Part 21

Mr. Barnum wanted me to write his Life. This would have been amusing work and profitable, but I shrunk from the idea of being identified with it. I might as well have done it, for I believe that Dr. Griswold performed the task, and the public never knew or cared anything about it. But my jolly companions at Dan Bixby's used to inquire of me at what hour we fed the monkeys, and whether the Great Gyascutus ever gave me any trouble; and I was sensitive to such insinuations.

At this time Mr. Barnum's great moral curiosity was a bearded lady, a jolly and not bad-looking Frenchwoman, whose beard was genuine enough, as I know, having pulled it. My own beard has been described by a French newspaper as _une barbe de Charlemagne_, a very polite pun, but hers was much fuller. It was soft as floss silk. After a while the capillary attraction ceased to draw, and Mr. Barnum thought of an admirable plan to revive it. He got somebody to prosecute him for false pretences and imposture, on the ground that Madame was a man. Then Mr. Barnum had, with the greatest unwillingness and many moral apologies, a medical examination; they might as sensibly have examined Vashishta's cow to find out if it was an Irish bull. Then came the attack on the impropriety of the whole thing, and finally Mr. Barnum's triumphant surrebutter, showing he had most unwillingly been _goaded_ by the attacks of malevolent wretches into an unavoidable course of defence. Of course, spotless innocence came out triumphant. Mr. Barnum's system of innocence was truly admirable. When he had concocted some monstrous cock-and-bull curiosity, he was wont to advertise that "it was with very great reluctance that he presented this unprecedented marvel to the world, as doubts had been expressed as to its genuineness--doubts inspired by the actually apparently incredible amount of attraction in it. All that we ask of an enlightened and honest public is, that it will pass a fair verdict and decide whether it be a humbug or not." So the enlightened public paid its quarters of a dollar, and decided that it _was_ a humbug, and Barnum abode by their decision, and then sent it to another city to be again decided on.

I returned to Philadelphia, and to my father's house, and occupied myself with such odds and ends of magazine and other writing as came in my way, and always reading and studying. I was very much depressed at this time, yet not daunted. My year in New York had familiarised me with characteristic phases of American life and manners; my father thought I had gone through a severe mill with rather doubtful characters, and once remarked that I should not judge too harshly of business men, for I had been unusually unfortunate in my experience.

A not unfrequent visitor at our house in Philadelphia was our near neighbour, Henry C. Carey, the distinguished scholar and writer on political economy, who had been so extensively robbed of ideas by Bastiat, and who retook his own, not without inflicting punishment. He was a handsome, black-eyed, white-haired man, with a very piercing glance. During the war, when men were sad and dull, and indeed till his death, Mr. Carey's one glorious and friendly extravagance was to assemble every Sunday afternoon all his intimates, including any distinguished strangers, at his house, round a table, in rooms magnificently hung with pictures, and give everybody, _ad libitum_, hock which cost him sixteen shillings a bottle. I occasionally obliged him by translating for him German letters, &c., and he in return revised my pamphlet on Centralization _versus_ State Rights in 1863. H. C. Baird, a very able writer of his school, was his nephew. The latter had two or three sisters, whom I recall as charming girls while I was a law-student. There were many beauties in Philadelphia in those days, and prominent at the time, though as yet a schoolgirl, was the since far-famed Emily Schaumberg, albeit I preferred Miss Belle Fisher, a descendant maternally of the famous Callender beauties, and by her father's side allied to Miss Vining, the American Queen of Beauty during the Revolution at Washington's republican court. There was also a Miss Lewis, whose great future beauty I predicted while as yet a child, to the astonishment of a few, "which prophecy was marvellously fulfilled." Also a Miss Wharton, since deceased, on whom George Boker after her death wrote an exquisite poem. The two were, each of their kind, of a beauty which I have rarely, if ever, seen equalled, and certainly never surpassed, in Italy. How I could extend the list of those too good and fair to live, who have passed away from my knowledge!--Miss Nannie Grigg--Miss Julia Biddle!--_Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan_?

Thus far my American experiences had not paid well. I reflected that if I had remained in Paris I should have done far better. When I left, I knew that the success of Louis Napoleon was inevitable. Three newspapers devoted to him had appeared on the Boulevards in one day. There was money at work, and workmen such as lived in the Hotel de Luxembourg, gentlemen who could not only plan barricades but fight at them, were in great demand, as _honest_ men always are in revolutions. Louis Napoleon was very anxious indeed to attach to him the men of February, and many who had not done one-tenth or one-twentieth of what I had, had the door of fortune flung wide open to them. My police-_dossier_ would have been literally a diploma of honour under the new Empire, for, after all, the men of February, Forty-eight, were the ones who led off, and who all bore the highest reputation for honour. All that I should have required would have been some ambitious man of means to aid--and such men abound in Paris--to have risen fast and high. As it turned out, it was just as well in the end that I neither went in as a political adventurer under Louis Napoleon, nor wrote the Life of Barnum. But no one knew in those days how Louis would turn out.

