Kitabı oku: «Belford's Magazine, Vol 2, December 1888», sayfa 5

It is not, however, much that New York should charter a company to violate the law of the land, when an Illinois legislature elects to the United States Senate a "high-protective-tariff" man who is building the State House of Texas with foreign contract laborers, brought there in defiance of the law passed by the Senate to which he was elected. Just how many of the four hundred thousand immigrants arriving annually are brought here under contract, or lured by deceptive promises and advertisements of those most interested in making laborers so plentiful that labor shall be cheap, it is of course impossible to tell. But that the fact is one of evil omen admits of no doubt. Rome drew nearer and nearer her end as the army of idle, hungry men increased. Feeding them from her public granaries may have postponed, it could not prevent, her final collapse. "Enforced idleness, or the cheapening of men," says a writer, "is not the sign of decadence, it is decadence." It is laudable and praiseworthy to make money by just and legitimate means, but it is damnable to unmake men in order to make money. To study the causes for this vast and constantly increasing army of unemployed, and then do something to check those causes and prevent their effects, while it might not be so good partisanship, would be much better statesmanship than to "fire the Northern heart" by "bloody shirt" speeches in the Senate, and the raking up of old letters to "expose" the views some men held twenty-five years ago.

Ethelbert Stewart.

P. S. – Since writing the above, several hosiery works and woollen mills have closed because of a "tariff agitation" which, if successful, will give them cheaper raw material! "No matter," says a leading hose manufacturer in a Chicago paper, "whether the result of the proposed tariff-tinkering will benefit or injure us ultimately, any sort of agitation of the question immediately blocks trade. People will not buy when there is the remotest hope that goods will be cheaper after a while. The manufacturing industries at this time cannot stand any tariff agitation." No sane person believes that there is a man, woman, or child in the United States going without stockings until they see whether the Mills bill will pass the Senate! No sane man believes that one pair less of hose is sold in the United States because of tariff agitation. The underlying fact is, that the protected industries propose to "shut down" and throw their employés out of work for the purpose of starving them into voting for a continuation of the present iniquitous tariff schedules. It is the refined "shot-gun electioneering system" of the North.

E. S.

THE BELLS OF CHRISTMAS

 
O bells that madly toll to-night,
What is the meaning of your note?
Is disappointment or delight
The burden of each brazen throat?
And what the words my weary brain
Discovers in your vague refrain?
 
 
From the high casement of my room
I watch the world below asleep;
While from the belfries clothed in gloom
The clangor rolls from deep to deep,
Repeating, as afar 'tis flung,
A lesson from an unknown tongue.
 
 
O music that eludes the soul, —
Like that sweet sea which vexed the thirst
Of Tantalus, but never stole
Across his fevered lips accursed, —
Unfold your mysteries to-night,
Your misty meaning and your might.
 
 
It surging sweeps upon the air.
Besides the clamor of the bells
Are echoing strains from everywhere,
Past, present, future. How it swells
Into an endless sea which roars
And moans on lonely rock-bound shores!
 
 
Hoarse, hollow echoes from dead years
Of that which I have thought and done —
The discords of past sin and tears
Through e'en your fairest measures run.
Alas! when will those discords cease?
Does sorrow never lead to peace?
 
 
Chords of the present clash and jar
As though each note would never end;
Yet as their rhythms die afar,
They slowly unto beauty blend,
And the last cadence fades away
As fades a perfect summer day.
 
 
O vibrant strains of the to-be,
With promise pregnant and with hope,
You are a glad epitome
Of the hereafter's power and scope;
Yet 'neath your softest note appears
The thunder-march of coming years.
 
 
Ring, Christmas bells! The past is dead,
E'en though its requiem never die,
And God His endless love has spread
Upon the scenes that round us lie.
Ring loudly to the midnight air
That Love and Hope have slain Despair.
 
 
Ring out, O bells! The world is wide,
And Goodness sits upon a throne.
Ring out upon the Christmas-tide
That God will not forget His own,
And that on all, from far above,
Descends His never-failing love.
 

William E. S. Fales.

