initial commit of ebook 34086HEADmain

1 files changed, 3348 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/34086.txt b/34086.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..379b72e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/34086.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3348 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Ifs of History, by Joseph Edgar Chamberlin
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Ifs of History
+
+
+Author: Joseph Edgar Chamberlin
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 16, 2010  [eBook #34086]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IFS OF HISTORY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Malcolm Farmer, Julia12000, and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made
+available by Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries
+(http://www.archive.org/details/toronto)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/ifsofhistory00chamuoft
+
+
+
+
+
+THE IFS OF HISTORY
+
+by
+
+JOSEPH EDGAR CHAMBERLIN
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Philadelphia
+Henry Altemus Company
+
+Copyright, 1907,
+by
+Howard E. Altemus
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+       I. IF THEMISTOCLES HAD NOT BEATEN
+             ARISTIDES IN AN ATHENIAN ELECTION       13
+
+      II. IF THE MOORS HAD WON THE
+             BATTLE OF TOURS                         21
+
+     III. IF KING ETHELRED OF ENGLAND
+             HAD NOT MARRIED THE NORMAN
+             EMMA                                    30
+
+      IV. IF COLUMBUS HAD KEPT HIS
+             STRAIGHT COURSE WESTWARD                37
+
+       V. IF QUEEN ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND
+             HAD LEFT A SON OR DAUGHTER              47
+
+      VI. IF THE PHILARMONIA HAD NOT
+             GIVEN CONCERTS AT VICENZA               56
+
+     VII. IF THE SPANISH ARMADA HAD
+             SAILED AT ITS APPOINTED TIME            64
+
+    VIII. IF CHAMPLAIN HAD TARRIED IN
+             PLYMOUTH BAY                            71
+
+      IX. IF CHARLES II HAD ACCEPTED THE
+             KINGSHIP OF VIRGINIA                    79
+
+       X. IF ADMIRAL PENN HAD PERSISTED IN
+             DISOWNING HIS SON WILLIAM               91
+
+      XI. IF THE BOY GEORGE WASHINGTON
+             HAD BECOME A BRITISH MIDSHIPMAN         99
+
+     XII. IF ALEXANDER HAMILTON HAD NOT
+             WRITTEN ABOUT THE HURRICANE            107
+
+    XIII. IF LAFAYETTE HAD HELD THE
+             FRENCH REIGN OF TERROR IN
+             CHECK                                  114
+
+     XIV. IF GILBERT LIVINGSTON HAD NOT
+             VOTED NEW YORK INTO THE
+             UNION                                  121
+
+      XV. IF THE PIRATE JEAN LAFITTE HAD
+             JOINED THE BRITISH AT NEW
+             ORLEANS                                129
+
+     XVI. IF JAMES MACDONNEL HAD NOT
+             CLOSED THE GATES OF HUGOMONT
+             CASTLE                                 138
+
+    XVII. IF ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FATHER
+             HAD MOVED SOUTHWARD, NOT
+             NORTHWARD                              150
+
+   XVIII. IF SKIPPER JENNINGS HAD NOT RESCUED
+             CERTAIN SHIPWRECKED
+             JAPANESE                               160
+
+     XIX. IF ORSINI'S BOMB HAD NOT FAILED
+             TO DESTROY NAPOLEON III                170
+
+      XX. IF PRESIDENT JAMES BUCHANAN HAD
+             ENFORCED THE LAW IN NOVEMBER,
+             1860                                   176
+
+     XXI. IF THE CONFEDERATES HAD MARCHED
+             ON WASHINGTON AFTER BULL
+             RUN                                    185
+
+    XXII. IF THE CONFEDERATE STATES HAD
+             PURCHASED THE EAST INDIA COMPANY'S
+             FLEET IN 1861                          194
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Whether or not we believe that events are consciously ordered before
+their occurrence, we are compelled to admit the importance of
+Contingency in human affairs.
+
+If we believe in such an orderly and predetermined arrangement, the
+small circumstance upon which a great event may hinge becomes, in our
+view, but the instrumentality by means of which the great plan is
+operated. It by no means sets aside the vital influence of chance to
+assume that "all chance is but direction which we cannot see."
+
+For instance, the believer in special providences regards as clearly
+providential the flight of the flocks of birds which diverted the
+course of Columbus from our shores to those of the West Indies; but it
+is none the less true that this trivial circumstance caused the great
+navigator to turn his prow.
+
+Those who, on the other hand, reject the idea of special providences,
+and treat history as a sequence of occurrences emerging mechanically
+from the relations of men with one another, must admit that causes
+forever contend with causes, and that the nice balance of action and
+reaction may sometimes be influenced radically by even so small a
+circumstance as the cackling of the geese of Rome. It is true that the
+evolutionist is apt to become a believer in necessity to an extent which
+appears unlikely to the mind of the other. Events, in his view, inhere
+in the nature and character of men, these in their turn being the result
+of the physical circumstances that differentiate the nations. This view
+seems at first to reduce the probability that accident will at any time
+sensibly alter the course of affairs.
+
+But if we take historical action and reaction at their moments of
+equilibrium, we see that the tide of affairs may sometimes appear to
+follow the drift of a feather. Consider, for instance, the declaration
+of the Duke of Wellington that the issue of the battle of Waterloo
+turned upon the closing of the gates of Hugomont Castle by the hand of
+one man. Wellington was certainly in a position to know if this was
+true; and in the light of the tremendous events that depended upon the
+trifling act, does it not appear that accident for one moment outweighed
+in consequence any necessity that inhered in the character of the French
+people or that of the nations arrayed against them at Waterloo? It may
+be the function of Contingency to correct the overconfidence of the
+evolutionist.
+
+At all events, we cannot dismiss the "if"; there is, as Touchstone says,
+much virtue in it.
+
+                                     J. E. C.
+
+
+
+
+THE IFS OF HISTORY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+IF THEMISTOCLES HAD NOT BEATEN ARISTIDES IN AN ATHENIAN ELECTION
+
+
+Mithra instead of Jesus! The western world Zoroastrian, not Christian!
+The Persian Redeemer, always called the Light of the World in their
+scriptures; the helper of Ahura-Mazda, the Almighty, in his warfare with
+Ahriman, or Satan; the intercessor for men with the Creator; the Saviour
+of humanity; he, Mithra, might have been the central person of the
+dominant religion of Europe and modern times, but for certain
+developments in Athenian politics in the years between 490 and 480
+B. C. For it is true that in the first three of four centuries of the
+Christian era the western world seemed to hesitate between the religion
+of Mithra and that of Christ; and if the Persians had completed the
+conquest of Greece in the fifth century B. C., Mithra might have so
+strengthened his hold upon Europe that the scale would have been turned
+forever in his direction.
+
+What was it that enabled the Greeks, in the crucial test, the ultimate
+contingency, to turn back the Persians and maintain their independence?
+History says that it was the result of the battles of Marathon and
+Salamis, in which the Greeks were triumphant over the Persians. This is
+true only in a limited sense. The battle of Marathon, in 490 B. C., did
+not save Greece, for the Persians came back again more powerful than
+ever. At Thermopylae, Leonidas and his band died vainly, for the hosts of
+Xerxes overran all Greece north of the isthmus of Corinth. They took
+Athens, and burned the temples on the Acropolis. They were triumphant on
+the land.
+
+But at Salamis, in the narrow channel between the horseshoe-shaped
+island and the Attican mainland, Themistocles, on the 20th day of
+September, 480 B. C., adroitly led the great Persian fleet of six
+hundred vessels into a trap and defeated it in as heroic a fight as ever
+the men of the West fought against the men of the East. Seated on his
+"throne," or rather his silver-footed chair, on a hilltop overlooking
+the scene, Xerxes, the master of the world, beheld the destruction of
+his ships, one by one, by the leagued Greeks. When the battle was over
+he saw that the escape of his victorious army from the mainland was
+imperiled, and while there was yet time, he led his Persian horde in a
+wild flight across his bridge of boats over the Hellespont. The field of
+Plataea completed the check, and the Persian invasions of Europe were
+over forever.
+
+What was it that enabled Themistocles to win this decisive victory for
+Greece after disastrous defeats on land? Simply his skill in the
+politics of Athens. Themistocles was a Hellenic imperialist. He was
+opposed by Aristides, who was a very just man, and an anti-imperialist
+and "mugwump." Greece was at that time terribly menaced by the Persian
+power, and threatened with "Medization," or absorption into the Persian
+nationality. Themistocles saw that the country's only chance lay in a
+union of all the Hellenes, and in the construction of a navy worth the
+name. Aristides was a better orator than he, and at first won against
+him in the Athenian elections. The Greek spirit was innately hostile to
+anything like centralization or imperialism. But when Aegina, which was
+the leading Grecian maritime state, and had some good ships, turned
+against Athens and defeated it on the sea, the Athenians' eyes began to
+open. Themistocles pushed his plan for the construction of a fleet of
+two hundred vessels and the addition of twenty new ships every year to
+this navy.