I have but one word to add to this. The secret of the Revolution of February had been in very few hands, which was the secret of its success. Any one of us could have secured fortune and "honours," or at least "orders," by betraying it. But we would as soon have secured orders for the pit of hell as done so. This was known to Louis Napoleon, and he must have realised who these men of iron integrity were for he was very curious and inquiring on this subject. Now, I here claim it as a great, as a surpassing honour for France, and as something absolutely without parallel in history, that several hundred men could be found who could not only keep this secret, but manage so very wisely as they did. Louis Blanc was an example of these honest, unselfish men. I came to know him personally many years after, during his exile in London.

One morning George H. Boker came to me and informed me that there was a writing editor wanted on the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_. Its proprietor was Alexander Cummings. The actual editor was Gibson Bannister Peacock, who was going to Europe for a six months' tour, and some one was wanted to take his place. Mr. Peacock, as I subsequently found, was an excellent editor, and a person of will and character. He was skilled in music and a man of culture. I retain grateful remembrances of him. I was introduced and installed. With all my experience I had not yet quite acquired the art of extemporaneous editorial composition. My first few weeks were a severe trial, but I succeeded. I was expected to write one column of leader every day, review books, and "paragraph" or condense articles to a brief item of news. In which I succeeded so well, that some time after, when a work appeared on writing for the press, the author, who did not know me at all, cited one of my leaders and one of my paragraphs as models. It actually made little impression on me at the time--I was so busy.

I had been at work but a short time, when one day Mr. Cummings received a letter from Mr. Peacock in Europe, which he certainly had hardly glanced at, which he threw to me to read. I did so, and found in it a passage to this effect: "I am sorry that you are disappointed as to Mr. Leland, but I am confident that you will find him perfectly capable in time." This gave me a bitter pang, but I returned it to Mr. Cummings, who soon after came into the office and expressed frankly his great regret, saying that since he had written to Mr. Peacock he had quite changed his opinion.

I enjoyed this new life to the utmost. Mr. Cummings, to tell the truth, pursued a somewhat tortuous course in politics and religion. He was a Methodist. One day our clerk expressed himself as to the latter in these words:--"They say he is a Jumper, but others think he has gone over to the Holy Rollers." The Jumpers were a sect whose members, when the Holy Spirit seized them, jumped up and down, while the Holy Rollers under such circumstances rolled over and over on the floor. We also advocated Native Americanism and Temperance, which did not prevent Mr. Peacock and myself and a few _habitues_ of the office from going daily at eleven o'clock to a neighbouring lager-beer _Wirthschaft_ for a refreshing glass and lunch. One day the bar-tender, Hermann, a very nice fellow, said to me, "I remember when you always had a bottle of Rudesheimer every day for dinner. That was at Herr Lehr's, in Heidelberg. I always waited on you."

Whoever shall write a history of Philadelphia from the Thirties to the end of the Fifties will record a popular period of turbulence and outrages so extensive as to now appear almost incredible. These were so great as to cause grave doubts in my mind whether the severest despotism, guided by justice, would not have been preferable to such republican license as then prevailed in the city of Penn. I refer to the absolute and uncontrolled rule of the Volunteer Fire Department, which was divided into companies (each having clumsy old fire apparatus and hose), all of them at deadly feud among themselves, and fighting freely with pistols, knives, iron spanners, and slung shot, whenever they met, whether at fires or in the streets. Of these regular firemen, _fifty thousand_ were enrolled, and to these might have been added almost as many more, who were known as runners, bummers, and hangers-on. Among the latter were a great number of incendiaries, all of whom were well known to and encouraged by the firemen. Whenever the latter wished to meet some rival company, either to test their mutual skill or engage in a fight, a fire was sure to occur; the same always happened when a fire company from some other city visited Philadelphia.

