Last Fourth of July, it may be remembered, fell on a Saturday. In their ambition to reproduce ancient Judaism (and this ambition is the key to their whole puzzle) the Mormons are Sabbatarians of a strictness which would delight Lord Shaftesbury. Accordingly, in order that their festivities might not encroach on the early hours of the Sabbath, they had the ball on Fourth-of-July eve, instead of the night of the Fourth. I could not realize the risk of such an encroachment when I read the following sentence printed on my billet of invitation:—

"Dancing to commence at 4 P.M."

Bierstadt, myself, and three gentlemen of our party were the only Gentiles whom I found invited by President Young to meet in the neighborhood of three thousand saints. Under these circumstances I felt like the three-thousandth homoeopathic dilution of monogamy. Morality in this world is so mainly a matter of convention that I dreaded to appear in decent polygamic society, lest respectable women, owning their orthodox tenth of a husband, should shrink from the pollution of my presence, whispering, with a shudder, "Ugh! Well, I never! How that one-wifed reprobate can dare to show his face!" But they were very polite, and received me with as skilfully veiled disapprobation as is shown by fashionable Eastern belies to brilliant seducers immoral in our sense. Had I been a woman, I suppose there would have been no mercy for me.

Over all these matters Brigham Young has supreme control. His power is the most despotic known to mankind. Here, by the way, is the constitutionally vulnerable point of Mormonism. If fear of establishing a bad precedent hinder the United States at any time from breaking up that nest of all disloyalty, because of its licentious marriage-institutions, Utah is still open to grave punishment, and the Administration inflicting it would have duty as well as vested right upon its side, on the ground that it stands pledged to secure to each of the nation's constituent sections a republican form of government,—something which Utah has never enjoyed any more than Timbuctoo. I once asked Brigham if Dr. Bernhisel would be likely to get to Congress again. "No," he replied, with perfect certainty; "we shall send —— as our Delegate." (I think he mentioned Colonel Kinney, but do not remember absolutely.) Whoever it was, when the time came, Brigham would send in his name to the "Deseret News,"—whose office, like everything else valuable and powerful, is in his inclosure. It would be printed as a matter of course; a counter-nomination is utterly unheard of; and on election-day —— would be Delegate as surely as the sun rose. The mountain-stream that irrigates the city, flowing to all the gardens through open ditches on each side of the street, passes through Brigham's inclosure: if the saints needed drought to humble them, he could set back the waters to their source. The road to the only cañon where firewood is attainable runs through the same close, and is barred by a gate of which he holds the sole key. A family-man, wishing to cut fuel, must ask his leave, which is generally granted on condition that every third or fourth load is deposited in the inclosure, for Church-purposes. Thus everything vital, save the air he breathes, reaches the Mormon only through Brigham's sieve. What more absolute despotism is conceivable? Here lies the pou-sto for the lever of Governmental interference. The mere fact of such power resting in one man's irresponsible hands is a crime against the Constitution. At the same time, this power, wonderful as it may seem, is practically wielded for the common good. I never heard Brigham's worst enemies accuse him of peculation, though such immense interests are controlled by his one pair of hands. His life is all one great theoretical mistake, yet he makes fewer practical mistakes than any other man, so situated, whom the world ever saw. Those he does make are not on the side of self. He merges his whole personality in the Church, with a self-abnegation which would establish in business a whole century of martyrs having a worthy cause.

Brigham's manners astonish any one who knows that his only education was a few quarters of such common-school experience as could be had in Ontario County, Central New York, during the early part of the century. There are few courtlier men living. His address is a fine combination of dignity with the desire to confer happiness,—of perfect deference to the feelings of others with absolute certainty of himself and his own opinions. He is a remarkable example of the educating influence of tactful perception, combined with entire singleness of aim, considered quite apart from its moral character. His early life was passed among the uncouth and illiterate; his daily associations, since he embraced Mormonism, have been with the least cultivated grades of human society,—a heterogeneous peasant-horde, looking to him for erection into a nation: yet he has so clearly seen what is requisite in the man who would be respected in the Presidency, and has so unreservedly devoted his life to its attainment, that in protracted conversations with him I heard only a single solecism, ("a'n't you" for "aren't you,") and saw not one instance of breeding which would be inconsistent with noble lineage.