THE AMERICAN EAGLE UNDER DIFFICULTIES

It seems to be a striking case of misunderstanding from the Romans down, or up, to the Americans. Every theory and supposition has curiously added to the misapprehension. Rightly judged, with the plainest facts of his life even casually considered, the Bird o' Freedom seems so disreputable a fowl that one wonders how he ever came to be chosen as a figure-head by Romans, Germans, Americans, or the Michigan Regiment that bore him alive as its standard through the smoke of a score of battles, and brought him home again unscathed to make a curious part of the history of a gallant State in the times that tried men's souls. Innumerable myths trail behind him as appendages to his unearned fame. He was the Bird of Jove. He has ever been the reputed king of an ethereal world of fancy. His eye alone may look upon the sun unwinking and undazed. And yet it is all in his eye, or rather in that of the credulous mortals who believe the ancient story. There never lived a poet, sticking to his business, that has not at some time in his career become a panegyrist of his extraordinary supposed qualities and a proclaimer of his magnificence. It is a curious fact, too, that all the moralists, save one, have at some time or other used him as a simile, a great example, a something to be imitated. That one, greatest of all, is content with the familiar and plebeian hen and chickens in one of the most eloquent and touching of his monologues, and uses the miserable sparrow in that illustration which has in all time since given comfort to forsaken souls.

With the poetry about this overrated fowl everybody is more or less familiar. There is nothing finer; and it is somewhat startling, and also destructive of our most cherished ideas, to say that it seems a case of mistaken identity almost from beginning to end. It cannot be the eagle, our eagle, that is meant. He has never in a single instance done anything to entitle him to a medal. Yet the idealism of the ages has been heaping honors on his crested head through the necessity, as yet unexplained, of having some winged creature to glorify, to use as an emblem, to paint, to describe incorrectly if poetically, to embellish a heroic national moral with. It has been done without regard to fact in all the school-readers and other truthful volumes intended for the use of the very young. Every boy regards the American Eagle as the king of birds even from a moral standpoint, and he is liable to at least a brief spell of disappointment if he has the faculty of observation and the love of nature sufficiently developed to find out by-and-by that he has been deceived.

The coparcener with the eagle in all this beautiful nonsense is a bird that never existed at all, and who, having at last fallen from her high estate, is now principally useful as a name for a hotel that has been too often burned, or as the escutcheon of an insurance company. Considered in a matter-of-fact way, and in the cold and unflattering light of natural history, our national emblem is no more a truth than the Phœnix is, and is almost as preposterous as the roc. One wonders why, in the course of so many ages in which the gradual drift has been toward common-sense and fact, men have not learned to turn for their animal ideals, if it is necessary to have them, to the beasts and birds entitled to some consideration for actual qualities; for both beauty and gallantry, for instance, to the male of the barn yard fowl; for devotion, to the grotesquely homely stork; for self-sacrifice, to any of the beautiful creatures who flutter along before you in the path, with the distressful pantomime of a broken wing and great distress, inviting you to kill them easily with a stick or stone if you have the heart, and offering you every inducement to pursue them that is latent in man's cruel heart, but only after all to lead the marauder further and further away from a nest that is cherished.

As to the first of these hastily-given examples, any country-raised boy will concede the point, and he has not been left entirely out in the poetry, and especially in the folk-lore, of the nations. He it was who marked with his clarion the moment when he upon whose name is founded the most powerful of the Christian Churches denied his master and his faith. He sings the coming of the dawn in every clime, and marks the hour when graveyards cease to yawn, or when Romeos must depart. He leads his harem abroad in the morning as he has ever done, ever ready to fight his rival from across the fence or to meet in unconsidered duel the marauding hawk. With a gallantry quite unknown to any other bird or human, he calls familiarly to others of his family to come and eat the choicest morsel he may find. He is gay. He has the natural gait and air of an acknowledged chieftain. The sun glints upon his neck. His tail is a waving plume the equal of which few birds can boast. He hath a bold and glittering eye. Sometimes retreating under the dictates of prudence, as many higher personages have often done and been commended therefor, he is yet the ideal of homely, home-defending courage. Withal, he will upon necessity demean himself to scratch for a brood of chirping orphans, and gather them to his gallant breast because they have no mother. Yet, forsooth, not this illustrious bird, but the eagle – the "American" Eagle – is the emblem of the foster-mother of all the nations.