+
+Squarely across his path stood Aristides, with his ridicule of the
+attempt of little Athens to become a maritime power, and his warnings
+against militarism. But Themistocles, by adroit politics, led the
+Athenians to become sick of Aristides, and persuaded them to ostracize
+or banish this just man. Aristides went to Aegina. Then Themistocles
+rushed forward his plan of naval reform, and carried it through. The two
+hundred ships were built, and not a moment too soon. It was this fleet,
+brilliantly led by Themistocles and Eurybiades at Salamis, which
+entangled the Persians in the narrow waters of Salamis and defeated
+them, and saved Europe for the Europeans.
+
+The victory saved it also for Christ, by keeping alive the worship of
+the half-gods of Greece and Rome until a whole-god came from Judaea. The
+Persians, too, had a whole-god. Idea for idea, principle for principle,
+tenet for tenet, dream for dream, all of later Judaism and all of
+medieval Christianity, except the person and story of Jesus, was in the
+religion of Persia. Not only the central ideas of formal Christianity,
+but many of its dependent and related principles, are found in
+Mithraism, which was the translation of the fundamental philosophic
+ideas of Zoroastrianism into terms of human life. The parallel is so
+striking that many thinkers regard Christianity merely as Mithraism
+bodied forth in a story invented by, or at least told to and believed
+by, a circle of primitive and uneducated zealots who knew nothing of the
+history of the doctrines they were embracing.
+
+But notwithstanding the philosophic likeness, the acceptance of
+Mithraism as it was held and practiced in Persia in Darius's time,
+instead of Christianity, which may have been Mithraism first Judaized
+and afterward Romanized, would have made a vast difference with the
+western world. If Greece had been Persianized before the rise of Rome's
+power, Rome, too, would have been Persianized. The influence of Hebrew
+thought upon the western world would have been forestalled. Zoroastrian
+rites would have prevailed. Over all would have spread the mysticism of
+the East.
+
+Our civilization might have risen as high as it has ever gone, in art,
+in the grace of life; but instead of being inspired with the eager
+desire of progress, by the restless Hellenic necessity of doing
+something better and higher, or at least something other, something
+new--instead of this, the spirit of peace and of satisfaction with old
+ideals would have permeated our systems and our life.
+
+Lord Mithra, too, would have been primarily the sun, primarily an
+embodiment of the light shining down to us through the sky from that
+central essence which alone can say, "I am that I am," and not, as in
+the Lord Christ, a humble, suffering, poor and despised man lifted up
+into Godhead.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+IF THE MOORS HAD WON THE BATTLE OF TOURS
+
+
+The most tremendous contingencies in all history--the determination of
+the fate of whole continents, whole civilizations, by a single
+incident--are sometimes the occurrences that are most completely and
+signally ignored by the ordinary citizen. For instance, it does not
+occur to the man on the street that but for a turn in the tide of battle
+on a certain October day in the year 732, on a sunny field in
+northern-central France, he, the man on the street, would to-day be a
+devout Mussulman, listening at evening for the muezzin's call from a
+neighboring minaret, abjuring pork and every alcoholic beverage, and
+shunning stocks and all kinds of speculation as prohibited forms of
+gambling.
+
+Islamism would to-day, but for a single hard-fought battle and its
+issue, probably be the established form of religion in all Europe. Even
+England would have been unable to resist the onset of the impetuous
+Arabs, once they had established themselves in triumph from the Tagus to
+the Vistula; and the conversion of all Europe would have carried with it
+the Moslemizing of the new world--supposing, indeed, that America had up
+to this time been discovered under Moorish auspices, which is unlikely.
+
+Europe was certainly nearer to conquest by the Moors in the eighth
+century than most people suppose. There are few finer or more heroic
+episodes in history than the extraordinary series of conquests by means
+of which, a handful of fanatical Arabs, inspired by the prophet
+Mohammed, carried, with fire and sword, the faith of Islam over the
+world, until, within two hundred years of the date of the prophet's
+birth, it reigned from the shores of the Atlantic to the banks of the
+Indus. Horde after horde of impetuous warriors of the Crescent had
+arisen. Their purpose, frankly, was to convert the world, and convert it
+by force. Cutting themselves off from their bases of supply, and relying
+upon an alliance of miracle and rapine to sustain them, their triumphant
+campaigns were one continuous and colossal Sherman's march to the sea.
+
+They struck Europe at the east, and also by way of the west. Greek fire
+checked them at the gates of Constantinople in the east, but they
+overran all northern Africa, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and
+flowed like a torrent over Spain and southern France. By the year 731,
+as Gibbon truly says, the whole south of France, from the mouth of the
+Garonne to that of the Rhone, had assumed the manners and religion of
+Arabia.
+
+Abd-er-Rahman, the conqueror, reigned supreme in southwestern Europe.
+Spain and Portugal had been annexed to Asia, and now the turn of France
+had surely come.
+
+But at this crisis a heroic figure arose in Europe--scarcely an elegant
+figure, though a picturesque one. The throne of the Franks had been
+seized by an illegitimate son of old King Pepin, a rough and heedless
+fighter, whose rule pleased the people better than did that of the
+priests and women whom Pepin had left behind him. This bloody-handed
+usurper was named Charles, or Karl, and he was destined afterward to be
+called Martel, "the Hammer," on account of the iron blows that he struck
+upon all who faced him.
+
+Abd-er-Rahman, the victorious Moor, advanced into northern France,
+overthrowing armies with ease, and sacking cities, churches and convents
+as he marched. Nothing could stay him, as it appeared. He had planted
+the standard of the prophet at the gates of Tours, which is one hundred
+and thirty miles, as the crow flies, from Paris. But meantime the
+usurping and base-born Charles, in command of a small army mostly
+composed of gigantic and well-seasoned German warriors, was sneaking
+along, like an Indian, under the shelter of a range of hills, toward the
+Saracen camp; and one day, to Abd-er-Rahman's great surprise, Charles
+fell upon him like a veritable hammer of red-hot iron.
+
+Not in one moment, nor in one day, was the issue decided. Six days the
+armies fought, and through all Abd-er-Rahman and his fanatical horde
+held their own. But on the seventh day Charles led a battalion of his
+biggest, fiercest Germans straight against the Moorish center.
+Abd-er-Rahman himself was slain; his army, appalled by this
+circumstance, was broken and beaten, and faded away toward the South.
+
+Charles Martel made sure his victory by another successful campaign. The
+Moors were driven out of France forever. In their stead Charles himself
+reigned. He had saved Europe to Christianity. Yet for his lack of
+docility, the church execrated him.
+
+If Abd-er-Rahman had overrun France, as he would surely have done if a
+less redoubtable and terrible antagonist than Charles Martel had faced
+him at Tours, he would next have turned his attention to Germany. With
+its fall, Italy and Rome would have invited his attention. There he
+would have found few but priests to oppose him, and the empire of the
+East, attacked in the rear as well as in the front, would speedily have
+succumbed. No Saint Cyril would have gone forth to convert the Russians
+and Bulgarians, who would promptly have been Tartarized.
+
+As we have seen, nothing could have saved England or Ireland. The
+prophet's world-conquest must have been accomplished.
+
+What then? Would the western world have remained at the stage of
+cultivation in which we see Arabia to-day? There is no reason to suppose
+that that would have been quite the case. It was not so in Moorish
+Spain, which rose to a high level of culture. Christianity would not
+have been suppressed. It was not suppressed in Turkey or Spain. But it
+would probably have been ruled, dominated, forced into odd corners, and
+to some extent Moslemized. Learning would not have languished, for in
+certain important forms it flourished in Spain. The western brain, the
+Aryan genius, must have had its way in many intellectual respects. Yet
+the cast of European thought would surely have been sicklied over with
+oriental contemplativeness.
+
+The "hustler" never could have existed under Moslem rule. The speculator
+never would have risen, because he would not have been tolerated. The
+Moslem doctrine forbids censuses and statistics, treating them as a form
+of wicked curiosity concerning the rule of God on earth. Pictorial art,
+and sculpture, which the Koran regards as idolatrous, would have been
+sternly repressed. Literature would have been great along the line of
+poetry; science great along the line of mathematics.
+
+The western woman would have been orientalized. So far from forming
+clubs, she would not have been permitted even to pray in the mosques.
+
+America would have remained undiscovered for centuries; and if at last
+accident or search had laid it bare, it would have followed the path of
+Europe. The mellifluous tones of the muezzin's cadence, "La ilah 'i il
+'Allah," "There is no god but God," would echo now where the shouts and
+yells of the Wall Street speculators reverberate. And the abode of the
+mighty would have been a House of Quiet, not the home of strenuousness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+IF KING ETHELRED OF ENGLAND HAD NOT MARRIED THE NORMAN EMMA
+
+
+Not much turns upon the marriage of kings in these days. The German
+Kaiser is not the less German assuredly because his mother was an
+Englishwoman. Nor did her marriage to the Crown Prince of Prussia give
+Prussia or Germany the slightest hold upon England.