I say all this good of him frankly, disregarding any slur that maybe cast on me as his defender by those broad-effect artists who always paint the Devil black,—for I think it high time that the Mormon enemies of our American Idea should be plainly understood as far more dangerous antagonists than hypocrites or idiots can ever hope to be. Let us not twice commit the blunder of underrating our foes.

Brigham began our conversation at the theatre by telling me I was late,—it was after nine o'clock. I replied, that this was the time we usually set about dressing for an evening party in Boston or New York.

"Yes," said he, "you find us an old-fashioned people; we are trying to return to the healthy habits of patriarchal times."

"Need you go back so far as that for your parallel?" suggested I. "It strikes me that we might have found four-o'clock balls among the early Christians."

He smiled, without that offensive affectation of some great men, the air of taking another's joke under their gracious patronage, and went on to remark that there were, unfortunately, multitudinous differences between the Mormons and Americans at the East, besides the hours they kept.

"You find us," said he, "trying to live peaceably. A sojourn with people thus minded must be a great relief to you, who come from a land where brother hath lifted hand against brother, and you hear the confused noise of the warrior perpetually ringing in your ears."

Despite the courtly deference and Scriptural dignity of this speech, I detected in it a latent crow over that "perished Union" which was the favorite theme of every saint I met in Utah, and hastened to assure the President that I had no desire for relief from sympathy with my country's struggle for honor and existence.

"Ah!" he replied, in a voice slightly tinged with sarcasm. "You differ greatly, then, from multitudes of your countrymen, who, since the draft began to be talked of, have passed through Salt Lake, flying westward from the crime of their brothers' blood."

"I do indeed."

There was something so preposterous in the idea of a mighty and prosperous people abandoning, through abject terror of a desperate set of Southern conspirators, the fertile soil and grand commercial avenues of the United States, to populate a green strip in the heart of an inaccessible desert, that, until I saw Brigham Young's face glowing with what he deemed prophetic enthusiasm, I could not imagine him in earnest. Before I left Utah, I discovered, that, without a single exception, all the saints were inoculated with a prodigious craze, to the effect that the United States was to become a blighted chaos, and its inhabitants Mormon proselytes and citizens of Utah within the next two years,—the more sanguine said, "next summer."

At first sight, one point puzzled me. Where were they to get the orthodox number of wives for this sudden accession of converts? My gentlemen-readers will feel highly nattered by a solution of this problem which I received from no leaser light of the Latter-Day Church than that jolly apostle, Heber Kimball.

"Why," said the old man, twinkling his little black eyes like a godly Silenus, and nursing one of his fat legs with a lickerish smile, "isn't the Lord Almighty providin' for His beloved heritage jist as fast as He anyways kin? This war's a-goin' on till the biggest part o' you male Gentiles hez killed each other off, then the leetle handful that's left and comes a-fleein' t' our asylum 'll bring all the women o' the nation along with 'em, so we shall hev women enough to give every one on 'em all they want, and hev a large balance left over to distribute round among God's saints that hez been here from the beginnin' o' the tribulation."

The sweet taste which this diabolical reflection seemed to leave in Heber Kimball's mouth made me long to knock him down worse than I had ever felt regarding either saint or sinner. But it is costly to smite an apostle of the Lord in Salt Lake City; and I merely retaliated by telling him I wished I could hear him say that in a lecture-room full of Sanitary-Commission ladies scraping lint for their husbands, sweethearts, and brothers in the Union army. I didn't know whether saints made good lint, but I thought I knew one who'd get scraped a little.

To resume Brigham for the last time. After a conversation about the Indians, in which he denounced the military policy of the Government, averring that one bale of blankets and ten pounds of beads would go farther to protect the mails from stoppage and emigrants from massacre than a regiment of soldiers, he discovered that we crossed swords on every war-question, and tactfully changed the subject to the beauty of the Opera-House.

The Opera-House was a subject we could agree upon. I was greatly astonished to find in the desert heart of the continent a place of public amusement which for capacity, beauty, and comfort has no superior in America, except the opera-houses of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. It is internally constructed somewhat like the first of these, seats twenty-five hundred people, and commodiously receives five hundred more, when, as in the present instance, the stage is thrown into the parquet, and the latter boarded up to the level of the former for dancing. Externally the building is a plain, but not ungraceful structure, of stone, brick, and stucco. My greatest surprise was excited by the really exquisite artistic beauty of the gilt and painted decorations of the great arch over the stage, the cornices, and the moulding about the proscenium-boxes. President Young, with a proper pride, assured me that every particle of the ornamental work was by indigenous and saintly hands.

