Part 56

In his personal intercourse, General Butler was the most genial of men. The subcommittee in charge of the preparation of a platform held its meetings in the drawing-room of his hotel apartment, and he had constituted himself our host as well as our colleague. I had not previously met him. It was not long after we came together before he began to call me by my Christian name. At one stage of the proceedings when by substituting one word for another it looked as though we might reach an agreement, he said to me: “Henry, what is the difference between ‘exclusively for public purposes’ and ‘a tariff for revenue only’?”

“I know of none,” I answered.

“Do you think that the committee have found you out?”

“No, I scarcely think so.”

“Then I will see that they do,” and he proceeded in his peculiarly subtle way to undo all that we had done, prolonging the session twenty-four hours.

He was an able man and a lovable man. The missing ingredient was serious belief. Just after the nomination of the Breckinridge and Lane Presidential ticket in 1860, I heard him make an ultra-Southern speech from Mr. Breckinridge’s doorway. “What do you think of that?” I asked Andrew Johnson, who stood by me, and Johnson answered sharply, with an oath: “I never like a man to be for me more than I am for myself.” I have been told that even at home General Butler could never acquire the public confidence. In spite of his conceded mentality and manliness he gave the impression of being something of an intellectual sharper.

He was charitable, generous and amiable. The famous New Orleans order which had made him odious to the women of the South he had issued to warn bad women and protect good women. Assuredly he did not foresee the interpretation that would be put upon it. He was personally popular in Congress. When he came to Washington he dispensed a lavish hospitality. Such radical Democrats as Beck and Knott did not disdain his company, became, indeed, his familiars. Yet, curious to relate, a Kentucky Congressman of the period lost his seat because it was charged and proven that he had ridden in a carriage to the White House with the Yankee Boanerges on a public occasion.

III

Mere party issues never counted with me. I have read too much and seen too much. At my present time of life they count not at all. I used to think that there was a principle involved between the dogmas of Free Trade and Protection as they were preached by their respective attorneys. Yet what was either except the ancient, everlasting scheme—

—“The good old rôle—the simple plan, That they should take who have the power And they should keep who can.”

How little wisdom one man may get from another man’s counsels, one nation may get from another nation’s history, can be partly computed when we reflect how often our personal experience has failed in warning admonition.

Temperament and circumstance do indeed cut a prodigious figure in life. Traversing the older countries, especially Spain, the most illustrative, the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not merely the logic of events, but the common law of the inevitable. The Latin of the Sixteenth century was a recrudescence of the Roman of the First. He had not, like the Mongolian, lived long enough to become a stoic. He was mainly a cynic and an adventurer. Thence he flowered into a sybarite. Coming to great wealth with the discoveries of Columbus and the conquests of Pizarro and Cortes, he proceeded to enjoy its fruits according to his fancy and the fashion of the times.

He erected massive shrines to his deities. He reared noble palaces. He built about his cathedrals and his castles what were then thought to be great cities, walled and fortified. He was, for all his self-sufficiency and pride, short-sighted; and yet, until they arrived, how could he foresee the developments of artillery? They were as hidden from him as three centuries later the wonders of electricity were hidden from us.

I was never a Free Trader. I stood for a tariff for revenue as the least oppressive and safest support of Government. The protective system in the United States, responsible for our unequal distribution of wealth, took at least its name from Spain, and the Robber Barons, as I used to call the Protectionists of Pennsylvania, were not of immediate German origin.

Truth to say, both on land and water Spain has made a deal of history, and the front betwixt Gibraltar and the Isle of San Fernando—Tangier on one side and the Straits of Tarifa on the other—Cape Trafalgar, where Nelson fought the famous battle, midway between them—has had its share.

Tarifa! What memories it invokes! In the olden and golden days of primitive man, before corporation lawyers had learned how to frame pillaging statutes, and rascally politicians to bamboozle confiding constituencies—thus I used to put it—the gentle pirates of Tarifa laid broad and deep the foundations for the Protective System in the United States.

