Page images
PDF
EPUB

human society from its first beginning to its ultimate end, an actual martial law of more validity than any other law whatever.' These statements are merely declaratory of what is universally known: there is nothing new about them. This law of necessity rests

on the instinct of self-preservation."

Referring to the man Lindley who had been killed, the speaker denied that it was murder. "Murder was the deliberate taking away of life which one did not deserve to lose. Lindley deserved to lose his; the children starved to death during the past ten years did not deserve to lose theirs." He made a bitter retort upon those in high places who had been so shocked at the Sheffield outrages. They had apologized for the saturnalia of crime which had occurred in Jamaica under Eyre; for the bcmbardment of Canton and of Kagosima without any declaration of war; for the blowing of Sepoys out of guns: did they not all feel the hypocrisy of their exclamations of horror at the death of Lindley?

I am not moralizing upon these facts; my object is simply to state the facts of the situation and the conditions under which the battle is being fought. Undoubtedly the assumption of the English working-men to carry on a practical government of their own were a frightful and intolerable one in any free and impartial government; but those who make it in England have at least the right to be judged under the fact that they are entirely excluded from all participation in framing the ordinary laws of the land; that these laws are made exclusively by the very class of men with whom they are carrying on a legitimate contest-the capitalists; that these law-makers have steadily refused to concede them the legal protection enjoyed by all other societies and every club in the kingdom; and that only by some kind of threat and force can they keep their labor market from being glutted by the selfish exclusion from the land of many thousands whom that land is appointed to feed and clothe.

These facts assuredly remove the contest out of the ordinary moral rules; how far each mind must decide for itself. It is certainly deplorable that the aripia of the Greeks-the public dishonor of the offender-in which all codes have germinated, should run into the severities of Californian Vigilance Committees and Sheffield rattenings. But these things, bad as they are, can only occur where the ordinary laws are unjust or inadequate. Injustice framed into law is the breaking of the social contract, and those who suffer most by it will always feel that such law is without authenticity-that society is by it remitted to its original elements, where each must protect himself as well as he can. And if the weapons of self-protection used be brutal, that too is a reflection of the wrong that has been done. In England no squire's self-interest would allow him to shelter his cattle no better than human laborers are sheltered; and within a few years it was shown in Parliament that more money was voted for the royal sta

bles than for the education of the masses of Great Britain!

Things are better now, though still wretchedly inadequate; but it is the next generation who alone will reap good from the reluctant reforms that have been adopted. What is there in the saw-grinder's lot or his compulsory habits to impress him with the sacredness of human life? He values his own so little that he insists on abridging it. What softness can be shed upon his heart by a life passed to its welcome and premature end in a dark vault which we can see daily contracting to the only a little closer and darker one in which he soon finds his first repose? But love for his child lives in him; for the child he strikes. "Our labor," said a workman, "our skill, our profits, our hopes, our lives, our children's souls, are taxed." Talus, nephew of Dædalus, invented the saw, it is said, copying in iron the jawbone of a serpent; under the touch of wrong the honest implement slides back again into serpents' fangs. It is a life-and-death struggle with the laborer; and when he kills the Lindleys it is because he sees them belted with the fleshless faces of the women and children he has been the means of starving.

