Twenty Years in Europe

Senator James F. Wilson, who had been a true friend in all the years that I had been in Europe, took me to the Executive Mansion one day, to introduce me to the President. It was a curious meeting that morning. I had never seen Mr. Harrison, and we waited with interest in the anteroom of his private office. The place was full of grave looking Senators. It might have been a funeral.

Mr. W. and I stood half an hour waiting among the rest. I wondered why the President’s door did not open. All the time there was a little low buzzing going on among some of the waiting ones, and I noticed a few slip up and whisper to a very sober looking little man, in a corner by the window. I supposed him to be a Senator. There would be some low talk with him, a stiff bow, and then some other Senator would slip up and go through the same performance. At last I whispered to Mr. Wilson, “Who is that man by the window?” “Why, that is the President,” he answered, to my complete astonishment. We had been in his presence all the time, and I had not known it. Now my attention was doubly fixed on him. Here was a quiet little man in the corner, ruling seventy millions of people. He seemed to indicate, by an extra glance, who might approach him next. I thought the Senators were all afraid of him, judging from the humble way in which they walked to the corner, and the very prompt manner in which they went away. There was not a smile on anybody’s face, and all was silence. Had they all been stepping up to take a last look at somebody’s corpse, the scene could not have been very different. If he actually promised some Senator something, there was no sign of the promise on his face.

After a while, he glanced over to Senator Wilson. We were but a few feet away. Mr. W. went up and spoke in a low voice, telling him, as I now know, something of the propriety of appointing men of experience to the service, and suggesting my name. Not a muscle moved on the President’s face. It is no go for me, I said to myself. Then Mr. Wilson said, a little louder: “Now, Mr. President, let me present Mr. Byers.” I heard him and stepped forward. I expressed the honor done me, and he mechanically took my hand; but, as if taking a second thought on the matter, he looked over my shoulder at somebody else, and, without saying a word, simply let go. My interview with the President of the United States was over. I laugh about it yet. “It did not promise much, did it?” I said to the Senator, as we went out. “Well, no, nothing extremely definite, or to count on,” replied Mr. Wilson. “But he never says much, and means much more than he says. He is icy with everybody, you saw that?” Yes, I thought I did. A year went by and I did not try it again. A place was offered me in South America, but I did not care for it. Then one morning Mr. Wilson said, “We will go and see Mr. Blaine.” The interview was absolutely the opposite of the one at the White House. Secretary Blaine had great esteem for the Iowa Senator, as did every one who knew him. He invited us both to come and visit him the next morning, at his private house. It was at the corner of Lafayette Square, opposite the Treasury. While we waited in the drawing-room I forgot for the moment what I had come for. I was only thinking of the singular history of that house.

Upstairs was the room where the attempt on Secretary Seward’s life was made, the night Lincoln was assassinated. Out there in front of the door, Key was killed by General Sickles. At this moment, the house was the home of the most noted living American statesman.

Shortly Mr. Blaine entered, all cheer and sunshine. He was a handsome man, with his fine erect form, his intellectual face, his genial smile, his great, big heart. He did not need the Presidency to make him great. Though able for very hard work still, he was looking very white in the face, his hair was quite gray. He talked to us for a time about the need of keeping well. Did he have premonitions then? “Never sleep in a room without a window raised, be it ever so little,” he said, “and don’t go to late night banquets in crowded rooms. Secretary Windom,” he went on, “has been murdered by trying to please crowds, speaking to them when he ought to have been in bed. I am done letting people make an exhibition of me. I will never, never sit in a room full of smokers again, and sacrifice health for others’ curiosity. That’s all they want of public men in such places, and one can die at it just as Windom has done.”[11 - A few evenings before, Secretary Windom had dropped dead while addressing a company of banqueters in New York.]

After a while I wondered if the Secretary had forgotten the object of our call. Senator Wilson hinted at it at last, and Mr. Blaine got up, walked about the room and said: “Really, now, I have been too busy to keep my promise.” He asked us to come to him again, and fixed the morning. “Bring with you the consular list and we will go all over it together.” He also spoke of a kind letter on file in my interests from General Sherman, who was then very ill in New York.

That afternoon, while on a street car going over to the Capitol, I heard the conductor tell a passenger that General Sherman was dead. I was greatly moved and pained. A thousand instances of his friendship for me rushed through my mind. In a few minutes I heard, from a seat in the Senate Gallery, the eulogiums pronounced by Senators Evarts, Hawley and Manderson. Hawley almost broke down in tears. The Senate adjourned, and probably every loyal heart in America was in sorrow. The Southerners in the Senate that afternoon, sat still, and heard the eulogies on Sherman in perfect silence. I wondered that not one of them had the nobility to rise in his seat and speak of the great dead.