This gave occasion to an incredible amount of blackmailing, since all house-owners were frequently called on to contribute money to the different companies, sometimes as a subscription for ball-tickets or repairs. It was well understood, and generally pretty plainly expressed, that those who refused to pay might expect to be burned out or neglected. The result of it all was a general fear of the firemen, a most degrading and contemptible subservience to them by politicians of all kinds, a terrible and general growth and spread of turbulence and coarse vulgarity among youth, and finally, such a prevalence of conflagration that no one who owned a house could hear the awful tones of the bell of Independence Hall without terror. Fires were literally of nightly occurrence, and that they were invariably by night was due to the incendiary "runner." A slight examination of the newspapers and cheap broadside literature of that time will amply confirm all that I here state. "Jakey" was the typical fireman; he was the brutal hero of a vulgar play, and the ideal of nineteen youths out of twenty. For a generation or more all society felt the degrading influences of this rowdyism in almost every circle--for there were among the vast majority of men not very many who respected, looked up to, or cared for anything really cultured or refined. I have a large collection of the popular songs of Philadelphia of that time, in all of which there is a striving downwards into blackguardism and brutality, vileness and ignorance, which has no parallel in the literature of any other nation. The French of the _Pere Duchene_ school may be nastier, and, as regards aristocrats, as bloody, but for general all-round _vulgarity_, the state of morals developed among the people at the time of which I speak was literally without its like. It is very strange that Pliny also speaks of the turbulence or rowdyism of the firemen of Rome.

I remember that even in Walnut Street, below Thirteenth Street, before my father's house (this being then by far the most respectable portion of Philadelphia), it happened several nights in succession that rival fire- companies, running side by side, fought as they ran, with torches and knives, while firing pistols. There was a young lady named Mary Bicking, who lived near us. I asked her one day if she had ever seen a man shot; and when she answered "No," I replied, "Why don't you look out of your window some night and see one?"

The southern part of the city was a favourite battleground, and I can remember hearing ladies who lived in Pine Street describe how, on Sunday summer afternoons, they could always hear, singly or in volleys, the shots of the revolvers and shouts of the firemen as they fought in Moyamensing.

Every effort to diminish these evils, or to improve the fire department in any way whatever, was vigorously opposed by the rowdies, who completely governed the city. The first fire-alarm electric telegraphs were a great offence to firemen, and were quietly destroyed; the steam- engines were regarded by them as deadly enemies. But the first great efficient reform in the Philadelphia fire department, and the most radical of all, was the establishment of a fire-detective department under a fire-marshal, whose business it was to investigate and punish all cases of incendiarism. For it was simply incendiarism, encouraged and supported by the firemen themselves, which caused nineteen-twentieths of all these disasters; it was the _fires_ which were the sole support of the whole system.

I was much indebted for understanding all this, and acting on it boldly, as I did, to the city editor and chief reporter on the _Evening Bulletin_, Caspar Souder. The Mayor of the city was Richard Vaux, a man of good family and education, and one who had seen in his time cities and men, he having once in his youth, on some great occasion, waltzed with the Princess--now Queen--Victoria. Being popular, he was called _Vaux populi_. I wrote very often leaders urging Mayor Vaux by name to establish a fire-detective department. So great was the indignation caused among the firemen, that I incurred no small risk in writing them. But at last, when I published for one week an article every day clamouring for a reform, Mayor Vaux--as he said directly to Mr. Souder, "in consequence of my appeals"--vigorously established a fire-marshal with two aids. By my request, the office was bestowed on a very intelligent and well-educated person, Dr. Blackburne, who had been a surgeon in the Mexican war, then a reporter on our journal, and finally a very clever superior detective. He was really not only a born detective, but to a marked degree a man of scientific attainments and a skilled statistician. His anecdotes and comments as to pyromaniacs of different kinds were as entertaining and curious as anything recorded by Gaboriau. Some of the most interesting experiences of my life were when I went with Dr. Blackburne from place to place where efforts had been made to burn houses, and noted the unerring and Red-Indian skill with which he distinguished the style of work, and identified the persons and names of the incendiaries. One of these "fire-bugs" was noted for invariably setting fire to houses in such a manner as to destroy as many inmates as possible. If there were an exit, he would block it up. Dr. Blackburne took me to a wooden house in which the two staircases led to a very small vestibule about three feet square before the front door. This space had been filled with diabolical ingenuity with a barrel full of combustibles, so that every one who tried to escape by the only opening below would be sure to perish. Fortunately, the combustibles in the barrel went out after being ignited. "I know that fellow by his style," remarked the Doctor, "and I shall arrest him at four o'clock this afternoon."