At Sheffield I found Henry Clifton Sorby-a young and rising man of science-presiding at the dawn of a new science. He has combined the microscope and the spectroscope, and is finding out from each essence in nature its special spectrum, whereby it may be classified. Many sad impressions I bore away from Sheffield, but from that lovely home where this man sat winning from nature beautiful secrets I received the promises of Utopia. Each thing has its special rainbow. A drop of the coloring matter of every flower and plant in his glass yields its varied character, expressed in one, two, or three bars, with transposed prismatic colors behind them. Thus I saw the rainbows of the violet, the rose, the night-shade rainbow, and those of other poisons, which had as much beauty as the rest. At length there was adjusted in the glass a little drop of liquid which I examined long and carefully. It was the rainbow of a drop of human blood that I now saw. Two dark, slender bars; the spectrum sombre toward its lower, bright at its upper hues. These, then, are the invisible traits, this the attendant radiance, of every drop of that unfathomable, endless, crimson stream forever flowing through time and the earth! The skillful chemist then put before me, one after another, the bloods of all the plants that most resembled human blood-elder-berry, logwood, beet-root-but distinguishable from all these were the glory and gloom surrounding that sacred drop from a man's heart. Lately a single drop soaked out of a murderer's clothing revealed itself to this new eye, and the murderer confessed his crime and was executed. It seemed to me as I gazed upon the rainbow of this globule that perhaps some farther science might read us the meaning of those slender

bars-the lower one thickest-and of the som- | the starving of thousands at the gates of utterly bre hues beneath and the bright above. Do useless palaces; the stripping of the hardthey correspond to the lower and the higher working many that the idle few may wear purnatures, to the parallel bars of divinity and an- ple and gold, have piled up such threatening imalism in man? Is the whole progress of hu- clouds as that hanging over Sheffield. manity recorded between those dark and those bright colors? Will the political and economic sciences one day learn from the spectrum of blood that they have forgotten one of the bars in the heart of man, and the upper auroral lights of it-thinking of him as one an hungered for, and able to live by, bread alone?

But I am glad to say a rainbow has lately shone out upon the black cloud. The revelations at Sheffield have set both masters and men to thinking; and both seem to be gaining the conviction that they are becoming victims of a horrible misunderstanding as to their true relations to each other. The great fact that labor and capital are mutually dependent on each other for their productiveness promises to be the corner-stone of a more harmonious fabric in the future. Lately the workmen of Nottingham proposed a Court of Arbitration between themselves and the masters on the subject of wages; and the result has been so satisfactory that, as I write, I see before me the account of an enthusiastic meeting held at Sheffield to establish a perpetual tribunal of this kind, to be composed of workmen and employers. And beyond these are the builders of the fairer future, the brave reformers who are leading on that which shall be to other social plans what the human form is to the animals that preceded it-CO-OPERATION.

Mr. John Ruskin has put forth the theory that the proper wage for a workman should be measured by the expenditure of vital force he has put forth on that work. A commission of physicians should decide what amount of food is needed to repair the expenditure, and what sleep and covering are needed to protect the laborer comfortably while he is doing the work of his contract; such repair and comfort should be his wages, expressed if he prefer it in money. If man were only a locomotive such a plan would be the right one. But as it is, what commission can estimate the waste of affection in the man who has no time to know his own children? Who can measure the waste of intellect that goes on in the dungeon of drudgery, or decide that brains and hearts that might be soaring at the gates of heaven may not be beating at the bars of a saw-grinder's prison? What physician can gauge heart-hunger and brainhunger? The best gauge at present of these is the readiness with which the artisan will risk his life, or slowly breathe poison, that he may win money to buy more than his food-a book or education for his child. Nay, since all shadows point to the sun, those very ratten-lated quite a pretty assortment. Her father ing crimes attest that the laboring-man in England has caught gleams that no longer permit him, as his ancestors did, to drink beer and think beer merely, but impel him to strike for gold, which he sees plainly means, in England, a warm fireside, a book, and leisure to read it.

M

MISS FOLJAMBE'S LAST.

ISS FOLJAMBE was eccentric. Every one knew it, and every one said it, very commonly adding, with an envious sigh: "Well, she can afford it!"

For one of Miss Foljambe's eccentric habits was inheriting fortunes, and she had accumu

left her one, her grandmother left her one, her maiden aunt, her only sister, her cousin in India, and finally the grocer round the corner, an old bachelor who had supplied the Foljambes with bread-stuffs and butter for a generation, and who also affected eccentricity after his degree. All these had in dying bequeathed their possessions to their beloved daughter, granddaughter, niece, sister, cousin, or patron, Miss Winifred Foljambe, in token of various sentiments, not so important in themselves as in their results.