I went to New York and on the morning of the funeral was with the family at the Sherman home. In the little back parlor, in the full uniform of his highest rank, lay the commander of the March to the Sea. Candles burned around his coffin in the darkened chamber. While I was standing there, looking at his face, his son, Father Thomas E. Sherman, who had that moment reached home from Europe, came into the room. He embraced me, for we had many mutual memories.

A short Catholic service was held by the children that morning over all that was left of their illustrious father. They were all sincere Catholics. The mother, devoted to the same church, had died in the room upstairs. The father had been reconciled to his children’s kind of religion. He was not a professor of any creed himself, and for his children to have this farewell ceremony, conducted by his own son, seemed in every way appropriate.

That afternoon, New York City and the people of America buried General Sherman. A more imposing funeral was never seen in the United States, not even at the death of Washington.

Shortly, Senator Wilson and I, on invitation, went to Secretary Blaine’s home again. There was a bright “Good morning, Mr. Wilson,” as the Secretary again entered the drawing-room. Seeing me, he walked across the room, took me by the hand and congratulated me on my reappointment. “Your name goes to the Senate this afternoon for St. Gall,” he continued, “the post shall shortly be increased in rank, and you will be made Consul General for Switzerland.” He offered me my old post at Zurich, however, if I preferred it. I never saw Mr. Blaine again.

CHAPTER XXX

1891

GO TO SWITZERLAND AS CONSUL GENERAL-AN OCEAN VOYAGE THEN AND NOW-A GLIMPSE OF BURNS’ HOME-THE HIGHEST CITY IN EUROPE-A NOVEL REPUBLIC-LIFE IN THE HIGHER ALPS-HEADQUARTERS FOR EMBROIDERY-PRINCESS SALM SALM-AN OPEN AIR PARLIAMENT-THE UPPER RHINE-AT HAMBURG-A SUMMER ON THE BALTIC-INTERVIEW WITH PRINCE BISMARCK.

In a few weeks I was again in Switzerland; this time away up among the Alps, for St. Gall is the highest city of any importance in the world.

The sea voyage had been uneventful. The only lion among the passengers on the “City of New York” was Henry M. Stanley. His wife, a distinguished looking English lady, was with him.

April 10, 1891.-This is my fourteenth sea voyage on the Atlantic. What changes in ships since 1869! First-class steamers of that time are now all off on second-class lines to South America; or else they are at the bottom of the sea. Three that I crossed on have since gone down-“City of London,” “Anglia,” “Deutschland.”

Yet aside from the added speed, the changes in ocean ships are not so favorable as we try to think them. True, the vessels are more palatial, but one can be just as seasick on a floating palace as on board a schooner. Besides, speed and a palace are poor recompense for the crowds that pack a modern ocean greyhound. Twenty years ago everybody knew everybody on shipboard, and many of the ship acquaintances became friends for life. Then, too, few of one’s fellow passengers had ever been to Europe. There was all the joy of expectation that made the little crowd happy. Those who fly often across the Atlantic have small pleasure compared with the delight of those who long ago saw land for the first time after a long voyage.

The crowds, the blasé character of half the passengers, have robbed a sea voyage of most of its delights.

April 20.-We came straight from Liverpool to Scotland, and staid a week in Ayrshire at the old home of my wife’s father. “Clerkland,” their old farm place, is there as good as it was centuries since, when presented by Mary Queen of Scots to Mary Livingstone, one of her maids of honor. It seems strange to read in the town register the name of every owner of the Gilmour home for three or four hundred years down to the present time. We do things differently in America, where we hardly know where our own fathers were born.

The old-fashioned graveyard back of the kirk at Stewarton, with its big brown granite slabs, confirms the town register. They are all there, save an occasional one who wandered beyond the sea and died among strangers. A pretty memorial window in the same kirk tells of John Gilmour, my wife’s uncle, a young poet, called the Kirk White of Ayrshire, who took all the Glasgow University prizes, won fame, and died at nineteen.

We went to every spot near Ayr, made illustrious by the name of Burns-Bonny Doon, Kilmarnock, Ellisland, everywhere, and held in our hands the very Bible the poet gave to Highland Mary as they bade farewell forever, standing with hands clasped across a little brook.

Our friend and guide was Mr. McKee, the old Burns scholar and historian, who in his youth had known many of Burns’ friends. He is a last link with the poet’s day. He gave me a souvenir, his own book on Burns. I have kept it with one given me later at Edinburgh by a friend of Walter Scott, who had been an apprentice in the printing house where Walter Scott was a member. As a messenger for the poet, he carried his manuscripts from Abbotsford to Edinburgh, and the money for them back to Scott. He wrote his name in an early edition of “Marmion,” and gave it to us.

