Greater Britain

The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth. Up to the commencement of the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians of Central North America, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the English colonists, no numerous race had ever been blotted out by an invader. The Danes and Saxons amalgamated with the Britons, the Normans with the English, the Tartars with the Chinese, the Goths and Burgundians with the Gauls: the Spaniards not only never annihilated a people, but have themselves been all but completely expelled by the Indians, in Mexico and South America. The Portuguese in Ceylon, the Dutch in Java, the French in Canada and Algeria, have conquered but not killed off the native peoples. Hitherto it has been nature‘s rule, that the race that peopled a country in the earliest historic days should people it to the end of time. The American problem is this: does the law, in a modified shape, hold good, in spite of the destruction of the native population? Is it true that the negroes, now that they are free, are commencing slowly to die out? that the New Englanders are dying fast, and their places being supplied by immigrants? Can the English in America, in the long run, survive the common fate of all migrating races? Is it true that, if the American settlers continue to exist, it will be at the price of being no longer English, but Red Indian? It is certain that the English families long in the land have the features of the extirpated race; on the other hand, in the negroes there is at present no trace of any change, save in their becoming dark brown instead of black.

The Maories – an immigrant race – were dying off in New Zealand when we landed there. The Indians of Mexico – another immigrant people – had themselves undergone decline, numerical and moral, when we first became acquainted with them. Are we English in turn to degenerate abroad, under pressure of a great natural law forbidding change? It is easy to say that the English in Old England are not a native but an immigrant race; that they show no symptoms of decline. There, however, the change was slight, the distance short, the difference of climate small.

The rapidity of the disappearance of physical type is equaled at least, if not exceeded, by that of the total alteration of the moral characteristics of the immigrant races – the entire destruction of eccentricity, in short. The change that comes over those among the Irish who do not remain in the great towns is not greater than that which overtakes the English handworkers, of whom some thousands reach America each year. Gradually settling down on land, and finding themselves lost in a sea of intelligence, and freed from the inspiring obstacles of antiquated institutions and class prejudice, the English handicraftsman, ceasing to be roused to aggressive Radicalism by the opposition of sinister interests, merges into the contented homestead settler, or adventurous backwoodsman. Greater even than this revolution of character is that which falls upon the Celt. Not only is it a fact known alike to physiologists and statisticians, that the children of Irish parents born in America are, physically, not Irish, Americans, but the like is true of the moral type: the change in this is at least as sweeping. The son of Fenian Pat and bright-eyed Biddy is the normal gaunt American, quick of thought, but slow of speech, whom we have begun to recognize as the latest product of the Saxon race, when housed upon the Western prairies, or in the pine-woods of New England.

For the moral change in the British workman it is not difficult to account: the man who will leave country, home, and friends, to seek new fortunes in America, is essentially not an ordinary man. As a rule, he is above the average in intelligence, or, if defective in this point, he makes up for lack of wit by the possession of concentrativeness and energy. Such a man will have pushed himself to the front in his club, his union, or his shop, before he emigrates. In England he is somebody; in America he finds all hands contented; or, if not this, at all events too busy to complain of such ills as they profess to labor under. Among contented men, his equals both in intelligence and ambition, in a country of perfect freedom of speech, of manners, of laws, and of society, the occupation of his mind is gone, and he comes to think himself what others seem to think – a nobody; a man who no longer is a living force. He settles upon land; and when the world knows him no more, his children are happy corn-growers in his stead.

The shape of North America makes the existence of distinct peoples within her limits almost impossible. An upturned bowl, with a mountain rim, from which the streams run inward toward the center, she must fuse together all the races that settle within her borders, and the fusion must now be in an English mould.

There are homogeneous foreign populations in several portions of the United States; not only the Irish and Chinese, at whose prospects we have already glanced, but also Germans in Pennsylvania, Spanish in Florida, French in Louisiana and at Sault de Ste Marie. In Wisconsin there is a Norwegian population of over a hundred thousand, retaining their own language and their own architecture, and presenting the appearance of a tough morsel for the English to digest; at the same time, the Swedes were the first settlers of Delaware and New Jersey, and there they have disappeared.