I can not, in justice, close this paper without admonishing the reader that the war going on between capital and labor in England is not to be attributed to the selfishness of the masters. They are men of personal generosity as much as others; and it is both their inclination and their interest to have their employments healthy So Miss Winifred lived in the great oldand their employés contented. It is the work-fashioned family mansion, where she had been men, never the masters, who (for fearfully strong reasons) resist the introduction of machinery which might relieve them of nearly all the more dangerous forms of labor, and the sanitary reforms. The fault is far back of any man or class; a few false principles adopted as rules of government in feudal ages, and never eradicated, have, under the light of civilization, developed, along with higher social wants, this "blood-red flower of war. Things, said Lord Bacon, move calmly in their places, violently out of them. As a storm in the atmosphere proceeds from a loss of elemental balance, so the heaping up of wealth here and of want there;

born some seven-and-twenty years before the date of this story, and was protected by a middle-aged aunt-in-law, who had rather less to do with her movements than the President of the United States, and was waited upon by a troop of servants, who one and all considered themselves re-discoverers of the terrestrial Paradise, and kept several pairs of horses in her stables, who were duly exercised by their grooms, while Miss Foljambe, in thick boots, water-proof cloak, and sensible bonnet, laughed in the face of the maddest storm that ever blew or the blackest frost that ever chilled the poor man's heart or his rich brother's purse-hand.

Sometimes, of course, Miss Foljambe had to return the calls and invitations people were forever showering upon her, and then she dressed and comported herself with becoming deference to the prejudices of her companions; but this was mere duty-visiting, as any one might plainly perceive; the water-proof or the heavy shag cloak, the stout boots, and the sensible bonnet went with Miss Foljambe upon the visits or the errands in which her soul delighted, and from which, in great measure, she derived her title of eccentric. Plenty of people who never heard Miss Foljambe's name knew the gray suit and the handsome, shrewd face of the wearer, and came to look upon it as a sure herald of relief in their direst distresses; came to know also that, although both will and power for such relief seemed almost unlimited, any attempt at imposition, or bullying, or laziness, was sure to bring down not only detection and reproof, but a withdrawal of favor and suppliesin fact, that honesty was decidedly the best policy in dealing with "the water-proof lady," as some of her pensioners had taken to call her.

Besides these two eccentricities of inheriting other people's money and giving her own money to other people, Miss Foljambe indulged an eccentric taste for rococo, and had crammed her house with all sorts of odd furniture, ornaments, and objects neither useful or ornamental, but simply ugly. But again, "she could afford it," and when the house got too full, as it did about once in three months, Miss Foljambe knew plenty of people very glad to accept the overflow.

Reubens was all the better for this taste, and so was Bruce the cabinet-maker, who was employed about three-fourths of his time in repairing, making over, and utilizing Miss Foljambe's purchases; for although that young lady for her own use might prefer a century-old chair, secretary, or bedstead in the purity of its original inconvenience, she never expected her pensioners to accommodate their practical needs to her whims, and Bruce had no need to look for other work so long as he could count upon Miss Foljambe's.

As for Reubens's, don't you know what that is? Why, it is the vortex where all the oddities spinning around the world's maelstrom finally bring up; it is the universal destiny, the finality of all things. How Reubens found them out in the first place, how he acquired them, whence he recruited his stock, are questions often asked, but never answered with even a show of plausibility, so that at last the popular opinion decided that Reubens himself manufactured them in some remote and subterraneous laboratory, applying rust, and moth, and wear, and gangrene to his finished work as other men apply paint and varnish and gloss. However this may have been, and it is as well to state at once that it was not in the least, there was no abode of Art or Fashion one-half, nay one-hundredth part, as attractive to Miss Foljambe as Reubens's dark, musty old rooms, dismal cellar, and broken-roofed garret. In one or the other

of these rosy bowers Miss Foljambe was pretty certain at every visit to find some new treasure hidden from all her former explorations, and yet bearing moral evidence upon its dusty face of never having stirred from its standing in the course of ages.