+
+It was altogether different in an earlier day. One royal marriage in
+particular, that of King Ethelred the Redeless, the "Unready," of
+England, to Emma, the daughter of Richard the Fearless, Duke of
+Normandy, in the year 1002, exercised upon Britain and the world the
+most tremendous influence. It led to the invasion and subjugation of
+England by William, surnamed the Conqueror, and to the reconstruction of
+that mother country of ours, politically, socially and racially, upon
+new lines. No royal marriage, perhaps, ever had such enduring and
+far-reaching consequences; no queen-elect ever took with her to her
+adopted country such a lading of fateful changes.
+
+The marriage was a sufficiently commonplace affair in itself. Ethelred
+was a smooth and rather gentle prince, who thought much more of his own
+easy fortunes than of anything else. He wanted a wife, and he did not
+like the Danes, who were racially and politically the nearest neighbors
+of his royal house. He visited Normandy, and must have pleased the Duke,
+for Richard, a bold and resourceful man, bestowed this fair-haired Emma,
+a lineal descendant of the victorious Norse pirates, but now quite
+Frenchified, upon the young Englishman.
+
+She was not destined to see her progeny long reign over England. But it
+did not matter about her descendants. The great change did not come with
+them. What she really did was to supply to her nephew, Duke William,
+known to history as the Conqueror, who was yet to come to the throne of
+Normandy, a pretext to seize the English crown for himself.
+
+William was of illegitimate birth. His mother was Arvela, a poor girl
+whom Duke Robert saw washing clothes in the river one day and
+straightway became enamored of. But on his father's side William was,
+through Emma's marriage, cousin of King Edward the Confessor, son of the
+unready Ethelred. On a lucky day for him he visited England. It was at a
+time when Edward was very ill, and William claimed ever after that he
+had received from Edward, on his sick bed, a solemn promise that the
+Norman duke should succeed him upon the English throne.
+
+Edward had no son, but it appears quite unlikely that a wise ruler such
+as he was should deliberately have given away the throne and country to
+a foreigner, especially when his brother-in-law Harold, Earl of Wessex,
+a capable man, stood ready to succeed him. The English, at any rate,
+took this view of the matter, for they straightway made Harold king,
+ignoring the claim of the vilely born Duke William to the throne.
+
+But as the world knows, William was able to make good his flimsy claim.
+Whether Edward gave him the crown or not, Stamford Bridge and Hastings
+did give it him. When at last, following the law of the time, he
+presented himself to the suffrage of the English nation, the
+representatives of the beaten people had no option but to elect him. He
+was a part of the baggage that Queen Emma brought with her.
+
+What was the rest of it? For one thing, union and consolidation,
+centralization. England up to that time had been but a broken congeries
+of earldoms or tribal territories, and would have gone on thus if it had
+not at last found a master. In the next place, William brought the touch
+of France, of Rome, of the graceful Latin world, to England. This son of
+a hundred pirates passed on to England the torch of a culture that had
+been lighted in Greece and relumed in Rome. It was not for nothing that
+what had been ox meat with the Saxons now became beef for the English;
+what had been calves' flesh became veal, and base swine flesh reappeared
+as a more elegant dish called pork. It meant something that the rude
+language of Beowulf was to be succeeded by the smoother lilt of
+Chaucer--that, in short, the English had a new and bookish tongue.
+
+It meant, in simple truth, the disappearance of the old England and the
+birth of a new and greater nation. "It was in these years of
+subjection," says Green, "that England became really England." The
+Normans degraded the bulk of the English lords, but they made these
+displaced nobles the nucleus of a new middle class. At the same time
+their protection led to the elevation into the same middle class of a
+race of cultivators who had been peasants. Furthermore, the Norman rule
+expanded villages into towns and cities, and these in time began to
+stand, as powerful boroughs, for the rights of the people. The conquest,
+says Green, "secured for England a new communion with the artistic and
+intellectual life of the world without her. To it we owe not merely
+English wealth and English freedom, but England herself."
+
+Edward A. Freeman calls the Norman conquest "the most important event in
+English history since the first coming of the English and their
+conversion to Christianity." If the succession of native kings had
+continued, says the same authority, "freedom might have died out step by
+step, as it did in some other lands. As it was, the main effect of the
+conquest was to call out the ancient English spirit in a new and
+antagonistic shape, to give the English nation new leaders in the
+conquerors who were gradually changed into countrymen, and by the union
+of the men of both races, to win back the substance of the old
+institutions under new forms."
+
+In other words, the Norman Princess Emma brought with her John Bull as a
+part of her dowry, when she came to weak Ethelred as his bride.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+IF COLUMBUS HAD KEPT HIS STRAIGHT COURSE WESTWARD
+
+
+On the morning of the 7th day of October, 1492, Christopher Columbus,
+sailing unknown seas in quest of "Cipango," the Indies, and the Grand
+Khan, still held resolutely to a course which he had laid out due to the
+westward. This course he held in spite of the murmurings of his crew,
+who wished to turn back, and contrary to the advice of that skilled and
+astute navigator, Martin Alonzo Pinzon, who commanded the _Pinta_.
+Pinzon had repeatedly advised that the course be altered to the
+southwestward.
+
+Columbus was sailing on a theory. Pinzon, like any other practical
+navigator in a strange sea, was feeling his way, and answering the
+indications of the waters, the skies, the green grasses that drifted on
+the surface of the waves, the flocks of birds that wheeled, and dipped,
+and showed their heels to the far-wandered navigators, and seemed to
+know their way so well over that remote and uncharted wilderness of the
+deep. Columbus had said, "We will sail to the west, and ever to the
+west, until the west becomes the east." Which to the men before the mast
+was sheer lunacy. But Pinzon had already found strange Afric lands. The
+scent of their leaves and flowers seemed to lie in his nostrils.
+
+Martin Alonzo Pinzon put off in a boat, later on that 7th day of
+October, and came back to the _Santa Maria_, in which was the Admiral.
+He brought the information that he had seen "a great multitude of birds
+passing from the north to the southwest; from which cause he deemed it
+reasonable to suppose that they (the birds) were going to sleep on land,
+or were perhaps flying from winter which must be approaching in the
+countries from which they came." The Admiral knew it was by the aid of
+the flight of birds that the Portuguese had discovered the greater part
+of the new lands which they had found. Columbus hesitated, wavered.
+
+Had the heart of the great theorist, sailing obstinately straight west
+in obedience to the call of the land whose presence there he had
+reasoned out, misgiven him at last? Had the discouragement and
+incredulity of his men affected him? We do not know. But we do know that
+finally he heeded Pinzon's oft-repeated demand that the course be
+altered.
+
+It looked like common sense to follow the birds. Really it was not. The
+theory was his true guide. Columbus betrayed his faith; he resolved, as
+his journal recorded, "to turn his prow to the west-southwest, with the
+determination of pursuing that course _for two days_." He never resumed
+the westward course. He had weakened in his devotion to his own
+idea--and had lost a continent for Spain and the Roman Catholic Church.
+
+For in spite of the conclusion reached by John Boyd Thacher, in his
+monumental work on Columbus, that even if the Admiral had held the
+westward course his fleet would not have passed the northernmost tip of
+the Bahamas, there is sufficient ground for the generally accepted
+conclusion that his landfall in that case would have been on the coast
+of Florida or South Carolina, or even North Carolina. After the
+alteration of his course, Columbus continued to sail for four days in a
+general southwesterly direction, before, on the 12th of October, he fell
+upon Watling's Island. In that time he had sailed, according to his own
+reckoning, one hundred and forty-one leagues. This distance, if
+persisted in due to the westward, would have brought him in contact with
+drift and real bird-flight indications of the continent.
+
+Let us see toward what point his course had been laid. Setting sail from
+Gomera, in the Canary Islands, Columbus purposed to go straight to the
+west until he reached land. Gomera lies in about the latitude of Cape
+Canaveral, or the Indian River, Florida. A line drawn from Gomera to
+Cape Canaveral passes to the northward of the Bahamas altogether. No
+land lay in the Admiral's path to Florida.
+
+But any supposition that Columbus would not have gone to the northward
+of the Indian River ignores the northward drift that the Gulf Stream
+would have caused his ships. He had yet, of course, to reach the axis
+of that powerful current, which is here comparatively narrow, and runs
+very swiftly at the point where the due westward course from Gomera
+would have struck it. It is a fair chance that this drift would have
+carried Columbus so far north as to land him in the neighborhood of what
+is now Charleston, S. C., or even further to the northward, if he had
+followed the path he had laid out for himself.