There is a place where every visitor to Chicago may see this emblematic lordling near at hand. It is at Lincoln Park. There is a colossal cage there where there are a dozen or so of him, and he is not even restricted in certain limited flights which seem fully satisfying to him in his well-fed condition. If you go to see him there you will have the advantage of observing how absurdly draggle tailed and slovenly he may become with full leisure to make his toilet if he ever does, and that he evidently is not naturally a dandy. This trait is not common with any of his captive neighbors except the coyotes, and nobody who has known the coyote in his native wilderness expects anything better of him. You can also observe his grotesqueness when he is on the ground, where he often comes, and there is probably nothing more ridiculously abortive in all nature than his movements when so situated. But one cannot visit him often or observe him long without becoming convinced that none of the attitudes in which he is almost invariably depicted on flags, medals, seals, coins, and other ornamental and emblematic devices is natural to him. He never assumes them even by mistake or chance. "The poised eagle" becomes poetry like all the rest, when you observe that his "eagle glance" has taken in a piece of fresh meat somewhere, and he wishes to keep someone else from getting it. He then scrambles to the edge of a board, or hitches along to the end of a branch of the dead tree where he sits, and drops off like a hen, making an awkward flight toward the morsel that has attracted him. And when he gets there he edges suspiciously around it in the evident fear that it may be alive and may bite him.

You will, however, be able to observe some of his traits that seem more natural. There are the cruel eyes and the relentless expression; the "hooked claws" and the "bending beak." It is an eye whose expression never changes, and which regards with constant malice all its surroundings. The brow, which gives it the look so much admired, seems, according to Mr. Ruskin, to be merely a provision of nature to keep the sun from shining into it, thus disposing, Ruskin-like, at one fell swoop of one of the most striking of the poetical myths.

Still others will be disposed of if you stay long. Did any one of my readers ever read that neither the eagle nor the lion would eat anything they had not themselves slain? Well, later advices seem to indicate that both will upon occasion descend to carrion of the basest quality, and that both consume considerable time in their native haunts in catching and devouring bugs. Lizards and such small fry are assiduously looked for. Convincing proof of this, in the eagle's case, was not wanting in one brief visit to the above-mentioned famous and beautiful resort. In the same huge cage with the eagles were certain crocodiles, or alligators, or whatever name you may choose to call the Floridian saurian by. To me they all seem very much alike. I suppose this is because I do not care much about supra-orbital bones, or the number of teeth or toes, or minute particulars of anatomical conformation, but am disposed, after a blundering and non-technical fashion, to mostly regard looks and actions. The adult, or semi-adult, alligators lie all the time asleep, never moving, never winking, never so much as apparently breathing, and looking very much like chunks in a clearing. One wonders, in view of all the stories told, if they are really alive this fine summer weather, when there is no excuse for hibernation, and if so, how they ever manage to catch anything except possibly by lying with their mouth open and waiting until something mistakes the locality and crawls into it by inadvertance.

But there is one little beast in this interesting family so young and inexperienced as to be only about nine inches long, including all there is belonging to him, largely tail. He is of a dark-green color, with a mottled-yellow belly, and a mouth, when he opens it, very red indeed. He has no teeth large enough to be very frightful at a distance, and evidently depends upon the mere opening of this fiendish mouth to scare away all disturbers of the profound peace which broods perpetually over him and all his family.

This small one had got away, and in a modified and unsatisfactory search for his native bayou had crept through the meshes of the wire and into the other apartment where the eagles were. He was down in the little rill of running water, and partially hidden under a stone. An eagle had espied him there, and was watching him, while I watched the eagle. Presently the natural instincts of the bird of Jove became too strong for successful repression even in the presence of distinguished company, and he left his perch in the usual ungraceful way, and after alighting on the ground waddled to where the little reptile was having a comfortable time in his exile. He hesitated about the water, but finally waded in and scratched the monster out from under his sheltering rock. He then caught him round the middle with one gigantic claw which met entirely around his prey, and scrambled ashore. By this time the saurian was fairly awake, and began to provide for his immediate future by opening his mouth. The eagle, looking between his legs, saw this and dropped him as an uncanny thing, and afterwards spent some ridiculous minutes dancing around his foe and warily dodging his satanic manifestations of open mouth. The whole performance was such on the part of the eagle as would have disgraced in the eyes of her waiting family, an ordinary hen, and the end was that the alligator got safely back to his puddle and his rock. He did it deliberately, and backwards, with his mouth open about one-third of his entire length. The bird was of average size. He had the white feathers on his head which made him the "bald" or "American" eagle. Here was the emblem of this great republic vanquished by a sleepy little lizard less than a foot long. It was almost as disgraceful a performance as the Mexican War of '46.