"But you don't know yet," he added, "how independent we are of you at the East. Where do you think we got that central chandelier, and what d' ye suppose we paid for it?"

It was a piece of workmanship which would have been creditable to any New York firm,—apparently a richly carved circle, twined with gilt vines, leaves, and tendrils, blossoming all over with flaming wax-lights, and suspended by a massive chain of golden lustre. So I replied that he probably paid a thousand dollars for it in New York.

"Capital!" exclaimed Brigham. "I made it myself! That circle is a cartwheel which I washed and gilded; it hangs by a pair of gilt ox-chains; and the ornaments of the candlesticks were all cut after my patterns out of sheet-tin!"

I talked with the President till a party of young girls, who seemed to regard him with idolatry, and whom, in return, he treated with a sage mixture of gallantry and fatherliness, came to him with an invitation to join in some old-fashioned contra-dance long forgotten at the East. I was curious to see how he would acquit himself in this supreme ordeal of dignity; so I descended to the parquet, and was much impressed by the aristocratic grace with which he went through his figures.

After that I excused myself from numerous kind invitations by the ball-committee to be introduced to a partner and join in the dances. The fact was that I greatly wished to make a thorough physiognomical study of the ball-room, and I know that my readers will applaud my self-denial in not dancing, since it enables me to tell them how Utah good society looks.

After spending an hour in a circuit and survey of the room as minute as was compatible with decency, I arrived at the following results.

I must condense greatly what I have to say about two other typical men besides Brigham Young, or I shall have no room to speak of the Lake and the Desert. Heber Kimball, second President, (proximus longo intervallo!) Brigham's most devoted worshipper, and in all respects the next most important man, although utterly incapable of keeping coherent the vast tissue of discordant Mormon elements, in case he should survive Brigham, is the latter's equal in years, but in all things else his antipodes. His height is over six feet, his form of aldermanic rotundity, his face large, plethoric, and lustrous with the stable red of stewed cranberries, while his small, twinkling black beads of eyes and a Satyric sensualism about the mouth would indicate a temperament fatally in the way of any apostleship save that of polygamy, even without the aid of an induction from his favorite topics of discourse and his patriarchally unvarnished style of handling them. Men, everywhere, unfortunately, tend little toward the error of bashfulness in their chat among each other, but most of us at the East would feel that we were insulting the lowest member of the demi-monde, if we uttered before her a single sentence of the talk which forms the habitual staple of all Heber Kimball's public sermons to the wives and daughters who throng the Sunday Tabernacle.

Heber took a vivid interest in Bierstadt's and my own eternal welfare. He quite laid himself out for our conversion, coming to sit with us at breakfast in our Mormon hotel, dressed in a black swallow-tail, buff vest, and a stupendous truncate cone of Leghorn, which made him look like an Italian mountebank-physician of the seventeenth century. I have heard men who could misquote Scripture for their own ends, and talk a long while without saying anything; but he so far surpassed in these particulars the loftiest efforts within my former experience, that I could think of no comparison for him but Jack Bunsby taken to exhorting. Witness a sample:—

This invitation would wind up the homily. We gladly accepted it, and I must confess, that, if there ever could be any hope of our conversion, it was just about the time we stood in Brother Heber's fine orchard, eating apples and apricots between exhortations, and having sound doctrine poked down our throats with gooseberries as big as plums, to take the taste out of our mouths, like jam after castor-oil.

Porter Rockwell is a man whom my readers must have heard of in every account of fearlessly executed massacre committed in Utah during the last thirteen years. He is the chief of the Danites,—a band of saints who possess the monopoly of vengeance upon Gentiles and apostates. If a Mormon tries to sneak off to California by night, after converting his property into cash, their knives have the inevitable duty of changing his destination to another state, and bringing back his goods into the Lord's treasury. Their bullets are the ones which find their unerring way through the brains of external enemies. They are the Heaven-elected assassins of Mormonism,—the butchers by divine right. Porter Rockwell has slain his forty men. This is historical. His probable private victims amount to as many more. He wears his hair braided behind, and done up in a knot with a back-comb, like a woman's. He has a face full of bull-dog courage,—but vastly good-natured, and without a bad trait in it. I went out riding with him on the Fourth of July, and enjoyed his society greatly,—though I knew that at a word from Brigham he would cut my throat in as matter-of-fact a style as if I had been a calf instead of an author. But he would have felt no unkindness toward me on that account. I understood his anomaly perfectly, and found him one of the pleasantest murderers I ever met. He was mere executive force, from which the lever, conscience, had suffered entire disjunction, being in the hand of Brigham. He was everywhere known as the Destroying Angel, but he seemed to have little disagreement with his toddy, and took his meals regularly. He has two very comely and pleasant wives. Brigham has about seventy, Heber about thirty. The seventy of Brigham do not include those spiritually married, or "sealed" to him, who may never see him again after the ceremony is performed in his back-office. These often have temporal husbands, and marry Brigham only for the sake of belonging to his lordly establishment in heaven.

