known to need telling again, and simply carried out the colonial policy of Spain from the time of the discovery of America. The successful rebellion of her colonies on the American continent failed to teach that country the lesson which England learned from a similar occurrence, and in Cuba was continued the same system of tyranny and official oppression which had driven the other colonies to revolt. The result was the same, Cuba blazed into rebellion, and for years war desolated that fair island.

[=General Weyler and His Policy=]

The United States, however, sedulously avoided taking any part in the affair until absolutely driven to interfere by the horrible inhumanity displayed by Captain-General Weyler. It was the awful policy of "reconcentration" that stretched the forbearance of the people of this country to the breaking point. Not content with fighting the rebels in arms, the brutal Weyler extended the war against the people in their homes, burning their houses, destroying the crops in their fields, driving them in multitudes into the cities and towns, and holding them there in the most pitiable destitution and misery until they died by thousands the terrible death of starvation. It was not until word came to this country that not less than 200,000 of the helpless people had perished in this horrible manner, and that there seemed no hope of alleviation of the frightful situation, that a practically universal demand for the government to interfere. Spain was asked to fix a date in which the war should be brought to an end, with the intimation that if the contest was not concluded or the independence of the island conceded by that date, this country would feel obliged to take decisive steps.

No satisfactory answer was received, and anticipations of war filled all minds, though many hoped that this dread ultimatum might be avoided, when, in the last week of January, 1898, the battleship Maine was ordered to proceed from Key West to the harbor of Havana. Her visit was ostensibly a friendly one, but there had been riots in Havana which imperilled the safety of American residents, to whom the Spanish inhabitants of that city were bitterly hostile, and it was felt that some show of force in that harbor was imperative.

[=The Sinking of the "Maine"=]

A terrible disaster succeeded. In one fatal instant, on the night of February 15th, the noble ship was hurled to destruction and her crew into eternity. This frightful event took place about 9.45 in the evening, while the ship lay quietly at anchor in the place selected for her by the Spanish authorities. Intense darkness prevailed in the harbor, Captain Sigsbee was writing in his cabin, the men were in their quarters below, when of a sudden came a terrible explosion that tore the vessel asunder and killed most of her crew. So violent was the shock that the whole water-front of the city was shaken as by an earthquake, telegraph poles were thrown down and the electric lights extinguished. The wrecked vessel sank quickly into the mud of the harbor's bottom, and a great flame broke from her upper works that illuminated the whole harbor. Of three hundred and fifty-three men in the ship's company only forty-eight escaped unhurt, and the roll-call of the dead in the end reached two hundred and sixty-six.

[=Preparations for War=]

This terrible event was the immediate cause of the war. It intensified the feeling of the people and of their representatives in Congress to such an extent that no other solution of the difficulty now seemed possible. The popular indignation was increased when the court of inquiry announced that, in its opinion, "the Maine was destroyed by a submarine mine." It was universally felt that the disaster was another instance of Spanish malignity, the war-fever redoubled, and Congress unanimously voted an appropriation of $50,000,000 "for the national defense." The War and Navy Departments hummed with the activity of recruiting, the preparations of vessels and coast defenses, and the purchase of war material and vessels at home, while agents were sent to Europe to procure all the warships that could be purchased. Unlimited capital was at their command, and the question of price was not an obstacle. When hostilities impended the United States was unprepared for war, but by amazing activity, energy and skill the preparations were pushed and completed with a rapidity that approached the marvelous.

[=War is Declared=]

Negotiations went on, it is true, but they were principally with the purpose of gaining time to permit American citizens to leave Cuba. Consul-general Lee left Havana on April 11th, and on the same day President McKinley sent a message to Congress in which he described in earnest terms the situation in Cuba, reciting the dreadful results of Weyler's heartless policy and asking for power to intervene. "In the name of humanity, in the name of civilization," he said, "the war in Cuba must stop." On April 18th, Congress responded with a series of resolutions that were virtually a declaration of war, and on the 22d war actually began, the fleet which had gathered at Key West being despatched to Cuba with orders to blockade Havana and some other leading ports. On the following day a call was issued for 125,000 volunteers to serve in the coming conflict.

[=Progress in Naval Warfare=]

While it seems important to give the preliminary events that led to the war, we do not propose to tell the story of the war itself, but to confine ourselves to a description of its more important incidents, in accordance with the plan of this work. It may be said here, however, that the war was in great part a naval one, and gave rise to naval operations of intense interest and great importance, so that this chapter will fitly round out the preceding one, which deals with the progress in naval warfare during the century. We there described the contests of ironclad ships during the Civil War. In other chapters have been told the stories of the fight between Austrian and Italian ironclads at the battle of Lissa and of the Japanese and Chinese ironclad fleets at the battle of the Yalu. We have now to tell the final events in naval warfare of the century, the epoch-making contest in Manila Bay, and the desperate flight and fight off Santiago harbor. If these examples of ocean warfare be contrasted with those between the Constellation and the French frigates L'Insurgente and Vengeance a century before, they will place in striking clearness the immense advance in naval warfare within the hundred years involved.

[=The Mission of Dewey=]

Of these two events the greatest was that which took place in Manila Bay. War, it must be remembered, is governed by a different system of ethics from that operative in peace. Though inhumanity in Cuba was the cause of the war, to strike the enemy wherever he could be found was the demand of prudence and military science. Spain had an important possession in the eastern seas, the Philippine Islands, off the southeastern coast of Asia. There, in the bay of Manila, near the large city of that name, lay a Spanish fleet, which, if left unmolested, might seek our Pacific Coast and commit terrible depredations. In the harbor of Hong Kong lay a squadron of American war-vessels under Commodore Dewey. Prudence dictated but one course under the circumstances. There was flashed to Dewey under sea and over land the telegraphic message to "find the Spanish fleet and capture or destroy it." How Dewey obeyed this order is the circumstance with which we are now concerned.

[=How Dewey entered Manila Bay=]

He lost no time. Leaving port in China on April 27th, he arrived off the entrance to Manila Bay on the night of the 30th. An island lay in the neck of the bay, with well-manned batteries on its shores. It was probable that torpedoes had been planted in the channel. But George Dewey had been a pupil of Farragut in the Civil War, and was inspired with the spirit of that hero's famous order, "Damn the torpedoes! Follow me!" Past Corregidor Island in the darkness glided the great ships, several of them being out of range of its batteries before the alarm was taken. Then some shots were fired, but the return fire from the squadron silenced the Spanish guns and the ships passed safely into Manila Bay.

[=The Opposing Fleet=]

About five o'clock on the morning of May 1st Dewey's fleet swept in battle-line past the front of the city of Manila, and soon after rounded up in face of the Spanish fleet, which extended across the mouth of Bakoor Bay, within which lay the naval station of Cavité. There were ten of the Spanish ships in all, with shore batteries to add to their defensive force, while the effective American ships consisted of six, the cruisers Olympia, Baltimore, Raleigh, Boston, and the gunboats Petrel and Concord. The Spaniards had two large and four small cruisers, three gunboats and an armed transport. They were not equal in size or weight of metal to the American vessels, but their fixed position, their protection by shore batteries, and the acquaintance of their officers with the waters in which they lay gave them an important advantage over the Americans, which was added to by their possession of torpedo boats and by the mines which they had planted in the track of an attacking fleet. Dewey and his men were, in fact, in a position of great peril, and if the Spaniards knew how to work their guns none of them might leave that bay alive. Fortunately for them the Spaniards did not know how to work their guns.

[=The Deadly Work of the American Guns=]

On swept the gallant squadron of assault, the Olympia leading with Dewey on the bridge. He had a look-out place protected by steel armor, but he preferred to stand in the open and dare all peril from the Spanish guns. The mines were there. As the flagship drove onward two of them exploded in her path. Luckily the nervous hands at the electric wires set them off too soon. Heedless of such perils as this Dewey pursued his course, and at 5.40 A.M. opened fire, followed by the remainder of his ships. From that moment the fire was deadly and continuous, the boom of the great guns seconded by the rattle of the rapid fire pieces until the air seemed full of the roar of ordnance. The Spanish returned as hot a fire, but by no means so effective. While most of their shot were wasted on the waves, the bulk of those from the American ships found a goal, and death and destruction reigned in the Spanish ships while their opponents moved on almost unharmed.

[=The Fate of the Spanish Flagship=]

Back and forth across the Spanish lines swept Dewey's ships, five times in all, at first at 5,000 yards distance, then drawing in to a distance of 2,000 yards. And during all this time the great guns roared their message and the small guns poured out their fiery hail, rending the Spanish hulls and carrying death to their crews, while the flames that shot up from their decks told that another element of destruction was at work. Early in the fight two torpedo boats darted out towards the Olympia, but were met with a torrent of fire that sent one to the bottom and drove the other hastily to the beach. Then, with an instinct of desperation, Admiral Montojo drove gallantly out in his flagship, the Reina Christina, with the purpose of engaging the Olympia at shorter range. At once Dewey turned his entire battery upon her, and poured in shot and shell at such a frightful rate that the Spaniard hastily turned and fled for the shelter of Bakoor Bay. But the deadly baptism of fire with which she had been met proved the end of her career. Swept from stern to stem by shells as she fled, she burst into flames, which continued to burn until she sank to a muddy death.

[=The Destruction of the Spanish Fleet=]

Meanwhile the Spanish ships and batteries returned the fire vigorously, but with singular lack of effect. While they were being riddled and sunk, the American ships escaped almost unhurt, and while hundreds of their crews fell dead or wounded, not an American was killed and seven men alone were slightly wounded. What little skill in aiming the Spaniards possessed was utterly disconcerted by the incessant and deadly American fire, and their balls and shells screamed uselessly through the air to plunge into the waves.

At the hour of 7.35 Dewey withdrew from the fight, that he might see how all things stood on his ships and give the men an interval of rest and an opportunity for breakfast. He knew very well that the Spaniards must await his return. Fight and flight were alike taken out of them. When he came back to the attack, shortly after 11 o'clock, nearly all the Spanish ships were in flames and some rested on the bottom of the bay. For an hour longer the firing continued on both sides. At the end of that time the batteries were silenced and the ships sunk, burned, and deserted. The great battle was at an end, and Dewey had made himself the hero of the war.

[=How the Nation Rewarded Dewey=]

When the news of the result reached Europe, the naval powers of the nations heard with utter astonishment of the fighting prowess and skill of the Yankees. Anything so complete in the way of a naval victory the century had not seen before, and it was everywhere recognized that a new power had to be dealt with in the future counsels of the nations. Americans, previously looked upon almost with contempt from a military point of view, suddenly won respect, and Dewey took rank among the great ocean fighters of the century. His nation hastened to honor him with the title of rear-admiral, and finally with that of admiral, its highest naval dignity, and on his return home in autumn of the following year he was received with an ovation such as few Americans had ever been given before. To his fellow citizens he was one of the chief of their heroes, and they could not do him honor enough.

The second notable naval event of which we have spoken took place off the harbor of Santiago, a city on the southern coast of Cuba, at a date after that just described.

[=The Fleet of Admiral Cervera=]

The finest fleet possessed by Spain, that under the command of Admiral Cervera, consisted of four cruisers, the Christobal Colon, plated with a complete belt of 6-inch nickel steel, and with a deck armor of steel 2 to 6 inches thick, and the Vizcaya, the Almirante Oquendo, and the Infanta Maria Teresa, each of 6890 tons, with 10- to 12-inch armor and powerful armament. They were all of high speed, and were the only vessels of which any dread was felt in the United States. With them were three torpedo boats, the Terror, the Furor and the Pluton, among the best of their class, and dangerous enemies to deal with.

This fleet lay in the Cape Verde Islands at the opening of the war. From there, in May, it set sail, causing doubt and dread in American coast cities while its destination remained unknown, and yielding relief when the news came that it had reached some of the lower islands of the West Indies. On May 21st it was learned that the dreaded squadron had reached Santiago and was safely at anchor in its harbor.

[=The Spanish Fleet at Santiago=]

The Atlantic fleet of the United States meanwhile had been partly engaged in blockading the Cuban ports, partly in searching for Cervera's fleet, and there was a decided sensation of relief when the tidings from Santiago were confirmed. Thither from all quarters the great ships of the fleet hastened at full speed, battleships, cruisers, monitors, gunboats, and craft of other kinds, and soon they hung like grim birds of war off the harbor's mouth, determined that the Spanish fleet should never leave that place of refuge except to meet destruction. To the battleships of the fleet was soon added the Oregon, which had made an admirable journey of many thousand miles around the continent of South America, and barely touched land in Florida before it was off again to take part in the great blockade.

[=The Sinking of the "Merrimac"=]

The story that follows is, if given in all its details, a long one, but we must confine ourselves to its salient points. Admiral Sampson, in command of the American fleet, at first sought to lock up the Spaniards in their harbor of refuge, by sinking a coaler, the Merrimac, in the narrow channel of Santiago Bay. The work was gallantly and ably done by Lieutenant Hobson and his daring crew, but proved a failure through causes beyond his control. The Merrimac sank lengthwise in the channel, and the passage remained open. This being recognized, the most vigilant watch was kept up, battle-ships, cruisers, and gunboats lying off the harbor's mouth in a wide semicircle, with their lookouts ever closely on the watch.

On the morning of Sunday, July 3d, the long-looked for alarm came, in a yell from the sentinel on the Brooklyn, "There is a big ship coming out of the harbor!" A like alarm was given on other ships, and Commodore Schley, on the Brooklyn, hastened to signal the fleet and to give the order, "Clear ship for action." Almost in an instant the lazily swinging fleet awoke to life and activity, and the men sprang from their listless Sunday rest into the most enthusiastic readiness for duty.

[=The Flight of the Spanish Ships=]

Admiral Sampson, unfortunately for him, was absent, having gone up the coast in the cruiser New York, and the direction of affairs fell to Commodore Schley. He was capable of meeting the emergency. It was soon evident that Cervera's fleet was coming out, the flagship, Infanta Maria Teresa, in the lead, the others following. On clearing the harbor headland they turned west, and the Americans at once set out in pursuit, firing as they went. "Full speed ahead; open fire, and don't waste a shot," shouted Schley. The Oregon had already opened fire from her great 13-inch guns, and was followed by the battleships Texas, Indiana, and Iowa. The Brooklyn joined in with her 8- and 5-inch batteries, and soon a rain of shells was pouring upon the devoted fugitive ships. The Maria Teresa ran towards the Brooklyn as if with intention to ram her, but the danger was avoided by a quick swerve of the helm, and Cervera's flagship turned again and sped away in flight.

[=A Hot Chase Down the Cuban Coast=]

The fugitive ships soon found themselves the centre of the most terrific fire any war vessels had ever endured, with the exception of those at Manila. Big guns and little guns joined in the frightful concert, shot after shot telling, while the response of the Spaniards was little more effective than that of their compatriots in Manila Bay. One man killed on the Brooklyn was the sole loss of life on the American side, while the unfortunate Spaniards were swept down by hundreds.

[=The Fate of the Spanish fleet=]

The first ship to succumb to this hail of shells was the Maria Teresa, which quickly burst into flames, and soon after ran ashore. Then the Brooklyn, Oregon and Indiana concentrated their fire on the Almirante Oquendo, which was similarly beached in flames. Next the Vizcaya drew abeam of the Iowa, which turned its fire from the Oquendo to this new quarry, pouring in shells that tore great rents in her side, while the Vizcaya fired back hotly but ineffectively. As the Spaniard drew ahead of the Iowa, the fire of the Oregon and Texas reached her, and an 8-inch shell from the Brooklyn raked her fore and aft. The next moment a great shell exploded in her interior, killing eighty men. She was clearly out of the race, and ran in despair for the beach.