I was once part proprietor of an eagle. He belonged to us, and we were a company of soldiers at a frontier post. While I knew him he lived in the mule-corral, and appeared to me to be at a great disadvantage there. Somebody had winged him against the face of the brown cliff at whose top he had been hatched, and he was now accustomed to sit upon a rail in the corner of the shed, and glare balefully at all intruders in the place he fancied he owned. He was perhaps fat beyond rule, but his claws were as long and sharp, and his eye was as relentless, as though still obliged to follow his natural calling of catching the little New-Mexican cotton-tail, and swooping down upon horned toads.

His wings measured about five feet from tip to tip, though he was supposed to have only lately passed the perilous period of his first moulting, and to be quite young. He was fed with bloody morsels of beef, and had, when he chose to take it, the freedom of the whole enclosure. But he was not on good terms with his neighbors, and maintained a very dignified demeanor toward some fifty mules, a dozen or so of cocks and hens, and an especially-privileged pig who had the run of the premises because it had been brought up by hand, and had, for a pig, remarkably aristocratic ideas. He frowned upon all manner of fellow-creatures who by accident and unintentionally paid a visit to his majesty. Peg, who owned a house which she considered her own near his perch, this mansion being a deal-box turned down, was a special aversion. Peggy was a large dog, and was herself not a pattern of amiability, especially when she was the mother of from nine to thirteen puppies, as frequently was the case; and it was commonly remarked that Aquila was in danger of having his head bitten off if he interfered with this interesting family, which he seemed rather foolishly inclined to do. Yet this was not by any means what became of this Monarch of the Air finally.

If the eagle is one of the striking emblems of power, he is also upon occasion, as before remarked, a specimen of decided and almost pitiable imbecility. He cannot even walk. His utmost endeavors in that humble direction seem to result only in an ungraceful waddle, in which his claws interfere with his shins, and those of his right foot interfere with those of his left, and he drags his tail in a most undignified manner in the dust. Also, his long wing-tips refuse to stay folded in a proper manner, as each time he stumbles he is impelled to throw out a wing, reminding one of a boy walking across a brook on a log. This one could fly only a little. The accident that had resulted in his captivity he had recovered from, but the wing bone had not been properly set where it was broken, and the short flights he attempted were very one-sided. So when he wished to go anywhere he usually walked, and it was such a walk as above described, or worse.

And when he did, it was to a place one would never have imagined that a properly conducted and self-respecting eagle would have thought of. But the bird seemed to have a liking for low resorts, and his special weakness was the pig-pen. This was, as it should have been, outside the walls, and was generally occupied by some eight or a dozen little, sharp-nosed, pointed-eared, anti-Berkshire, Mexican pigs, whose business it was to eat up all that was left from the dinner of more than a hundred soldiers, and to be the heirs of all the condemned commissary stores, and whose fate it was to be finally eaten themselves, say about Christmas. The last lot that went in there is a distinct recollection to me, aside from their doings with the eagle. They came from some aboriginal hamlet on the banks of the Rio Grande, about a hundred miles away. Each two of them had accommodations to themselves – a pen made of willow sticks, tied together with raw-hide, and slung upon a donkey. The long-suffering animal who had carried them so far had a round dozen for his cargo. He was heaped and piled with pig-cages, and the topmost pair of little swine were having an airy ride at the apex of a pyramid about eight feet from the ground, swaying from side to side with a sea-sick motion as the donkey walked; and they looked sick. A more unpromising family was never reared even in New Mexico. Nevertheless they were dropped over the side of the pen after much chaffering with the owner, and at an expense of "four bits" each.