The lake from which the city takes its name is about twenty miles distant from the latter, by a good road across the level valley-bottom. Artistically viewed, it is one of the loveliest sheets of water I ever saw,—bluer than the intensest blue of the ocean, and practically as impressive, since, looking from the southern shore, you see only a water-horizon. This view, however, is broken by a magnificent mountainous island, rising, I should think, seven or eight hundred feet from the water, half a dozen miles from shore, and apparently as many miles in circuit. The density of the lake-brine has been under- instead of over-stated. I swam out into it for a considerable distance, then lay upon my back on, rather than in, the water, and suffered the breeze to waft me landward again. I was blown to a spot where the lake was only four inches deep, without grazing my back, and did not know I had got within my depth again until I depressed my hand a trifle and touched bottom! It is a mistake to call this lake azoic. It has no fish, but breeds myriads of strange little maggots, which presently turn into troublesome gnats. The rocks near the lake are grandly castellated and cavernous crags of limestone, some of it finely crystalline, but most of it like our coarser Trenton and Black-River groups. There is a large cave in this formation, ten minutes' climb from the shore.

I must abruptly leap to the overland stage again.

From Salt Lake City to Washoe and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the road lies through the most horrible desert conceivable by the mind of man. For the sand of the Sahara we find substituted an impalpable powder of alkali, white as the driven snow, stretching for ninety miles at a time in one uninterrupted dazzling sheet, which supports not even that last obstinate vidette of vegetation, the wild-sage brush. Its springs are far between, and, without a single exception, mere receptacles of a salt, potash, and sulphur hell-broth, which no man would drink, save in extremis. A few days of this beverage within, and of wind-drifted alkali invading every pore of the body without, often serve to cover the miserable passenger with an erysipelatous eruption which presently becomes confluent and irritates him to madness. Meanwhile he jolts through alkali-ruts, unable to sleep for six days and nights together, until frenzy sets in, or actual delirium comes to his relief. I look back on that desert as the most frightful nightmare of my existence.

As if Nature had not done her worst, we were doomed, on the second day out from Salt Lake, to hear, at one station, where we stopped, horrid rumors of Goshoots on the war-path, and, ere the day reached its noon, to find their proofs irrefragable. Every now and then we saw in the potash-dust moccasin-tracks, with the toes turned in, and presently my field-glass revealed a hideous devil skulking in the mile-off ledges, who was none other than a Goshoot spy. How far off were the scalpers and burners?

The first afternoon-stage that day was a long and terrible one. The poor horses could hardly drag our crazy wagon, up to its hubs in potash; and yet we knew our only safety, in case of attack, was a running fight. We must fire from our windows as the horses flew.

Only one consolation was left us. In the middle of the defile stood an overland station, where we were to get fresh horses. The next stage was twenty miles long. If we were attacked in force, we might manage to run it, almost the whole way, unless the Indians succeeded in shooting one of our team,—the coup they always attempt.

I have no doubt we were ambushed at several points in that defile, but our perfect preparation intimidated our foes. The Indian is cruel as the grave, but he is an arrant coward. He will not risk being the first man shot, though his band may overpower the enemy afterward.

At last we turned the corner around which the station-house should come in view.

A thick, nauseous smoke was curling up from the site of the buildings. We came nearer. Barn, stables, station-house,—all were a smouldering pile of rafters. We came still nearer. The whole stud of horses—a dozen or fifteen—lay roasting on the embers. We came close to the spot. There, inextricably mixed with the carcasses of the beasts, lay six men, their brains dashed out, their faces mutilated beyond recognition, their limbs hewn off,—a frightful holocaust steaming up into our faces. I must not dwell on that horror of all senses. It comes to me now at high noonday with a grisly shudder.