Milwaukee is a Norwegian town. The houses are narrow and high, the windows many, with circular tops ornamented in wood or dark-brown stone, and a heavy wooden cornice crowns the front. The churches have the wooden bulb and spire which are characteristic of the Scandinavian public buildings. The Norwegians will not mix with other races, and invariably flock to spots where there is already a large population speaking their own tongue. Those who enter Canada generally become dissatisfied with the country, and pass on into Wisconsin, or Minnesota, but the Canadian government has now under its consideration a plan for founding a Norwegian colony on Lake Huron. The numbers of this people are not so great as to make it important to inquire whether they will ever merge into the general population. Analogy would lead us to expect that they will be absorbed; their existence is not historical, like that of the French in Lower Canada.

From Burlington, in Iowa, I had visited a spot the history of which is typical of the development of America – Nauvoo. Founded in 1840 by Joe Smith, the Mormon city stood upon a bluff overhanging the Des Moines rapids of the Mississippi, presenting on the land side the aspect of a gentle, graceful slope, surmounted by a plain. After the fanatical pioneers of English civilization had been driven from the city, and their temple burnt, there came Cabet‘s Icarian band, who tried to found a new France in the desert; but in 1856 the leader died, and his people dispersed themselves about the States of Iowa and Missouri. Next came the English settlers, active, thriving, regardless of tradition, and Nauvoo is entering on a new life as the capital of a Wine-growing country. I found Cabet and the Mormons alike forgotten. The ruins of the temple have disappeared, and the huge stones have been used up in cellars, built to contain the Hock – a pleasant wine, like Zeltinger.

The bearing upon religion of the gradual destruction of race is of great moment to the world. Christianity will gain by the change; but which of its many branches will receive support is a question which only admits of an imperfect answer. Arguing à priori, we should expect to find that, on the one hand, a tendency toward unity would manifest itself, taking the shape, perhaps, of a gain of strength by the Catholic and Anglican Churches; on the other hand, there would be a contrary and still stronger tendency toward an infinite multiplication of beliefs, till millions of men and women would become each of them his own church. Coming to the actual cases in which we can trace the tendencies that commence to manifest themselves, we find that in America the Anglican Church is gaining ground, especially on the Pacific side, and that the Catholics do not seem to meet with any such success as we should have looked for; retaining, indeed, their hold over the Irish women and a portion of the men, and having their historic French branches in Louisiana and in Canada, but not, unless it be in the Cities of New York and Philadelphia, making much way among the English.

Between San Francisco and Chicago, for religious purposes the most cosmopolitan of cities, we have to draw distinctions. In the Pacific city the disturbing cause is the presence of New Yorkers; in the metropolis of the Northwestern States it is the dominance of New England ideas: still, we shall find no two cities so free from local color, and from the influence of race. The result of an examination is not encouraging: in both cities there is much external show in the shape of church attendance; in neither does religion strike its roots deeply into the hearts of the citizens, except so far as it is alien and imported.

The Spiritualist and Unitarian churches are both of them in Chicago extremely strong: they support newspapers and periodicals of their own, and are led by men and women of remarkable ability, but they are not the less Cambridge Unitarianism, Boston Spiritualism; there is nothing of the Northwest about them. In San Francisco, on the other hand, Anglicanism is prospering, but it is New York Episcopalianism, sustained by immigrants and money from the East; in no sense is it a Californian church.

Throughout America the multiplication of churches is rapid, but among the native-born Americans, Supernaturalism is advancing with great strides. The Shakers are strong in thought, the Spiritualists in wealth and numbers; Communism gains ground, but not Polygamy – the Mormon is a purely European church.

There is just now progressing in America a great movement, headed by the “Radical Unitarians,” toward “free religion,” or church without creed. The leaders deny that there is sufficient security for the spread of religion in each man‘s individual action: they desire collective work by all free-thinkers and liberal religionists in the direction of truth and purity of life. Christianity is higher than dogma, we are told; there is no way out of infinite multiplication of creeds but by their total extirpation. Oneness of purpose and a common love for truth form the members’ only tie. Elder Frederick Evans said to me: “All truth forms part of Shakerism;” but these free religionists assure us that in all truth consists their sole religion.