+
+Amazing the consequences that hung upon the flight of those "multitudes
+of birds" that wheeled Bahama-ward on that October day! The Admiral's
+landfall on the coast even of Florida would have made all temperate
+America Spanish, for it would have focused the might of Ferdinand and
+Isabella upon our shores. We know that the islands which lay immediately
+to the southward of his "Salvador," in the Bahamas, beckoned Columbus in
+that direction, and that the Indians were able by signs to make it
+clear to him that a greater land, which was Cuba, and which he called
+"Cipango," lay in this southerly direction. That way he laid his course,
+"in order," as he wrote in his journal, "to go to this other island
+which is very large and where all these men whom I am bringing from the
+island of San Salvador make signs that there is a great deal of gold and
+that they wear bracelets of it on their arms and legs and in their ears
+and in their noses and on their breasts."
+
+Reason enough! Only it meant that Spain's energy in this hemisphere was
+to be directed to the West Indies, and South America, and Mexico, for as
+long a time as it was destined to endure, and that the vast continental
+North was to be left as the heritage of another race.
+
+It is true that Florida afterward became Spanish. But it was not a
+question of what Florida, merely, was to be. If Columbus had landed
+upon the mainland, the northeastward trend of the coast, reaching back
+toward Spain by just so much, would have beckoned him northward, not
+southward. Even if he had explored southwardly, by some chance, he must
+have returned northward when he had reached the point of the Florida
+peninsula; and in the northerly direction he would have cruised,
+returning Europe-ward. And he would have annexed the land step by step,
+as he annexed Cuba, Hispaniola, and all the southern lands as fast as he
+touched them.
+
+The Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, would have been the scenes of the
+Spaniards' settlement for a hundred years. Though afterward they took
+Florida, that was as a mere side issue; it was unconsidered, neglected,
+after Cuba and Mexico; and was passed on at length to the race that came
+to the mainland more than a hundred years after the landfall at San
+Salvador.
+
+Who can estimate the consequences of a fate which should have sent
+Columbus straight on his way! Who can compass the thought of the
+millions of country-loving Americans of our race unborn here, but
+nurtured under skies now foreign to their very nature, but for that
+glittering flock of tropical birds whirling southwestwardly? It is no
+idle conjecture; von Humboldt, one of the wisest of cosmographers, says
+that never in the world's history had the flight of birds such momentous
+consequences. "It may be said," he avers, "to have determined the first
+settlements in the new continent, and its distribution between the Latin
+and Germanic races." He believed that the Gulf Stream would have carried
+Columbus around Cape Hatteras. It might indeed have done so.
+
+We of the United States may well believe that the hand of Providence
+guided those birds on that October day; but none the less are we
+compelled to admit the strange dependence of human events upon
+circumstances that are most trifling in themselves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+IF QUEEN ELIZABETH HAD LEFT A SON OR DAUGHTER
+
+
+Never did greater events hinge upon a woman's caprice against marriage
+than those which were poised on the will of Elizabeth, Queen of England,
+in the long years that lay between the time when, as a young queen, it
+was proposed to marry her to the Duke of Anjou, and the sere and yellow
+leaf of her womanhood, when her potential maternity was past.
+
+If Elizabeth had married, as her people often implored her to do, and if
+her progeny had sat upon the throne and continued the sway of the
+Tudors, half a century of turmoil and bloodshed, under the essentially
+foreign rule of the Stuarts, might have been spared to England. The
+Revolution doubtless would never have taken place. The material and
+intellectual advance of England and all Britain would have been steady
+and sure upon the splendid foundation of the Elizabethan structure.
+
+But, on the other hand, as good is often evolved from evil, much that is
+sacred and vital to the whole Anglo-Saxon race might have been missed.
+The Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus Act and other guarantees that were
+obtained through the Revolution or the Commonwealth would have been
+wanting in the English Constitution. Oliver Cromwell and John Hampden
+would probably have remained in rustic obscurity. All modern Europe
+would have lacked the political incentive, the revolutionary impulse,
+the constructive audacity, which it has derived from the Grand
+Remonstrance, from the battlefields of Marston Moor and Naseby, where
+royalty was overthrown by the arm of the common people, and from the
+eternal menace that lay in the death-block of King Charles.
+
+It was not because of any aversion to the society of men that Elizabeth
+remained unmarried. Very far from this; it is likely that her extreme
+liking for male society cut a considerable figure in her refusal. She
+did not propose to give any man a public right to interfere with her
+liberty of choice in this regard. History agrees that there was a sting
+of truth in the words of Mary, Queen of Scots, in a letter which she
+once sent to Elizabeth: "Your aversion to marriage proceeds from your
+not wishing to lose the liberty of compelling people to make love to
+you." The queen was fickle and passionate. She had little fear of the
+royal Mrs. Grundy. At the tender age of sixteen scandal linked her name
+with that of the Lord Admiral Seymour in such a way that an
+investigation by the council was necessary. She baffled the lawyers in
+the examination by her "very good wit."
+
+From the time of her accession, at the age of twenty-five, to the time
+of her death, Elizabeth was certainly never without a favorite. She had
+small conscience, and there can be little doubt that she required the
+assassination of poor Amy Robsart in order that her favorite, Dudley,
+might be free from his young wife; and when, after the age of sixty, her
+young cavalier of that time, the fascinating Essex, wearying of dancing
+attendance upon her at court, joined the expedition of Drake against
+Portugal, the Queen bade him return instantly at his "uttermost peril."
+In the end she signed the unhappy Essex's death warrant for an alleged
+rebellion against her.
+
+But her motive in refusing matrimony was not altogether--perhaps not
+even chiefly--one of coquetry. She was avid of power, and could brook no
+rival in its exercise. It is probable that considerations of real
+patriotism restrained her from marrying a continental prince. She shrank
+from introducing foreign influence as instinctively as Americans have at
+all times. She shrank from bowing to any yoke of Europe. But there were
+also objections to her marrying an Englishman. If she had chosen one she
+would have aroused the jealousy of all Englishmen not of his party or
+following. She regarded it as the better policy to keep them all hoping.
+
+The unmarried state suited her arrogant and domineering nature well. She
+had none of the docility which made Queen Victoria a model house-wife
+and mother, and also a model constitutional sovereign. It was her
+purpose to have undivided power or none. To the deputation of the House
+of Commons which visited her with a petition that she marry, she
+answered: "For me it shall be sufficient that a marble stone declare
+that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin."
+
+The Commons who uttered the petition must have felt a premonition of
+what would actually take place if there were no heir of Elizabeth's
+body. The next heir to the throne was Mary, Queen of Scots. She was a
+zealous Catholic, and England had just fully established its religious
+independence. It is true that Mary's son and heir, James, who afterward
+became King of England, as well as of Scotland, was a Protestant, but
+the loyalty of the adhesion of his house to the new confession might
+well have been distrusted. There was no promise of happiness for England
+in the accession of a prince or princess of this house to its throne.
+
+But the Stuarts came--and the troubles of England began in real
+earnest. Elizabeth's reign had been, as it then seemed to all
+Englishmen, and as in very many respects it was, the golden age of
+Britain. Never had art, and literature, and material prosperity, risen
+to so high a level. The world seemed opening to a new and glorious life,
+like a rose bursting into bloom. In literature it had been the age of
+Shakespeare and Bacon. But with the Stuarts, literature and art passed
+into a long eclipse. Shakespeare's light may be said to have gone out
+for a hundred years, to be lighted again only from the borrowed torch of
+German culture.
+
+Let us suppose that Elizabeth had been able to find a consort as wise
+and as harmless as was Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. Let
+us suppose that the pair had left behind them a thoroughly English
+prince, their own son, a man who would have been capable of continuing
+Elizabeth's prudent rule and of holding England to its traditions while
+maintaining the extraordinary advance that had marked her splendid
+reign. Without James's mingled poltroonery and tyranny to nurse and
+stimulate it, it is doubtful if Puritanism would have had its spasm of
+ascendency. English history would have been spared an epoch of chaos, of
+wild experimentation, of political empirics.
+
+At the same time it would have been deprived of a form of political
+genius which was hammered out of the fire of rebellion. English
+Whiggism, English liberalism, English nonconformity have made the world
+over anew. America, in particular, would have been infinitely poorer
+without the Puritan ferment. Should we have had the New England
+migration at all, if England had continued its calm and homogeneous
+development under Elizabethan influences? Would not rather all America
+have been like Virginia, and the new world organized on a roast-beef,
+plum-pudding and distinctly Anglican and conformist basis?
+
+If we can imagine Massachusetts a purely Episcopal colony to-day, ruled
+by parochial vestries instead of by town-meeting-parliaments and the
+village Gladstone and his responsible cabinet in every hamlet, and the
+whole province presided over by some self-sufficient Sir Alexander
+Swettenham as the representative of British royalty, we may perhaps
+imagine England without the cataclysm of the Stuarts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+IF THE PHILARMONIA HAD NOT GIVEN CONCERTS AT VICENZA
+
+
+For the sake of variety, perhaps of diversion, in the midst of more
+serious speculations, let us have an "if" of musical history--and one
+which, no doubt, musicians may regard as purely fanciful, totally
+absurd. It should be stated at the start that this chapter is written by
+one who has no knowledge of music, but is capable of a very keen
+enjoyment of it, and has in his time heard much professional music--many
+concerts, operas and oratorios--and also much of the spontaneous
+untrained music of the people, including old New England ballads now
+forgotten; the songs of German peasants at the fireside and spinning
+wheel; the native corn songs, "wails" and "shouts" of Southern negroes
+on the plantations; and the medicine songs, scalp songs, ceremonial
+chants and love ditties of the American Indians.
