Obrazy na stronie
PDF
ePub

for the suppression of the slave-trade, and paying her money as the price of her consent, America has deprived herself of a justifying cause for warlike proceedings against Cuba, which she might now have turned to very good account. But while, for previous reasons, I do not think it likely America can buy Cuba; I have not the same horror that some express at the idea of her taking it. I also differ from those who think that the possession of Cuba by the United States, would strengthen the hands of the supporters of the slave system in America itself, and procrastinate or prevent the settlement of that question-the great national question of the American continent. But my conviction is, that it would just leave the slave question where it is; while, at the same time, it would effectually put an end to the traffic in slaves, at least in as far as Cuba is concerned.

"I submit then," he concludes, "to the public of my native country, that were Spain's debt to England, for the repayment of which Cuba may be considered as part of the security, duly provided for or secured, there is little or no interest which could or should prevent England from viewing the occupation of Cuba by our brethren of the United States of America with feelings of complacency. For the honor of America herself, such occupation, if it is to be undertaken, should be undertaken only on some justifying cause, or by a legitimate transaction of sale. If America gets Cuba, the possession may not be very valuable to herself, whatever it is under the present system to Spain; but her doing so will, at all events put an end to the slave-trade, in so far at least as the importation of slaves into Cuba is concerned."

So much for the opinions of candid English writers on the subject of the annexation of Cuba to the United States. So far as English interference is contemplated, we have always regarded it as a dream. A nation living on credit, whose masses are deprived of labor at the slightest threat of war, and whose capital and commercial business are so interwoven and confounded with those of the American people, cannot run the risk of even a temporary suspension of friendly relations with them. On the other hand, the present considerable consumption of English manufactures in Cuba, can but increase under the more liberal regulations of our own government. Peace, and markets for her manufactures, are matters of life and death for England; the minister, Tory or Whig, who forgets these truths, would bitterly lament his error; because the mind of man is not able to compass the disasters

which a war, especially with her ancient colony, would bring upon herself and upon the commerce of the world. But we believe there are higher and far more important reasons for amity between the two countries. Say what we will, bluster as we may, and as we sometimes do, there is a cordial feeling now existing, and fast increasing, and which must and will bind them together. We see evidences of this daily, notwithstanding the efforts of shallow-minded people on both sides to excite national prejudices, and irritate national feelings.

Still, what of the future? Cuba will become a part of the United States. The how or the when, it is useless to predict. Political events have transpired so rapidly within the last few years, that

"That of an hour's age doth hiss the speaker."

We are borne onward by a force which seems hastening some great consummation. If all do not agree as to the result which these changes are to bring, no one can shut his eyes to the changes themselves. They have multiplied within the year; they are multiplying; they will continue to multiply. The conservative and the radical-the ultra Whig and the ultra Democrat-are all overwhelmed by the resistless course of things, if they stop even but a moment to contemplate it. What is to be done? Shall we attempt to stay this sweeping current, and be carried away by it? or shall we rather do what we may to control and direct it? Let us see what are the principles on which this extraordinary progression depends.

The people of the United States assert political, religious, and commercial freedom; they believe in the philanthropic mission of their country to extend the same throughout this hemisphere; and, while they acknowledge that slavery is constitutional, and beyond the reach of abolitionary cabals, they claim that it is not beyond the moral influence of civilization, which slowly induces its peaceful . termination. Such, in our view, is the expression of public opinion in the United States; of that opinion which, being the result of the contests of parties, guides the acts of the government. As a people, too, we contend that the physical and moral wants of mankind cannot be disregarded. If subjects are oppressed by tyrants, supported by brute force, the citizen of the free state will be very likely to use his individual might and influence to take off the irons from the victims.

The power of the American confederacy lies in the number of resolute freemen

who cover the surface of its territoryin the fact, that their industry does not sustain heavy taxation to pay debts contracted by preceding generations, nor to support menials, office-holders, or princes, useless or injurious; or armies, only necessary to perpetuate wrong. More even than all this, does their power spring, especially in foreign countries, from the certainty that the cause of the Americans is the cause of individual right. It is this which makes America the asylum of the oppressed of all Europe, and the government of the Union, that which approaches nearest perfection, by indefinitely diffusing enjoyments, her nationality the practical realization of cosmopolitanism. The expansive arms of her policy find no obstacle in the origin of her citizens. The Dutch peopled New-York, the Swedes New Jersey and Delaware, the Germans Pennsylvania, the French flew to South Carolina after the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and in Louisiana and Florida the French and Spanish still preserve the usages of their ancestors. The result has been astonishing. We have increased in wealth, civilization, industry and power, in a manner unprecedented in the annals of the world. Our population doubles every twenty-five years; and a progression so stupendous foils human calculation as to what will be our power and influence in times to come. More than twenty millions of souls now, forty millions in 1873, and so successively on, till we come to three hundred and twenty millions in one century. Make from this estimate, founded on experience, what reasonable deductions we please, and what results may we not still expect? Those are now in existence who will see this vast confederacy holding a population of two hundred millions! Where is the model, the

precedent, the resemblance of this great spectacle, in history?