After that, we toiled on twenty miles farther with our nearly dying horses; a hundred miles more of torturing suspense on top of that sight branded into our brains before we gained Ruby Valley, at the foot of the Humboldt Mountains, and left the last Goshoot behind us.

The remainder of our journey was horrible by Nature only, without the atrocious aid of man. But the past had done its work. We reached Washoe with our very marrows almost burnt out by sleeplessness, sickness, and agony of mind. The morning before we came to the silver-mining metropolis, Virginia City, a stout, young Illinois farmer, whom we had regarded as the stanchest of all our fellow-passengers, became delirious, and had to be held in the stage by main force. (A few weeks afterward, when the stage was changing horses near the Sink of Carson, another traveller became suddenly insane, and blew his brains out.) As for myself, the moment that I entered a warm bath, in Virginia City, I swooned entirely away, and was resuscitated with great difficulty after an hour and a half's unconsciousness.

We stopped at Virginia for three days,—saw the California of '49 reënacted in a feverish, gambling, mining town,—descended to the bottom of the exhaustlessly rich "Ophir" shaft,—came up again, and resumed our way across the Sierra. By the mere act of crossing that ridge and stepping over the California line, we came into glorious forests of ever-living green, a rainbow-affluence of flowers, an air like a draught from windows left open in heaven.

It is among the possibilities of the future, that, in due course of time, the United States of America shall become to England what England has become to Saxony. We cannot be sure, it is true, that the mother-country will live, a prosperous and independent kingdom, to see the full maturity of her gigantic offspring. We have no right to assume it as a matter of course, that the Western Autocracy will fill up, unbroken, the outline traced for it by Nature and history. But England, forced as her civilization must be considered ever since the Conquest, has a reasonable chance for another vigorous century, and the Union, the present storm once weathered, does not ask a longer time than this to become, according to the prediction of the London "Times," the master-power of the planet.

The class that guides the destinies of Great Britain and her dependencies is far-reaching in its anticipations as it is deep-rooted in its recollections. Quantum radice in Tartara, tantum vertice ad auras,—if we may invert the poet's words. An American millionnaire may be anxious about the condition of his grandchildren, but a peer whose ancestors came in with the Conqueror looks ahead at least as far as the end of the twentieth century. The royal astrologers have cast the horoscope of the nationality born beneath the evening-star, and report it as being ominous for that which finds its nativity in the House of Leo.

An unexpected accident of situation startled us by the revelation of a secret which had been, on the whole, very well kept. No play of mirrors in a story, no falling of a screen in a comedy, no flash of stage-lightning in a melodrama, ever betrayed a lover's or a murderer's hidden thought and purpose more strikingly than the over-hasty announcement that the Union was broken into warring fragments, never again to be joined together, unveiled the cherished hope of its Old-World enemies. The whispers of expectant heirs at the opening of a miser's will are decorous and respectful, compared to the chuckle of the leading English social and political organ and its echoes, when the bursting of the Republican "bubble" was proclaimed as an accomplished fact, and the hour was thought to have come when the "Disunited States" could be held up as a spectacle to the people of Europe. A Te Deum in Westminster Abbey would hardly have added emphasis to the expression of what appeared to be the prevailing sentiment of the upper classes.

If the comparative prudence of the British Government had not tempered this exultant movement, the hopes of civilization would have been blasted by such a war as it is sickening to think of: England in alliance with an empire trying to spread and perpetuate Slavery as its very principle of life, against a people whose watchwords were freedom, education, and the dignity of labor. If the silent masses of the British people had not felt that our cause was theirs, there would have been no saying how far the passionate desire to see their predictions made facts might have led the proud haters of popular government.

Between these two forces the British Cabinet has found a diagonal which has met with the usual success of compromises. The aristocracy, which very naturally wishes to see the Union divided, is in a fair way of being disappointed, because, as its partisans may claim, England did not force herself into our quarrel. That portion of the middling classes which could not tolerate the thought of a Slave Empire has been compelled to witness a deliberate exposure in the face of the whole world of the hollowness of those philanthropic pretensions which have been so long the boast of British patriots. The people of the Union, who expected moral support and universal indignant repudiation of the slaveholding Rebel conspiracy, have been disgusted and offended. The Rebels, who supposed Great Britain, and perhaps France also, would join them in a war which was virtually a crusade against free institutions, have been stung into a second paroxysm of madness. Western Europe failed us in the storm; it leaves them in the moment of shipwreck.