+
+The contingency which will be presented here is this: If a certain group
+of unprofessional singers and musicians in the highly cultivated Italian
+town of Vicenza, about midway of the sixteenth century, had not banded
+themselves together in a society called the Philarmonia, and for the
+first time in Europe given musical entertainments to which the public
+were admitted, the musical institution called the concert might never
+have existed, and music in that case would have remained a spontaneous
+expression of human emotion, untainted with what is now called
+virtuosity--that is, the strife and strain after technical mastery,
+which affects the whole character of music, and diverts it from its
+original purpose of pleasing the sense and comforting the heart.
+
+Expert professional music was a thing of very slow growth. The old
+chapelmasters or choirmasters were, of course, in a sense professional,
+since they lived upon the church. But they had also a sacerdotal
+character. At the beginning they were always priests. To make a class of
+professional musicians, vying with one another for mere mastery, the
+public concert, with paid musicians, had to be developed.
+
+Though the Philarmonia gave public concerts at Vicenza, as we have said,
+in the middle of the sixteenth century, concert music and opera music
+had no general existence for as much as a century afterward. The first
+opera ever represented was Peri's "Eurydice," written about 1600. Even
+that was merely the expression of a group of enthusiasts, a sort of
+private attempt to embody a theory of their own about what music should
+be. It was not until the year 1672 that the first concert, with a price
+for admission, was given in London. The price then charged was a
+shilling, and the concert was in a private house.
+
+By that time the start had been made. Other concerts were given soon
+afterward. They became popular. There was a demand for skilled musicians
+and soloists. Performers began practicing for the sake of excelling in
+technical achievement. By swift and sudden steps a premium was put upon
+mechanical perfection in the handling of instruments. The old
+spontaneous methods of expression gradually became discredited.
+
+As a consequence of the new development, two sorts of music grew up in
+the world. On the one side stood concert music, professional music,
+virtuoso music. This was difficult and complicated, and it was
+impossible for ordinary people to sing it or play it. On the other side
+was the popular music--folk music, the music of the street, the nursery,
+the stable-shed and the taproom. As popular music was regularly deserted
+now for the concert school by those who possessed the greatest musical
+talent, it began to degenerate until it reached at last the degradation
+of "Grandfather's Clock," "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," "Waiting at the Church"
+and the graphophone.
+
+On the other hand, concert music moved farther and farther away from the
+hearts and the comprehension of the people, until it has become a thing
+apart from their lives, to be enjoyed almost as much with the eye as
+with the ear, the interest lying chiefly in the production, in
+succession, of individual masters, each of whom visibly surpasses the
+mechanical achievements of his immediate predecessor.
+
+If those first concerts had not been given by the Philarmonia at
+Vicenza, and the idea had not slowly rippled outward thence, like
+spreading circles from a stone thrown into the water, until it reached
+Vienna, Paris and London, what would have been the state of music
+to-day?
+
+Manifestly the development of church music would have gone on. The
+people, no doubt, would have been taking part in magnificent chorals.
+The masses of the Catholic Church would have their correspondent feature
+in the anthems and hymns sung in the Protestant churches by the
+congregations. Every instrument that existed in the sixteenth century
+would have been perfected, but not one would have taken on the intricate
+development which musical mechanism exacts.
+
+In other words, the harpsichord would never have become a piano, and the
+electrical church organ would not have been heard of. We should all play
+some such instrument as the harp, the violin, the viol, the flute, the
+pipe or the dulcimer. All might have been composers, as the negroes and
+Indians are to-day, but on a higher plane.
+
+What popular music might be now but for that unlucky Philarmonia
+discovery is suggested by an extract from the writings of Thomas Morley,
+an Englishman who became a great amateur and introducer of Italian
+madrigals in his own country. In the year 1597 he wrote that, on a
+certain evening, in England,--
+
+     supper being ended, and musicke-bookes, according to the
+     custome, being brought to the table, the mistresse of the house
+     presented mee with a part, earnestly requesting mee to sing.
+     But when, after manie excuses, I protested unfainedly that I
+     could not, euerie one began to wonder. Yea, some whispered unto
+     others, demanding how I was brought up. So that, upon shame of
+     mine ignorance, I go now to seek out mine old friende master
+     Gnorimus, to make myselfe his schollar.
+
+In those days a person who could not sing, and sing well, was regarded
+as a freak, and was required to fit himself to join in the universal
+diversion. If we had not turned over our music making to professionals
+it would be so now. Instead of going to the concert or the opera after
+the evening meal, or playing bridge or talking scandal, people would
+have participated in the singing of madrigals, glees or whatever other
+sort of popular spontaneous music had been developed, and all would have
+been sustained and uplifted by the exalted joy that comes from joining
+with others in the production of good music.
+
+The people would have been joyously and heartily musical. Their taste
+would not have been degraded to the point where it is gratified, as in
+the graphophone, with a complicated succession of flat and strident
+sounds unmusical in themselves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+IF THE SPANISH ARMADA HAD SAILED AT ITS APPOINTED TIME
+
+
+When Philip the Second, son of the great emperor Charles V, came to the
+throne of Spain, that country had become the greatest cosmopolitan
+empire in the world. The throne of Castile, at one time or another
+during Philip's reign, was the throne not only of Spain and Portugal,
+but of the Netherlands and Burgundy, the Sicilies, Sardinia, Milan,
+Cuba, Hispaniola, Florida, Mexico, California, nearly all of South
+America, and the Philippine Islands. The Spanish monarch was the eldest
+son of the church; and Philip, strong, ambitious, bigoted and insolent,
+expected, as he laid the foundations of his glorious palace, the
+Escorial, the eighth wonder of the world, to become master of France and
+Britain, and to bequeath to his son the vastest empire that the sun had
+ever shone upon.
+
+By his marriage with Queen Mary he acquired the nominal title of king of
+England, though he was never crowned. But his grudge rose against
+England after Mary's death and Elizabeth's accession. The country proved
+itself a thorn in his side, helping the Dutch rebels and undoing at home
+the persecuting work of his late spouse. Philip formed a great project
+for the invasion of the country.
+
+Spain was supreme then on the sea. The English navy had greatly
+declined. In 1575 it had but twenty-four vessels of all classes on the
+water. Philip knew the cleverness of the English with their ships,
+however, and in planning this invasion he proposed to be invincible.
+Invincible he sought to make the Armada, or fleet, that he sent against
+the country, and invincible not only he, but all Europe, believed it to
+be, when, in January of the year 1588, the great flotilla was ready to
+sail.
+
+It consisted of about one hundred and thirty ships, of which sixty-two
+were over three hundred tons burden. It was commanded by a brave and
+skillful sea fighter, Santa Cruz. The English had bettered their
+conditions of seven years before very greatly, but they were at this
+moment absolutely unprepared to meet a foreign fleet. Their ships were
+scattered far and wide, and many were unequipped. If the Armada had
+sailed at that moment it would have found no force ready to meet it. And
+it would have escaped the storms that later befell.
+
+But _manana_ is the curse of all Spain's projects. The Armada lingered.
+Santa Cruz, its chief, sickened in port and died. Very likely if he had
+sailed no such fate would have overtaken him. This was the first of the
+big fleet's misfortunes. Philip looked about for another commander. By a
+fatuous favoritism his choice fell upon the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who
+was utterly incompetent.
+
+The months flew past. Meantime the English, fully apprised of the king's
+intentions, were getting a fleet together. In those days it was not
+necessary to wait five years for a battleship to be constructed. Almost
+any big ship could be turned into a fighting craft. In particular, the
+English were well off in guns, and the delay of the Armada gave them a
+chance to get their artillery on board.
+
+When--_nombre de Dios!_--does the reader suppose that this invincible
+fleet, ready in January, really set sail from Coruna? On the 12th day of
+July! It had already been scattered and weakened by a storm off Lisbon.
+On the 21st of July Medina Sidonia sailed into Drake's and Hawkins's
+"line ahead" formation in the English channel as Rojestvensky sailed
+into Togo's lair off Tsu-Shima in 1905, and the result to him somewhat
+resembled the subsequent fate of the Russian fleet in the Sea of Japan.
+It was not, however, so bad. If Medina Sidonia had gone, with his
+surviving ships, after the first onset, to Denmark, and refitted, he
+might yet have embarrassed the British. But he sought to make the
+passage around the north of Scotland, and a succession of storms wrecked
+his whole remaining fleet.