The careful and philosophical observer of the essential progress of mankind in our times, has been led more and more to cherish a belief in the sublime idea of the fraternizing and cementing of the nations, which shall be a fulfilment of the crowning prophecy of inspiration. It has pleased Heaven to make our country the home of freedom, the birthplace of liberal institutions, the best example for the struggling, and the surest hope of the enfranchised everywhere. More than this, we have rendered feasible, purposes and systems, in policy and civilization, which might well have been regarded as impossible, but for steamboats, railroads, telegraphs and printing-presses, that in an hour are capable of flooding continents with intelligence. We find under these circumstances a glorious truth confessed, which a little while ago was regarded as incredible, that the extension of empire by CONQUEST will soon be superseded by the irrepressible desire of states to become united to each other by the NEW LAW OF ANNEXATION. This is already inspiring no inconsiderable proportion of the inhabitants of every nation on this continent to become an integral part of our own great Republic. The history of the future will be, in a continually increasing degree, a detail of the rapid operation of this principle, until the world shall be completely united and bound together by the tracks of its intercommunication, the combination of its interests, the sympathies of its intelligence, and the unity and oneness of its hopes; and the last triumph which is ordered by Providence, has realization in the dawn of that period when all the nations of the earth shall be as ONE PEOPLE.

SPRING OR SUMMER?

SWIFTLY the young Spring came,―

Love is not dearer

Whispered the Summer's name
As ever nearer.

Swiftly the young Spring fled,

Dawn is not fleeter,

Promiser or promised,

Heart! which was sweeter?

[blocks in formation]

I

ANDREW CRANBERRY, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW.

COULD never tell why, but I arose that morning repeating Coleridge's translation of Schiller's "Hymn to Bacchus"

"Never, believe me, Appear the immortals, Never alone," &c.

I had not been dining out. I had refused Horatio Tidd's invitation to step round to the club, and take it hot with sugar, which was Tidd's practice. I had returned home at the moral hour of eleven, and, after composing myself with the "North American" (the best of sedatives), had slipped quietly into the sheets; and that was the end of me until seven, A. M.

At that hour I awoke, with my eyes turned towards the ceiling, and instantly began to repeat the lines I have quoted.

66

Come, Cranberry," said I to myself, "this is a little absurd for you, who have to go down town and arrange the means of getting a dinner, to lie here in bed and babble heathenish hymns, as if life were only a luxurious nap. I advise you to get up."

"Certainly," replied I to myself, "if you think best. So here goes."

And I sprang up, and sat a moment upon the edge of the bed. Yet instantly I began again

"Never, believe me,"

and away I went, half-musing, half-muttering, until I felt a little chilly about the ankles

"Well," said I, laughing to myself, "I agree with you; this is about the most silly business I have been lately engaged in."

And I began to strop my razor. (That reminds me of my bon-mot, generally known as the Cranberry-joke. Once dining with a select party, and being asked how I secured such a kid-glove quality to my chin every morning, I answered, "I steel it." Upon which there was a subdued smile all round the table; and old Stryng Beenz, wishing, after his Dutch fashion, to compliment my good looks, cried out, "Then Cranberry steals the best part of himself every day." At which, as no one clearly understood it, every body loudly laughed.)

To return. I placed myself before my shaving-glass, and began to "steel" my chin. But in the midst, as I stood there, holding my nose awry, with my chin halfraised and saturated in lather, out came the words again, like a torrent, and I said confidentially to myself, in the glass"Never, believe me,"

and cut my chin for my pains.

Now, I am a reasonable man, I believe. Andrew Cranberry, Attorney-at-Law, is not held to be superstitious; but there was something peculiar in this constant recurrence of my mind to a poem that I had not read for years.

"What does it portend?" inquired I, as I wiped my face with a damp towel, and walked meditatively towards the shower-bath.

"Does it mean," thought I, interrogatively, as I took the string in my hand, "that I shall ever feel gay enough to sing hymns to the jolly god? Or is it a sort of devil's taunt that I must drink only a Barmecide cup, and content myself with cold water?"

Splash! came the shower as I spoke. I had inadvertently pulled the cord.

But the water did not wash away the subject of my thoughts. The sun shone brightly through the muslin curtains of my windows. I felt, without seeing, the beauty of the day. I knew that the life of Babylon was already coursing along its veins-those stony veins called streets. I knew that men had been hard at work since sunrise since daybreak - toiling heavily at labor that should not end until their lives ended; confined in close and noisome places, in which the day was never very bright, and their hopes grew daily darker. I knew that in the green parks and gardens-under the trees and upon the margin of fountains-children in bright dresses were playing in the sun, shouting, singing, and frolicking. I knew that the endless miles of monotonous red brick wall which makes the exterior of city houses, inclosed every kind and degree of joy and sorrow; that the street door saw gay equipages, and smiling and perfumed fashion, and an air of festal content-as if Babylon were Paradise-while the chamber-door witnessed bitter envies, and cold bickerings, and loveless lives.