St. Gall, Switzerland, May Day, 1891.-The Consulate and our home is at 41 Museum Strasse. The duties here are five times what they were at Rome. The district sends forty million francs worth of laces and embroideries to New York in a single year, and a hundred million francs worth of goods are sent from the country at large. These are all invoiced and samples examined at the consulates, while to avoid frauds, copies of the sworn invoices are sent to the shipper, to the Custom House, and to the Treasury.

There is not another city situated like St. Gall in all the world. It has 40,000 people, and they live like a little kingdom to themselves, up here among the Alps. The customs of the people differ from everything else in Switzerland. The families are as clannish as the old Scots, and their ways of doing things almost as old as their mountains.

This land of St. Gall was once a Republic by itself, like Venice. Its history is half forgotten. Napoleon put an end to it after it had endured five hundred years.

It was modeled on the plan of some of the Greek states. Its founders had been readers of history, not politicians trying experiments. They had a good chance to govern wholly for themselves, and to be let alone. They were isolated in the heart of the beautiful Alps, and their valleys were three or four thousand feet above sea level. Mountain scenery of the finest description surrounded them everywhere, just as it does the land of their children to-day. A thousand feet below them, lay a beautiful and historic lake.

They had Burgomasters for Presidents, and it was purely a people’s government. Its type exists in neighboring Appenzell even to-day. There the parliament meets in meadows, and the people pass laws by the showing of hands.

Wegelin, the famous historian of Frederick the Great, speaking of this forgotten government of St. Gall, says: “It is a Republic where a handful of virtuous citizens accomplish what the greatest monarchs fail in. They guard their state from disorder and revolution by the simple grace of homely virtues. An habitual honor prevails there as a happy instinct.”

To the honor of the modern dwellers in the land of the old Republic, let it be said, the virtues of their ancestors have not been forgotten.

A great Italian traveler visited the little old Republic once, and I translate from a letter he wrote home. It is a novel letter: “The people of the St. Gall Republic are great traders and manufacturers, and are noted for their integrity. Weaving linen is their great industry. There are few failures in business, and cheating is a crime. The merchants and traders are mostly nobles. They travel when young and learn all languages. Flax is spun here to the fineness of a hair. The bleaching is wonderful, owing to the pure water of the Alps. The rich own many estates in the Rhine valley near by, and beautiful gardens are about the town. The taxes are small, but more than support the economical government. The surplus in the city treasury is loaned to citizens at low interest, to insure factories, house building, etc. Officers are held to terribly strict account. The blessings of heaven rest on the Republic as a reward for its charities, which are unbelievably great. No citizen is permitted to live in bitter distress. The people are extremely pious and the men appear in church (close by) several times a day, in white collars and black mantles, while women serve God only in black dresses.”[12 - A detailed sketch by me of this remarkable little Republic, appeared in Magazine of American History, December, 1891.]

With some modifications as to taxes, church-going, etc., this Italian’s letter would be a fair description of the people here to-day. The manufacturing industry of their fathers, in changed form, continues, and St. Gall is the first embroidery-making city of the world.

In its neighborhood, 30,000 people work at hand looms in their pleasant homes, making curtains, lace edgings, handkerchiefs-the delight of mankind. Great factories, working steam machines, are also filling the world’s market with the same articles. Designing these beautiful articles has become a St. Gall fine art. Nature helps the artist here, for after a moist day and a cold night in winter, the pines of the forest, the hedge rows, the lawn trees and the vines put on a magnificence of frost work absolutely indescribable. Millions of forest pines, drooping with icicles, snow and frost, resemble an ocean of Christmas trees glinting in the sunlit gates of paradise.

The people of St. Gall, surrounded as they are, could not help but make things beautiful. That many have grown rich at it, and live in beautiful villas on the heights about the city, is not to be wondered at.

Sometimes, though, a high American tariff, or bitter competition elsewhere, make hard times for the common embroiderer whose wages are never high. This very winter starvation stares many of the makers of the beautiful things in the face, and a franc a day is the poor pittance for twelve hours’ work. In better times even six francs are earned. Then the great shippers, who furnish the linen and cotton and silk to the peasants, and buy their embroideries from them, grow rich. St. Gall is full of rich people, and it is full of scholars and culture.

Once a year the city itself, at its own expense, gives all the schools a great festival and banquet on some high, green meadow. The sight of from five to ten thousand happy boys and girls, all in pretty costumes, bearing garlands and marching with banners and music, is not to be forgotten.