+
+All authorities agree that in January, 1588, no English force existed
+which could have hoped to check Santa Cruz as things then stood. What if
+he had come on and landed an army of trained veterans upon England's
+undefended shores? He must have won. Queen Elizabeth must have been
+overthrown. Ireland would have gladly joined Philip. England was almost
+half Catholic, and the people of that faith might eventually have become
+reconciled to the foreigner. Philip might have made himself another
+Norman William. The Spanish culture would have been imposed upon the
+English nation. But unlike William of Normandy, who transferred his
+power to Britain, Philip would have remained a Spanish sovereign, and
+London would have been ruled from Madrid.
+
+Philip would never have temporized with English Protestantism. The
+chances are that he would have stamped it out utterly and at the start,
+as he sought, too late, to do in the Netherlands. If he might have
+worked his will, he would also have suppressed English learning and
+literature. William Shakespeare, who had just come up to London, had
+never produced a play when the Armada sailed, and probably he never
+would have produced one if it had conquered. The glorious Elizabethan
+culture would have been nipped in the bud.
+
+All Britain's possessions in the new world, already existent or to be,
+would have fallen to Spain or France if Philip had overthrown
+Elizabeth--doubtless to Spain, for Philip's ambition to seize the French
+throne would have been furthered by his conquest of England. Spanish
+viceroys would have borne sway for centuries over all North America. A
+hybrid Indian-Latin race would have arisen here, as in Mexico and Peru.
+Lacking the inspiration of North American freedom, all Spanish America
+to the southward would have remained to this day under the dons.
+
+Castilian speech, Castilian cultivation, Castilian manners, the
+Castilian faith, might have reigned supreme over a dusky race from the
+St. Lawrence to the Straits of Magellan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+IF CHAMPLAIN HAD TARRIED IN PLYMOUTH BAY
+
+
+On the 18th of July, in the year 1605, Samuel de Champlain, in command
+of a ship of the King of France, and engaged in the search for an
+eligible site for a great settlement, anchored in the harbor which was
+afterward to be known as the harbor of Plymouth, in New England. Two
+days before, he had been in Boston Bay. He mapped both these havens, and
+expressed his approval of the physical resources, and also the native
+Indian peoples, of the region.
+
+At that time the coast of New England was really unappropriated, though
+soon after it was claimed by both France and England. It was merely a
+question which power should first seriously undertake the settlement of
+the country. If France planted her colony here, the land was destined to
+be French. If England hers, it would be English.
+
+Champlain carefully studied the advantages of Boston and Plymouth. That
+he thought favorably of the latter place is proved by the very decent
+map, still extant, which he made of Plymouth and Duxbury waters. "Port
+St. Louis," he called the place, after the patron saint of France, and
+after his royal master. It looked very much as if he hoped that the spot
+he so honored would be made the seat of the French empire in the western
+world.
+
+But Champlain sailed away, bearing with him the blessing of the thickly
+settled and sedentary native people. He passed around Cape Cod, and
+went westward as far as Nauset harbor, near New Bedford. And then, in
+due time, he sailed for France. When, in 1608, he finally laid the
+foundations of the city which was to be the capital of France in the new
+world, he did not lay them at Plymouth or Boston, but at Quebec, on the
+St. Lawrence.
+
+Why was his choice thus made? Largely, no doubt, because Champlain,
+whose accurate information and seemingly always wise observation were
+greatly trusted by the King of France, was infatuated with the noble
+aspect and vast proportions of the gulf and river of St. Lawrence. He
+was first of all a sailor, and he had seen nothing to compare with the
+magnificence of this great _embouchure_. Here were scope and refuge for
+the greatest of navies! Here, it seemed, was a place designed by the
+Almighty to be the seat of an empire!
+
+Champlain had an excellent eye for harbors, but not so good an eye of
+prophecy for the grand constructive events that were to be. He left the
+Massachusetts coast unappropriated. First its native inhabitants, so
+numerous, so gentle, so industrious, were decimated by a plague that
+came to them from the white men. Only a remnant survived. And when, in
+1620, their sachem, Samoset, shouted "Welcome, Englishmen!" to the men
+of the Mayflower, the Indian king hailed, unconsciously, the advent of
+an empire which was to cast the domain of New France into a cold and
+waning shadow. For Quebec was too far north, and its hinterland too poor
+and restricted, ever to nurse an imperial race.
+
+What if Champlain had been more sagacious, and had made his stand on the
+coast of Massachusetts? In all probability the settlement would have
+been definitive. The Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Boston,
+finding no place for their settlement in the north, would, in 1620,
+have gone to Virginia or Georgia. The steely Yankee wedge which, on one
+side, was to force the Dutch out of New Amsterdam, and on the other the
+French out of Port Royal and Acadia, would never have been driven. New
+England would have been French forever, and New York Dutch.
+
+The principle of the hinterland was asserted so successfully in our
+early history that Massachusetts and Connecticut were able to claim
+territory as far west as the Mississippi River. It was by means of this
+hinterland claim that the young American republic succeeded in rounding
+out its northwestern possessions, after the War of the Revolution, and
+obtaining Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. All these
+would have been French if Champlain had made New England French; and the
+English colonies, if they had ever become strong enough to throw off the
+British yoke, would have consisted of a restricted section in the
+Southeast.
+
+Indeed, without Sam Adams, Otis, Warren, and Israel Putnam, without the
+revolt against the Stamp Act, and without Lexington, Concord and Bunker
+Hill, it is impossible to conceive of the American republic at all.
+
+Supposing it to have been constituted notwithstanding, it would have had
+to do without the influence of the New England town meeting, the New
+England common free school, the New England college, and the
+congregational system of church organization. It would have been
+deprived of the work of Franklin, Hancock, the Adamses, Webster, Sumner,
+Garrison, Phillips, Grant and the Shermans, in its affairs, and of
+Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne and Parkman in
+its intellectual life.
+
+What would the New England country and the people have been like, if
+Champlain had never turned back from Plymouth Bay? We know from
+Benjamin Franklin's account what the progeny of the English settlers had
+become even as long ago as 1772. "I thought often," he wrote in that
+year, "of the happiness of New England, where every man is a freeholder,
+has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, has plenty of
+good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the
+manufacture perhaps of his own family. Long may they continue in this
+situation!" What the Canadian habitant is to-day, we know. Very often he
+is unable to read or write, and his material and moral condition very
+low. Even as late as 1837 the Canadian provinces were still arbitrarily
+ruled by royal governors, with appointed councils or upper houses which
+had a veto on all legislation. There was no self-rule, and the mass of
+the French people were illiterate and miserably poor.
+
+Sieur Samuel de Champlain did a good day's work for English-speaking
+America, and the great free republic that was to be, when he pointed his
+prow northward and sailed away, out of sight of Cape Cod, in the summer
+of 1605.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+IF CHARLES II HAD ACCEPTED THE KINGSHIP OF VIRGINIA
+
+
+Once at least the New World has furnished to the Old World a reigning,
+actual king; once, for thirteen years, a monarch, sitting on a throne in
+America, ruled thence an ancient kingdom in Europe. And twice this
+singular thing might have happened, with this time an enthroned
+sovereign on the banks of the James instead of on the shore of a
+Brazilian bay, if a certain king's son and king-to-be had been of a
+somewhat more venturing and less indolent disposition.
+
+The occasion when the thing really happened was when Don John VI, King
+of Portugal, removed his royal throne and all the paraphernalia of
+government from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, in 1807 (being impelled
+thereto by an intrusive movement on the part of one Napoleon Bonaparte),
+and turned Portugal (after the withdrawal of the French) into an actual
+dependency of Brazil. This it remained until King John recrossed the
+Atlantic in 1820. Throughout that period the scepter bore sway from west
+to east, from America Europe-ward.
+
+Very much the same thing would have occurred further north in the
+contingency to which I have referred; and if it had, a royalist or
+monarchist influence might have been laid upon the English colonies in
+America which would have colored their history and institutions in a
+marked degree, even if their destiny had not been permanently affected.
+
+When Charles I, King of England, was arrested, imprisoned, and put to
+death by the Parliament party in 1649, Virginia experienced a shock of
+shame and indignation. That colony had absolutely no sympathy with
+Cromwell and his party. It was in no sense or part Puritan. The Cavalier
+sentiment dominated it completely; for though the bulk of its
+inhabitants came out very poor, and were as far as possible from being
+"gentlemen," they were not at all of the material of which Roundheads
+were made; nor had they any influence in the government of the Province.
+The General Assembly represented the gentlemen of the colony, who were
+royalists to a man.