The distinctive feature of these American philosophical and religious systems is their gigantic width: for instance, every human being who admits that disembodied spirits may in any way hold intercourse with dwellers upon earth, whatever else he may believe or disbelieve, is claimed by the Spiritualists as a member of their church. They tell us that by “Spiritualism they understand whatever bears relation to spirit;” their system embraces all existence, brute, human, and divine; in fact, “the real man is a spirit.” According to these ardent proselytizers, every poet, every man with a grain of imagination in his nature, is a “Spiritualist.” They claim Plato, Socrates, Milton, Shakspeare, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Luther, Joseph Addison, Melancthon, Paul, Stephen, the whole of the Hebrew prophets, Homer, and John Wesley, among the members of their Church. They have lately canonized new saints: St. Confucius, St. Theodore (Parker), St. Ralph (Waldo Emerson), St. Emma (Hardinge), all figure in their calendar. It is a noteworthy fact that the saints are mostly resident in New England.

The tracts published at the Spiritual Clarion office, Auburn, New York, put forward Spiritualism as a religion which is to stand toward existing churches as did Christianity toward Judaism, and announce a new dispensation to the peoples of the earth “who have sown their wild oats in Christianity,” but they spell supersede with a “c.”

This strange religion has long since left behind the rappings and table-turnings in which it took its birth. The secret of its success is that it supplies to every man the satisfaction of the universal craving for the supernatural, in any form in which he will receive it. The Spiritualists claim two millions of active believers and five million “favorers” in America.

The presence of a large German population is thought by some to have an important bearing on the religious future of America, but the Germans have hitherto kept themselves apart from the intellectual progress of the nation. They, as a rule, withdraw from towns, and, retaining their language and supporting local papers of their own, live out of the world of American literature and politics; taking, however, at rare intervals, a patriotic part in national affairs, as was notably the case at the time of the late rebellion. Living thus by themselves, they have even less influence upon American religious thought than have the Irish, who, speaking the English tongue, and dwelling almost exclusively in towns, are brought more into contact with the daily life of the republic. The Germans in America are in the main pure materialists under a certain show of deism, but hitherto there has been no alliance between them and the powerful Chicago Radical Unitarians, difference of language having thus far proved a bar to the formation of a league which would otherwise have been inevitable.

On the whole, it would seem that for the moment religious prospects are not bright; the tendency is rather toward intense and unhealthily-developed feeling in the few, and subscription to some one of the Episcopalian churches – Catholic, Anglican, or Methodist – among the many, coupled with real indifference. Neither the tendency to unity of creeds nor that toward infinite multiplication of beliefs has yet made that progress which abstract speculation would have led us to expect, but so far as we can judge from the few facts before us, there is much likelihood that multiplication will in the future prove too strong for unity.

After all there is not in America a greater wonder than the Englishman himself, for it is to this continent that you must come to find him in full possession of his powers. Two hundred and fifty millions of people speak or are ruled by those who speak the English tongue, and inhabit a third of the habitable globe; but, at the present rate of increase, in sixty years there will be two hundred and fifty millions of Englishmen dwelling in the United States alone. America has somewhat grown since the time when it was gravely proposed to call her Alleghania, after a chain of mountains which, looking from this western side, may be said to skirt her eastern border, and the loftiest peaks of which are but half the height of the very passes of the Rocky Mountains.

America is becoming not English merely, but world-embracing in the variety of its type; and, as the English element has given language and history to that land, America offers the English race the moral directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue. Through America, England is speaking to the world.

PART II.

POLYNESIA

CHAPTER I.

PITCAIRN ISLAND

PANAMA is a picturesque time-worn Spanish city, that rises abruptly from the sea in a confused pile of decaying bastions and decayed cathedrals, while a dense jungle of mangrove and bamboo threatens to bury it in rich greenery. The forest is filled with baboons and lizards of gigantic size, and is gay with the bright plumage of the toucans and macaws, while, within the walls, every housetop bears its living load of hideous turkey-buzzards, foul-winged and bloodshot-eyed.