The recent action of the British Government, under the persuasive influence of Mr. Seward's polite representation, that instant hostilities would be sure to follow, if England did not keep her iron pirates at home, has improved somewhat the tone of Northern feeling towards her. The late neighborly office of the Canadian Government, in warning us of the conspiracy to free our prisoners, has produced a very favorable impression, so far as the effect of a single act is felt in striking the balance of a long account.

We are all of us in the habit of using words so carelessly, that it will help us to limit their vagueness as here employed. We speak of "England" for Great Britain, for the simple reason that Ireland is but a reluctant alien she drags after her, and Scotland only her most thriving province. We are not surprised, for instance, when "Blackwood" echoes the abusive language of the metropolitan journals, for it is only as a village-cur joins the hounds that pass in full cry. So, when we talk of "the attitude of England," we have a tolerably defined idea, made up of the collective aspect of the unsympathetic Government, of the mendacious and insolent press, of the mercenary trading allies of the Rebels, of the hostile armaments which have sailed from British ports, of the undisguised enmity of many of her colonists, neighbors of the North as well as neighbors of the South; all of which shape themselves into an image having very much the look of representing the nation,—certainly much more the look of it than the sum of all those manifestations which indicate sympathy with the cause of the North.

The attitude of England, then, has been such, since the Rebellion began, as to alienate much of the affection still remaining among us for the mother-country. It has gone far towards finishing that process of separation of the child from the parent which two centuries of exile and two long wars had failed to complete. But, looking at the matter more clearly, we shall find that our causes of complaint must be very unequally distributed among the different classes of the British people.

The Government has carefully measured out to us, in most cases certainly, strict, technical justice. It could not well do otherwise, for it knows the force of precedents. But we have an unpleasing sense that our due, as an ally and a Christian nation, striving against an openly proclaimed heathen conspiracy, has been paid us grudgingly, tardily, sparingly, while our debt, as in the case of the Rebel emissaries, has been extorted fiercely, swiftly, and to the last farthing. We have recognized a change, it is true, ever since Earl Russell gave the hint that our cause was more popular in England than that of the South. We have gratefully accepted the friendly acts already alluded to. Better late than not at all. But the past cannot be undone. British "neutrality" has strengthened the arms that have been raised against our national life, and winged the bloody messengers that have desolated our households. Still, every act of justice which has even a show of good-will in it is received only too graciously by a people which has known what it is to be deserted by its friends in the hour of need. Whatever be the motives of the altered course of the British Government,—an awakened conscience, or a series of "Federal" successes,—Mr. Sumner's arguments, or General Gillmore's long-range practice,—a more careful study of the statistics of Slavery, or of the lists of American iron-clad steamers,—we welcome it at once; we take the offered hand, if not with warm pressure, at least with decent courtesy. We only regret that forbearance and good offices, and that moral influence which would have been almost as important as an offensive and defensive alliance, had not come before the flower of our youth was cut down in the battle-field, and mourning and misery had entered half the families of the land.

"The people," as Mr. Motley has said, in one of his official letters, "everywhere sympathize with us; for they know that our cause is that of free institutions,—that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy." We have evidence that this is partially true of the British people. But we know also how much they are influenced by their political and social superiors, and we know, too, what base influences have been long at work to corrupt their judgment and inflame their prejudices. We have too often had occasion to see that the middle classes had been reached by the passions of their superiors, or infected by the poison instilled by traitorous emissaries. We have been struck with this particularly in some of the British colonies. It is the livid gleam of a reflected hatred they shed upon us; but the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence, and we feel sure that the British inhabitants of an African cape or of a West-India islet would not have presumed to sympathize with the Rebels, unless they had known that it was respectable, if not fashionable, to do so at home. It is one of the most painful illustrations of the influence of a privileged class that the opinions and prejudices and interests of the English aristocracy should have been so successfully imposed upon a large portion of the people, for whom the North was fighting over again the battles of that long campaign which will never end until the rightful Sovereigns have dispossessed the whole race of Pretenders.