+
+It is not surprising, therefore, that upon the receipt of the news of
+the execution of Charles I, the General Assembly of Virginia lost no
+time in meeting and passing an act in which the dead king's son, Charles
+II, was recognized as the rightful and reigning sovereign. Legal
+processes, and the machinery of the provincial government, continued to
+run in the king's name. In England, Cromwell was installed as Lord
+Protector. But Virginia refused to recognize him or his title. At least
+one county of Virginia formally proclaimed Charles king, requiring "all
+his majesty's liege people to pray God to bless Charles the Second, King
+of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Virginia, New England and the
+Caribda Islands." This, I believe, was the first appearance of the term
+"King of Virginia," a title which was destined to be heard again
+somewhat later.
+
+Nor did the people content themselves with proclaiming Charles king. In
+1650, Governor Berkeley sent Colonel Norwood to Holland to invite the
+prince to become the ruling sovereign of what Raleigh had called "the
+newe Inglishe Nation" on this side the water. Charles did not accept.
+Nor did he frankly refuse. He had not the boldness to go to Virginia,
+but he was delighted with the chance to put on for a moment the manner
+and authority of a ruler. He sent Berkeley a new commission as governor,
+signed by himself as king, and gave Colonel Norwood a commission as
+treasurer of the colony. Both commissions were honored in Virginia.
+
+The colony, indeed, with Barbadoes in the West Indies, virtually
+constituted itself the Dominion of King Charles the Second; and it is in
+memory of that assumption of the whole kingdom's prerogative, as the
+Virginians believe, that the state is called the Old Dominion to-day.
+
+Nor did the people propose that their allegiance should remain merely
+nominal. They essayed actually to cut the connection with Cromwell's
+Commonwealth and maintain themselves as the sovereign remainder of the
+English realm. They succeeded in maintaining this position for a
+considerable time--until, that is, 1651, when Cromwell's government
+sent three ships of war to reduce the Virginians to submission. As all
+the principal settlements were within easy reach of navigable water, and
+had not developed sufficient back territory by means of which to support
+themselves, it was impracticable for them to hold out long; they were
+obliged to submit. Cromwell treated the province oppressively, and
+forbade the other colonies to trade with it.
+
+It is not at all surprising that Virginia, which in the meantime had
+become the place of refuge of many more royalists, took steps to throw
+off the Puritan allegiance as soon as possible after Cromwell's death,
+and sought to anticipate the restoration of the Stuarts. Sir William
+Berkeley, whom Cromwell had displaced with a Roundhead governor, was
+again called to the head of things by the people. He refused to assume
+the governorship at their mandate unless they gave him their solemn and
+formal promise to venture their lives and fortunes for King Charles II.
+This promise was given him by the unanimous voice of the electors.
+Berkeley then proceeded to proclaim Charles "King of England, Scotland,
+France, Ireland and Virginia." Virginia was once more the sole existing
+segment of the king's dominion. In Virginia, and in Virginia only,
+processes and documents were issued in his name.
+
+Charles was therefore really king in Virginia, though in very fact he
+was still living a lazy and rather low life in the Dutch towns, or
+eating, as a guest, the bread of the French and Spanish nobility. The
+Virginians, however, were not at all content with having set up a mere
+paper sovereignty for him. Berkeley had kept in touch, by letter and
+through messengers, with Charles, and had sent word to him, in Holland,
+before the Commonwealth had fallen, that he would raise his standard in
+Virginia if the king would give his consent. Once more he offered him a
+Virginian crown. Richard Lee was sent to Holland with a proposition from
+Berkeley to take the field for the king. It was even proposed that
+Charles should come to Virginia and set up his throne there.
+
+The king once more sent cordial thanks to the Virginians. But he did not
+accept their proposition. We can imagine that along one side of his
+nature it appealed to him, and on the other and commanding side it was
+quite unwelcome; that is to say, while it must have inflamed somewhat
+his ambition to be king once more and have done with the eating of the
+bread of others, it was quite in conflict with his natural indolence and
+moral cowardice. His first attempt to assert his kingship, when, on the
+field of Worcester, he was ignominiously defeated by Cromwell, had
+sickened him with all proceedings having the stamp of energy upon them.
+As a matter of fact, it would have been perfectly safe for him to raise
+his standard and set up his throne in Virginia. But he would not venture
+it. He would remain on the Continent and await the turn of events.
+
+Ere long events made him king in England. The Commonwealth fell to
+pieces when there was no longer a strong hand to guide it. Charles
+landed shabbily, even squalidly, at Dover, almost sneaking into the
+country, instead of coming in triumph from Virginia, with a kingly New
+World in his hand, as he might have done if he had accepted Berkeley's
+invitation.
+
+If, after his defeat at Worcester, he had taken advantage of Virginia's
+first proffer and of French assistance, and raised his flag in America,
+Charles might have affected the world's history very materially. There
+was no time when the Puritans were not in a minority in England. They
+held down the majority for a time because they had developed a superior
+military capacity, and had a splendid, resolute army. But to the nucleus
+of a brilliant Cavalier command in the New World, the more vigorous
+English royalists might have rallied. A court at Williamsburg, which was
+then and for a long time afterward the capital of Virginia, would have
+meant a royal court in London much sooner than it really arrived, and
+would have caused the Commonwealth to leave a fainter and narrower mark
+upon the history of England than in the event it did leave.
+
+Meantime, what a brilliant court would have assembled around the gay and
+talkative monarch at Williamsburg! Already the Lees, the Washingtons,
+the Berkeleys, and many others of the "first families," were established
+in Virginia. Charles would probably have been happy in the easy,
+light-hearted atmosphere of the plantations. There were no Puritans
+there to bother him. Virginia had made its own laws against Puritan
+practices--and enforced them.
+
+Never was a monarch who would have been better pleased with having about
+him actual slaves--men and women whose bodies he would have owned. His
+sway must have spread northward as far as the border of the French
+possessions, for though New England was Puritan, it bent reluctantly to
+the sway of the Commonwealth, seeming to scent in the Roundhead
+sovereignty a kind of rival that threatened to take over its half-won
+autonomy. A kingship exercised in America would probably have suited the
+men of New England very well.
+
+In all likelihood the throne would in due time have been transferred to
+the mother country. But its erection here, even for a few years, must
+have infused into the character of the Americans generally a larger
+element of monarchicalism than fell to their lot as it was. Virginia
+would hardly have fallen off so readily into colonial republicanism as
+it did in 1774-1776. English neglect of a really royalist Virginia sowed
+the seed of Virginian rebellion. If Virginia had not supported
+Massachusetts, shoulder to shoulder, there could not have been an
+American Revolution. Charles did not know how far he let Virginia go
+when he rebuffed Berkeley's emissaries.
+
+The sentiment of personal loyalty to the crown remained strong in the
+colonies up to the very outburst of the Revolution. The Americans
+dissolved the relation of subject and sovereign with regret. If they had
+ever had a king whom they could call their own, the interest enkindled
+and perpetuated by his presence might very well have turned the scale in
+1776 and prevented the withdrawal of the colonies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+IF ADMIRAL PENN HAD PERSISTED IN DISOWNING HIS SON WILLIAM
+
+
+When an English father, irascible and opinionated, disowns and turns out
+of doors a son who has not only disobeyed him but proved false to the
+traditions and obvious interests of the family, he is very apt to adhere
+to his action. A very great deal turned upon a case, once, in which an
+English father, after making a very firm show of disowning his son, at
+last relented and took him back to his heart.
+
+Pennsylvania, to wit, turned upon it; and all the amazing success of
+William Penn's great experiment in colonization. There has never been
+anything quite like that success in the world's history, for the great
+trek of the already established American population in the nineteenth
+century was a readjustment, an extension, rather than a colonization in
+the true sense. The planting of Pennsylvania was a true colonization.
+Not only did it amount to the creation of a great and model
+commonwealth, full-fledged, with a composite new-world population, in
+twenty or even ten years' time, but it furnished the keystone to the
+arch of states that constituted the American republic in the next
+century after Penn's settlement.
+
+Philadelphia led the American towns in the seven years of the
+Revolution. It was their capital commercially as well as politically. It
+supplied most of the sinews of war. Without Robert Morris's $1,400,000,
+all of which came from Philadelphia, the final and crucial campaign of
+the war could not have been fought. More than that, without just the
+sort of commonwealth that Pennsylvania had already become, standing in
+the center of things--cosmopolitan, independent of royalist or
+aristocratic influence, populous, well-to-do, democratic, steady--it is
+hard to see how the Revolution could have been undertaken at all.
+
+But for the incident which permitted Penn's settlement, the vast
+territory which afterward constituted Pennsylvania would have become
+merely an extension of New York, or of New Jersey, or of Maryland, or of
+Virginia, or of all of them. The chances are that its resources would
+have been exploited by slave labor. The greater part of the state might
+have remained slave territory up to 1861. In any case its development
+would have been much more slow, its peopling much less rapid. Not only
+must Indian wars have checked growth, but the spectacle of the arrival
+of five hundred thousand stalwart Germans, the creation of the largest
+city in the colonies within fifty years, and the upbuilding, in that
+time, of a trade from the Delaware River that employed more than five
+hundred ships and seven thousand sailors, could never have been
+presented.