Meanwhile the Christobal Colon was running at great speed along the beach, pursued by the American ships. Of these the Oregon and Brooklyn alone were able to keep within hopeful distance. For an hour the chase kept up, then the Oregon tried a 13-inch shell, which struck the water close astern of the Colon, four miles away. Another was tried and reached its mark. Soon after a shell from the Brooklyn pierced the Colon at the top of her armor belt. Then she too gave up and ran for the beach, Admiral Sampson, on the New York, reaching the scene in time only to receive the surrender of her officers.

[=The "Gloucester" and Her Work=]

Perhaps the most telling work of the day was that done by the little Gloucester, a yacht turned into a gunboat, which was commanded by Richard Wainwright, one of the surviving officers of the Maine. Two torpedo-boat destroyers had followed the Spanish ships from the harbor, and these were gallantly attacked and sunk by Wainwright in his little craft, thus finally disposing of the second Spanish fleet with which the Yankees came into contact.

[Sidenote=: The Lesson of the War=]

The annals of naval history record no more complete destruction of an enemy's fleet than in the two cases we have described, and never has such work been done with so little loss--only one man being killed and a few wounded in both American fleets. It taught the world a new lesson in the art of naval warfare, and admonished the nations that the United States was a power to be gravely considered in the future in any question of war.

We have told the only incidents of this short war with which we are concerned. In the conflict on land there was nothing of special character. An American army landed near Santiago and fought its fight to a quick finish in the capture of that city; and a similar story is to be told of Manila; while the attempted conquest of Porto Rico was cut short in the middle by the signing of a peace protocol. In December a treaty of peace was signed in which Spain abandoned her colonies of Cuba and Porto Rico, the latter being ceded to the United States, while the Philippine Islands, the scene of Dewey's great victory, were likewise ceded to this country. The latter, however, was not to the pleasure of the island people, who took up arms to fight for freedom from the dominion of the whites.

[=The United States Made a Colonial Power=]

Brief as was the war, it had the effect of radically changing the position of the United States, which for the first time in its history became a colonial power, and acquired an interest in that troublesome Eastern Question which reached, at the end of the century, a highly critical stage. Into what complication this new political relation is likely to lead the republic of the West it is impossible to say, but this country will certainly play its part in the shaping of the future destiny of the East.

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XXXV. The Dominion of Canada

[=The Area and Population of Canada=]

Occupying the northern section of the western hemisphere lies Great Britain's most extended colony, the vast Dominion of Canada, which covers an immense area of the earth's surface, surpassing that of the United States, and nearly equal to the whole of Europe. Its population, however, is not in accordance with its dimensions, being less than 5,000,000, while the bleak and inhospitable character of much the greater part of its area is likely to debar it from ever having any other than a scanty nomad population, fur animals being its principal useful product. It is, however, always unsafe to predict. The recent discovery of gold in a part of this region, that traversed by the Klondike River, has brought miners by the thousands to that wintry realm, and it would be very unwise to declare that the remainder of the great northern region contains no treasures for the craving hands of man.

[=Canada's Early History=]

It is the development of Canada during the nineteenth century with which we are here concerned, and we must confine ourselves, as in the case of the other countries treated, to its salient points, those upon which the problem of its progress turns. First settled by the French in the seventeenth century, this country came under British control in 1763, as a result of the great struggle between the two active colonizing powers for dominion in America. The outcome of this conquest is the fact that Canada, like the other colonies of Great Britain, possesses a large alien population, in this case of French origin; and it may further be said that the conflict between England and France in America is not yet at an end, since political warfare, varied by an occasional act of open rebellion, has been maintained throughout the century by the French Canadians.

The revolution of 1775 in the colonies to the south failed to gain adherents in Canada, which remained loyal to Great Britain and repelled every attempt to invade its territory. It met invasion in the war of 1812 in the same spirit, and despite the fact that there has long been a party favoring annexation to the United States, the Canadians as a whole are to-day among the most loyal colonial subjects of the home government of Great Britain.

At the opening of the nineteenth century the population of Canada was small, and its resources were only slightly developed. Its people did not reach the million mark until about 1840, though since then the tide of immigration has flowed thither with considerable strength and the population has grown with some rapidity. In 1791 the original province of Quebec was divided into Upper and Lower Canada, a political separation which by no means gave satisfaction, but led to severe political conflicts. As a result an act of union took place, the provinces being reunited in 1840.

[=Upper and Lower Canada=]

Upper Canada, at the opening of the century, was only slightly developed, the country being a vast forest, without towns, without roads, and practically shut out from the remainder of the world. The sparse population endured much suffering, which, in 1788, deepened into a destructive famine, long remembered as a terrible visitation. But it began to grow with the new century, numbers crossed the Niagara River from the States to the fertile lands beyond, immigrants crossed the waters from Great Britain and France, Toronto was made the capital city, and the population of the province soon rose to 30,000 in number. Lower Canada, however, with its old cities of Quebec and Montreal, and its flourishing settlements along the St. Lawrence River, continued the most populous section of the country, though its people were almost exclusively of French origin. The strength of the British population lay in the upper province.

[=The War of 1812=]

These historical particulars are desirable as a statement of the position and relations of Canada at the opening of the nineteenth century, though in the succeeding history of the country only an occasional event occurred of sufficiently striking character to fit into our plan. We have already detailed the events of the war of 1812 on the Canada frontier, in which the capture and burning of York (now Toronto) served as an excuse for the subsequent indefensible burning of Washington by the British. Battles were fought on Canadian soil in 1814 at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane--the latter the bloodiest battle of the war. But though the Americans were victorious in these engagements, they soon after withdrew from Canada--to which they have never since returned in a hostile way. Many political complications have arisen between the two countries, and at times sharp words have been spoken, but all the questions have been amicably settled and the two countries remain fairly good friends, with only such disputes as too close neighborhood is apt to provoke.

[=John Strachan and the Family Compact=]

The leader of public opinion in Canada during the three years' struggle with the United States was a clergyman of the English church, John Strachan, rector of York. Though a clergyman of the English establishment, Strachan was by birth a Scotchman, and a decidedly pugnacious and determined character, a man of courage, persistence, cunning and political skill, whose ambition drove him forward, until, with his party, he formed in 1820 what was long known as the "Family Compact," which for years ruled the country in an autocratic way. The governor and council were the tools of Strachan and his allies; they filled the public offices with their favorites, and went so far as to drive Robert Gourlay, an honest and capable business man, from the country, because he was so presumptuous as to reflect on the character of their administration.

[=A Religious Quarrel=]

In 1824 their power was for a time overturned. William Lyon Mackenzie, a Scotchman of impetuous disposition, started the Colonial Advocate newspaper, which opposed the "Compact" so vigorously as to arouse the hatred of its adherents. The office of the Advocate was gutted by a mob, but Mackenzie recovered large damages, an opposition Assembly was elected, and the Family Compact fell from power. Strachan however, was only temporarily defeated. A religious quarrel arose which lasted for thirty years, and in which he played the leading part. This turned upon the use of what was known as the "clergy reserve fund," an allotment of one-seventh of the crown lands for the support of a Protestant clergy. A portion of this fund was demanded by a Scotch Presbyterian congregation, but Strachan, who had a controlling voice in its disposition, claimed it all for the English Established Church, and entered into this new fight with all his old energy. He gained strong support, was promoted to the dignity of a bishop, founded King's College from part of the fund, and, in 1853 obtained a transfer of the fund--which had been placed at the disposal of the British Parliament for religious purposes--to Canada. The controversy was finally settled in 1854, an act being passed which secured their life interests to the clergy already enjoying them, while the remainder of the fund was devoted to public education.

Thus for forty years and more John Strachan made himself the most prominent and powerful figure in Upper Canada. Meanwhile a strained condition of affairs existed in Lower Canada, due to the rivalry and struggle for power of the inhabitants of French and British descent. The strife became so intense as in 1837 to lead to open rebellion.

[=French Supremacy in Lower Canada=]

The great supremacy of the French in numbers gave them a decided majority in the Assembly, and for years Louis Papineau was elected by them speaker of that body, though bitterly opposed by the British population. When Lord Dalhousie, the governor-general, refused to recognize him in this position, sufficient influence was brought to bear upon the home government to have the autocratic lord transferred to India, and the French retained their control of the Assembly. A reform in the government of the province was recommended by a committee of the British Parliament, which resulted in 1832 in giving the Assembly control of the local finances.

This gave the French Canadians a perilous power, and they endeavored to rid themselves of the English judges and civil officials by a process of financial starvation. Salaries were unpaid and the government was blocked through lack of funds. The sharpness of the strife was added to by resolutions in the British Parliament which condemned the Canadian legislature and supported the council--an arbitrary body under the governor's control, and in the British interest.

[=The Revolt of 1837=]

The strife eventually deepened into revolt. Both provinces vigorously demanded that the council should be chosen by the votes of the people, and thus truly represent the country. Lower Canada became violently excited on this question; funds known as "Papineau tribute" were collected; the liberty cap was worn; imported goods were replaced by homespun clothes, and military training soon began. These movements were followed by hostile acts, the English "Constitutionalists" and the French "Sons of Liberty" coming into warlike contact. But Sir John Colborne, the governor, was a man of energy and decision, and quickly brought the incipient rebellion to an end. The insurgents were attacked and dispersed wherever they showed themselves, Dr. Nelson, one of their leaders, was captured, and Papineau, the head of the revolt, was obliged to escape across the border.

This movement in Lower Canada was accompanied by a similar revolt in Upper Canada under the leadership of William Lyon Mackenzie, the former opponent of the Family Compact. He, as a leader of the opposition forces, had continued bitterly to oppose the oligarchy which controlled Canadian affairs. Three times he was elected to the Assembly of Upper Canada, and three times expelled by the tyrannical majority. The law officers of Great Britain pronounced his expulsion illegal, and he was re-elected by a large majority, but the arbitrary Assembly again refused to admit him.

[=Mackenzie's Rebellion=]

The result of this unlawful action was to make him highly popular, he was elected the first mayor of Toronto, and the struggle went on more bitterly than ever. An unlucky expression he had used--"The baneful domination of the mother country"--was now quoted against him as evidence of disloyalty, and Mackenzie, exasperated by the acts of his enemies, lost his self-control and entered into rebellion. He made a compact with Louis Papineau to head a rising in Toronto on the same day with the insurgent rising in Montreal. In furtherance of this he proclaimed a "Provisional Government of the State of Upper Canada," gathered a force of eight hundred men, and threatened Toronto with capture. But hesitation was fatal to his cause, his men were attacked and dispersed, and he was forced to flee. On Navy Island he flung the flag of rebellion to the breeze, but he had lost his one opportunity and the flag soon went down. Lack of prudence and patience had put an end to a promising political career.

[=Growth of Population and Industry=]

The suppression of this rebellion was followed in 1840 by the Act of Union of the two provinces already mentioned. The population now began to grow with considerable rapidity. From about 1,100,000 in 1840, it grew to nearly 2,000,000 in 1850, and 2,500,000 in 1860. And the people were spreading out widely northward and westward, settling new lands, and stretching far towards the Pacific border. The industries of Canada, which had been greatly depressed by the adoption of free trade in Great Britain, were revived by a treaty of reciprocity in trade with the United States, and prosperity came upon the country in a flood.

But political troubles were by no means at an end, and much irritation arose from acts of citizens of the United States during the Civil War. Refugees and conspirators from the south sought the Canadian cities, and endeavored to involve the two countries in hostile relations. Fenian raids were attempted from the United States, and there was much alarm, though nothing of importance arose from the disturbed condition of affairs.

[=Organization of the Dominion of Canada=]

[=The Riel Revolts=]

In time the confederation which existed between the two larger provinces of Canada became too narrow to serve the purposes of the entire colony. The maritime provinces began to discuss the question of local federation, and it was finally proposed to unite all British North America into one general union. This was done in 1867, the British Parliament passing an act which created the "Dominion of Canada." The new confederation included Ontario (Upper Canada), Quebec (Lower Canada), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Four years later Manitoba and British Columbia were included, and Prince Edward's Island in 1874. A parliament was formed consisting of a Senate of life members chosen by the prime minister and an Assembly elected by the people. The formation of the dominion was soon followed by trouble, this time arising in the Indian country, over which the Canadian people had rapidly extended their authority. Louis Riel, son of the leader of the Metés (half-breed) Indians, headed a rebellion in 1869 and established a provisional government at Fort Garry. In the following year the revolt collapsed on the arrival of General Wolseley at this fort. Twice in later years Riel attempted rebellion, the second time in 1885. He was finally captured and executed, and the rebellious sentiment vanished with his death.

Shortly after the formation of the dominion, Sir John Macdonald became a conspicuous figure in Canadian politics and for many years served as prime minister of the country. He took part in the treaty of Washington, which referred to arbitration of the Alabama claim and other questions between Great Britain and the United States, and came near defeat in consequence, since the parts of the treaty which referred to Canada were very unpopular in that country. He was defeated in 1873 on the question of the Canadian Pacific Railway, concerning which a great scandal had arisen, with suspicion of wholesale bribery. In 1878 Macdonald returned to the premiership, which he continued to hold until his death in 1891.

[=The Canadian Pacific Railway=]

Despite the scandal attending the Pacific Railway bill, that enterprise was pushed forward with much energy, and, after desperate financial struggles, was completed in 1886. It need scarcely be said that it has since played a highly important part in the development of Canada. Under the liberal ministry of Alexander Mackenzie (1873-78) the country prospered greatly for a time, but a period of financial stringency followed, and the people demanded commercial protection. This was given by the Conservatives, under Macdonald, in 1879, a protective tariff being adopted as a measure of defence against the commercial enterprise of the United States. The result was a rapid revival of trade and wide-spread prosperity. In 1880, by an act of the British Parliament, the control of all the British possessions in Canada--except Newfoundland, which had not joined the Union--was transferred to the Dominion Parliament, and the country became in large measure an independent nation.

[=The Fishery Difficulties=]

The important questions which have since that time arisen in Canada have had largely to do with its relations to the United States and its people. One of the most troublesome of these has been the question of the fisheries on the banks of Newfoundland and the coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. For years the problem of the rights of American fishermen on the Canadian coast excited controversy, In 1877 the Halifax Fishery Commission awarded $5,500,000 to Great Britain, to pay for the privileges granted to the United States, and in 1888 a treaty was signed for the settlement of this vexatious question.

[=The Fur-Seal Question=]

The temporary removal of this difficulty was followed by the development of a still more serious fishery controversy between the two countries, that relating to the fur-seal fishery of Alaska. The fur-seals, frequenting the Pribylof Islands of the Bering Sea for breeding purposes, belonged to the United States, which rented out the right of killing seals on these islands to the Alaska Commercial Company, whose killing privileges were restricted to 100,000 yearly. But these seals had a wide range of excursion at sea, and Canadian fishermen began to prey upon them in the open waters. These depredations, beginning in 1886, reduced the herds by 1890 to such an extent that the Alaska Company could secure only 21,000 skins in that year. There was serious danger of the extermination of the animals, and the United States took active measures to prevent poaching on its preserves, as it regarded the work of the Canadians. The controversy on this question became strenuous as time went on, and it was seriously thought at one time that the easiest way out of the difficulty would be to kill all the seals at once and so put an end to the problem. Finally the two nations concerned agreed to submit the question to arbitration, and a decision was rendered in 1893, establishing a "protected zone" of sixty miles around the Pribylof Islands. Unfortunately the ocean range of the seals is much wider than this, and the diminution of the herd has still gone on. The difficulty, therefore, remains unsettled.

[=The Gold of the Klondike=]

Sir John Macdonald died in 1891 and Sir John S. D. Thompson, a man of marked ability, became premier in 1892. He lived, however, only until 1894 and for a brief interval Sir Charles Tupper filled the office. Before the end of the year he resigned, and Sir Wilfred Laurier became premier, he being the first French Canadian to hold that high office. The most important questions rising under his administration were those springing from the discovery of gold on the Klondike River. This find was made in the autumn of 1896, and as reports quickly spread of the richness of the diggings, a rush of miners, mainly Americans, took place during the following year. But it was quickly perceived that the region was not in Alaska, as at first supposed, but in Canadian territory, and mining laws were imposed by the Canadian government, including heavy fees and royalties, which were bitterly objected to by the American miners.