"Why, where did this come from? I was in this room only last week, and I am sure it was not here then!" she would exclaim, dragging a corner of the suspected treasure to the light.

"Not here! Ah, dear lady, how can you think that? It ish always here, like me," old Reubens would reply, raising his white eyebrows and wagging his patriarchal beard.

"That means you won't tell. Well, pull this out into the light, and give me the price." And here would go another piece of invaluable rubbish for Bruce to render presentable. At last we come to the story.

It was a stormy day in December. Miss Foljambe had compelled herself to attend a wedding reception the previous évening, and felt herself entitled to a little extra recreation by way of reward. So putting on the shag coat and the heaviest of boots, topped by knickerbockers, she took her way down town, visited three families of strangers, each of whom she found ready to perish, and all of whom she left thanking God and their unknown benefactor, and then she looked in at Reubens's.

"Good-morning, lady. I vash hoping to see you this day," remarked the Jew, creeping out of his den like a wary old spider.

"Why, Mr. Reubens? Have you any thing new, or is it only something strangely overlooked in all my researches here ?" asked Miss Foljambe, smiling.

"New!

new here.

Ah, dear lady, there ish nothing
Like their master, they are all

old, very old and worn."
"All the better. But what is it ?"
"It ish a table that the good lady may like
to shce-ah, the poor old bones-ah!"

But for all his groaning and panting the cunning old fellow continued to mount to the very garret almost as nimbly as Miss Foljambe could follow, and began to rummage among a heap of old carpets which she remembered lying in the same corner at her first visit. From beneath them, however, Reubens presently extricated a small table, and, lifting it with difficulty, set it before Miss Foljambe, and dusted it with the skirt of his ragged dressing-gown.

"Oh, the little beauty! What a love of a table!" exclaimed the young lady, going upon her knees to examine the feet. It was a card-table, covered with the traditional green baize, and carved in all the affluent absurdities of a century ago. The wood was ebony, and the inlaying sandal-wood. Around the edge a carved moulding quaintly represented drapery looped away from the sides where the players were to sit. The legs terminated in cagles' claws, clutching each a lamb, the heads of the unfortunate victims projecting between the talons.

"There never was any thing so lovely," re- | gan to tear it off. Miss Foljambe stopped him peated Miss Foljambe, after a scrutiny of half to give directions for the new cover, and went an hour. "What is the price, Mr. Reubens ?" to send a man after it-persons with several "A mere trifle, lady; a trifle to you, at any fortunes at their command seldom liking to rate, who are rich-as Jews are not," said the wait for what they wish to have. old Hebrew, naming a sum I am ashamed to repeat.

"That is absurd, Mr. Reubens," said Miss Foljambe, tranquilly. "Such a sum would make half a dozen families happy for a week." "God of Abraham! and my own poor family are crying for bread," exclaimed Reubens, ready to roll in the dust. "But the good lady is my honored patron. We will say something less for the table-the handsome, rare, old table. Will she give me ten dollars less ?"

"I will give you just half what you asked in the first place, and you know, as well as I, it is four times what any one else would give," said Miss Foljambe, positively. Reubens did know it; and, with many protestations of the sacrifice he was making, accepted the diminished price with sufficient eagerness, and promised that the table should arrive at home nearly as soon as Miss Foljambe herself.

The next morning that lady sent for Bruce, who, presenting himself without delay, was shown into presence of the table and Miss Foljambe.

Bruce was a manly-looking fellow of thirty years old or thereabouts, and his eccentric employer had more than once wished to suddenly petrify or bronzify him, as an addition to her collection, but had never mentioned the idea to him--a somewhat singular reticence considering that frankness à l'outrance was one of Miss Foljambe's most noted eccentricities.