*****

The Sirocco or Foehn winds have been blowing for a week. Sunday, the fine town of Meyringen was burned up, seven hotels and three hundred houses. Nothing can save a town, once on fire, when this dry scorching wind blast is in the mountains. It is no longer believed to be a Sirocco, however, coming from the African desert, but a thing born of the changeful temperatures in the mountains. It is a disagreeable freak of nature, and half the people are ill when the Foehn wind blows. But it brings the mountains out in added grandeur, everything seems nearer, snow fields and lofty mountains forty miles away seem but five miles off. Their distinctness then is marvelous, their beauty tenfold.

*****

The scenery everywhere about St. Gall is purely Alpine. The “Rosenberg,” a long, low mountain close by, is lined with magnificent villas; nothing like it elsewhere in the world. Back of these villas, far below them, but still in view, is the Lake of Constance. In front of them, deep in the valley, sits the city, while beyond the valley rise the glorious mountains. Nature and man have combined here to make everything beautiful. The people are kind and hospitable, more so than elsewhere in Switzerland. Evenings, we are often invited out to homes where the characteristic St. Gall life is enjoyable.

Many a time we have climbed up the Apfelberg to the homes of Swiss friends. Sylvester evenings, Christmas evenings, and the like, are celebrated by family reunions, sparkling Christmas trees and great dinners. Wine flows like water and the fatted Nüremberg goose takes the place of the American turkey. A circle is formed around the Christmas tree and all join hands and dance, father, mother, sister, brother, friends and servants. As at the country houses in England, for once, servants and master are on a footing. Everybody taking part gets his present.

On summer evenings the young ladies of the house sometimes place by our plates at supper wild Alpine roses that grew in their own garden. Possibly not another spot in the world, where fine modern homes and Alpine roses are side by side.

The view of the illuminated city at night from these high villas, is grand beyond any fireworks ever conceived. On festive occasions, fires are built on the sides of the opposite mountains, or Bengal lights burn on villa lawns high up beyond the valley, when the scene reveals all our imagined pictures of fairyland.

The Americans, together with the Minister and Consuls in Switzerland, celebrated the Fourth of July at the hotel “Baur au Lac” in Zurich. Minister Washburn presided. Many were present. The day before, I had sent cowboys into the higher Alps about St. Gall, to gather Alpine roses for the occasion. They brought me bushels of them, and the chief decoration of the table at the banquet was a solid pyramid of Alpine roses ten feet high.

Few American tourists visit St. Gall, but many New York importers have agents and factories here. There is a constant business rivalry between them and the Swiss.

One of the interesting people who came to us this summer was Princess Salm Salm. She has her home at Bonn on the Rhine. She is one of the most beautiful women to be met anywhere. A kind heart has kept her young. She is one of the few Americans who married foreign titles and were happy. It was a love match-not a buying of a bride. Her life has been one of extraordinary interest. Her husband, a German Prince on General Bleeker’s staff in our Civil War, fell in love with the young beauty at Washington, married her, and when the war was done took her with him to Mexico, where he was a high officer on the staff of the Emperor Maximilian. Like the Emperor, he was sentenced to be shot. His young wife, by extraordinary cleverness and great exertion, saved his life. History now relates how the Emperor’s life would have been saved also, had he followed this clever woman’s plans. All was arranged for his escape. The Emperor hesitated and was lost. The Prince and Princess went to Germany, where her beauty, talents and rank, brought her friends among the great people of the country. She and her husband were favorites of the King of Prussia. When the war with France broke out the Prince was an officer in the Fourth Guards, or the Queen’s Own regiment. His wife was one of the titled women of Germany who labored in the army hospitals. The Prince was shot dead while leading his command at Gravelotte. The Princess remained, helping the wounded to the end of the war. A more fascinating book than her story of her life in three wars, I have not read. Many novels have this interesting woman for their heroine.

*****

Last week, five of us, including my son, started to climb up the Saentis, the highest mountain in the vicinity. We began the ascent late. Storm and darkness coming on, we lost our way. Half the night was spent up there, creeping about on ice and stones. At last we stood still and yelled all together. We were heard at the little weather hut on top of the mountain at last, and the guides came down with dogs and lanterns and helped us out of our dilemma. We were all well used up, and as for myself, I received an injury that I may never get rid of. We got home next day, and were off the mountains just in time to escape a great snowfall that will bury the path till next year.

*****

General Sherman’s daughter, Mrs. Thackera, paid us a long visit, as did our old friends, the Edmundsons and Frankels.