The effect of this course on the part of the mother-country has been like that of harsh treatment upon children generally. It chills their affections, lessens their respect for the parental authority, interrupts their friendly intercourse, and perhaps drives them from the family-mansion. But it cannot destroy the ties of blood and the recollections of the past. It cannot deprive the "old home" of its charm. If there has been but a single member of the family beneath its roof who has remained faithful and kind, all grateful memories will cluster about that one, though the hearts of the rest were hard as the nether millstone.

The soil of England will always be dearer to us of English descent than any except our own. The Englishman will always be more like one of ourselves than any "foreigner" can be. We shall never cease to feel the tenderest regard for those Englishmen who have stood by us like brothers in the day of trial. They have hardly guessed in our old home how sacred to us is the little island from which our fathers were driven into the wilderness,—not saying, with the Separatists, "Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome!" but "Farewell, dear England!" At that fearful thought of the invasion of her shores,—a thought which rises among the spectral possibilities of the future,—we seem to feel a dull aching in the bones of our forefathers that lie beneath her green turf, as old soldiers feel pain in the limbs they have left long years ago on the battle-field.

The mother-country held her American colonies as bound to labor for her profit, not their own, just as an artisan claims the whole time of his apprentice. If we think the policy of England towards America in the year 1863 has been purely selfish, looking solely to her own interest, without any regard to the principles involved in our struggle, let us look back and see whether it was any different in 1763, or in 1663. If her policy has been uniform at these three periods, it is time for us to have learned our lesson.

Two hundred years ago, in the year 1663, an Act of Parliament was passed to monopolize the Colonial trade for England, for the sake, as its preamble stated, "of keeping them [the Colonies] in a firmer dependence upon it, and rendering them yet more beneficial and advantageous unto it, in the further employment and increase of English shipping and seamen, vent of English woollens and other manufactures and commodities," etc. This act had, of course, the effect of increasing and perpetuating the naturally close dependence of the Colonies on the mother-country for most of the products of industry. But in an infant community the effect of such restrictions would be little felt, and it required another century before an extension of the same system was publicly recognized as being a robbery of the child by the parent. To show how far the system was carried, and what was the effect on the public mind of a course founded in pure, and, as it proved, short-sighted selfishness, it will be necessary to recall some of the details which help to account for the sudden change at last in the disposition of the Colonists.

One hundred years ago, on the tenth of February, 1763, a treaty of peace between England and France, as the leading powers, was signed at Paris. This was no sooner arranged than the Ministry began that system of Colonial taxation which the Massachusetts House of Representatives denounced as tending to give the Crown and Ministers "an absolute and uncontrollable power of raising money upon the people, which by the wise Constitution of Great Britain is and can be only lodged with safety in the legislature." Part and parcel of this system was that comprehensive scheme of tyranny by means of which England attempted to secure the perpetual industrial dependence of the American Colonies, the principle of which we have already seen openly avowed in the Act of Parliament of 1663, a hundred years earlier.

The same jealousy of the Colonies, lest they should by their success in the different branches of industry interfere with the home monopoly, shows itself in various other forms. There was, naturally enough, a special sensitiveness to the practice of the art of printing. Sir Edmund Andros, when he came out as Governor of the Northern Colonies, was instructed "to allow of no printing-press"; and Lord Effingham, on his appointment to the government of Virginia, was directed "to allow no person to use a printing-press on any occasion whatever."

The Board of Trade and Plantations made a report, in 1731, to the British Parliament concerning the "trades carried on, and manufactures set up, in the Colonies," in which it is recommended that "some expedient be fallen upon to direct the thoughts of the Colonists from undertakings of this kind; so much the rather, because these manufactures in process of time may be carried on in a greater degree, unless an early stop be put to their progress."

In one of Franklin's papers, published in London in 1768, are enumerated some instances of the way in which the Colonists were actually interfered with by legislation.

"Iron is to be found everywhere in America, and beaver are the natural produce of that country: hats and nails and steel are wanted there as well as here. It is of no importance to the common welfare of the empire whether a subject of the king gets his living by making hats on this or on that side of the water. Yet the hatters of England have prevailed to obtain an act in their own favor restraining that manufacture in America, in order to oblige the Americans to send their beaver to England to be manufactured, and purchase back the hats, loaded with the charges of a double transportation. In the same manner have a few nail-makers, and a still smaller body of steel-makers, (perhaps there are not half a dozen of these in England,) prevailed totally to forbid, by an Act of Parliament, the erecting of slitting-mills or steel-furnaces in America, that the Americans may be obliged to take all their nails for their buildings, and steel for their tools, from these artificers," etc.