Upon the present occasion she said: "Mr. Bruce, you see this table. I want a new baize put upon the top, and the carvings cleansed and oiled. Some of the inlaid work is starting out, and this leg is splitting off."

"A good shake would send the whole thing in pieces," said Bruce, meditatively.

"Then don't shake it," replied Miss Foljambe, with some asperity. "Do whatever you can to strengthen it, but nothing to alter it."

Bruce nodded and pursed up his lips, as if he would like to whistle, as he stooped to take a reverse view of the frame of the table.

When she came back the cover was off, and the top of the table also. Miss Foljambe screamed,

"Why, Bruce! Is it broken?"

"No, ma'am. I took off the top so as to get at the frame inside better. There's no harm done yet."

"I am glad of that." And Miss Foljambe seated herself to watch Bruce, who was minutely examining the top of the table, which he had placed across two chairs.

"There's a drawer," said he, presently, looking up with rather an excited face.

"A drawer? Where, pray?" asked Miss Foljambe, staring at the two boards hinged together into which the table-top was now resolved.

"In the thickness of the board. I don't see how to get it open, but I can see the end of it. I suppose there is a spring somewhere. Oh, here it is!"

And as Bruce pressed his finger upon the under side of the board a little click was heard, and he carefully drew out a small drawer, perhaps half an inch in depth, and six or seven inches in length and width.

"Just room to hide a few cards, and know where to get them again," said the cabinetmaker, with a shrewd smile.

"But those are not cards," said Miss Foljambe, extending her hand for the little packet Bruce was curiously turning over and over.

"No; they seem to be papers. Some one hid them, and now, most likely, the hider is hid underground." replied Bruce, examining the mechanism of the drawer, and paying very little attention to the papers, which Miss Foljambe was eagerly examining.

Presently she got up and left the room without a word. Bruce went on with his work very contentedly, for now he might whistle to his heart's content, and did so.

Winifred, meantime, went to shut herself up in a little den called her dressing-room, probably because she did every thing but dress there. At present she wished to consider, un

"I wish you to work here, if you please. I disturbed and unwatched, the significance of dare not trust it to be moved a great deal."

"It wouldn't be very safe before it is fixed, without I brought a boy to hold on to each leg all the way to the shop," said Bruce, gravely.

"Very well," briefly replied Miss Foljambe, quick at detecting any slight upon her new

treasure.

66 Have you your tools with you?" "Yes, ma'am."

"Bring them up, then, and go about it. I will send to your shop for some baize to re-cover the top. I suppose you have it."

"Yes, ma'am ;" and Bruce, thrusting the blade of a thin knife beneath the old baize, be

her discovery.

The packet, tied with a faded bit of red tape for even red tape decays with time-consisted of two papers, and a miniature upon ivory representing a very handsome young woman, rather in the Amazonian style; but the picture bore no name, date, or other inscription, and if it had a story could not tell it.

The papers consisted of a certificate of marriage between Jonas Bascombe and Fanny Bellows, dated two-and-thirty years back, and a Will carefully drawn and formally executed, by which Jonas Bascombe, in the same year, bequeathed his entire property of every descrip

L

tion to Fanny his beloved wife, and after her to her children by him, or, failing issue to their marriage, to her unconditionally. This Will, duly signed and sealed, was witnessed by one Philip Waters and Betsey Andrews, neither of whom, to judge by their cramped and illegible autographs, were so much in the habit of penmanship as of handicraft.

Miss Foljambe read the whole of both these documents with the most precise attention, took another good look at the handsome young woman, who might or might not have been Fanny Bascombe née Bellows, and then laying them all upon her lap, leaned back in the old brocade easy-chair, put her foot upon the castellated fender-both relics of Reubens's-and applied herself to thought.

