An Autobiography by Catherine Helen Spence - HTML preview

PLEASE NOTE: This is an HTML preview only and some elements such as links or page numbers may be incorrect.
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.

Impressions Of America

Alfred Cridge, who reminded me so much of my brother David that I felt at home with him immediately, had prepared the way for my lectures on effective voting in San Francisco. He was an even greater enthusiast than I. "America needs the reform more than Australia," he used to say. But if America needs effective voting to check corruption, Australia needs it just as much to prevent the degradation of political life in the Commonwealth and States to the level of American politics. My lectures in San Francisco, as elsewhere in America, were well attended, and even better received. Party politics had crushed out the best elements of political life, and to be independent of either party gave a candidate, as an agent told Judge Lindsay when he was contesting the governorship of Colorado, "as much chance as a snowball would have in hell." So that reformers everywhere were eager to hear of a system of voting that would free the electors from the tyranny of parties, and at the same time render a candidate independent of the votes of heckling minorities, and dependent only on the votes of the men who believed in him and his politics. I met men and women interested in public affairs--some of them well known, others most worthy to be known, and all willing to lend the weight of their character and intelligence to the betterment of human conditions at home and abroad. Among these were Judge Maguire, a leader of the Bar in San Francisco and a member of the State Legislature, who had fought trusts, "grafters," and "boodlers" through the whole of his public career, and Mr. James Barry, proprietor of The Star.

"You come from Australia, the home of the secret ballot?" was the greeting I often received, and that really was my passport to the hearts of reformers all over America. From all sides I heard that it was to the energy and zeal of the Singletaxers in the various States--a well-organized and compact body--that the adoption of the secret ballot was due. To that celebrated journalist, poetess, and economic writer, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, who was a cultured Bostonian, living in San Francisco, I owed one of the best women's meetings I ever addressed. The subject was "State children and the compulsory clauses in our Education Act," and everywhere in the States people were interested in the splendid work of our State Children's Department and educational methods. Intelligence and not wealth I found to be the passport to social life among the Americans I met. At a social evening ladies as well as their escorts were expected to remove bonnets and mantles in the hall, instead of being invited into a private room as in Australia--a custom I thought curious until usage made it familiar. The homeliness and unostentatiousness of the middle class American were captivating. My interests have always been in people and in the things that make for human happiness or misery rather than in the beauties of Nature, art, or architecture. I want to know how the people live, what wages are, what the amount of comfort they can buy; how the people are fed, taught, and amused; how the burden of taxation falls; how justice is executed; how much or how little liberty the people enjoy. And these things I learned to a great extent from my social intercourse with those cultured reformers of America. Among these people I had not the depressing feeling of immensity and hugeness which marred my enjoyment when I arrived at New York. My literary lectures on the Brownings and George Eliot were much appreciated, especially in the East, where I found paying audiences in the fall or autumn of the year. These lectures have been delivered many times in Australia; and, as the result of the Browning lecture given in the Unitarian Schoolroom in Wakefield street, Adelaide, I received from the pen of Mr. J. B. Mather a clever epigram. The room was large and sparsely filled, and to the modest back seat taken by my friend my voice scarcely penetrated. So he amused himself and me by writing:

I have no doubt that words of sense
Are falling from the lips of Spence.
Alas! that Echo should be drowning
Both words of Spence and sense of Browning.

I found the Brownings far better appreciated in America than in England, especially by American women. In spite of the fact that The San Francisco Chronicle had interviewed me favourably on my arrival, and that I knew personally some of the leading people on The Examiner, neither paper would report my lectures on effective voting. The Star, however, quite made up for the deficiencies of the other papers, and did all it could to help me and the cause. While in San Francisco I wrote an essay on "Electoral Reform" for a Toronto competition, in which the first prize was $500. Mr. Cridge was also a competitor; but, although many essays were sent in, for some reason the prize was never awarded, and we had our trouble for nothing. On my way to Chicago I stayed at a mining town to lecture on effective voting. I found the hostess of the tiny hotel a brilliant pianist and a perfect linguist, and she quoted poetry--her own and other people's--by the yard. A lady I journeyed with told me that she had been travelling for seven years with her husband and "Chambers's Encyclopedia." I thought they used the encyclopaedia as a guide book until, in a sort of postscript to our conversation, I discovered the husband to be a book agent, better known in America as a "book fiend."

