Читать книгу Children of the Market Place - Edgar Lee Masters - Страница 4

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I am eighteen and the year is 1833. All of Europe is in a ferment, is bubbling over in places. Napoleon has been hearsed for twelve years in St. Helena. But the principles of the French Revolution are working. Charles is king of France, but by the will of the nation first and by the grace of God afterward. There is no republic there; but the sovereignty of the people, the prime principle of the French Revolution, has founded the right of Charles to rule. … And what of England? Fox had rejoiced at the fall of the Bastille. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey had sung of liberty, exulting in the emancipation of peoples from tyranny. Then they had changed. Liberalism had come under the heel again. Revolution was feared and denounced. Liberal principles were crushed. … But not for long. We students read Shelley and Byron. They were now gone from earth, eleven and nine years respectively. They had not altered their faith, dying in the heyday of youthful power. Would they have changed at any age to which they might have lived? We believed they would not have done so. But what of England? It is 1833 and the reform bill is a year old. The rotten boroughs are abolished. There is a semblance of democratic representation in Parliament. The Duke of Wellington has suffered a decline in popularity. Italy is rising, for Mazzini has come upon the scene. Germany is fighting the influence of Metternich. We students are flapping our young wings. A great day is dawning for the world. And I am off to America!

What is stirring there? I am bound for the Middle West of that great land. What is it like? Shall I ever return? What will my life be? These are my reflections as I prepare to sail.

I take passage on the Columbia and Caledonia. She is built of wood and is 200 feet long from taffrail to fore edge of stem. Her beam is 34–½ feet. She has a gross tonnage of 520 tons. She can sail in favorable weather at a speed of 12 knots an hour. I laughed at all this when, something more than twenty years after, I crossed on the Persia, 376 feet long, of 3500 tonnage, and making a speed of nearly 14 knots an hour, with her 4000-horse-power engines.

It is April. The sea is rough. We are no sooner under way than the heavy swell of the waves tosses the boat like a chip. The prow dips down into great valleys of glassy water. The stern tips high in the air against an angry sky. The shoulders of the sea bump under the poop of the boat, and she trembles like a frightened horse under its rider. I have books to read. My grandmother has provided me with many things for my comfort and delight. But I cannot eat, not until during the end of the voyage. I lie in a little stateroom, which I share with an American. He persists in talking to me, even at night when I am trying to sleep. He tells me of America. His home is New York City. He has been as far west as Buffalo. He gives me long descriptions of the Hudson River, and the boats on it that run to Albany. He talks of America in terms of extravagant eulogy. The country is free. It has no king. The people rule. I have read a little and heard something of America. At Oxford we students had wondered at the anomaly of a republic maintaining the institution of slavery. I asked him about this. He said that it did not involve any contradiction; that the United States was founded by white men for white men; that negroes were a lower order of beings; that their servitude was justified by the Bible; that a majority of the clergy and the churches of the country approved of the institution; that the slaves were well treated, much better housed and fed than the workers of Europe; better than the free laborers even in America. His thesis was that the business of life was the obtaining of the means of life; that all the uprisings in Europe, the French Revolution included, were inspired by hunger; that the struggle for existence was bound to produce oppression; that the strong would use and control the weak, make them work, keep them in a state where they could be worked. All this for trade. He topped off this analysis with the remark that negro slavery was a benign institution, exactly in line with the processes of the business of life; that it had been lied about by a growing fanaticism in the States; New York had always been in sympathy, for the most part with the Southern States, where slavery was a necessary institution to the climate and the cotton industry. He went on to tell me that about a year before a maniacal cobbler named William Lloyd Garrison had started a little paper called The Liberator in which he advocated slave insurrections and the overthrow of the laws sustaining slavery; and that a movement was now on foot in New England to found the American Anti-Slavery Society. And that John Quincy Adams, once President, but now a senile intermeddler, had been presenting petitions in Congress from various constituencies for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. This would be finally squelched, he thought. New England had always demanded a tariff in order to foster her industries, and that policy trenched on the rights of the states not needing and not wanting a tariff. While slavery did not in any way harm New England, she intermeddled in a mood of moral fanaticism.

I was much interested in these revelations by Mr. Yarnell, for such was his name. … One morning we began to sense land. We had been about three weeks on the water. We were nearing the harbor of New York.