This fire-detective department and the appointment of Blackburne was the real basis and beginning of all the reforms which soon followed, leading to the abolition of the volunteer system and the establishment of paid _employes_. And as I received great credit for it then, my work being warmly recognised and known to all the newspaper reporters and editors in the city, who were the best judges of it, as they indeed are of all municipal matters, I venture to record it here as something worth mentioning. And though I may truly say that at the time I was so busy that I made no account of many such things, they now rise up from time to time as comforting assurances that my life has not been quite wasted.

This reminds me that I had not been very long on the newspaper, and had just begun to throw out editorials with ease, when Mr. Cummings said to me one day that I did not realise what a power I held in my hand, but that I would soon find it out. Almost immediately after, in noticing some article or book which was for sale at No. 24 Chestnut Street, I inadvertently made reference to 24 Walnut Street. Very soon came the proprietor of the latter place, complaining that I had made life a burden to him, because fifty people had come in one day to buy something which he had not. I reflected long and deeply on this, with the result of observing that to influence people it is not at all necessary to argue with them, but simply be able to place before their eyes such facts as you choose. It is very common indeed to hear people in England, who should have more sense, declare that "nobody minds what the newspapers say." But the truth is, that if any man has an eye to read and memory to retain, he _must_, willy-nilly, be influenced by reading, and selection from others by an able editor is often only a most ingenious and artful method of arguing. It has very often happened to me, when I wanted to enforce some important point, to clothe it as an anecdote or innocent "item," and bid the foreman set it in the smallest type in the most obscure corner. And the reader is influenced by it, utterly unconsciously, just as we all are, and just as surely as all reflection follows sensation--as it ever will--into the Ages!

There was much mutual robbing by newspapers of telegraphic news in those days. Once it befell that just before the _Bulletin_ went to press a part of the powder-mills of Dupont Brothers in Delaware blew up, and we received a few lines of telegram, stating that Mr. Dupont himself had saved the great magazine by actually walking on a burning building with buckets of water, and preventing the fire from extending, at a most incredible risk of his life. Having half-an-hour's time, I expanded this telegram into something dramatic and thrilling. A great New York newspaper, thinking, from the shortness of time which elapsed in publishing, that it was all telegraphed to us, printed it as one of its own from Delaware, just as I had written it out--which I freely forgive, for verily its review of my last work but one was such as to make me inquire of myself in utter amazement, "Can this be I?"--"so gloriously was I exalted to the higher life." The result of this review was a sworn and firm determination on my part to write another book of the same kind, in which I should show myself more worthy of such cordial encouragement; which latter book was the "Etruscan Legends." I ought indeed to have dedicated it to the _New York Tribune_, a journal which has done more for human freedom than any other publication in history.

I do not know certainly whether the brave Dupont whom I mentioned was the Charley Dupont who went to school with me at Jacob Pierce's, nor can I declare that a very gentlemanly old Frenchman who came to see him in 1832 was his father or grandfather, the famous old Dupont de l'Eure of the French Revolution. But I suppose it was the latter who carried and transformed the art of manufacturing moral gunpowder in France to the making material explosives in America. Yes, moral or physical, we are all but gunpowder and smoke--_pulvis et umbra sumus_!

There was a morning paper in Philadelphia which grieved me sore by pilfering my news items as I wrote them. So I one day gave a marvellous account of the great Volatile Chelidonian or Flying Turtle of Surinam, of which a specimen had just arrived in New York. It had a shell as of diamonds blent with emeralds and rubies, and bat-like wings of iridescent hue surpassing the opal, and a tail like a serpent. Our contemporary, nothing doubting, at once published this as original matter in a letter from New York, and had to bear the responsibility. But I did not invest my inventiveness wisely; I should have shared the idea with Barnum.

There was in Philadelphia at this time a German bookseller named Christern. It was the thought of honourable and devoted men which recalled him to my mind. I had made his acquaintance long before in Munich, where he had been employed in the principal bookseller's shop of the city. His "store" in Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, became a kind of club, where I brought such of my friends as were interested in German literature. We met there and talked German, and examined and discussed all the latest European works. He had a burly, honest, rather droll assistant named Ruhl, who had been a student in Munich, then a Revolutionist and exile, and finally a refugee to America. To this shop, too, came Andrekovitch, whom I had last known in Paris as a speculator on the Bourse, wearing a cloak lined with sables. In America he became a chemical manufacturer. When at last an amnesty was proclaimed, his brother asked him to return to Poland, promising a support, which he declined. He too was an honourable, independent man. About this time the great--I forget his name; or was it Schoffel?--who had been President of the Frankfort Revolutionary Parliament, opened a lager-beer establishment in Race Street. I went there several times with Ruhl.