Nobody had ever seen anything like the World's Fair. My friend Dr. Bayard Holmes of Chigago, whose acquaintance I made through missing a suburban train, expressed a common feeling when he said he could weep at the thought that it was all to be destroyed--that the creation evolved from the best brains of America should be dissolved. Much of our human toil is lost and wasted, and much of our work is more ephemeral than we think; but this was a conscious creation of hundreds of beautiful buildings for a six months' existence. Nowhere else except in America could the thing have been done, and nowhere else in America but in Chicago. At the Congress of Charity and correction I found every one interested in Australia's work for destitute children. It was difficult for Miss Windeyer, of Sydney, and myself--the only Australians present--to put ourselves in the place of many who believed in institutions where children of low physique, low morals, and low intelligence are massed together, fed, washed, drilled, taught by rule, never individualized, and never mothered. I spoke from pulpits in Chicago and Indianopolis on the subject, and was urged to plead with the Governor of the latter State to use his influence to have at least tiny mites of six years of age removed from the reformatory, which was under the very walls of the gaol. But he was obdurate to my pleadings and arguments, as he had been to those of the State workers. He maintained that these tiny waifs of six were incorrigible, and were better in institutions than in homes. The most interesting woman I met at the conference was the Rev. Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, pastor of Bell Street Chapel, Providence. I visited her at home, in that retreat of Baptists, Quakers, and others from the hard persecution of the New England Orthodoxy, the founders of which had left England in search of freedom to worship God. Her husband was the Unitarian minister of another congregation in the same town. At the meetings arranged by Mrs. Spencer, Professor Andrews, one of the Behring Sea arbitrators, and Professor Wilson were present; and they invited me to speak on effective voting at the Brunn University.

In Philadelphia I addressed seven meetings on the same subject. At six of them an editor of a little reform paper was present. For two years he had lived on brown bread and dried apples, in order that he could save enough to buy a newspaper plant for the advocacy of reforms. In his little paper he replied to the critics, who assured me that it was no use worrying, as everything would come right in time. "Time only brings wonders," he wrote, "when good and great men and women rise up to move the world along. Time itself brings only decay and death. The truth is 'Nothing will come right unless those who feel they have the truth speak, and Work, and strain as if on them alone rested the destinies of the world.'" I went to see a celebrated man, George W. Childs, who had made a fortune out of The Philadelphia Ledger, and who was one of the best employers in the States. He knew everybody, not only in America but in Europe; and his room was a museum of gifts from great folks all over the world. But, best of all, he, with his devoted friend Anthony Drexel, had founded the Drexel Institute, which was their magnificent educational legacy to the historic town. I saw the Liberty Bell in Chicago--the bell that rang out the Declaration of Independence. and cracked soon after--which is cherished by all good Americans. It had had a triumphant progress to and from the World's Fair, and I was present when once again it was safely landed in Independence Hall, Philadelphia. I think the Americans liked me, because I thought their traditions reputably old, and did not, like European visitors, call everything crude and new. The great war in America strengthened the Federal bond, while it loosened the attachment to the special Satte in which the United States citizen lives. Railroads and telegraphs have done much to make Americans homogeneous, and the school system grapples bravely with the greater task of Americanizing the children of foreigners, who arrive in such vast numbers. Canada allowed the inhabitants of lower Canada to keep their language, their laws, and their denominational schools; and the consequence is that these Canadian-British subjects are more French than the French, more conservative than the Tories, and more Catholic than Irish or Italians. Education is absolutely free in America up to the age of 18; but I never heard an American complain of being taxed to educate other people's children. In Auburn I met Harriet Tribman, called the "Moses of her people"--an old black woman who could neither read nor write, but who had escaped from slavery when young, and had made 19 journeys south, and been instrumental in the escape of 300 slaves. To listen to her was to be transferred to the pages of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Her language was just that of Tom and old Jeff. A pious Christian, she was full of good works still. Her shanty was a refuge for the sick, blind, and maimed of her own people. I went all over Harvard University under the guidance of Professor Ashley, to whom our Chief Justice had given me a letter of introduction. He got up a drawing-room meeting for me, at which I met Dr. Gordon Ames, pastor of the Unitarian Church of the Disciples. He invited me to preach his thanksgiving service for him on the following Thursday, which I was delighted to do. Mrs. Ames was the factory inspector of women and children in Massachusetts, and was probably the wisest woman I met in my travels. She spoke to me of the evils of stimulating the religious sentiment too young, and said that the hushed awe with which most people spoke of God and His constant presence filled a child's mind with fear.