As soon as by some means he found out they were there, it was to the pig-pen that this fatuous fowl resorted. I do not know why, but it was not because he loved them, nor that he had especial business with them. Making his way thither as best he could he would perch upon the side of the pen and glare balefully down upon the occupants, who did not seem to greatly care if he chose to amuse himself in that senseless manner. But after a while he would drop down on the back of the nearest one, and holding fast with his claws, he would proceed to bite the back of his neck, tweak his ears, and otherwise maltreat him. But at his first squeal the others would make common cause with him, after the unselfish fashion of pigs, and together they would pull our emblem down, drag him down in the dust or mud as the case might be, and finally would hustle him off into a corner, where he would sit scowling until some soldier came and took him away. Whenever the shrill voice of a pig was heard expostulating it would be understood that the eagle was at it again, and somebody would go to the rescue of our national greatness. Often have I seen a couple of soldiers, each with the tip of a wing in his hand, and with the eagle between them, marching him across the parade-ground to his proper roost. On these occasions he looked exceedingly silly. When his feet touched the ground he would attempt to walk, and with even less success than usual. He reminded me of some urchin who had fallen into the creek, and who was being led homeward in much wetness and humiliation.

It is a sad story when the traditional dignity of the principal character is considered, for he was finally killed by those pigs. The facts developed at the inquest seemed to indicate that he had no discretion, and had gone too often. They had walked over him, and had even lain down upon him. Dead and disregarded he lay in a corner among the litter, and they had not even attempted to eat him. This seemed to indicate that they had killed him merely as a lesson to him. There never was more ignominious end to an exalted character.

Literature is very full of the reputed nobleness of certain birds and beasts; their vaunted qualities of head and heart; the pride of their bearing; the independence of their lives; the solitary grandeur of their characters. And in the majority of cases these heathenish notions have remained undispelled by the lapse of time. Even men assume for long periods of time the characters that romantic biographers have clothed them with, and the youth of this country, now men, are only just beginning to recover their senses after the singular yarns of such books as Abbott's Life of Napoleon, read in youth. As instances of the first statement, the elephant is actually, and in his real circus life, an indocile and malicious beast, prone to blind rages, revenges, and sly malice. The camel, darling of the Arab, ship of the desert, etc., has, by the testimony of those who know him well, less sense than a sheep; as long-necked and homely a piece of perfect stupidity as there is in the caravan, and looks it. I shall have attained the topmast round of a species of high treason when I mention a doubt as to whether that noble slave, the horse, is entitled to his general reputation, but such a doubt I have. There are those who lose a good deal of money on him, and will forgive him anything, even to the occasional breaking of their necks. He has his admirers in a majority of mankind, yet there never actually lived that fabled creature, a "safe" horse.

To revert again, and finally, to our national emblem, his mode of life gives him, if we may fall into the vernacular, dead away. He may have his virtues from our standpoint, and one of them is that he is not prolific. His crude nest is such a one as a boy might build in rough imitation of a nest, and call it an eagle's. Made of big sticks and nothing else, and added to as the years pass, it is wedged into the forks of a solitary hemlock, as high as possible from the ground and as remote as possible from any other thing, or is perched upon the shelf of the cliff above the canyon or the coast. It contains only three or four homely eggs. He seems faithful in his domestic relations, and pairs off not for a season, but for life or good behavior. This one fact covers his good qualities, for there is undoubtedly a spice of the heroic about it. With all his rapacious and predatory power of wing it may not be doubted that he is a bug-eater and a lizard-catcher, and that on mesa or in valley he fights with the raven and the buzzard for the possession of the uppermost eye of the casual dead mule. But his especial, weakness is an article of diet that he has no right to in the animal code, for the reason that he can't catch it. That is fish, and he invariably simply steals it when he gets it. Any man who has witnessed this proceeding and not been outraged by it could hardly be considered a competent juryman in a Chicago boodle case. The osprey, having caught his lawful fish by pure skill and natural capacity, bears it away wriggling in his talons. He is weighted by his booty and flies heavily. Somebody who has been sulkily watching him for perhaps a day or two from some unseen nook, sails after him and pounces upon him from above. Turning to fight he must drop his fish, which the other gets and goes off with. One can but see the disappointed fisherman return again to his watching, and think of a hungry brood of nestlings waiting at home, and feel some degree of displeasure and regret in the fact that the marauder, unpunished and unregretful, is none other than the emblem and figure-head of the great republic. He knows that no nation can be considered strictly honest except his own, and he ever after is disposed to wonder at that ignorance of the plainest facts of natural history that has led it to choose out from the beasts and birds a thief and a coward for the only bit of heraldry its statutes know,

James Steele.