It was the rainy season (which here, indeed, lasts for three-quarters of the year), and each day was an alternation of shower-bath, and vapor-bath with sickly sun. On the first night of my stay, there was a lunar rainbow, which I went on to the roof of the hotel to watch. The misty sky was white with the reflected light of the hidden moon, which was obscured by an inky cloud, that seemed a tunnel through the heavens. In a few minutes I was driven from my post by the tropical rain.

At the railway station, I parted from my Californian friends, who were bound for Aspinwall, and thence by steamer to New York. A stranger scene it has not often been my fortune to behold. There cannot have been less than a thousand natives, wearing enormous hats and little else, and selling everything, from linen suits to the last French novel. A tame jaguar, a pelican, parrots, monkeys, pearls, shells, flowers, green cocoa-nuts and turtles, mangoes and wild dogs, were among the things for sale. The station was guarded by the army of the Republic of New Granada, consisting of five officers, a bugler, a drummer, and nineteen privates. Six of the men wore red trowsers and dirty shirts for uniform; the rest dressed as they pleased, which was generally in Adamic style. Not even the officers had shoes; and of the twenty-one men, one was a full-blooded Indian, some ten were negroes, and the remainder nondescripts, but among them was of course an Irishman from Cork or Kilkenny. After the train had started, the troops formed, and marched briskly through the town, the drummer trotting along some twenty yards before the company, French-fashion, and beating the retraite. The French invalids from Acapulco, who were awaiting in Panama the arrival of an Imperial frigate at Aspinwall, stood in the streets to see the New Granadans pass, twirling their moustaches, and smiling grimly. One old drum-major, lean and worn with fever, turned to me, and, shrugging his shoulders, pointed to his side: the Granadans had their bayonets tied on with string.

Whether Panama will continue to hold its present position as the “gate of the Pacific” is somewhat doubtful: Nicaragua offers greater advantages to the English, Tehuantepec to the American traders. The Gulf of Panama and the ocean for a great distance to the westward from its mouth are notorious for their freedom from all breezes; the gulf lies, indeed, in the equatorial belt of calms, and sailing-vessels can never make much use of the port of Panama. Aspinwall or Colon, on the Atlantic side, has no true port whatever. As long, however, as the question is merely one of railroad and steamship traffic, Panama may hold its own against the other isthmus cities; but when the canal is cut, the selected spot must be one that shall be beyond the reach of calms – in Nicaragua or Mexico.

From Panama I sailed in one of the ships of the new Colonial Line, for Wellington, in New Zealand – the longest steam-voyage in the world. Our course was to be a “great circle” to Pitcairn Island, and another great circle thence to Cape Palliser, near Wellington – a distance in all of some 6600 miles; but our actual course was nearer 7000. When off the Galapagos Islands, we met the cold southerly wind and water, known as the Chilian current, and crossed the equator in a breeze which forced us all to wear great-coats, and to dream that, instead of entering the southern hemisphere, we had come by mistake within the arctic circle.

After traversing lonely and hitherto unknown seas and looking in vain for a new guano island, on the sixteenth day we worked out the ship‘s position at noon with more than usual care, if that were possible, and found that in four hours we ought to be at Pitcairn Island. At half-past two o‘clock, land was sighted right ahead; and by four o‘clock, we were in the bay, such as it is, at Pitcairn.

Although at sea there was a calm, the surf from the ground-swell beat heavily upon the shore, and we were faint to content ourselves with the view of the island from our decks. It consists of a single volcanic peak, hung with an arras of green creeping plants, passion-flowers, and trumpet-vines. As for the people, they came off to us dancing over the seas in their canoes, and bringing us green oranges and bananas, while a huge Union Jack was run up on their flagstaff by those who remained on shore.