She related an experience with her own child, who on going to bed had asked if God was in the room. The child was told that God was always besides us. After being left in darkness the child was heard sobbing, and a return to the nursery elicited the confession, "Oh, mamma, I can't bear to be left with no one but God." Better the simple anthropomorphism which makes God like the good father, the generous uncle, the indulgent grandfather, or the strong elder brother.

Such ideas as these of God were held by the heroines of the following stories:--A little girl, a niece of the beloved Bishop Brooks, had done wrong, and was told to confess her sin to God before she slept, and to beg His forgiveness. When asked next day whether she had obeyed the command, she said--"Oh, yes! I told God all about it, and God said, 'Don't mention it, Miss Brooks.'" A similar injunction was laid upon a child brought up by a very severe and rather unjust aunt. Her reply when asked if she had confessed her sin was "I told God what I had done, and what you thought about it, and I just left it to Him." The response of a third American girl (who was somewhat of a "pickle" and had been reared among a number of boys) to the enquiry whether she had asked forgiveness for a wrong done was--"Oh, yes; I told God exactly what I had done, and He said, 'Great Scot, Elsie Murray, I know 500 little girls worse than you.'" To me this was a much healthier state of mind than setting children weeping for their sins, as I have done myself.

On my second visit to Boston I spent three weeks with the family of William, Lloyd Garrison, son of the famous Abolitionist. The Chief Justice had given me a letter of introduction to him, and I found him a true-hearted humanitarian, as devoted to the gospel of single tax as his father had been to that of anti-slavery. They lived in a beautiful house in Brookline, on a terrace built by an enterprising man who had made his money in New South Wales. Forty-two houses were perfectly and equally warmed by one great furnace, and all the public rooms of the ground floor, dining, and drawing rooms, library, and hall were connected by folding doors, nearly always open, which gave a feeling of space I never experienced elsewhere. Electric lighting and bells all over the house, hot and cold baths, lifts, the most complete laundry arrangements, and cupboards everywhere ensured the maximum of comfort with the minimum of labour. But in this house I began to be a little ashamed of being so narrow in my views on the coloured question. Mr. Garrison, animated with the spirit of the true brotherhood of man, was an advocate of the heathen Chinee, and was continually speaking of the goodness of the negro and coloured and yellow races, and of the injustice and rapacity of the white Caucasians. I saw the files of his father's paper, The Liberator, from its beginning in 1831 till its close, when the victory was won in 1865. Of the time spent in the Lloyd-Garrison household "nothing now is left but a majestic memory," which has been kept green by the periodical letters received from this noble man up till the time of his death last year. He showed me the monument erected to the memory of his father in Boston in the town where years before the great abolitionist had been stoned by the mob. Only recently it rejoiced my heart to know that a memorial to Lloyd Garrison the younger had been unveiled in Boston, his native city; at the same time that a similar honour was paid to his venerated leader, "the prophet of San Francisco."