It was a fruitful as well as a congenial theme, and I rang all the changes on it. To take by law from one man what is his and give it to another man who has not earned it and has no right to it, I showed to be an invention of the Moors, copied by the Spaniards and elevated thence into political economy by the Americans. Tarifa took its name from Tarif-Ben-Malik, the most enterprising Robber Baron of his day, and thus the Lords of Tarifa were the progenitors of the Robber Barons of the Black Forest, New England and Pittsburgh. Tribute was the name the Moors gave their robbery, which was open and aboveboard. The Coal Kings, the Steel Kings and the Oil Kings of the modern world have contrived to hide the process; but in Spain the palaces of their forefathers rise in lonely and solemn grandeur just as a thousand years hence the palaces upon the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park and along Riverside Drive, not to mention those of the Schuylkill and the Delaware, may become but roosts for bats and owls, and the chronicler of the Anthropophagi, “whose heads do reach the skies,” may tell how the voters of the Great Republic were bought and sold with their own money, until “Heaven released the legions north of the North Pole, and they swooped down and crushed the pulpy mass beneath their avenging snowshoes.” The gold that was gathered by the Spaniards and fought over so valiantly is scattered to the four ends of the earth. It may be as potent to-day as then; but it does not seem nearly so heroic. A good deal of it has found its way to London, which a short century and a half ago “had not,” according to Adam Smith, “sufficient wealth to compete with Cadiz.” We have had our full share without fighting for it. Thus all things come to him who contrives and waits.

Meanwhile, there are “groups” and “rings.” And, likewise, “leaders” and “bosses.” What do they know or care about the origins of wealth; about Venice; about Cadiz; about what is said of Wall Street? The Spanish Main was long ago stripped of its pillage. The buccaneers took themselves off to keep company with the Vikings. Yet, away down in those money chests, once filled with what were pieces of eight and ducats and doubloons, who shall say that spirits may not lurk and ghosts walk, one old freebooter wheezing to another old freebooter: “They order these things better in the ‘States.’”

I have enjoyed hugely my several sojourns in Spain. The Spaniard is unlike any other European. He may not make you love him. But you are bound to respect him.

There is a mansion in Seville known as The House of Pontius Pilate because part of the remains of the abode of the Roman Governor was brought from Jerusalem and used in a building suited to the dignity of a Spanish grandee who was also a Lord of Tarifa. The Duke of Medina Celi, its present owner, is a lineal scion of the old piratical crew. The mansion is filled with the fruits of many a foray. There are plunder from Naples, where one ancestor was Viceroy, and treasures from the temples of the Aztecs and the Incas, where two other ancestors ruled. Every coping stone and pillar cost some mariner of the Tarifa Straits a pot of money.

Its owner is a pauper. A carekeeper shows it for a peseta a head. To such base uses may we come at last. Yet Seville basks in the sun and smiles on the flashing waters of the Guadalquivir, and Cadiz sits serene upon the green hillsides of San Sebastian, just as if nothing had ever happened; neither the Barber and Carmen, nor Nelson and Byron; the past but a phantom; the present the prosiest of prose-poems.

There are canny Spaniards even as there are canny Scots, who grow rich and prosper; but there is never a Spaniard who does not regard the political fabric, and the laws, as fair game, the rule being always “devil take the hindmost,” community of interests nowhere. “The good old vices of Spain,” that is, the robbing of the lesser rogue by the greater in regulated gradations all the way from the King to the beggar, are as prevalent and as vital as ever they were. Curiously enough, a tiny stream of Hebraic blood and Moorish blood still trickles through the Spanish coast towns. It may be traced through the nomenclature in spite of its Castilian prefigurations and appendices, which would account for some of the enterprise and activity that show themselves, albeit only by fits and starts.

Chapter the Thirtieth

The Makers of the Republic—Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster—The Proposed League of Nations—The Wilsonian Incertitude—The “New Freedom”

The makers of the American Republic range themselves in two groups—Washington, Franklin and Jefferson—Clay, Webster and Lincoln—each of whom, having a genius peculiarly his own, gave himself and his best to the cause of national unity and independence.

In a general way it may be said that Washington created and Lincoln saved the Union. But along with Washington and Lincoln, Clay makes a good historic third, for it was the masterful Kentuckian who, joining rare foresight to surpassing eloquence and leading many eminent men, including Webster, was able to hold the legions of unrest at bay during the formative period.

There are those who call these great men “back numbers,” who tell us we have left the past behind us and entered an epoch of more enlightened progress—who would displace the example of the simple lives they led and the homely truths they told, to set up a school of philosophy which had made Athens stare and Rome howl, and, I dare say, is causing the Old Continentals to turn over in their graves. The self-exploiting spectacle and bizarre teaching of this school passes the wit of man to fathom. Professing the ideal and proposing to recreate the Universe, the New Freedom, as it calls itself, would standardize it. The effect of that would be to desiccate the human species in human conceit. It would cheapen the very harps and halos in Heaven and convert the Day of Judgment into a moving picture show.

I protest that I am not of its kidney. In point of fact, its platitudes “stick in my gizzard.” I belong the rather to those old-fashioned ones—