They must have been hidden from Fanny as well as from the rest of the world, for no woman would be so careless of her marriage certificate as to sell it in an old table without remembering it. And the Will? Miss Foljambe pursued and captured a floating idea that a Will to be good for any thing had to be proved, and after that was kept-somewhere, not in the secret drawer of a card-table, at any rate.

Yes, Jonas was clearly a crafty old fellow who chose to keep the reins in his own hands, and even while bequeathing his entire property to his handsome young wife concealed the instrument by which he did so, and very likely never informed her of its existence.

appointing husband shut up in the penitentiary for five years—a convenient device by which the wife was protected, and the husband retained within easy reach should she desire to visit him.

"Ah, good-evening, Mr. Varens !" exclaimed Miss Foljambe, as the lawyer entered her presence in the stealthy and apologetic manner peculiar to him. "You are the very person I most wish to see."

Varens rubbed his dry hands together, with a little crackling noise as if they had been covered with parchment, and smiled discreetly.

"A great many persons would be glad to have Miss Foljambe give them that assurance,” said he.

"A great many persons are not as useful to me as you, Mr. Varens," replied the lady, briefly, and then proceeded at once to the business of the occasion, telling her story clearly and concisely, and finishing by laying the Will, the Certificate, and the picture before the lawyer.

He examined all with the utmost attention, paced a few times up and down the room, with the restless, feline motion of a cat suspecting the near vicinity of a mouse, then sat down again to say:

"It can be done, Miss Foljambe. There is very little doubt that it can be done; but how soon or how satisfactorily I can not yet say. Shall I take these proofs away with me? and The mar-will you be so good as to wait patiently until you hear from me before attempting any action on your own part ?"

riage certificate had been hidden also, as a choice rod in pickle, should Fanny prove unruly-perhaps even Jonas had denied the marriage, or at any rate kept it private. But if he had died without revealing his secret what then? How had Fanny managed to prove her marriage, and how had she secured her inheritance? Miss Foljambe wove romances innumerable, and imagined as many terminations to the whole affair as there were days in the year, but yet without coming within a hundred miles of the true one. At last she started up and clapped her hands together.

"I have it! Varens!" exclaimed she, and rushing to her secretary wrote a peremptory note summoning Varens to attend her at the earliest possible moment.

"You mean that I made a mess of it by advertising for Bunker, and nearly allowing him to escape before you could catch him?" said Miss Foljambe, coolly. "Well, I won't do so this time. Take your own way about it, only succeed."

To this injunction Mr. Varens only replied by a bow that might mean any thing, every thing, or nothing, and remarked that it was a very cold night.

Miss Foljambe rang the bell for refreshments, including some of a spirituous nature, and for the chaperon. She liked persons who did much and talked little, and treated her detective all the better that he made no promises.

This proved to be late in the evening, and Ten days passed away. Bruce had finished Varens himself proved to be a little, dry, with-repairing the card-table; and Miss Foljambe ered old man, with eager gray eyes, thin lips, shutting upon each other like the lips of a steel trap, and more wrinkles upon his face than hairs upon his head.

Varens called himself a lawyer, but if he had made it police detective, unattached, he would have come nearer the mark. Miss Foljambe had employed him upon a former occasion to ferret out the whereabout of a missing husband, who, when found and brought home to his weeping and loving wife, revenged himself by knocking her down and kicking her; but then that was no fault either of Varens or Miss Foljambe, and only resulted in the latter's employng the former at a round price to get the dis

was still vainly racking her mind for something to hide in the secret drawer-something which should startle and interest some future explorer as much as her discovery had her, when Mr. Varens wrote a vague little note to say that he should present himself at Miss Foljambe's that evening.

"Well!" exclaimed that young lady as the little dry old man entered her drawing-room. Mr. Varens's look of mild astonishment gently rebuked this impatience, and he replied:

"Very well, I thank you, Miss Foljambe. I hope you are well."

"I meant to inquire what have you to tell!" persisted Miss Foljambe, sturdily.

« PreviousContinue »