I account it one of the greatest privileges of my visit to America that Mrs. Garrison introduced me to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and by appointment I had an hour and a half's chat with him in the last year of his long life. He was the only survivor of a famous band of New England writers, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorn, Bryant, Lowell, Whittier, and Whitman were dead. His memory was failing, and he forgot some of his own characters; but Elsie Venner he remembered perfectly and he woke to full animation when I objected to the fatalism of heredity as being about as paralysing to effort as the fatalism of Calvinism. As a medical man (and we are apt to forget the physician in the author) he took strong views of heredity. As a worker among our destitute children, I considered environment the greater factor of the two, and spoke of children of the most worth less parents who had turned out well when placed early in respectable and kindly homes. Before I left, the author presented me with an autograph copy of one of his books--a much-prized gift. He was reading Cotton Mather's "Memorabilia," not for theology, but for gossip. It was the only chronicle of the small beer of current events in the days of the witch persecutions, and the expulsion of the Quakers, Baptists, and other schismatics. I have often felt proud that of all the famous men I have mentioned in this connection there was only one not a Unitarian, and that was Whittier, the Quaker poet of abolition; and his theology was of the mildest.

Another notable man with whom I had three hours' talk was Charles Dudley Warner, the humorous writer. I am not partial to American humorists generally, but the delicate and subtle humour of Dudley Warner I always appreciated. In our talk I saw his serious side, for he was keen on introducing the indeterminate sentence into his own State, on the lines of the Elmira and Concord Reformatories. He told me that he never talked in train: but during the three hours' journey to New York neither of us opened the books with which we had provided ourselves, and we each talked of our separate interests, and enjoyed the talk right through. Mrs. Harriet Beeclier Stowe I saw, but her memory was completely gone. With Julia Ward Howe, the writer of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" I spent a happy time. She had been the President of the New England Women's Club for 25 years, and was a charming and interesting woman. I was said to be very like her, and, indeed was often accosted by her name; but I think probably the reason was partly my cap, for Howe always wears one, and few other American ladies do. Whenever I was with her I was haunted by the beautiful lines from the closing verse of the "Battle Hymn"--

In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born, across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me; As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.

At her house I met many distinguished women. Mrs. J. F. Fields, the widow of the wellknown author-publisher; Madame Blaine Bentzam, a writer for French reviews; Miss Sarah Ortne Jewett, one of the most charming of New England write is, and others. My best work in Canada was the conversion to effective voting of my good friend Robert Tyson. For years now he has done yeoman service in the cause, and has corresponded with workers all over the world on the question of electoral reform. I visited Toronto, at the invitation of Mr. William Howland, with whom I had corresponded for years. I was invited to dinner with his father, Sir William Howland, who was the first LieutenantGovernor of Toronto after the federation of the Dominion. I found it very difficult to remember the names of the many interesting people I met there, although I could recollect the things they spoke about. Mr. Howland took me on with him to an evening garden party--quite a novel form of entertainment for me--where there were other interesting people. One of these, a lady artist who had travelled all round the world, took me on the next afternoon to an at-home at Professor Goldwin Smith's. In a talk I had with this notable man he spoke of his strong desire that Canada should become absorbed in the States; but the feeling in Canada was adverse to such a change. Still, you found Canadians everywhere, for many more men were educated than could find careers in the Dominion. Sir Sandford Fleming, the most ardent proportionalist in Canada, left Toronto on his trip to New Zealand and Australia shortly after I arrived there. I spent a few hours with him, and owed a great deal of my success in the Dominion to his influence. I felt that I had done much good in Canada, and my time was so occupied that the only thing I missed was leisure.

Much of the time in New York was spent in interviews with the various papers. I had a delightful few days at the house of Henry George, and both he and his wife did everything in their power to make my visit pleasant. Indeed, everywhere in America I received the greatest kindness and consideration. I had been 11 months in the States and Canada, and lived the strenuous life to the utmost. I had delivered over 100 lectures, travelled thousands of miles, and met the most interesting people in the world. I felt many regrets on parting with friends, comrades, sympathizers, and fellow-workers. When I reflected that on my arrival in San Francisco I knew only two persons in America in the flesh, and only two more through correspondence, and was able to look back on the hundreds of people who had personally interested me, it seemed as if there was some animal magnetism in the world, and that affinities were drawn together as if by magic.