But the chief question, arising from the find was that concerning the true boundary between the two countries, This had never been clearly decided upon for the southern section of Alaska, and the natural desire of Canada to obtain an ocean outing for the new gold district, which was being very rapidly settled, soon stirred up a very active controversy.

[=A Boundary Question=]

The claim of Russia, transferred by purchase to the United States, called for a strip of land ten leagues wide from the coast backward. This would have been definite enough had it been quite clear what constituted the coast. The sea line of Alaska is marked by deep indentations, some of which are open to question as to whether they should be considered oceanic or inland waters. Such a one is Lynn Canal, which affords the natural waterway to the mountain passes leading to the upper Yukon, by whose waters the gold district can be most easily reached. This inlet, running sixty miles into the land, is less than six miles wide at its mouth; and while the United States claimed that it was part of the open sea, the Canadian government looked upon it as territorial water, and demanded that the coast line should be drawn across its mouth. This would have given Canada control of its upper waters and the access to the sea from the Klondike region over its own territory which it so urgently needed. It would also have given it possession of Dyea and Skagua, two mining towns built and peopled by Americans at the head of the canal, and whose people would have bitterly opposed being made citizens of Canada.

[=An International Commission=]

As will be perceived from the above statement a number of international questions had arisen between the United States and Canada, of which only the most urgent have here been mentioned. In 1898 an earnest attempt was made to adjust these annoying problems, by the appointment of an International Commission, whose sessions began in the city of Quebec, August 23, 1898. On the part of Great Britain and Canada the membership consisted of Lord Herschell, ex-Lord Chancellor of England, chairman, Sir Wilfred Laurier, the Premier of Canada, Sir Richard J. Cartwright, Minister of Trade and Commerce, Sir Louis H. Davies, Minister of Marine and Fisheries, John Charlton, M. P., and Sir James T. Winter, Premier of Newfoundland. The American members were Charles W. Fairbanks, United States Senator from Indiana, chairman, George Gray, Senator from Delaware, Nelson Dingley, Representative from Maine, John W. Foster, former Secretary of State and ex-Minister to Spain, Russia and Mexico, John A. Kasson, former Minister to Germany and Austria, and T. Jefferson Coolidge, former Minister to France. Senator Gray resigned in September, to take part in Peace Commission on the Spanish War, and was succeeded by Senator Charles J. Faulkner, of West Virginia.

[=The Questions at Issue=]

The principal questions that came before this Commission for consideration were the following: The adjustment of the difficulties concerning the Atlantic and Pacific coast fisheries and those still arising in reference to the fur-seals; the establishment of a fixed boundary between Alaska and Canada; provision for the transit of merchandise to or from either country across territory of the other, or to be delivered at points in either country beyond the frontier; the questions of labor laws and mining rights affecting the subjects of either country within the territory of the other; a mutually satisfactory readjustment of customs duties; an understanding concerning the placing of war vessels on the great lakes; arrangements to define and mark the frontier line; provision for the conveyance of accused persons by officers of one country through the territory of the other; and reciprocity in wrecking and salvage rights.

[=The Failure of the Commission=]

As will be perceived from this list of subjects to be considered, the High Commission had abundance of work mapped out for it. While some of the questions were of minor importance and might be settled with comparative ease, others were of high significance and likely to prove very difficult to adjust. In fact, they proved beyond the powers of the commission. Adjourning from Quebec to meet in Washington in November, the members continued in session there for several months longer, but adjourned finally in the spring of 1899 without having been able to come to a decision on the difficult matters involved.

[=Commerce of Canada with the United States=]

Several of these questions, indeed, were of the most complex and vexatious character, particularly that relating to the fisheries, which had been a source of trouble and conflict through most of the century. As respects the transport of goods of one country over the territory of the other, it is a matter of much importance to Canada, which sends great quantities of goods over United States territory for shipment abroad, six times more Canadian grain, for instance, going by way of Buffalo, than via Montreal and the St. Lawrence. The problem of reciprocal customs regulations is also one of much importance to Canada, which imports more merchandise from the United States than is sent by that country to all the remainder of the American Continent, amounting in all to about $70,000,000 annually. In return its exports to the United States amount to about $50,000,000, the total commerce being of importance enough to call for special tariff regulations between the two countries.

After the adjournment of the commission, efforts were made to adjust the boundary question, so far as Lynn Canal was concerned, through an understanding between the two governments. The United States, in consideration of the needs of Canada in the Klondike region, showed a disposition to concede temporarily to that country a tidewater port in the Lynn Canal. But decided protests from commercial ports on the Pacific seaboard caused the withdrawal of the proposed concession. A temporary adjustment of the question was subsequently made, a line being drawn by officials of the two countries which followed the mountain summits and cut off Canada from access to the sea except across United States territory.

[=Railway Progress in Canada=]

The progress of Canada during the past quarter of a century has been very great, while her population has increased in that period by nearly one-half. Railways have spread like a network over the rich agricultural territory along the southern border land of the dominion, from ocean to ocean, and are now pushing into the deep forest land and rich mineral regions of the interior and the northwest, their total length in 1899 being over 17,000 miles, a large mileage for a population of 5,000,000. The most recent railway projected is one to the Klondike region, which already has a large population, and possesses in Dawson City a thriving and enterprising headquarters of the mining region. Canada has also been active in canal building, and has now under consideration a project of the highest importance, namely, the excavation of a ship-canal from Lake Huron to the St. Lawrence. This great enterprise, if carried into effect, will shorten the distance of commercial navigation by hundreds of miles and be of untold advantage to the Canadian commonwealth. It is proposed also to deepen the existing canals, so as to permit the conveyance of ocean freight without breaking bulk.

[=Manufacturing Enterprise=]

[=The Yield of Precious Metals=]

In manufacturing industry almost every branch of production is to be found, the progressive enterprise of the people of the Dominion being great, and a large proportion of the goods they need being made at home. The best evidence of the enterprise of Canada in manufacture is shown by the fact that she exports many thousand dollars worth of goods annually more than she buys--England being her largest customer and the United States second on the list. In addition to her manufactured products, Canada is actively agricultural, and possesses vast natural wealth in the products of her rich mines, vast forests and prolific fisheries. The most recent of these sources of wealth are her mines of the precious metals, which yielded over $6,000,000 in gold and $7,000,000 in silver in 1897, shortly after the discovery of the Klondike deposits. The yield of those has since very greatly increased.

[=Extent and Resources of the Dominion=]

Not only is the outside world largely ignorant of the importance of Canada, but few of her own people realize the greatness of the country they possess. Its area of more than three and one-half millions of square miles--one-sixteenth of the entire land surface of the earth--is great enough to include an immense variety of natural conditions and products. This area constitutes forty per cent. of the far extended British empire, while its richness of soil and resources in forest and mineral wealth are as yet almost untouched, and its promise of future yield is immense. The dimensions of the dominion guarantee a great variety of natural attractions. There are vast grass-covered plains, thousands of square miles of untouched forest lands, multitudes of lakes and rivers, great and small, and mountains of the wildest and grandest character, whose natural beauty equals that of the far-famed Alpine peaks. In fact, the Canadian Pacific Railway is becoming a route of pilgrimage for the lovers of the beautiful and sublime, its mountain scenery being unrivaled upon the continent.

The population of Canada varies in character according to location. In Ontario the people are generally English. In Quebec, and many other portions of what was formerly called Lower Canada, the original settlers were French, and their descendants are still in the majority and retain many of the habits and customs of their mother country--so much so, in fact, that, though England has ruled the land for about one hundred and fifty years, the French language is still almost exclusively spoken. Even in the cities of Montreal and Quebec the prevalence of the language makes the visitor from Toronto feel that he is in a foreign city.

[=The Character of the Canadian Population=]

In the west, until a few years ago, the prevailing population was the original Indian and the half-breed. But this element, though still numerous, is fast being swallowed up or hidden by the throng of immigrants, who are now pouring into that vast and resourceful region. These immigrants, unlike those of the older eastern provinces, are made up of all the nationalities of northern Europe, the British Isles, however, being well represented. Out of this mixture a new people, combining the good and progressive elements of various nations, is springing up. In this respect the Canadians of the northwest are much like the inhabitants of the northwestern United States.

Population at present is densest on the southern borders of the country, along the Great Lakes and the shores of the St. Lawrence. The interior is very sparsely settled, and as the latitude increases the cold of winter, except where the country is warmed by the winds of the Pacific, becomes more intense, until, in the northern part of the dominion, it is practically impossible for the Caucasian race to live in comfort. Much of this unbroken wilderness is covered with gigantic forests, which make lumbering the chief industry of that section, as agriculture is of the lower latitudes. In fact, lumbering and agriculture are the chief industries of all sections except the sea-coasts, where fishing interests are of great importance, and certain portions of the great northwest, like the Yukon districts, where mining is predominant. On the whole, Canada has before it a great future, and what its political destiny will be no man can foresee.

In several conditions the people of Canada, while preserving the general features of English society, are much more free and untrammeled. The caste system of Great Britain has gained little footing in this new land, where nearly every farmer is the owner of the soil which he tills, and the people have a feeling of independence unknown to the agricultural population of European countries. There has been great progress also in many social questions. The liquor traffic, for instance, is subject to the local option of restriction; religious liberty prevails; education is practically free and unsectarian; the franchise is enjoyed by all citizens; members of the parliament are paid for their services; and though the executive department of the government is under the control of a governor-general appointed by the queen, the laws of Canada are made by its own statesmen, and a state of practical independence prevails. Recognizing this, and respecting the liberty-loving spirit of the people, Great Britain is chary in interfering with any question of Canadian policy, or in any sense in attempting to limit the freedom of her great Transatlantic Colony.

RT. HON. J. S. D. THOMPSON, K. C. M. G. Prime Minister of Canada, 1892-1894.]

RT. HON. SIR WILFRID LAURIER, Prime Minister of Canada, 1896.]

SIR CHARLES TUPPER.]

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Chapter XXXVI

Livingstone, Stanley, Peary, Nansen and Other Great Discoverers and Explorers.

[=Ignorance of the Earth's Surface at the Beginning of the Century=]

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, long as man had previously existed upon the earth, much more than half its surface was unknown to the most civilized nations. Of the extensive continent of Africa, for instance, only the coast regions had been explored, while the vast interior could fairly be described as the "Great Unknown." The immense continent of Asia was known only in outline. With its main features men had some acquaintance, but its details were as little known as the mountains of the moon. With America men were little better acquainted than with Africa. The United States itself had been explored only as far west as the Mississippi, and that but imperfectly. The vast space between that great stream and the Pacific almost wholly awaited discovery. The remainder of the continent was divided into national domains, which were thinly inhabited and very imperfectly known. Of the continental island of Australia only a few spots on the border had been visited, and still less was known of the broad region of the North Polar zone.

[=Great Activity of Explorers in the Nineteenth Century=]

At the end of the century a very different tale could be told. The hundred years had been marked by an extraordinary activity in travel, adventure, and discovery; daring men had penetrated the most obscure recesses of continents and islands, climbed the most difficult mountains, ventured among the most savage tribes, studied the geographical features and natural productions of a thousand regions before unknown, and learned more about the conditions of the earth than had been learned in a thousand years before. The work of the century has no parallel in history except the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when America was discovered and the East Indies were explored, and the horizon of human knowledge was immensely extended.

The great achievements of the century with which we have to deal were performed by a large number of adventurous men, far too numerous even to be named in this review.

[=The Notable Fields of Nineteenth Century Travel=]

In fact it would need a volume, and one of considerable extent, to tell, even in epitome, the story of travel and exploration within the nineteenth century. Such a story, given in any fulness, would far transcend our purpose, which is confined to the description of the great events of the century, those of epoch-making significance, and which played leading parts in the progress of the period with which we are concerned. In this review, therefore, we may fairly confine ourselves to records of travel in two regions of the earth, the continent of Africa and the Arctic Zone, of both of which little was known at the opening of the century, while the story of their exploration has been of startling interest and importance. The interior of Asia and America, while presenting problems to be solved, were not unknown in the sense in which we speak of Africa, over which rested a pall of darkness as black as the complexion of its inhabitants. Australia alone was unknown in a similar sense. But the interior of that great island is practically a desert, and its exploration possesses nothing of the interest which attaches to that of Africa, a land which for many centuries has attracted the active attention and aroused the vivid curiosity of mankind, while a satisfactory acquaintance with it has been left for the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Of the great travelers to whom we are indebted for our present knowledge of this continent two stand pre-eminent, David Livingstone and Henry M. Stanley, and we may deal with their careers as the pivots around which the whole story of African exploration revolves.

[=Famous African Travelers=]

The first of modern travelers to penetrate the interior of western Africa to any considerable depth was the justly celebrated Mungo Park, whose first journey to the Niger was made in 1795-96, and the second in 1805. He traced that important stream through a large part of its upper course--finally losing his life as a result of his intrepid daring. On the east coast, at a somewhat earlier date (1768-73) the equally famous James Bruce penetrated Abyssinia to the head-waters of the Blue Nile, which he looked upon as the source of the great river of Egypt. About the same time the French traveler Vaillant entered the continent at Cape Town and journeyed north for more than three hundred miles, into the country of the Bushmen.

Such was the state of African exploration at the beginning of the century under consideration. The travelers named, and others of minor importance, had not penetrated far from the coast, and the vast interior of the continent remained almost utterly unknown. In fact the century was half gone before anything further of consequence was discovered, the first journey of Dr. Livingstone being made in 1849.

[=Dr. Livingstone's Missionary Labors=]

David Livingstone, an enterprising man, of Scotch birth, left England in 1840 to devote his life to missionary work in Africa. He had studied medicine and theology, and was well equipped in every way for the arduous and difficult work he had undertaken. Landing at Port Natal, he became associated with the Rev. Robert Moffat, a noted African missionary, whose daughter he afterwards married, and for years he labored perseveringly as an agent of the London Missionary Society. He studied the languages, habits, and religious beliefs of a number of tribes, and became one of the most earnest and successful of missionaries, his subsequent journeys being undertaken largely for the advance of his religious labors.

His experience in missionary work convinced him that success in this field of duty was not to be measured by the tale of conversions--of doubtful character--which could be sent home every year, but that the proper work for the enterprising white man was that of pioneer research. He could best employ himself in opening up and exploring new fields of labor, and might safely leave to native agents the duty of working these out in detail.

[=Discovery of Lake Ngami=]

This theory he first put into effect in 1849, in which year he set out on a journey into the unknown land to the north, the goal of his enterprise being Lake Ngami, on which no white man's eyes had ever fallen. In company with two English sportsmen, Mr. Oswell and Mr. Murray, he traversed the great and bleak Kalahari Desert,--which he was the first to describe in detail,--and on the 1st of August the travelers were gladdened by the sight of the previously unknown liquid plain, the most southerly of the great African lakes.

Two hundred miles beyond this body of water lived a noted chief named Sebituane, the chief of the Makololo tribe, whose residence Livingstone sought to reach the following year, bringing with him on this journey his wife and children. But fever seized the children and he was obliged to stop at the shores of the lake. Nothing daunted by this failure, he set out again in 1851, once more accompanied by his family, and with his former companion, Mr. Oswell, his purpose being to settle among the Makololos and seek to convert to Christianity their great chief. He succeeded in reaching the tribe, but the death of Sebituane, shortly after his arrival, disarranged his plans, and he was obliged to return. But before doing so he and Mr. Oswell made an exploration of several hundred miles to the northeast, their journey ending at the Zambesi, the great river of South Africa, which he here found flowing in a broad and noble current through the centre of the continent.