As the first man came on deck, he rushed to the captain, and, shaking hands violently, cried, in pure English, entirely free from accent, “How do you do, captain? How‘s Victoria?” There was no disrespect in the omission of the title “Queen;” the question seemed to come from the heart. The bright-eyed lads, Adams and Young, descendants of the Bounty mutineers, who had been the first to climb our sides, announced the coming of Moses Young, the “magistrate” of the isle, who presently boarded us in state. He was a grave and gentlemanly man, English in appearance, but somewhat slightly built, as were, indeed, the lads. The magistrate came off to lay before the captain the facts relating to a feud which exists between two parties of the islanders, and upon which they require arbitration. He had been under the impression that we were a man-of-war, as we had fired two guns on entering the bay, and being received by our officers, who wore the cap of the Naval Reserve, he continued in the belief till the captain explained what the “Rakaia” was, and why she had called at Pitcairn.

The case which the captain was to have heard judicially was laid before us for our advice while the flues of the ship were being cleaned. When the British government removed the Pitcairn Islanders to Norfolk Island, no return to the old home was contemplated, but the indolent half-castes found the task of keeping the Norfolk Island convict roads in good repair one heavier than they cared to perform, and fifty-two of them have lately come back to Pitcairn. A widow who returned with the others claims a third of the whole island as having been the property of her late husband, and is supported in her demand by half the islanders, while Moses Young and the remainder of the people admit the facts, but assert that the desertion of the island was complete, and operated as an entire abandonment of titles, which the reoccupation cannot revive. The success of the woman‘s claim, they say, would be the destruction of the prosperity of Pitcairn.

The case would be an extremely curious one if it had to be decided upon legal grounds, for it would raise complicated questions both on the nature of British citizenship and the character of the “occupation” title; but it is probable that the islanders will abide by the decision of the Governor of New South Wales, to which colony they consider themselves in some degree attached.

When we had drawn up a case to be submitted to Sir John Young, at Sydney, our captain made a commercial treaty with the magistrate, who agreed to supply the ships of the new line, whenever daylight allowed them to call at Pitcairn, with oranges, bananas, ducks, and fowls, for which he was to receive cloth and tobacco in exchange, tobacco being the money of the Polynesian Archipelago. Mr. Young told us that his people had thirty sheep, which were owned by each of the families in turn, the household taking care of them, and receiving the profits for one year. Water, he said, sometimes falls short in the island, but they then make use of the juice of the green cocoa-nut. Their school is excellent; all the children can read and write, and in the election of magistrates they have female suffrage.

When we went on deck again to talk to the younger men, Adams asked us a new question: “Have you a Sunday at Home, or a British Workman?” Our books and papers having been ransacked, Moses Young prepared to leave the ship, taking with him presents from the stores. Besides the cloth, tobacco, hats, and linen, there was a bottle of brandy; given for medicine, as the islanders are strict teetotalers. While Young held the bottle in his hand, afraid to trust the lads with it, Adams read the label and cried out, “Brandy? How much for a dose?.. Oh, yes! all right – I know: it‘s good for the women!” When they at last left the ship‘s side, one of the canoes was filled with a crinoline and blue silk dress for Mrs. Young, and another with a red and brown tartan for Mrs. Adams, both given by lady passengers, while the lads went ashore in dust-coats and smoking-caps.

Now that the French, with their singular habit of everywhere annexing countries which other colonizing nations have rejected, are rapidly occupying all the Polynesian groups except the only ones that are of value – namely, the Sandwich Islands and New Zealand – Pitcairn becomes of some interest as a solitary British post on the very border of the French dominions, and it has for us the stronger claim to notice which is raised by the fact that it has figured for the last few years on the wrong side of our British budget.

As we stood out from the bay into the lonely seas, the island peak showed a black outline against a pale-green sky, but in the west the heavy clouds that in the Pacific never fail to cumber the horizon were glowing with a crimson cast by the now-set sun, and the dancing wavelets were tinted with reflected hues.

The “scarlet shafts,” which poets have ascribed to the tropical sunrise, are common at sunset in the South Pacific. Almost every night the declining sun, sinking behind the clouds, throws rays across the sky – not yellow, as in Europe and America, but red or rosy pink. On the night after leaving Pitcairn, I saw a still grander effect of light and color. The sun had set, and in the west the clear greenish sky was hidden by pitch-black thunder-clouds. Through these were crimson caves.