All these images came to my mind as I slowly dressed myself, and I half shuddered to feel that I was one of them; that the inevitable course of events went on; that the stream of life, an aggregate of infinite drops-mine as large as any-flowed steadily forward; and that no power, no prayer, no despair could arrest it.

"Heigho!" said I to myself. "what does all this mean? Andrew Cranberry, what the deuce ails you? Mark my word, young man, this means something."

And I shook my finger solemnly, for my own edification; rubbed the ox-marrow upon my hair (I am a little particu

lar) with peculiar unction, as if to say, “Andrew! hold hard, keep dark."

Finally, after stepping to the glass, and solemnly winking at myself, to secure a perfect understanding, I went down with an air of quiet determination, to breakfast.

I may as well confess it now and here, I lived in a boarding-house.

Boarding-houses rose with the fall. They came in with the going out from Paradise. I honor the austere Dante, and I sympathize with him that, in the departments of his Inferno, he omitted the boarding-house. "It is enough," he seems to say; "I have painted terrors enough to warn you to the right. Should I announce the possibility of an eternity of boarding-house, human effort would be paralyzed."

Fancy it, my dear second cousin Lucy Arrowroot, invalid widow of Nee Britchiz, ancient book-keeper-you who live, or whose days are wasted in that dingy square room, with four rusty black hair cloth chairs, with the seedy carpet, with the angular bedstead, the square washstand, the square bureau with the square portrait over it upon the dingy wall. You, pale Lucy, once the rosiest of village girls, arch coquette-whose ringing laugh now hushed makes that country silence sad (one day I shall tell your story), you who lived in the sunshine like a flower, and whom now only rarely and by stealth, creeping between chimneys and along dark walls, a sunbeam visits-will you please fancy how you would shrivel up with terror-like a bird before a snake at the very idea of an eternity of boarding-house.

I mean, of course, no reflection upon Lucy's landlady, estimable Mrs. Frizzle Front-one of whose dismal back rooms I occupied until a prolonged fit of depression of spirits seriously alarmed my physician for my sanity-and whom I therefore know very well. It is the nature of boarding-houses to be dismal, and the landlady cannot help it.

But then, again, why have landladies such a tendency to be elderly widows in unmitigated mourning- or attenuated spinsters of a serious turn? In my darker and more misanthropic moments, I have audaciously fancied them revenging themselves upon the world by keeping a few persons endurably miserable for a regular sum per week.

When young Moelle de Boeuf- that sprightly Parisian-came to Babylon, he said to me (having brought letters from my old tutor, the Rev. Agnus Peewee who was then in Paris, "studying man," as he expressed it), "Now, mon ami, I wish to find apartments."

I trembled, for I knew very well, from Peewee's letters, what "apartments" mean in Paris-a nice, snug, quiet, airy, handsome suite of rooms, with a ditto, ditto. ditto little chambermaid, called femme-dechambre, or something pretty; and I hadn't the heart to show him the funereal abodes which with us correspond to that Parisian arrangement for bachelor happiness. Poor, pale Lucy, when I spoke to her about De Boeuf, and his account of the accommodations for single men in Paris, said, in her faint, sweet way, "I am glad to hear that bachelors can be made happy"-and then glanced at the grim, square portrait of old Nee Britchiz upon the dingy wall, and the ghost of a smile glimmered upon her face, as if her matrimonial life with the ancient book-keeper had been so happy!

"Well," said Moelle, "even if I couldn't find pleasant apartments, I can get some sunshine out of a good dinner. Just show me your best cafés-your Tro's Frèresyour Café Anglais-Maison Dorée-Café de Paris, &c."

So I took him-this flâneur-this spray of la jeunesse dorée-to whom a substantial aroma was a light lunch, and showed him our cafés-the holes in the sides of the street where steaming Babylon gorges its dinner, and considers the necessity of mastication a blunder in the organization of nature, as wasting precious time.

I avoided him after that; I never dared to meet him again. But once I could not escape. It was at Mrs. Parr Venoo's great fancy ball, in her great fancy house upon the Twentieth Avenue. Moelle de Boeuf, quivering with jewelry, wandered mournfully around the rooms, constantly. "setting" his face-that long, bird-like face, with round blank eyes, and a heavily-hooked moustache-between the heads of people in the crowd, so that many of the most sprightly belles looked as if they had a forlorn owl perched upon their shoulders. He said nothing-this patentleathered Molle de Bœuf, quivering with jewelry-but the expression of his face, as he gloomed and glowered from every corner of the rooms, apostrophized our native land thus: "Oh, unhappy country, which forces men to marry, that they may have a decent place to live in, and a decent dinner to eat! I wonder no more at your lank-visaged children-their solemnity is intelligible now! Oh, unspeakable land! where, in the fury of making a living, men forget to live!"

And the owl flitted from fashionable shoulder to fashionable shoulder, impressing me so deeply, that I can rarely mingle even now in the social festivities of Baby

« PoprzedniaDalej »