[=Livingstone's Journey from the Zambesi to the West Coast=]

The subsequent travels of Livingstone were performed more for purposes of exploration than for religious labors, though to the end he considered himself a missionary pioneer. Sending his family to England, he left Capetown in June, 1852, and reached Linyanti, the capital of the Makololo, in May, 1853, being received in royal style by the chief and his people, by whom he was greatly esteemed. He next ascended the Zambesi, in search of some healthy high land for a missionary station. But everywhere he found the tsetse fly, an insect deadly to animals, and, annoyed by the ravages of this insect among his cattle, he determined to leave that locality and enter upon the greatest journey ever yet undertaken in Africa, one through the unknown interior to the west coast.

The start was made from Linyanti on November 11, 1853, the party ascending the Leeba to Lake Dilolo, which was reached in February, 1854. Finally, on the 31st of May, they came to the coast town of St. Paul de Loanda, in Portuguese West Africa. Their long and dangerous journey had been attended by numberless hardships, and Livingstone reached the coast nearly worn out by fever, dysentery and semi-starvation. But nothing could deter the indefatigable traveler. He set out again after a few months, reached Lake Dilolo on June 13, 1855, and Linyanti in September. After a brief interval of rest he left this place with a determination to follow the broad-flowing Zambesi to its mouth in the eastern sea.

[=The Discovery of the Great Victoria Falls=]

A fortnight after his start he made the most notable of his discoveries, the one with which his name is most intimately associated in popular estimation, that of the great Victoria Falls of the Zambesi, a cataract which has no rival upon the earth except the still mightier one of the Niagara. Here an immense cleft or fissure in the earth cuts directly across the channel of the river, which pours in an enormous flood down into the cavernous abyss, whence "the smoke of its torrent ascendeth forever." The country surrounding seems to be a great basin-shaped plateau, surrounded by a ring of mountains, the depression having probably at one time been filled with an immense lake whose waters were drained off when the earth split asunder across its bed.

[=The First Crossing of the Continent=]

On went the untiring traveler, and on May 20, 1856, he reached the east coast at the Portuguese town of Quillimane, at the mouth of the Zambesi, in a frightfully emaciated condition. He had, in two and a half years of travel, performed one of the most remarkable journeys ever made up to that time. First proceeding north from the Cape to Loanda, through twenty-five degrees of latitude, he had for the first time in history, crossed the continent of Africa from ocean to ocean, through as many degrees of longitude, while his discoveries in the geography and natural history of the region traversed had been immense.

Livingstone returned to England in the latter part of the year and was received with the highest enthusiasm, being welcomed as the first to break through that pall of darkness which had so long enveloped the interior of Africa. The Royal Geographical Society had already conferred upon him its highest token of honor, its gold medal, and now honors and compliments were showered upon him until the modest traveler was overwhelmed with the warmth of his reception.

[=Livingstone Discovers Lake Nyassa=]

The desire to complete his work was strong upon him, and after publishing an account of his travels, in a work of modest simplicity, he returned to Africa, reaching the mouth of the Zambesi in May, 1858. In 1859 his new career of discovery began in an exploration of the Shire, a northern affluent of the Zambesi, up which he journeyed to the great Lake Nyassa, another capital discovery. For several years he was engaged in exploring the surrounding region and in furthering the interests of missionary enterprise among the natives. In one of his journeys his wife, who was his companion during this period of his travels, died, and in 1864 he returned home, worn out with his extraordinary labors in new lands and desiring to spend the remainder of his days in quiet and repose.

But at the suggestion of Murchison, the famous geologist and his staunch friend, he was induced to return to Africa, one of his main purposes being to take steps looking to the suppression of the Arab slave trade, whose horrors had long excited his deepest sympathies. Landing at the mouth of the Rovuma River--a stream he had previously explored--on March 22, 1866, he started for the interior, rounded Lake Nyassa on the south, and set off to the northeast for the great Lake Tanganyika--which had meanwhile been discovered by Barton and Speke, in 1857.

[=Stanley in Search of Livingstone=]

[=The Death of the Great Explorer=]

After his departure Livingstone vanished from sight and knowledge, and for five years was utterly lost in the deep interior of the continent. From time to time vague intimations of his movements reached the world of civilization, but the question of his fate became so exciting a one that in 1871 Henry M. Stanley was dispatched, at the expense of the proprietor of the New York Herald, to penetrate the continent and seek to discover the long-lost traveler. Stanley found him at Ujiji, on the northeast shore of Tanganyika, on October 18, 1871, the great explorer being then, in his words, "a ruckle of bones." Far and wide he had traveled through Central Africa, discovering a host of lakes and streams, and finding many new tribes with strange habits. Among his notable discoveries was that of the Lualaba River--The Upper Congo--which he believed to be the head-waters of the Nile. His work had been enormous, and the "Dark Continent" had yielded to him a host of its long hidden mysteries. Not willing yet to give up his work, he waited at Ujiji for men and supplies sent him by Stanley from the coast, and then started south for Lake Bangweolo, one of his former discoveries. But attacked again by his old enemy, dysentery, the iron frame of the great traveller at length yielded, and he was found, on May 1, 1873, by his men, dead in his tent, kneeling by the side of his bed. Thus perished in prayer the greatest traveler in modern times.

For more than thirty years Livingstone had dwelt in Africa, most of that time engaged in exploring new regions and visiting new peoples. His travels had covered a third of the continent, extending from the Cape to near the equator, and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, his work being all done leisurely and carefully, so that its results were of the utmost value to geographical science. He had also aroused a sentiment against the Arab slave-trade which was to give that frightful system its death-blow.

The work of Livingstone stirred up an enthusiasm for African travel, and many adventurous explorers set out for that continent during his career. After the discovery of Lake Tanganyika by Burton and Speke, in 1857, the latter started to the northeast, and reached the head-waters of the great Victoria Nyanza, the largest body of water on the continent. Subsequently this traveler, accompanied by Mr. Grant, journeyed to the White Nile, north of this lake, while Samuel Baker, another adventurous traveler, accompanied by his heroic wife, reached in 1864 a great lake west of the Victoria, which he named the Albert Nyanza.

[=Other African Travelers=]

Further north Dr. Barth, as early as 1850, set out on a journey across the Sahara to the Soudan, and at a later date various travelers explored this northern section of the continent, while in 1874-75 Lieutenant Cameron repeated Livingstone's feat of crossing the continent from sea to sea. But the greatest of African travelers after Livingstone was Henry M. Stanley, with whose work we are next concerned.

While a reporter in the New York Herald, this enterprising man had been sent to Crete to report upon the revolution in that island, to Abyssinia during the British invasion, and to Spain during the revolution in that country. While in Spain, in 1869, James Gordon Bennett sent him the brief order to "find Livingstone." This was enough for Stanley, who proceeded at once to Zanzibar, organized an expedition, and did "find Livingstone," as above stated.

[=Stanley's Journey to the Victoria Nyanza=]

[=The Descent of the Great Congo River=]

Next, filled with the spirit of travel, Stanley set out to "find Africa," now as joint agent for the Herald and the London Daily Telegraph. Setting out from Zanzibar in November, 1874, he proceeded, with a large expedition, to the Victoria Nyanza, which he circumnavigated; and then journeyed to Tanganyika, whose shape and dimension he similarly ascertained. From these he proceeded westward to the Lualaba, the stream which Livingstone had supposed to be the Nile. How Stanley made his way down this great stream, overcoming enormous difficulties and fighting his way through hostile tribes, is too long a story to be told here. It must suffice to say that he soon found that he was not upon the Nile, but upon a westward flowing stream, which he eventually identified as the Congo--a great river whose lower course only had been previously known. For ten months the daring traveler pursued his journey down this stream, assailed by treachery and hostility, and finally reached the ocean, having traversed the heart of that vast "unexplored territory" which long occupied so wide a space on all maps of Africa. He had learned that the interior of the continent is a mighty plateau, watered by the Congo and its many large affluents and traversed in all directions by navigable waters. Politically this remarkable journey led to the founding of the Congo Free State, which embraces the central region of tropical Africa, and which Stanley was sent to establish in 1879.

In 1887 he set out on another great journey. The conquest of the Egyptian Soudan by the Mahdi, described in a preceding chapter, had not only greatly diminished the territory of Egypt, but had cut off Emin Pasha (Dr. Edward Schnitzler), governor of the Equatorial Province of Egypt, leaving him stranded on the Upper Nile, near the Albert Nyanza. Here Emin maintained himself for years, holding his own against his foes, and actively engaging in natural history study. But, cut off as he was from civilization, threatened by the Mahdi, and his fate unknown in Europe, a growing anxiety concerning him prevailed, and Stanley was sent to find him, as he had before found Livingstone.

[=Stanley Goes to the Rescue of Emin Pasha=]

Organizing a strong expedition at Zanzibar, the traveler sailed with his officers, soldiers and negro porters for the mouth of the Congo, which river he proposed to make the channel of his exploration. Setting out from this point on March 18, 1887, by June 15th the expedition had reached the village of Yambuya, 1,300 miles up the stream. Thus far he had traversed waters well known to him. From this point he proposed to plunge into the unknown, following the course of the Aruwimi, a large affluent of the Congo which flowed from the direction of the great Nyanza lake-basins.

It was a terrible journey which the expedition now made. Before it spread a forest of seemingly interminable extent, peopled mainly by the curious dwarfs who form the forest-folk of Central Africa. The difficulties before the traveler were enormous, but no hardship or danger could daunt his indomitable courage, and he kept resolutely on until he met the lost Emin on the shores of Albert Nyanza, as he had formerly met Livingstone on those of Lake Tanganyika.

[=A Terrible Forest Journey=]

Three times in effect Stanley crossed that terrible forest, since he returned to Yambuya for the men and supplies he had left there and journeyed back again. Finally he made an overland journey to Zanzibar, on the east coast, with Emin and his followers, who had been rescued just in time to save them from imminent peril of overthrow and slaughter by the fanatical hordes of the Mahdi. This second crossing of the continent by Stanley ended December 4, 1889, having continued little short of three years. The discoveries made were great and valuable, and on his return to Europe the explorer met with a reception almost royal in its splendor. Among the large number of travelers who during the latter half of the century have contributed to make the interior of Africa as familiar to us as that of portions of our own continent, Livingstone and Stanley stand pre-eminent, the most heroic figures in modern travel: Livingstone as the missionary explorer, who won the love of the savage tribes and made his way by the arts of peace and gentleness; Stanley as the soldierly explorer, who fought his way through cannibal hordes, his arts being those of force and daring. They and their successors have performed one of the greatest works of the nineteenth century, that of lifting the cloud which for so many centuries lay thick and dense over the whole extent of interior Africa.

[=The Exploration of the Arctic Zone=]

Leaving this region of research, we must now seek another which has been the seat of as earnest efforts and terrible hardships and has aroused as ardent a spirit of investigation, the Arctic Zone. At no point in the story of the nineteenth century do we find a greater display of courage and resolution, a more patient endurance of suffering, and a more unyielding determination to extend the limits of human knowledge, than in this region of ice and snow, the delving into whose secrets has actively continued during the latter half of the century.

[=Early Expeditions to the Far North=]

A number of voyages were made to the Arctic regions in former centuries, and Henry Hudson as early as 1607 sailed as far north as the latitude of 81 degrees 30 minutes in the vicinity of Spitzbergen. With the opening of the nineteenth century exploration grew more active, and voyage after voyage was made; but the distance north reached by Hudson two centuries before was not surpassed until 1827, when Parry reached 82 degrees 40 minutes north latitude in the same region of the sea. Beyond these efforts to penetrate the ice barrier, and the discovery of some islands in the Arctic Ocean, nothing of special interest occurred until the date of Sir John Franklin's expedition, which left England in 1845 and disappeared in the icy seas, every soul on board perishing. This expedition was made famous by the many search parties which were sent out in quest of the lost mariners.

By one of these parties the northwest passage from ocean to ocean, around the Arctic coast of America, was traversed in 1854. The fate of Franklin and his men was not fully solved until 1880, when an American expedition, under Lieutenant Schwatka, found the last traces left by the unfortunate explorers.

As famous and as disastrous as the Franklin expedition was the "Lady Franklin Bay Expedition," conducted by Lieutenant Greely, of the United States army, which set out in 1881. This expedition was not sent for purposes of polar research, but in pursuance of a plan to conduct a series of circumpolar meteorological observations. The relief party of 1883, dispatched to the rescue of the explorers, was unfortunately put under the control of military men, who not only failed to reach their destination, but even to leave a supply of food where Greely and his men might justly expect to find one.

[=The Dreadful Fate of the Greely Party=]

As a result of this failure, the explorers were obliged to abandon their ships and make their way southwards over almost impassable ice. In October they reached Cape Sabine, one of the bleakest spots in the Arctic zone. If food had been left there for them all would have been well. But they looked in vain for the expected supplies, and when, in June, 1884, Commodore Schley reached them with a new relief ship, starvation had almost completed its work. Of the whole party only six men survived, and a day or two more of delay would have carried them all away. Among the survivors was their leader, Lieutenant Greely.

[=The Fatal "Jeannette" Expedition=]

A disaster as fatal in character attended the Jeannette expedition, sent out by the New York Herald, in 1879, under Commander DeLong, to push north by way of Bering Strait. The vessel was crushed by the ice in 1882, and the crew made their way over the frozen surface past the New Siberian Islands to the mouth of the Lena River, on the north coast of Siberia. Here starvation attacked them, and DeLong and many of his men miserably perished, their bodies being found by Engineer Melville, one of their companions, who had pushed south to the Siberian settlements and secured aid, with which he heroically returned for the rescue of the unfortunate mariners.

[=Expedition of Prof. Nordenskjöld=]

Another expedition calling for attention was that of Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld, a Swedish scientist. The purpose of this enterprise was to discover, if possible, a practical commercial route through the waters north of Europe and Asia, the long sought-for Northeast Passage. In 1878 Nordenskjöld set out in the Vega, commanded by Captain Pallander, of the Swedish Navy. The party succeeded in making the long journey round the northern coasts of Europe and Asia, wintering in Bering Strait and reaching Japan in 1879. This vessel was the first one to round the northernmost point of Asia, and Nordenskjöld was rewarded by being made a baron and a commander of the order of the Pole Star in his own country, and by marks of distinction from several others of the courts of Europe.

[=Land Journeys in Greenland=]

Since 1890 the work of polar exploration has taken new forms. In 1870 Nordenskjöld made a journey into Greenland, and a second one in 1883, penetrating that island more than 100 miles and reaching a snow-clad elevation of 7,000 feet. In 1886 Lieutenant Robert E. Peary, of the United States Navy, made a similar journey, and in 1888 Dr. Frithjof Nansen, a Norwegian explorer, crossed the southern part of the island on snowshoes from east to west.

[=Peary Crosses North Greenland=]

In 1891 Peary proceeded with a small party to McCormick Bay, a locality far up on the west coast of Greenland, whence he set out in the following spring with a single companion for a sledge journey over the northern section of the island. After a remarkable journey of 650 miles he reached the northeast coast of Greenland, at 81°, 37" N. latitude, but the appearance of an area of broken stones impassable by sledges cut off his progress to the far north. In 1895 Peary repeated this journey, but failed to make farther progress northward.

During the final decade of the century polar expeditions became numerous. Walter Wellman, a young American journalist, attempted in 1894 to reach the pole by sledge and boat over the Spitzbergen route, but his supporting vessel was crushed in the ice, and he was forced to retreat when near the 81st parallel. He made a second "dash for the pole" in 1898-99, but was disabled by an accident, and again obliged to return without success. In 1894 Frederick G. Jackson, an English explorer, visited Franz Joseph Land, an island region discovered by an Austrian expedition in 1872-74, and whose northern extension was not known. He remained on this island three years, carefully exploring it, and in 1896 stood on its northern extremity, near the 81st parallel, and in view of an open expanse of polar waters. Jackson's most notable service to science was the rescue of the daring explorer Nansen, whose expedition needs next to be described.