On the twenty-ninth day of our voyage, we sighted the frowning cliffs of Palliser, where the bold bluff, coming sheer down three thousand feet, receives the full shock of the South Seas – a fitting introduction to the grand scenery of New Zealand; and within a few hours we were running up the great sea-lake of Port Nicholson toward long lines of steamers at a wharf, behind which were the cottages of Wellington, the capital.

To me, coming from San Francisco and the Nevadan towns, Wellington appeared very English and extremely quiet; the town is sunny and still, but with a holiday look; indeed, I could not help fancying that it was Sunday. A certain haziness as to what was the day of the week prevailed among the passengers and crew, for we had arrived upon our Wednesday, the New Zealand Thursday, and so, without losing an hour, lost a day, which, unless by going round the world the other way, can never be regained. The bright colors of the painted wooden houses, the clear air, the rose-beds, and the emerald-green grass, are the true cause of the holiday look of the New Zealand towns, and Wellington is the gayest of them all; for, owing to the frequency of earthquakes, the townsfolk are not allowed to build in brick or stone. The natives say that once in every month “Ruaimoko turns himself,” and sad things follow to the shaken earth.

It was now November, the New Zealand spring, and the outskirts of Wellington were gay with the cherry-trees in full fruiting and English dog-roses in full bloom, while on every road-side bank the gorse blazed in its coat of yellow: there was, too, to me, a singular charm in the bright green turf, after the tawny grass of California.

Without making a long halt, I started for the South Island, first steaming across Cook‘s Straits, and up Queen Charlotte Sound to Picton, and then through the French Pass – a narrow passage filled with fearful whirlpools – to Nelson, a gemlike little Cornish village. After a day‘s “cattle-branding” with an old college friend at his farm in the valley of the Maitai, I sailed again for the south, laying for a night in Massacre Bay, to avoid the worst of a tremendous gale, and then coasting down to The Buller and Hokitika – the new gold-fields of the colonies.

CHAPTER II.

HOKITIKA

PLACED in the very track of storms, and open to the sweep of rolling seas from every quarter, exposed to waves that run from pole to pole, or from South Africa, to Cape Horn, the shores of New Zealand are famed for swell and surf, and her western rivers for the danger of their bars. Insurances at Melbourne are five times as high for the voyage to Hokitika as for the longer cruise to Brisbane.

In our little steamer of a hundred tons, built to cross the bars, we had reached the mouth of the Hokitika River soon after dark, but lay all night some ten miles to the southwest of the port. As we steamed in the early morning from our anchorage, there rose up on the east the finest sunrise view on which it has been my fortune to set eyes.

A hundred miles of the Southern Alps stood out upon a pale-blue sky in curves of a gloomy white that were just beginning to blush with pink, but ended to the southward in a cone of fire that stood up from the ocean: it was the snow-dome of Mount Cook struck by the rising sun. The evergreen bush, flaming with the crimson of the rata-blooms, hung upon the mountain-side, and covered the plain to the very margin of the narrow sands with a dense jungle. It was one of those sights that haunt men for years, like the eyes of Mary in Bellini‘s Milan picture.

On the bar, three ranks of waves appeared to stand fixed in walls of surf. These huge rollers are sad destroyers of the New Zealand coasting ships: a steamer was lost here a week before my visit, and the harbormaster‘s whale-boat dashed in pieces, and two men drowned.

Lashing everything that was on deck, and battening down the hatches in case we should ground in crossing, we prepared to run the gauntlet. The steamers often ground for an instant while in the trough between the waves, and the second sea, pooping them, sweeps them from end to end, but carries them into the still water. Watching our time, we were borne on a great rolling white-capped wave into the quiet lakelet that forms the harbor, just as the sun, coming slowly up behind the range, was firing the Alps from north to south; but it was not till we had lain some minutes at the wharf that the sun rose to us poor mortals of the sea and plain. Hokitika Bay is strangely like the lower portion of the Lago Maggiore, but Mount Rosa is inferior to Mount Cook.