"It is an idle argument in the Americans," said Governor Pownall, "when they talk of setting up manufactures for trade; but it would be equally injudicious in Government here to force any measure that may render the manufacturing for home consumption an object of prudence, or even of pique, in the Americans."

The maternal Government pressed this matter a little too fast and too far. The Colonists became piqued at last, and resolved, in 1764, not to purchase English stuffs for clothing, but to use articles of domestic manufacture as far as possible. Boston, always a ringleader in these mischiefs, diminished her consumption of British merchandise ten thousand pounds and more in this one year. The Harvard-College youth rivalled the neighboring town in their patriotic self-sacrifice, and the whole graduating class of 1770, with the names of Hutchinson, Saltonstall, and Winthrop at the head of the list, appeared at Commencement in black cloth of home-manufacture. This act of defiance only illustrates more forcibly the almost complete dependence of Colonial industry at the time of its occurrence, the effect of a policy which looked upon the Colonies with no reference to any other consideration than the immediate profit to be derived from them.

"The duty of a colony is affection for the mother-country: here I may affirm, that, in whatever form and temper this affection can lie in the human breast, in that form, by the deepest and most permanent impression, it ever did lie in the breast of the American people. They have no other idea of this country [England] than as their home; they have no other word by which to express it, and, till of late, it has constantly been expressed by the name of home. That powerful affection, the love of our native country, which operates in every heart, operates in this people towards England, which they consider as their native country; nor is this a mere passive impression, a mere opinion in speculation,—it has been wrought up in them to a vigilant and active zeal for the service of this country."

And Franklin's testimony confirms that of the English Governor.

"The true loyalists," he says, "were the people of America against whom the royalists of England acted. No people were ever known more truly loyal, and universally so, to their sovereigns.... They were affectionate to the people of England, zealous and forward to assist in her wars, by voluntary contributions of men and money, even beyond their proportion."

Such was the people whose love and obedience the greedy and grasping policy of the British Government threw away, never to be regained. The Revolution came at last, and the people reckoned up the long arrears of oppression. "In the short space of two years," says a contemporary writer, "nearly three millions of people passed over from the love and duty of loyal subjects to the hatred and resentment of enemies."

We have seen that our cautious parent had taken good care not to let her American children learn the use of her tools any farther or faster than she thought good for them—and herself. They no sooner got their hands free than they set them at work on various new contrivances. One of the first was the nail-cutting machinery which has been in use ever since. All our old houses—the old gambrel-roofed Cambridge mansions, for instance—are built with wrought nails, no doubt every one of them imported from England. Many persons do not know the fact that the screw-auger is another native American invention, having been first manufactured for sale at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1776, or a little earlier. Eli Whitney contrived the cotton-gin in 1792, and some years later the machinery for the manufacture of fire-arms, involving the principle of absolute uniformity in the pattern of each part, so that any injured or missing portion of a gun may be instantly supplied without special fitting.

The Yankee whittling a shingle with his jack-knife is commonly accepted as a caricature, but it is an unconscious symbolization of the plastic instinct which rises step by step to the clothes-pin, the apple-parer, the mowing-machine, the wooden truss-bridge, the clipper-ship, the carved figure-head, the Cleopatra of the World's Exhibition.

One American invention, or discovery, has gone far towards paying back all that the new continent owes to the old civilizations. The cradle of artificial anæsthesia—man's independence of the tyranny of pain—must be looked for at the side of the Cradle of Liberty. Never was a greater surprise than the announcement of this miraculous revelation to the world. One evening in October, 1846, a professional brother called upon the writer of this paper. He shut the door carefully, and looked nervously around him. Then he spoke, and told of the wondrons results of the experiment which had just been made in the operating-room. "In one fortnight's time," he said, "all Europe will be ablaze with this discovery." He then produced and read a paper that he had just drawn up for a learned society of which we were both members, the first paper ever written on this subject. On that day not a surgeon in the world, out of a little New-England circle, made any profession of knowing how to render a patient quickly, completely, pleasantly, safely insensible to pain for a limited period. In a few weeks every surgeon in the world knew how to do it, and the atmosphere of the planet smelt strong of sulphuric ether. The discovery started from the Massachusetts General Hospital, just as definitely as the cholera started from Jessore, to travel round the globe.