[=Nansen and His Enterprise=]

Frithjof Nansen, whose crossing of Greenland has been mentioned, soon after projected an enterprise of a new character. There was excellent reason to suppose that a strong ocean current crossed the polar area, flowing from the coast of the Eastern hemisphere across to Greenland and down both shores of that island. By trusting to the drift influence of this current a vessel might be carried past the pole and the long baffling mystery solved. Nansen accordingly had a vessel constructed adapted to resist the most powerful crushing force, and so formed that a severe ice pressure would lift it to the surface of the floe. In this vessel, the Fram, he set out in June, 1893, sailed east to the vicinity of the New Siberia Islands, and there made fast his ship to an ice floe, with the hope that the current would slowly carry ice and ship across the polar area.

[=Nansen's "Farthest North"=]

For three years Nansen and his crew were lost to all knowledge of man, in these frozen seas, and all hopes of his return had nearly vanished when he triumphantly reappeared, having achieved a marvelous success, even though short of that which he had desired. For more than a year the Fram had drifted slowly northward, and on Christmas eve, 1894, the latitude of 83 degrees 24 minutes, reached by the Greely expedition, and the highest yet attained, was passed. In March, 1895, Nansen left the ship, dissatisfied with its slow progress, and with one companion started on a sledge journey to the north. But the ice grew so difficult to cross and his dog teams so depleted in number, that, after a desperate effort, he was obliged to give up the enterprise on April 7th. He had then reached latitude 86 degrees 14 minutes, being 200 miles nearer the pole than former explorers had gone, and within 300 miles of that "farthest north" point. The vessel which he had left continued to drift north until it reached 85 degrees 57 minutes, when it turned southward. Here the sea was found to be deep, and the belief that the pole might be surrounded by a land area was disproved. It lies probably in a sea region of over 10,000 feet in depth.

[=The Rescue of Nansen=]

Nansen and Johansen, his companion, finally reached the coast of Franz Joseph Land, where they drearily spent the winter of 1895-96, living on the flesh of bears and walrusses, which they shot. In the spring they set out to cross the ice to Spitzbergen, and after two unsuccessful attempts had the good fortune to meet Dr. Jackson on the shores of Franz Joseph Land. The incident was one of the most notable in the history of research, it seeming next to impossible that almost the only human beings in the vast area of the frozen north should have the remarkable fortune to come together. The voyagers completed their journey home in Jackson's supply ship, the Windward, their arrival in the realms of civilization being one of the most striking events of the century. In 1897 Jackson returned, having explored and mapped Franz Joseph Land.

[=Andrée's Fatal Balloon Venture=]

The final years of the century were very active in polar research. A new explorer of Swedish birth, S. A. Andrée, devised a plan of reaching the pole as original as that of Nansen, and thought by many to be more hopeful. This was the taking advantage of the currents of air, instead of those of water. Mr. Andrée was an aëronaut of experience, and found it possible, by aid of a rope drag and a rubber sail, to direct the motion of a balloon somewhat aside from the course of the wind. A balloon seemingly suitable for his enterprise was constructed, and in the summer of 1897 he set out for the north with two companions, and with ardent hopes of returning successful in a few months. Unhappily, accident or miscalculation interfered with the plans of the adventurous aëronaut, and he and his companions have failed to return. They have in all probability fallen victims to the terrible conditions of the northern zone.

In 1898 Lieutenant Peary set out again for the scene of his former triumph, now equipped for a continued effort to solve the problem of the pole. He proposed to establish depots of provisions at successive points in the north, and to continue the enterprise for years if necessary, finally dashing polar-ward from his farthest north station. In the same year the Norwegian Captain Sverdrup proceeded to the same locality in the famous Fram, with purposes analogous to those of Peary. In 1899 the adventurous Italian Prince Luigi, set out for Franz Joseph Land, well equipped for a journey north, and proposing to devote several years to the enterprise.

Thus there is room for hope that the pole may be reached by the end of the nineteenth century, or before the twentieth century is many years advanced. Meanwhile the enterprise of South Polar exploration, long neglected, has been actively revived. Several expeditions have recently visited that region, and active steps are being taken for its exploration on a larger scale.

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Chapter XXXVII

Robert Fulton, George Stephenson, and the Triumphs of Invention.

[=Anglo-Saxon Activity in Invention=]

In no direction has the nineteenth century been more prolific than in that of invention, and its fame in the future is likely to be largely based on its immense achievements in this field of human activity. It has been great in other directions,--in science, in exploration, in political and moral development, but it is perhaps in invention and the industrial adaptation of scientific discovery that it stands highest and has done most for the advancement of mankind. And it is a fact of great interest that much the most striking and important work in this direction has been done by the Anglo-Saxon race, in many respects the most enterprising and progressive race upon the face of the earth. For the beginning of this work, during the eighteenth century, credit must be given to Great Britain, and especially for the notable invention of the steam engine, which forms the foundation stone of the whole immense edifice. But to the development of the work, during the nineteenth century, we must seek the United States, whose inventive activity and the value of its results have surpassed those of any other region of the earth.

[=James Watt and the Steam Engine=]

We cannot confine ourselves to the nineteenth century in considering this subject, but must go back to the eighteenth, and glance at the epoch-making discovery of James Watt, the famous Scottish engineer, to whom we owe the great moving force of nineteenth century industry and progress, and whose life extended until 1819, well within the century. There exists an interesting legend that his attention was first attracted to the power of steam when a boy, when sitting by the fireside and observing the lid of his mother's tea-kettle lifted by the escaping steam. It is not, however, to the discovery, but to the useful application of steam power that his fame is due. The use of steam as a motive power had been attempted long before, and steam pumps used almost a century before Watt's great invention. What he did was to produce the first effective steam engine, the parent machine upon which the multitudinous improvements during the succeeding century were based.

[=Nineteenth Century Invention=]

While the eighteenth century is notable for the discovery of the steam engine and for the first stages in the production of labor-saving machinery, the great triumphs in the latter field of invention were made in the succeeding century, during which era the powers of human production were developed to an extent not only unprecedented, but almost incredible, the powers of man, aided by steam and electricity, being increased a hundred-fold during a century of time. It would need a volume devoted to this subject alone to tell, even in epitome, all that has been done in this direction, and here we must confine ourselves to a rapid review of the leading results of inventive genius.

[=Labor-saving Machinery of the Eighteenth Century=]

Both in Great Britain and in America notable triumphs in the invention of labor-saving machines were accomplished in the closing period of the eighteenth century. These include the famous British inventions of the spinning jenny of James Hargreaves, the spinning frame of Sir Richard Arkwright, and the power loom of Dr. Cartwright, the first notable aids in cotton manufacture. These were rendered available by the cotton-gin of Eli Whitney, the American inventor, by whose genius the production of cotton fibre was enormously cheapened. Other celebrated American inventors of this period were John Fitch, to whose efforts the first practical steamboat was due, and Oliver Evans, who revolutionized milling machinery, his devices in flour and grist mills being in use for half a century after his death. He was also the first to devise a steam carriage, and in 1804 built a steam dredger, which propelled itself through the streets of Philadelphia and afterwards was moved as a stern-wheel steamboat on the Schuylkill River. Another famous invention of this period was the nail machine of Jacob Perkins, patented in 1795, though not fully developed until 1810. At that time nails were all hand-wrought, and cost twenty-five cents a pound. By this machine the ancient hand process was speedily brought to an end and the price of nails has since been reduced to little more than that of the iron of which they are made. Another famous American inventor of early date was Thomas Blanchard, the most notable of whose many inventions was the Blanchard lathe, developed in 1819, for the turning of irregular forms, a contrivance of the utmost value in doing away with slow and costly methods of labor.

[=The Steamboat and Locomotive=]

Of early inventions of the nineteenth century, however, the most notable were the steamboat and the locomotive, the later development of which has been of extraordinary value to mankind. Previous to the century under review, for a period of several thousand years, the horse had been depended on for rapid land travel, the sail for rapid motion on the water. The inventions of Fulton and Stephenson brought these ancient systems to an end, and within a single century produced a magical change in the ability of man to make his way over the surface of land and sea.

The application of steam to the movement of boats had been tried by several inventors in Great Britain and America in the eighteenth century, the most successful being John Fitch, whose steamboat was used for months on the Delaware about 1790. But the earliest inventor to produce a commercially successful steamboat was Robert Fulton, another American, whose boat, the Clermont, was given its trial trip on the Hudson in 1807.

[=Fulton's Boat the "Clermont"=]

[=The First Steamboat Trip Up the Hudson=]

This boat, in which was employed the principle of the side paddle-wheel, and which used a more powerful engine than John Fitch could command, was completed in August, 1807, and excited a great degree of public interest, far more than had been given to the pioneer steamboat. Monday, September 11, 1807, the time set for sailing, came, and expectation was at its highest pitch. The friends of the inventor were in a state of feverish anxiety lest the enterprise should come to grief, and the scoffers on the wharf were ready to give vent to shouts of derision. Precisely at the hour of one the moorings were thrown off, and the Clermont moved slowly out into the stream. Volumes of smoke rushed forth from her chimney, and her wheels, which were uncovered, scattered the spray far behind her. The spectacle was certainly novel to the people of those days, and some of the crowd on the wharf broke into shouts of ridicule. Soon, however, the jeers grew silent, for it was seen that the steamer was increasing her speed. Soon she was fairly under way, and making a steady progress up the stream at the rate of five miles per hour. The incredulity of the spectators had been succeeded by astonishment, and now this feeling gave way to undisguised delight, and cheer after cheer went up from the vast throng. In a little while, however, the boat was observed to stop, and the enthusiasm at once subsided. The scoffers were again in their glory, and unhesitatingly pronounced the enterprise a failure. But to their chagrin, the steamer, after a short delay, once more proceeded on her way, and this time even more rapidly than before. Fulton had discovered that the paddles were too long, and took too deep a hold on the water, and had stopped the boat for the purpose of shortening them.

This defect remedied, the Clermont continued her voyage during the rest of the day and all night, without stopping, and at one o'clock the next day ran alongside the landing at Clermont, the seat of Chancellor Livingston. She lay there until nine the next morning, when she continued her voyage toward Albany, reaching that city at five in the afternoon. On her return trip, she reached New York in thirty hours running time--exactly five miles per hour.

[=The Effect of the Steamboat on River Men=]

The river was at this time navigated entirely with sailing vessels. The surprise and dismay excited among the crews of these vessels by the appearance of the steamer was extreme. These simple people beheld what they supposed to be a huge monster, vomiting fire and smoke from its throat, lashing the water with its fins, and shaking the river with its roar, approaching rapidly in the face of both wind and tide. Some threw themselves flat on the decks of their vessels, where they remained in an agony of terror until the monster had passed, while others took to their boats and made for the shore in dismay, leaving their vessels to drift helplessly down the stream.

The introduction of the steamboat gave a powerful impetus to the internal commerce of the Union. It opened to navigation many important rivers whose swift currents had closed them to sailing craft, and made rapid and easy communication between the most distant parts of the country practicable. The public soon began to appreciate this, and orders came in rapidly for steamboats for various parts of the country. Fulton executed these as fast as possible, several among the number being for boats on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

[=Development of Ocean Steamers=]

The subsequent history of this important invention need but be glanced at here. The first steamship to cross the ocean was the Savannah, which set out from the city of that name in 1819, and reached Liverpool by the combined aid of wind and steam in twenty-eight days. The first to cross entirely by steam power was the Royal William, a Canadian-built vessel, in 1833. A year or two later the Great Britain, the first iron ocean steamer--322 feet long by 31 feet beam--crossed the ocean in fifteen days. Since then the development of steam navigation, alike on inland and ocean waters, has been enormous, and an extraordinary increase has been made in the size and speed of steam vessels. Forty years ago the fastest ocean steamer took more than nine days to cross from New York to Queenstown. This journey can be made now in a little over five days. As regards size, the great Oceanic, whose first voyage was made in 1899, surpasses any other boat ever built. This sea-monster is 704 feet long, and has a displacement of 28,000 tons, while it is capable of steaming around the earth at twelve knots an hour without recoaling. Its engine power is enormous, and its carrying capacity unprecedented. This leviathan considerably outranks in dimensions the Great Eastern, the former ocean marvel, and fitly typifies the progress of the century. As will be remembered the Great Eastern proved a failure, while the Oceanic is a pronounced success.

Important as has been the invention of the steamboat, it is much surpassed by that of the locomotive and the railroad, which have increased the ease, cheapness, and rapidity of land travel and freight transportation far more than steam navigation has increased traffic by water. While the sailing vessel falls short of the steamship as an aid to commerce, the difference between the two is very much less than that between the horse and the locomotive, the iron rail and the ordinary road, and the railroad has achieved a revolution in transportation equal to that made by the steam engine in manufacture.

[=George Stephenson and the Locomotive=]

[=The Performance of the "Rocket"=]

The motor engine is, aside from the work of Oliver Evans, already mentioned, solely a result of nineteenth century enterprise. The railroad came earlier, first in the form of tramways of wood; the earliest iron rails being laid in England about 1767. But it was not until after 1800 that an attempt was made to replace the horse by the steam carriage on these roads. Of those who sought to solve this problem, George Stephenson, a poor English workingman, stands decidedly first. While serving as fireman in a colliery, and later as engineer, he occupied himself earnestly in the study of machinery, and as early as 1814 constructed for the colliery a traction engine with two cylinders. This was seated on a boiler mounted on wheels, which were turned by means of chains connected with their axles. It drew eight loaded cars at a speed of four miles an hour. This was a clumsy affair, weak in power, and inefficient in service, but it was much superior to any other engine then in use, and was improved on greatly by his second engine, built the following year, and in which he used the steam blast-pipe. These early engines were not much esteemed, and the horse continued to be employed in preference, the first passenger railroad, the Stockton and Darlington, opened in 1825, being run by horse-power. Meanwhile Stephenson continued to work on the locomotive, improving it year after year, until his early ventures were far surpassed in efficiency by his later. A French engineer, M. Seguin, in 1826, successfully introduced locomotives in which improved appliances for increasing the draught were employed. At that time, indeed, inventors seem to have been actively engaged on this problem, and when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, begun in 1825, offered premiums for the best engines to be run at high speed, a number of applicants appeared. The premium was easily won, in 1830, by Stephenson's "Rocket," the most effective locomotive yet produced. This antediluvian affair, as it would appear to-day, weighed only 4¼ tons, but was able to draw a load of 17 tons at an average speed of fourteen miles an hour, sometimes reaching seventeen miles. When run alone it attained thirty miles an hour, to the amazement and admiration of the public. It is to George Stephenson we owe the locomotive as an effective piece of mechanism. "He found it inefficient," says Smiles, "and he made it powerful, efficient and useful."

[=First American Railroads and Locomotives=]

While these events were taking place in England and France, the new idea had taken root in America, and the inventors and engineers of the United States set themselves to the development of the problem. Short lines of railway, for horse traction, were laid at early dates, the first locomotive, the "Stourbridge Lion," being imported from England and placed on a short line at Honesdale, Pa., in 1829. The Baltimore and Ohio, the first passenger railroad in the United States, was begun in 1830, and on it was tried the earliest American-built locomotive, the production of Peter Cooper, the celebrated philanthropist of later years. This was a toy affair, with a three and a half inch cylinder, an upright tubular boiler made of old gun barrels, and a fan blower to increase the draught. Its weight was two and a half tons. Yet it did not lack speed, making the run from Baltimore to Ellicott's Mills, twenty-seven miles, in an hour. But the first serviceable American locomotive was the "Best Friend," built at West Point, N. Y., and run on the Charleston and Hamburg Road, in South Carolina, in 1830, shortly after Stephenson's "Rocket" had been tried. The "Best Friend" could make more than thirty miles an hour, and could draw a train of four or five coaches, with forty to fifty passengers, at twenty miles an hour. It was inferior to the "Rocket," however, in design, and its career came to a sudden end through the zeal of a negro fireman, who sat on the safety valve to stop the escape of steam. The fireman shared the fate of the locomotive.

[=Development of The Railroad=]

Such was the railroad as it began,--a microscopic event. To-day it is of telescopic magnitude. At the end of 1831 there were less than a hundred miles of railroad in the United States, and probably still fewer elsewhere. At the end of the century this country alone had over 180,000 miles of railroad, while there were single railroad systems with more than 8000 miles of track. In the whole world there were about 450,000 miles of road,--only two and a half times the mileage of the United States.

[=Great Railroad Bridges=]

As for the development of the locomotive, the railroad carriage, the track, etc., it has been enormous, and sixty miles an hour for passenger trains is now a common speed, while the numbers of people and tons of freight transported annually by the railroads of the world are incredibly great. We cannot here undertake to describe the notable feats of engineering which have carried railroads over rivers and chasms, over mountains impassable otherwise except by sure-footed mules, across deserts too hot and dry even for mule trains. "No heights seem too great to-day, no valleys too deep, no cañons too forbidding, no streams too wide; if commerce demands it the engineer will respond and the railways will be built." The railroad bridges of the country would make a continuous structure from New York to San Francisco, and include many of the boldest and most original, as well as the longest and highest, bridges in the world. The pioneer railroad suspension bridge at Niagara Falls was as remarkable in its day for boldness and originality as for dimensions and success. A single span of 821 feet, supported by four cables, carried the track 245 feet above the river that rushed beneath. The cables were supported by masonry towers, whose slow disintegration gave occasion for an engineering feat even more notable than the original construction of the bridge. The first railroad bridge across the Ohio was at Steubenville, completed in 1866; the first iron bridge over the Upper Mississippi was the Burlington bridge of 1869. The first great bridge across the Mississippi was Eads' magnificent structure at St. Louis, whose beautiful steel arches of over 500 feet span each give no hint of the difficult problems that had to be solved before a permanent bridge was possible at that point. It was completed in 1874. Since then the great river has been frequently bridged for railroads, while its great branch, the Missouri, has been crossed by bridges in a dozen places.

[=The Electric Steel Railway=]

The steam railroad has been supplemented by the electric street railway, which at the close of the century was being extended at a highly promising rate. Passenger travel in cities by aid of the horse railway was inaugurated about the middle of the century, the horse beginning to be replaced by the electric motor in 1881, when the first railway of this character was laid in Berlin. A second was laid in Ireland in 1883. But the electric steel railway has made its greatest progress in the United States, where the first line went into operation at Richmond, Va., in 1888. This adopted the overhead trolly system, since so widely employed, and the length of line had increased to over 3,000 miles in 1892 and 15,000 miles in 1897. Since that date the progress of electric railways has been enormous, they being extended from the cities far into the country, where they come into active competition with the steam roads. Electric locomotives are also in use, and the twentieth century is likely to see a development of electric traction which will have the whole earth for its field, and may perhaps displace the steam road, the great triumph in transportation of the nineteenth century.

[=The Bicycle and the Automobile=]

Other recent devices for swift travel are the bicycle, which came extraordinarily into use during the last quarter of the century, and the automobile carriage, whose era only fairly began as the century reached its end. It is in the direction of the latter and of aërial travel that the twentieth century will perhaps achieve its most notable triumphs in this field. As for the horse, man's most useful servant at the beginning of the century, it was rapidly being displaced at the end, and may during the century to come cease to be employed in the service of man.

[=Marvels in Iron and Wood-working=]

The story of railroading leads naturally to that of progress in iron and steel work generally, which has been extraordinary during the century. Of inventions in this direction perhaps the most notable is the Bessemer steel-making process, which converts iron into steel by the direct addition of the necessary quantity of carbon, and has had the important result of making steel cheaper to-day than iron was not very many years ago. In iron-working machinery the progress has been very great, and in no other field has the genius of the American inventor been more conspicuously displayed. The same may be said of wood-working machinery, in which the most clever mechanism is employed. The result is that many articles in metal and wood, of the most varied and useful kinds, formerly almost unattainable by the rich, are now within the easy reach of the poor, and the comfort and convenience of common life to-day are enormously in advance of those enjoyed by our ancestors of a century ago.

As it is impossible to name all the inventions which conduce to this increase in convenience, it will perhaps suffice to name one alone, the friction match, that most useful of small contrivances, which has relegated into the museum of antiquities the slow and clumsy flint and steel to which the world was for centuries confined. This invention, gradually developed in various countries, owes its cheapness largely to the invention of an American, whose patent, taken out in 1836, first made possible the production of phosphorus matches on a large scale.

[=Progress in Illumination and Heating=]

Mention of the friction match opens to us one broad vista of nineteenth century progress, too great to be more than glanced at. This embraces the replacement of wood by coal for heating purposes, the development of the stove, the furnace, the coal-burning grate, and various conveniences of like character. As regards the tallow candle, which was in common use during the first third of the century, it seems as antiquated now as the pyramids. Various kinds of oil succeeded it as illuminants, until the discovery of petroleum set them all aside, and gave the world one of its most useful natural products. Then came the illuminating gas, and finally the wonderful electric light, whose brilliant glow lighted up the threshold of the twentieth century. Petroleum, gas and electricity are also beginning to replace coal for heating and cooking purposes,--as coal replaced wood,--and an outlook into the future seems to reveal to us the marvelous electric energy performing these and a thousand other services; this energy yielded, not as now, by costly fuel dug from the earth, but by power derived from falling water, from moving air, from swelling tides and flowing currents, and even from the direct light and heat of the sun.

[=Howe and the Sewing Machine=]

We cannot undertake to describe in detail the inventions of the century, even all those of great service to mankind. A mere inventory of these would more than fill this chapter, and we must confine ourselves to the notable ones of American origin. Among the most important of these may be named the sewing machine, a device gradually approached through a century of effort, but not made workable until a poor mechanic named Elias Howe attacked the problem, and worked it out through years of penury and disappointment. It was the lock-stitch and shuttle to which he owed his success, but these devices, patented by him in 1846, were pirated by wealthy corporations, and years of litigation were necessary before he gained his rights. He finally obtained a royalty of five dollars for each machine made up to 1860, and, after the renewal of his patent in that year, one dollar for each machine. The numbers produced were sufficient to make him very wealthy, and by the time the original patents expired, in 1877, over six million machines had been produced and sold by American manufacturers alone. Aside from the vast number of sewing machines now used in families, those used in factories are estimated to give employment, throughout the world, to over 20,000,000 women.

[=Goodyear and the Vulcanization of Rubber=]

Another American invention of the greatest utility is that of vulcanized India-rubber, the production of a poor man named Charles Goodyear, who, like Howe, spent years of his life and endured semi-starvation while persistently experimenting. Beginning in 1834, it was 1839 before, after innumerable failures, he discovered the secret of vulcanizing the rubber by means of sulphur. Before that date the softening effect of heat rendered rubber practically useless, but the vulcanized rubber produced by Goodyear was, before his death in 1860, applied to nearly five hundred purposes, and gave employment to 60,000 persons in Europe and the United States. Since then its utility has very greatly increased, and its recent employment for bicycle and carriage tires opens up a new field for its use which must enormously increase the demand.

[=Morse and the Telegraph=]

Another of the famous inventions of the century, the electric telegraph, usually attributed to Samuel Finley Morse, should really be credited to the labors of several scientists both in Europe and America. The merit of Morse lay, not in the discovery of the principle of electric telegraphy, but in his simplified telegraphic alphabet, which has nearly driven out all other devices and has made its way throughout the world. Morse's first line, completed in 1844, was the pioneer of a development analogous to that of the railroad. To-day the telegraph runs over all continents and under almost all seas, the length of the telegraph lines in the world at the end of the century being over 5,000,000 miles, of which more than half were in America. The telephone--the marvelous talking telegraph--invented by Alexander Bell and developed in the final quarter of the century, now has over half a million miles of wire in the United States.

[=The Inventions of Edison=]

The mention of the telegraph and telephone calls to our attention one of the ablest and most prolific of American inventors, the indefatigable Thomas Alva Edison, to whom are due important discoveries in multiplex telegraphy--the sending of various messages at once over a single wire--in telephony, in the incandescent electric light, and other fields of research. Most surprising of his many discoveries is the marvelous phonograph, by which the sounds of the human voice may be put on permanent record, to speak again in their original tones years or centuries hence.

Other inventors have been active in this field, and extraordinary progress has been made in systems of telegraphy, some of the new inventions being capable of remarkable feats in the rapid sending of messages, while it is possible now to transmit pictures as well as words over the telegraphic wire.

[=Marconi and Wireless Telegraphy=]

So vast, indeed, has been the advance in this field of practical science, so many the applications and devices employed, and so wonderful the results, that it seemed as if the powers of telegraphy must be exhausted, when, at the very end of the century, one of its most remarkable results was announced, as the discovery of a young Italian named Marconi. This was the method of "wireless telegraphy," the sending of messages through the air without the aid of connecting wires. This discovery, like most others, cannot be credited to one man alone. A number of scientists were experimenting with it simultaneously, but to Marconi is due the honor of a successful and practical solution of the problem. It has long been known that electric energy can produce effects through space by the influence known as induction, in which a moving current causes a reverse current to appear in a neighboring wire. By aid of the very powerful currents now produced this effect may be shown at a considerable distance. Whether the action in wireless telegraphy is the result of induction, or of a direct passage of electricity through space, must be left for scientists to decide, but the results are astonishing, messages having been sent and received over distances of many miles. It is not well to state how many miles, since the system is still in its infancy, and before these words are read, for all that can now be affirmed to the contrary, a message may be sent in this manner from America to Europe.

Wireless telegraphy is a combination of science and invention. Scientifically the electric waves appear to flow out through the air in all directions from the powerful currents employed. Mechanically a lofty pole seems necessary, and by the aid of a directive contrivance the waves can be sent in a fixed course. In the Marconi contrivance, the electric waves, when received, are made to pass through a vial containing metal filings, which are caused to cohere so as to furnish a direct line of passage for the current. Marconi's special invention is a small tapper which strikes the vial of filings and causes them to fall asunder, thus breaking the current. The public at large, however, is likely to be more interested in results than methods, and in the system of wireless telegraphy there is promise of a development that may supplant all existing telegraphic systems during the century upon whose threshold we stand.

[=Labor-saving Agricultural Implements=]

In no field of effort have inventors been more active or their results more useful than in the production of labor-saving devices in agriculture. In these we have to do with the yield of food, the very corner-stone of life itself, and whatever seems to increase the product of the fields, or to cheapen the necessaries of life, is of the most direct and immediate utility to mankind. This subject, therefore, one of vital interest to all the farmers of our country, calls for special notice here.

[=Early Farming Tools=]

Great inventions are not necessarily large or costly. The scythe is a simple and inexpensive tool; yet the practical perfecting of it by Joseph Jenks, almost at the outset of farm-life in New England, formed an epoch-mark in agriculture. It was the beginning of a new order of things. Putting curved fingers to the improved scythe-blade and snath did for the harvester what had been done for the grass-cutter, gave him an implement which doubled or trebled his efficiency at a critical season, and furnished in the American grain cradle a farm-tool perfect of its kind, and likely to hold its place as long as grain is grown on uneven ground. For the great bulk of grain and grain-cutting, the scythe and the cradle have been displaced by later American inventions,--mowers and harvesters, operated by animal or steam power,--still they are likely to remain forever a part of every farm's equipment. Their utility is beyond computation.

[=The Development of the American plow=]

The plow supplied to the Colonial farmers, was as venerable as the reaping-hook. It had been substantially unimproved for four thousand years. The moment our people were free to manufacture for themselves, they set about its improvement in form and material, the very first patent granted by the National Patent Office being for an improved plow of cast-iron. The best plow then in use was a rude affair, clumsily made, hard to guide, and harder to draw. It had a share of wrought iron, roughly shaped by the roadside black-smith, a landside and standard of wood, and an ill-shaped mould-board plated with tin, sheet iron, or worn-out saw-plates. Only a stout man could hold it, and a yoke of oxen was needed for work that a colt can do with a modern plow. Its improvement engaged the attention of many inventors, notably President Jefferson, who experimented with various forms and made a mathematical investigation of the shape of the mould-board, to determine the form best suited for the work. He was the first to discover the importance of straight lines from the sole to the top of the share and mould-board. Pinckney discovered the value of a straight line from front to rear. Jethro Wood discovered that all lines, from front to rear, should be straight. The method of drafting the lines, on a plane surface, in designing plows, is due to Knox. The discovery of the importance of the centre-draught, and the practical means of attaining it by the inclination of the landside inward, is credited to Mears. Governor Holbrook, of New Hampshire, devised the method of making plows of any size symmetrical, so as to ensure the complete pulverization of the soil. Col. Randolph, Jefferson's son-in-law, "the best farmer in Virginia," invented a side-hill plow. Smith was the first to hitch two plows together; and Allen, by combining a number of small plow-points in one implement, led the way to the production of the infinite variety of horse-hoes, cultivators, and the like, for special use. But Jethro Wood, of New York, in 1819 and after, probably did more than any other man to perfect the cast-iron plow, and to secure its general use in place of the cumbrous plows of the earlier days. His skill as an inventor, and his pluck as a fighter against stolid ignorance and prejudice, for the advancement of sensible plowing, cost him--what they ought to have gained for him--a fortune. The use of cast-iron plows had become general by 1825.

[=Increase of Working Power of the Farmer=]

The construction of plows has since been taken up by a multitude of inventors, the most valuable of improvements, probably, coming through the use of chilled iron, and the most promising from the application of steam-power to plowing. The increase in the working power of the farmer, from American improvements in plows, may be estimated from the fact that two million plowmen, with as many teams, would need to work every day in the year with the primitive plow to prepare the soil annually under cultivation in this country. It would be impossible, under the ancient system, to do this work within the brief plowing season.

The era of agricultural machinery began about 1825, its earliest phase appearing in the application of horse-power to the threshing and cleaning of grain. Already the American tendency to seek practical results by the simplest means, and to make high-priced labor profitable by increasing its efficiency, had been shown in the improvement of a wide range of farmer's tools, almost everything they had to use being made lighter, neater, and more serviceable. The same improving, practical sense was displayed in devising more complicated labor-saving machines, which made it possible to do easily and directly what had been previously difficult or quite impossible to do. Too often, however, the early inventor was defeated by the lack of skilled labor and proper machine tools for making his improvements commercially successful. As soon as the mechanic arts had been sufficiently perfected and extended--largely by American genius--the development and production of agricultural machinery became rapid and profitable.

[=Threshing Machines and Their Performance=]

Washington had tried a sort of threshing machine as early as 1798; and one of the first patents issued by the Patent Office was for an improved thresher; yet the flail held the field until after 1825. In the following twenty-five years over two hundred patents were granted for improvements in threshers, and since then the patents have numbered thousands. By 1840, most of the grain was threshed by horse-driven machinery. In 1853, when a famous trial of rival threshers was held in England, the American machine did three times as much as the best English machine, and did it better. In a subsequent trial in France, the average work of experts with the flail being reckoned as one, that of the best French machine was twenty-five; of the best English machine, forty-one; while Pitt's American machine did the work of seventy-four. The application of steam-power greatly increased the efficiency of threshing machines, raising the output from perhaps 2,000 bushels a day to six or seven thousand for a single machine.

[=The American Reapers and Mowers=]

Still more significant and important have been the victories of American inventors in connection with mowers and reapers. The circumstance that reaping by machinery is as old as the Christian era, and that a multitude of comparatively modern attempts have been made, particularly in England, to apply horse-power to the cutting of grass and grain, only added to the merit of inventors like Hussey and McCormick, who practically solved the problems involved by means so simple and efficient that they have not been and are likely never to be entirely displaced. Hussey's mowing machine of 1833 had reciprocating knives working through slotted fingers, a feature not only new but essential to all practical grass and grain cutters, except the special type known as lawn-mowers. McCormick patented a combination reaper and mower in 1834, which he subsequently so improved as to make it the necessary basis of all reapers. In competitive trials at home and abroad, the American mowers and reapers have never failed to demonstrate their superiority over all others.

[=Harvesters and Self-binders=]

The first great victory, which gave these machines the world-wide fame they have so successfully maintained, was won in London in 1851. In the competitive trial near Paris, in 1855, the American machine cut an acre of oats in twenty-two minutes; the English in sixty-six minutes; the French in seventy-two. In the later competition, local and international, their superior efficiency has been not less signally manifested. By increasing the efficiency of the harvester twenty-fold (and twice that by the self-binders), these products of American invention have played a part second only to railroads in opening up the West to profitable cultivation, rapidly converting a wilderness into the granary of the world. Devices for binding grain as it was cut began to be developed about 1855. The first machine used wire binders; the later twine. The combination of reapers and threshers in one machine has been most largely developed in California. The largest in use there weighs eight tons; and, pushed by thirty mules, cuts a swath twenty-two feet wide and eighteen miles long in a day--over forty-eight acres, yielding about as many tons of wheat, which is cut, threshed, cleaned and deposited in 700 sacks. The machine employs a driver, a shearer, a knife-tender, and a sack-lowerer--four men, costing eight dollars a day for wages.

[=The Great Variety of Agricultural Implements=]

Less important individually, yet in the aggregate of incalculable assistance to agriculture, have been a multitude of American inventions intended to expedite and lighten the farmer's work--stump and stone extractors for clearing the ground, ditching machines for drainage systems, fencing devices, particularly the barbed wire fence, special plows for breaking up new ground, harrows of many types, seeders, planters, cultivators, horse rakes, hay tedders and hay loaders, potato and rock diggers, corn huskers and shellers, cotton pickers, and countless other labor-saving tools and devices. In most cases these improved appliances enable one man to do easily the work of several working with primitive tools. With the help of machine planters and seeders the farmer's work is made at least five times more efficient; with cultivators, ten times; with potato diggers, twenty; with harrowers, thirty; with mowers and harvesters, from twenty to fifty; with corn huskers and shellers, a hundred. The latest cotton harvester, employing a team, a driver, and a helper, does the work of forty hand-pickers.

These agricultural machines, by greatly cheapening all food products, have had a wider influence, probably, than any other group of American inventions. In connection with improvements in means of transportation--largely of American origin--they have changed the food conditions of half the world, making food more abundant, more varied, more wholesome, more secure, and vastly cheaper than ever before. At the same time they have lightened the farmer's labor, shortened his hours of toil, increased his gains, and quite transformed his social and industrial position.

[=Productive Activity of the Nineteenth Century=]

The marvelous evolution in the nineteenth century, of which we have mentioned only some of the more notable particulars, the whole story being far too voluminous to deal with here, has had the result of immensely increasing the wealth of the world and the cheapness and rapid distribution of products, and of placing within the ready control of mankind hundreds of articles of art and utility scarcely dreamed of a century ago. In textile production, in metal working, in the making of furniture, clothing and other articles of ordinary use, in heating and illumination, in travel and transportation of goods, farm operations, engineering, mining and excavation, and the production of the tools of peace and the weapons of war, in ways, indeed, too numerous to mention, the inventive activity and the industrial energy of the nineteenth century have added enormously to the variety and abundance of useful objects at man's disposal, increased his wealth to an extraordinary extent, and enabled him to move over land and sea with marvelous ease and speed, and to send information around the world with a rapidity that almost annihilates time and space.

[=Commerce of the United States=]

Not the least among the results of modern mechanical progress is the vast development in commerce, and particularly in that of the Anglo-Saxon people--the inhabitants of Great Britain and the United States--the commercial enterprise of which countries is nowhere else equalled. The ocean commerce of the United States, for instance, has nearly doubled within thirty years, and now amounts to nearly $2,000,000,000 worth of goods annually, two-thirds of which are articles of export. But this great sum is far from indicating the actual commerce of this country, since it is greatly surpassed by its interior commerce, the movement of goods by aid of river, canal, and railroad from part to part of the vast area of the United States, the extent of which commerce it is impossible even to estimate.

[=Wealth and its Sources=]

The statement of a single fact will suffice to put in striking prominence the result of this in increasing the value of property and the wealth of the people of this country. In the year 1801, the opening year of the century, the ideas entertained of riches differed remarkably from what they do now. At that time it is doubtful if there was a person in this country worth more than a quarter million of dollars. Thirty years afterwards, Stephen Girard, with an estate of about nine million dollars, was looked upon as a prodigy of wealth, and his reputation as a man of immense riches spread round the world. In 1900, the closing year of the century, there were single estates worth more than two hundred million dollars, and the number of millionairs in the United States could be counted by the hundreds. As regards the largest estates possessed in 1801, there are thousands among us with greater wealth to-day, while the general average of property possessed by our citizens has very greatly advanced.

If it be asked in what this wealth consists, it may be said that the railroad property of the country alone suffices to account for a considerable proportion of it. The assets of the railroads of the United States are valued at over $12,000,000,000, and the annual profits of their business amounts to a very great sum. Another immense source of wealth is the landed property of the United States, the annual product of which alone is worth over $3,000,000,000. A third great element of wealth consists in the dwellings and other buildings of cities and towns; and a fourth in the buildings and machinery of manufacturing enterprises, whose annual products alone are valued at more than $10,000,000,000. It will suffice here to name a fifth great source of wealth, our mines and their productions, particularly those of coal, iron and precious metals. The annual yield of coal alone is worth more than $200,000,000; that of iron more than $90,000,000; those of gold and silver more than $100,000,000. To these may be added an annual production of nearly $60,000,000 worth of copper, and as much of petroleum and its products--each of which nearly equals gold in value,--$12,000,000 worth of lead, and large values of other minerals; the grand total being over $750,000,000.

[=Expansion of Values During the Century=]

If these figures should be extended to cover the world, the total sum of values would be something astounding. What we are principally concerned with here is the fact that this vast total of wealth is very largely the result of nineteenth century enterprise, and mainly as applied in Europe and the northern section of North America. What the percentage of increase in value has been it is quite impossible to state, but the wealth of the world as a whole is probably more than double what it was a century ago, while that of such expanding countries as the United States has increased in a vastly greater proportion. That this growth in wealth will go on during the twentieth century cannot be doubted, but that the proportionate rate of increase will equal that of the century now at its end may well be questioned, the inventive activity and application of nature's forces within this century having reached a development which seems to preclude as great a future rate of progress. The nineteenth may, therefore, perhaps remain the banner century in material progress.

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Chapter XXXVIII

The Evolution in Industry and the Revolt Against Capital.

Industry in the past centuries was a strikingly different thing from what it has been in the recent period. For a century it has been passing through a great process of evolution, which has by no means reached its culmination, and whose final outcome no man can safely predict.

[=The Conditions of Mediæval Industry=]

For a long period during the mediæval and the subsequent centuries industry existed in a stable condition, or one whose changes were few and none of them revolutionary. Manufacture was in a large sense individual. The great hive of industry known as a factory did not exist, workshops being small and every expert mechanic able to conduct business as a master. Employees were mainly apprentices, each of whom expected to become a master mechanic, or, if he chose to work for a master, did so with an independence that no longer exists. The workshop was usually a portion of the dwelling, where the master worked with his apprentices, teaching them the whole art and mystery of his craft, and giving them knowledge of a complete trade, not of a minor portion of one as in our day.

The trade-union had its prototype in the guild. But this was in no sense a combination of labor for protection against capital, but of master workmen to protect their calling from being swamped by invasion from without. In truth, when we go back into the past centuries, it is to find ourselves in another world of labor, radically different from that which surrounds us to-day.

[=The Cause of the Revolution in the Labor System=]

It was the steam-engine that precipitated the revolution. This great invention rendered possible labor-saving machinery. From working directly upon the material, men began to work indirectly through the medium of machines. As a result the old household industries rapidly disappeared. Engines and machines needed special buildings to contain them and large sums of money to purchase them, the separation of capital and labor began, and the nineteenth century opened with the factory system fully launched upon the world.

[=Present Aspect of the Labor Question=]

The century with which we are concerned is the one of vast accumulations of capital in single hands or under the control of companies, the concentration of labor in factories and workshops, the extraordinary development of labor-saving machines, the growth of monopolies on the one hand and of labor unions on the other, the revolt of labor against the tyranny of capital, the battle for shorter hours and higher wages, the coming of woman into the labor field as a rival of man, the development of economic theories and industrial organizations, and in still other ways the growth of a state of affairs in the world of industry that had no counterpart in the past, and which we hope may not extend far into the future, since it involves a condition of anarchy, injustice, and violence that is certainly not calculated to advance the interests of mankind.

[=A Revolution In Industry=]

In past times wealth was largely accumulated in the hands of the nobility, who had no thought of using it productively. Such of it as lay under the control of the commonalty was applied mainly for commercial purposes and in usury, and comparatively little was used in manufacture. This state of affairs came somewhat suddenly to an end with the invention of the steam-engine and of labor-saving machinery. Capital was largely diverted to purposes of manufacture, wealth grew rapidly as a result of the new methods of production, the making of articles cheaply required costly plants in buildings and machinery which put it beyond the reach of the ordinary artisan, the old individuality in labor disappeared, the number of employers largely diminished and that of employees increased, and the mediæval guild vanished, the workmen finding themselves exposed to a state of affairs unlike that for which their old organizations were devised.

A radically new condition of industrial affairs had come, and the industrial class was not prepared to meet it. Everywhere the employers became supreme and the men were at their mercy. Labor was dismayed. Its unions lost their industrial character and resumed their original form of purely benevolent associations. Such was the state of affairs in the early years of the nineteenth century. Industry was in a stage of transition, and inevitably suffered from the change. It was only at a later date that the idea of mutual aid in industry revived, and the trade union--a new form of association adapted to the new situation--arose as the lineal successor of the old society of artisans.

[=The Trade Union=]

The trade union resembles the old industrial association in general character, and in modes of action, but is much more extensive and concentrated in organization and far-seeing in management, in accordance with the vast expansion of industries and the changed relations of the workingman. The new form of association was not welcomed by the employers, who scented danger afar. They attacked it in the press, in the legislature, and by every means at their command. But the trade union had come to stay, hostile legislation failed to destroy it, and the opposition of employers to check its growth. It slowly, but steadily advanced, increased in strength and unity of purpose, gained legislative recognition, and in time became a legally protected institution and one of the powerful forces in modern industry.

The trade union had its origin in England, in which country the modern conditions of industry rapidly gained a great development. It appeared in a crude form near the end of the eighteenth century, one of the earliest societies known being the "Institution," established by the cloth-workers of Halifax in 1796. Many other unions were formed during the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, in spite of persecution and attempts at repression. It was not until 1825, however, that they gained legal recognition, and not until 1871 that they obtained permanent protection for their property and funds. Some of the earlier unions still survive, though many changes have taken place in their constitution.

[=Progress and Purpose of the Unions=]

In 1850 a new departure was taken, in the formation of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, one of the most perfect types of a trade union in the world. It is organized for the mutual benefit of its members as well as for protection against oppression by employers, and the annual tax upon its members for various purposes amounts to as much as $15.00 per year, often more. Others of the same character followed, and in all there are about 2,000 trade unions in Great Britain and Ireland, with a membership of nearly 2,250,000, and an annual income of about $10,000,000.

The purposes of the union are various. The mutual aid and benefit feature is secondary to the protective purpose, which is to secure the most favorable conditions of labor that can be obtained. This includes efforts to raise wages and to prevent their fall, reduction of hours of labor and prevention of their increase, the regulation of apprentices, overtime, piecework, and many other difficulties which arise in the complicated relations of labor and capital.

It is generally acknowledged that the trade union has reached its highest state of organization and power in Great Britain, and that the British workman, in consequence, controls the situation more fully than in any other country. This form of organization has only of late years appeared on the continent of Europe, freedom to combine have been denied to workmen in most countries until late in the century. There are excellent unions in the Australian colonies, both these and those of the mother country being superior in organization and influence to the trade unions of the United States, though those of the latter country have gained much in power and cohesion in recent years.

[=The International Workingmen's Association=]

The first great combination of all trades was the International Workingmen's Association, founded in London in 1847, and intended to combine the industrial classes throughout Europe. Dr. Karl Marx gave it a definite organization on the continent in 1864, but it was there warped widely from its original purpose, became a field for anarchists, and came to an end in 1872. In the United States a general organization called the Knights of Labor was formed in 1869, and at one time had a membership of a million, but has now greatly decreased, being largely replaced by the American Federation of Labor, an association of trade unions of very large membership. Of single trade organizations probably the most powerful in this country is the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, with more than 60,000 members. The International Typographical Union, the oldest in America, has a membership of over 40,000, and there are many others of great strength.

The weapon of offense with which the labor organization seeks to gain its ends is the strike, in which the artisans quit work for the purpose of forcing employers to grant their demands, and endeavor to prevent others from taking their place. The reverse of this is the lock-out, an expedient adopted by capitalists for the purpose of obliging workmen to yield to their demands.

[=The System of the Strike=]

[=Great American Strikes=]

During the century under consideration strikes have been very numerous both in England and America, many of them of great dimensions and serious results. It must suffice to speak of some of the more important of those within the United States. In 1803 occurred a strike of sailors in New York, often spoken of as the first strike in this country, though there seem to have been several in the preceding century. A strike of Philadelphia shoemakers took place in 1805 and one of New York cordwainers in 1809, while as time went on strikes became frequent, with varying results of success and failure. Violence was at times resorted to, and in the early days strikers were tried for conspiracy. As population increased and labor associations became stronger, strikes grew greatly in dimensions, and were frequently attended with bloodshed and destruction. Such was the case with the famous railroad strike of 1877, which interrupted traffic over great part of the country for a week, and resulted in acts of sanguinary violence at Pittsburg. There a lawless mob joined the strikers, the militia were attacked and lives were lost, and the railroad buildings and cars were burned, the total loss being estimated at $5,000,000. The coal miners of Pennsylvania joined the strike, and in all about 150,000 men stopped work.

Since that date strikes have been very numerous and some of them of great proportions. Among these, one of the most notable was that which began in Chicago on May 1, 1886, in which fully 40,000 men took part. On the 4th, when the disorder was at its height, a meeting of Anarchists was held, in the streets, which the police attempted to disperse on account of the violent and threatening language used. While doing so a dynamite bomb was thrown in their midst, which killed several and wounded about sixty of the officers. This action was denounced by workingmen throughout the country and excited general horror and detestation.

Another serious strike took place at the Carnegie Steel-Works, at Homestead, Pa., in 1892, which was also attended with bloodshed, the workmen firing on a force of detectives hired to protect the works. The disturbance became so great that the whole military force of Pennsylvania had to be called out. Two years afterwards Chicago was the scene of a great railroad strike, directed against the Pullman Car Works of that city. The movement of trains was greatly interfered with, and in the end President Cleveland sent United States troops to Chicago to maintain order and protect the movement of the mails.

[=Arbitration and Profit Sharing=]

That the difficulty between capital and labor will ever be settled by the strike and the lock-out cannot be expected, though these methods of warfare have had the effect of producing some degree of wholesome fear on both sides, and of rendering each more likely to offer concessions than to indulge in a costly and doubtful strife. A disposition to replace violent measures by peaceful arbitration is growing up, while in some instances employers have agreed to share a portion of their profits with their employees. This system of profit sharing, originating in France, has been extended to other countries, and appears to have proved very generally successful. Workmen act as if they were real partners in the business, and had their own interests to serve. They do more and better work, and are more careful in the use of tools and materials, so that in some instances the increased profit arising from their carefulness and diligence has covered their share of the proceeds, leaving that of their employers undiminished. Strikes have almost ceased to exist in such institutions, and the future of profit-sharing is full of promise.

[=Experiments and Theories in Economics=]

But expedients which leave the existing system practically unchanged can have only a temporary and partial utility. The cause of the difficulty appears to lie deeper and to call for more radical changes. It is not easy to believe that a system of perpetual protest and frequent strife is a natural one, and it seems as if it must in the future be replaced by some more peaceful and satisfactory relation between capital and labor. During the nineteenth century the labor problem has given rise to a number of experiments and theories looking towards its solution, an account of which is here in place.

The chief of the experiments alluded to is that of co-operation, the association of workingmen as producers, a democratic organization of labor calculated, if successfully instituted, to bring the present system to an end, and replace it by one in which the division into employer and employee, capitalist and artisan, will cease to exist, each workman embracing both of these in his single person, the combined property of the group representing the capital of the concern and the profits being equitably divided. This seemingly promising solution of the problem has not hitherto proved satisfactory in practice. In most cases experience and skill in management have been wanting, and the placing of ambitious and influential members of the association in the positions of business manager and financier, regardless of their adaptation to these duties, has wrecked more than one promising co-operative concern.

[=Co-operative Associations=]

But while most of such manufacturing associations of workingmen have failed, some have succeeded, and the story of the latter seems to show that there is nothing false in the principle, the failure being due to the results of injudicious management, as above indicated. The successful associations have accumulated large capital, pay good dividends, and are noted for the honesty of their operations and the unusual industry of their members, each of whom feels that the profit from increased or superior product will come to himself. Of co-operative institutions now in existence, the most famous is that of the Rochdale Pioneers, founded at Rochdale, England, in 1844. This association, organized by twenty-eight poor weavers with a capital of twenty-eight pounds, at first as a distributive enterprise, is now a rich and flourishing institution, which adds manufacturing to its distributive interests.

At first these poor pioneers, who had very slowly collected their small capital of one pound each, opened a store to supply themselves with provisions, having only four articles to sell--flour, butter, sugar and oatmeal. They limited interest on shares to five per cent., and divided profits among members in proportion to their purchases, a system which proved highly advantageous. From the first this organization was successful, and by 1857 it had 1,850 members, a capital of £15,000, and annual sales of £80,000. Since then its growth has continued rapid, and it is now in a high state of prosperity.

There were co-operative societies in Great Britain long before the date of this, and many have been started since, nearly all of them being in the form of co-operative stores, of which the Army and Navy Stores are among the most flourishing. There are now in that country probably over 1,500 of these associations, with a million of members, a capital of more than £10,000,000, and profits of over £3,000,000 annually. In 1864 there was founded at Manchester a Wholesale Society to supply goods to these stores, and a second at Glasgow in 1869--the two being now practically one institution. This society purchases and forwards goods, and owns a number of steamships of its own, which traffic with cities on the continent. Its manufacturing industries are also large, including boot and shoe factories at Leicester, soap works at Durham, woolen-cloth mills at Batley, and other factories elsewhere. There are in addition mills and factories carried on by retail societies, the annual production by these associations being probably considerably over £5,000,000. It will be perceived from the above statement that the workmen's co-operative enterprises in Great Britain comprise one of the important institutions of the country, one that has become firmly established during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and may grow enormously in importance during the twentieth. It is likely to play a prominent part in the solution of the labor question.

[=Co-operation in Europe and the United States=]

In no other country has this form of association flourished. In France profit-sharing has made a much greater progress, and ordinary co-operation has met with slight success. In Germany and Austria co-operation has taken the form of people's banks. These originated in 1849 at the little town of Delitzsch, in Saxony, and have flourished greatly, there being several thousand societies in the German states, with probably two million members and a very large business. There are also in Germany a considerable number of productive associations and co-operative dairies, while the latter have greatly flourished in Denmark. In Italy the people's banks have made marked progress, and there are several hundred co-operative dairies, bakeries and other enterprises.

Co-operation has made no decided progress in the United States, it being most developed in New England, where it takes the form of associations of fishermen, of creameries and banks. In Philadelphia co-operative building societies have provided workmen with more than 100,000 homes. The co-operative store has not flourished, and associated manufacture has made little progress, though profit-sharing has been introduced into many large stores and factories.

[=The Theories of Socialism and Anarchism=]

Such is the status of the experimental development in associated manufacturing and distributive enterprise. The theoretical phase of this question has gone much further, and has given rise to an extensive popular movement whose final outcome it is not easy to predict. This is really, in its way, an extension of the co-operative idea, being an attempt to make co-operation national, the entire nation becoming one great co-operative association, and the functions of government being extended to cover production and distribution of the necessaries of life, in addition to its present duties. This theory is most commonly known as Socialism, though also entitled Nationalism and Collectivism. Its main purpose is industrial reform, but it seeks to produce by political means what the trade union has attempted to do by non-political agitation. An opposite doctrine, which has many adherents, is known as Anarchism, whose platform contemplates the overthrow of existing institutions and the rebuilding of society from its elements upon the basis of local grouping. This doctrine has attracted to itself much of the ignorant and violent element of the European populations, and has been seriously discredited by the outrages committed by its members. Prominent examples of these were the massacre of the police in Chicago, already mentioned, the excesses of the Commune in Paris, and the acts of violence of the Russian Nihilists. The theory itself is philosophical, even if impracticable, and has been advocated by a number of able men who cannot be charged with its excesses.

[=Communistic Societies=]

Returning to the doctrines of Socialism, it may be said that it was preceded by the conception of Communism, or equal distribution of the proceeds of labor among the members of a community. This has long since passed from the stage of belief to that of experiment, many Communistic societies having been founded in both ancient and modern times. The Essenes, prominent in Palestine in the time of Christ, were one of the ancient examples. In modern times the United States has been a favorite field for the founding of Communistic societies, probably from the reason that they were less likely to come into conflict with existing institutions than in Europe.

The best known of those societies of a religious character comprise the Dunkers, founded at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, in 1713; the Harmony Society, established in 1824, and still in existence at Economy, near Pittsburg; the Separatist Community, established at Zoar, Ohio, in 1817; the Shakers, first organized at Watervliet, N. Y., in 1774; and the Perfectionists, founded by John H. Noyes, at Putney, Vermont, in 1837. Several others, less well known, might be named, but it must be said that the persistence of several of these organizations has been mainly due to the religious enthusiasm of their members, and is in no sense a proof of the economic correctness of their principle. Many of them require celibacy of their members, while the Perfectionist Society practiced free love until broken up by the strong disapproval of the community.

[=Secular Communistic Experiments=]

In addition to these religious experiments in Communism, a number of secular communistic societies have been founded in this country. Prominent among these was that established by Robert Owen, in 1824, at New Harmony, Indiana. Every effort was made to promote the success of this enterprise, and ten other communities on the same principle were organized elsewhere, but they all failed in a few years, and the Owenite movement came to an end in this country by 1832.

A second example was the celebrated Brook Farm enterprise, first suggested by Dr. Channing, and founded at West Roxbury, Mass., in 1841. It included the most remarkable group of men and women ever embraced in such an undertaking, among its members being Emerson, Hawthorne, Dana, Ripley, Alcott, and other well known literary men. Its business management was anything but practical, and it came to an end in 1847. The form of community suggested by Fourier, the French theorist, was abundantly tried in the United States, where thirty-three communities or "phalanxes" were founded in the years 1842-53. They had all failed by 1855.

The result of these efforts to establish societies where everything shall be in common between the members, of which hundreds have been founded and none persisted for more than a few years, except where sustained by religious fanaticism, does not speak well for the practical nature of communism. The mass of the people have always kept away from it, and its abrogation of the principle of personal reward for personal effort seems likely to prevent its ever becoming successful.

[=Development of Socialism=]

Socialism was originally similar to Communism, but as now understood and advocated differs essentially from it, since the principle of equal division of property or products is no longer maintained. Nationalism, or the ownership of all productive property and all manufactures and their products by the nation, with the complete distribution of profits among the people, on the basis of the value to the community of the labor or service of each person, is the existing form of Socialism. Originated and developed within the nineteenth century, it has now become one of the prominent social and political movements of the age, and some brief description of it is here in order.

France is the birth place of Socialism in its primary form. Two writers, Mably and Morelly, advanced a scheme for a communistic reorganization of society about the middle of the eighteenth century, and in 1796 a communistic conspiracy to revolutionize the government, organized by a man named Babeuf, at the head of a society called the Equals, was discovered and suppressed. Later arose Robert Owen in England, with his communistic scheme, and St. Simon and Fourier in France, whose plans were only in part communistic. A more properly Socialistic movement was attempted by Louis Blanc in Paris during the revolution of 1848, when national workshops for the industrial classes of France were established. In Paris 150,000 workmen were employed in these shops, but they were closed after a brief trial. Their failure, it is claimed, was largely the result of bad management. Of recent English Socialistic movements may be named that of Maurice and Kingsley, the originators of Christian Socialism, which continues to exercise an important influence.

[=Lasalle and Karl Marx=]

After 1850 the socialistic movement temporarily declined in France and Great Britain, but it gained a great impetus in Germany, under the teachings of certain able and skillful advocates. German Socialism first became active in 1863, through the efforts of Ferdinand Lasalle, though it had earlier supporters. He proposed to establish a German workman's republic, with himself as president; but ended his career in the following year, being killed in a duel. After his death his system of "social democracy" fell under the control of the notable Karl Marx, a writer of original genius, to whom Socialism as it exists to-day is largely due. The International Association of Workingmen, as reorganized by him in 1864, changed its purpose from an industrial to a political one, and soon became a threatening compound of dangerous elements. It was socialistic in aim, having, below its declared purpose of the protection and emancipation of the working classes, schemes for the abolition of the wages system, the state control of all property, and the grading of compensation for labor on the basis of time occupied, instead of on the more logical basis of ability and industry shown and value of product.

[=The Literature of Socialism=]

Karl Marx's famous work "Capital," is the ablest and most logical exposition of the socialistic theory yet produced, and has exerted a powerful influence on recent thought. It set in motion a great political and social movement which has grown with extraordinary rapidity, in spite of repressive laws against it, and has given rise to a large number of volumes dealing with the subject, some of which have had a phenomenal sale. The popular little volume entitled "Merrie England" is said to have sold to the number of considerably more than a million copies, while Bellamy's "Looking Backward," which advocates a communistic organization of society, has had a sale of several hundred thousands.

[=Growth of the Socialist Party in Germany=]

In recent years Socialism has spread upward from the working classes and gained many advocates among the leaders of thought. It has had a considerable development in all western Europe, and particularly in Germany, in which country the Socialists form a powerful political party, which as early as 1887 polled eleven per cent. of the total vote, and gained a considerable membership in the Reichstag. By 1890 its vote had so largely increased that liberalism obtained a majority in the Reichstag. At the end of the century the Social Democrat party had 56 members in the Reichstag as contrasted with 54 members of the German Conservatives. The remainder of the 396 members were divided among a number of parties, the Clericals or Centre being the strongest, with 104 members. As will be seen from these figures, Socialism has made a remarkable advance in that country, having within less than forty years become a power in Parliament. The time may come in the near future when it will be the controlling party in legislature and government.

[=The Populist Party in the United States=]

In the United States Socialism has grown with less rapidity, yet within recent years it has sprung into political importance in the rapid growth of the Populist party, organized in 1892. This new organization gained five senators and eleven representatives in Congress in the year of its origin. In 1896, while its success was no greater, it had the striking effect of gaining the adhesion of the Democratic party, not only to the Free Silver plank in its platform, but to some of its more socialistic features. There are probably very many citizens of this country of strongly socialistic views who are opposed to the radical measures advocated by the Populists, and the real strength of Socialism in the United States may be much greater than is commonly supposed. It is shown in other directions than that of party affiliation, and at the end of the century was particularly indicated in the movement for the municipal ownership of street railways, gas works, and other forms of what are known as public utilities. This movement has gone farther in Europe than in this country, several nations owning their railway and telegraph plants, while municipal control of street railways and other public utilities is becoming general. In short, it would be difficult to point to a popular movement in the history of the world that has made a more rapid and substantial advance than has Socialism within the past forty years.

[=The Development of the Trust=]

As the nineteenth century approached its end a new element in the economic situation, which had been displaying itself in some measure for a considerable number of years, suddenly assumed a striking prominence in the United States, and remarkably transformed the industrial situation. This was the element of the combination of distributive and manufacturing enterprises, shown at first in the growth of the department stores and the pooling of manufacturing interests, and later in the formation of trusts and monopolies, powerful corporations of industrial interests, which assumed gigantic proportions in 1898 and the succeeding years.

Several of these great organizations, absorbing all the factories or plants of the special trades concerned into single vast corporations, have been in existence for years. Most prominent of these are the Sugar Trust and the Standard Oil Company, which have eliminated the element of competition from those industries and accumulated their profits in the hands of a few great capitalists.

The complete control of important productive interests gained by these groups of capitalists has instigated those connected with other lines of production to similar methods, and the formation of trusts has gone on at an accelerating ratio, until all the great and many of the minor industries of the country have formed trust organizations, while a large number of establishments have been closed, and thousands of workmen and other employees dismissed.

[=Probable Effect of Trusts=]

The result of all this has been to produce a state of affairs in which competition, so long considered the life of trade, is practically eliminated from many branches of industry, while the opportunities for individual enterprise, which have been active for so many centuries, have in great part vanished. An economic situation seems at hand in which the mass of the community will be obliged to assume the position of employees, the class of employers being reduced to a few very rich men, absorbing the profits of industry and holding the remainder of the community in a condition of galling servitude.

[=To What the Trust Must Lead=]

Such an undesirable condition of industrial affairs as is here threatened has naturally aroused a strong feeling of opposition, and the forces of the community are being marshalled to prevent such a radical revolution in industry. Just how the brake is to be applied is not clear. It is not easy to prevent capital from pooling its forces, and legislation may fail to find a remedy which will reach the root of the disease. Yet a cure must come, in one way or the other--the trust movement being either reversed or carried forward to its logical conclusion. It is being widely recognized and acknowledged, even by some of the trust potentates themselves, that the movement thus inaugurated is likely to hasten the advent of socialistic institutions. The abolition of individual enterprise under the trust must eventually become almost as extreme as it would be in a socialistic community, and if the trust movement continues the principal objection to socialism will be removed. It must be evident to all that the tyranny of a group of irresponsible and grasping capitalists, ambitious to obtain enormous wealth, will be much greater than that of officials chosen as the servants of the people, and subject to removal at their will, can ever become.

[=An Industrial Revolution=]

The Roman despot wished that all the Roman people had but one neck, that he might cut it off with a single blow. Capital is in a measure reducing itself to this condition, and the people may in time cut off its head in a similar manner. It is easier to deal with the few than with the many, and the relation into which capital and labor has now come can have, sooner or later, only one or the other of two endings. As above said, the evolution now in operation must go forward or go backward; go backward until the former state of affairs is regained, or go forward until industrial slavery grows complete, in which case the people will, in the end, inevitably rebel. It is impossible for such a movement to stop half way, one result or the other must inevitably come, either a return to individualism or a progress to collectivism. Which it shall be depends upon the people themselves. The power is in their hands the moment they elect to cast aside their differences and act in concert, and the presence of a great danger or an intolerable situation is the one thing to bring them to this common action. In such a case it will rest with themselves which status of industry they prefer, the old state of individualism and competition or a new state of collectivism and industrial alliance. Though it is but dimly recognized, the world of industry is in the throes of a revolution, the final result of nineteenth century development, and it must be left for the twentieth century to decide what the outcome of this revolution is to be.

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