+
+The part which Pennsylvania began to play from the moment of Penn's
+arrival, and which it still plays, in American affairs, was directly
+dependent upon Penn's character and genius, and, for a long time, upon
+his wealth and social position. Without the wealth which William Penn
+inherited from his father, Admiral Sir William Penn, he could not have
+organized his Pennsylvania Society, nor bought the site of Philadelphia.
+Without the position, as well as the wealth, which he inherited, he
+could not, in the first place, have aspired to the acquaintance with and
+confidence of King Charles II; and these were absolutely essential to
+the extraordinary charter, in behalf of a despised and distrusted
+people, which Penn received at the king's hands.
+
+Had Penn always been in this favorable position? We shall see. The
+admiral, his father, was a good churchman and a conservative man. King
+Charles held him in very high estimation. The son was brilliant, and of
+noble character. He was sent to Oxford University; and what was the
+father's astonishment, after the boy had been there some little time, to
+hear that he had joined the despised and persecuted sect of the Quakers!
+This was very much as if, at the present day, the son and heir of a
+great multi-millionaire should join, not merely the Socialists, but the
+Anarchists at Paterson!
+
+Sir William raved and scolded. The son only grew more firm in the faith.
+Sir William endured much; but finding the young man actually inclined to
+address the king as "thou," he told him that if he committed this
+impropriety, or "thee-ed" and "thoued" either him, the admiral, or the
+Duke of York, he would disown him, and cut him off without a shilling.
+On the very first opportunity after this, young William addressed King
+Charles as "thou!" The king, having a more than royal sense of humor,
+made a jest of the matter, but Sir William did not. He was as good as
+his word. He turned his son out of doors, and bade him begone. The youth
+went abroad, and took up for a time a very much discredited existence.
+He had already been expelled from the university.
+
+Here, for a time, the fate of Pennsylvania certainly trembled in the
+balance. It was quite within the outraged admiral's power to make the
+ban permanent. If he had done so, there would never have been a
+Quaker-German commonwealth in America.
+
+It is known that the son accepted his banishment as permanent. But his
+mother did not. She pleaded with the father for his forgiveness. She
+reminded him of the boy's great natural goodness, his brilliancy, his
+affectionateness. He would, Lady Penn maintained, recover from his
+distemper of Quakerism. She begged her husband, before it was too late,
+to relent and recall him.
+
+At length, moved by this appeal and the promptings of his own heart, the
+admiral called the young man home. Once or twice afterwards he was on
+the point of a more radical banishment of him. But, fortunately for the
+New World, Sir William's heart was soft after all. The son was
+reestablished in his good graces. After the admiral's death, in 1670, it
+was found that he had bequeathed all his wealth to the son, and, owing
+to the son's influence, the Quakers improved their position not a
+little, and in due time Penn organized and put through the Pennsylvania
+experiment. But King Charles took good care to inform him that the name
+"Pennsylvania," officially bestowed on the colony, was not in honor of
+the founder, but in compliment to the admiral, his father.
+
+Narrow as this contingency may have been, since so great an event
+depended on the impulse of one man, it was after all a moral
+contingency, and not due of physical accident, as so many others have
+been. It is the more impressive for this reason. It is good to know that
+a few heartbeats the more, in the breast of a man who can be kind as
+well as hot-tempered, may create a mighty empire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+IF THE BOY GEORGE WASHINGTON HAD BECOME A BRITISH MIDSHIPMAN
+
+
+One summer day, in 1746, a British ship of war lay in the Potomac River
+below the place where the city of Washington now stands. The officers of
+the ship had been visiting at Mount Vernon, which was the residence of
+Major Lawrence Washington, adjutant-general of Virginia.
+
+No vessel of the royal navy entered the Potomac River without a visit on
+the part of its officers to Major Washington's house. He had been in the
+king's service at the siege of Cartagena and elsewhere. Admiral Vernon
+was his friend; Major Washington's estate on the Potomac had been named
+after the admiral. Lawrence Washington's acquaintance with the men of
+both army and navy was wide, and his popularity among them great. A
+visit to his hospitable residence, where he entertained them with true
+Virginian lavishness, was always a bright spot in any naval officer's
+life at that day.
+
+At Lawrence Washington's table, for two or three years prior to 1746,
+had sat his younger brother, George by name. This lad, who was a
+gentleman and a soldier in miniature, had often listened to stories of
+the exploits of the navy--of the capture of Porto Bello, of the
+bombardment of Cartagena, and of cruisings and battles along the Spanish
+Main. These stories and personal contact with their heroes had inspired
+him with an eager desire to enter the naval service. His father was
+dead, and his brother, who had virtually taken the father's place,
+favored the boy's design. His mother had opposed it. But at last she had
+been induced to give her consent. A midshipman's warrant was obtained
+for young George Washington, and on the summer day in 1746 of which we
+have spoken his luggage had actually been sent on board the ship lying
+in the river.
+
+But at the last moment Mary Washington flatly rebelled. She could not
+bear the thought of her boy's going to sea. She foresaw a time when she
+would need him at home. She withdrew her consent; and as her signature
+was necessary to his enlistment, it was impossible for him to join the
+ship, and his luggage was sent back to Mount Vernon.
+
+So thus it happened that George Washington did not, at the age of
+fourteen, enter the British navy, and embark upon a career which would
+probably have held him fast all the rest of his life.
+
+It was a real contingency--that of the possible commitment of George
+Washington to the royal cause. Every influence that bore upon him, up to
+the date of his brother Lawrence's death, in 1752, was royalist. This
+brother was married to the daughter of George William Fairfax, cousin
+and manager of the great American estates of Lord Fairfax. Lord Fairfax
+himself, removing to Virginia, became the patron, friend and mentor of
+young George Washington. The young man was in constant association with
+Englishmen, and always more or less under official influence.
+
+The Fairfaxes remained loyal to the British power when the war of
+independence was declared. If Lawrence Washington had lived it is quite
+conceivable--aye, probable--that he would have gone with them. If George
+Washington had not been thrown much into contact after that with his
+Virginian neighbors, among whom the spirit of rebellion had been
+propagated from Massachusetts--if he had not himself become a colonial
+soldier and commander--there can be little question that he would have
+clung to the English side.
+
+In the meantime, undoubtedly, he would have been advanced to rather high
+rank in the naval service, if he had joined it. The years between 1746,
+when the midshipman's warrant was obtained for Washington, and 1774,
+when the colonies began to flame up into revolt, had been of great
+activity at sea.
+
+The young officer might have participated in the destruction of the
+French fleet at Cape Finisterre; in the victory off Lagos; in the great
+decisive combat in Quiberon Bay; in the capture of Havana, and in many
+other sea fights. He would have fought by the side of Boscawen, Sir
+Edward Hawke, Lord Howe, Duff and Rodney, and very likely have won
+laurels such as theirs. Nothing colonial could have separated him from
+the flag which he had thus served, any more than the influence of his
+native state could have separated Farragut from the Stars and Stripes in
+1861.
+
+Is it too much to say that the American republic would have been
+fatherless without Washington? Perhaps an arm might have been
+found--though that is doubtful--that could have wielded his sword. But
+where was the brain, the patience, the tact, the determination, that
+would have composed the differences in the American councils, and have
+kept the discordant colonies and the jealous commanders together?
+
+That another man, that any combination of men, could have done what he
+did, is inconceivable. In the grandeur of his character and in the
+genius with which he accomplished a tremendous work, he is uncompanioned
+not only in America, but in the history of the world. Without his
+steadying hand in the war, the American army would have followed a
+devious course to death, and the young republic one to its destruction.
+
+As to the decisive part which he played in the formation of the union of
+the States after the war, the word of his companions in the Federal
+Constituent Convention is conclusive. "Were it not for one great
+character in America," said Grayson of Virginia, referring to
+Washington, "so many men would not be for this government; we do not
+fear while he lives, but who besides him can concentrate the confidence
+and affection of all Americans?" No one else ever could have
+concentrated them. Monroe reported to Jefferson, "Be assured
+Washington's influence carried this government." And Bancroft has put
+this judgment on record: "The country was an instrument with thirteen
+strings, and the only master who could bring out all their harmonious
+thought was Washington. Had the idea prevailed that he would not accept
+the Presidency, it would have proved fatal."
+
+Washington was the pivot upon which all things turned. Lacking such a
+pivot, the machinery of the American republic would have tumbled into
+ruin. Happy the choice of the Virginian mother who could not spare her
+boy on that summer day, and sent aboard the man-of-war in Potomac's
+stream for his dunnage!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+IF ALEXANDER HAMILTON HAD NOT WRITTEN ABOUT THE HURRICANE
+
+
+"He thought out the Constitution of the United States and the details of
+the government of the Union; and out of the chaos that existed after the
+Revolution raised a fabric every part of which is instinct with his
+thought." So said one of his contemporaries, Ambrose Spencer, of
+Alexander Hamilton; and another said: "He did the thinking of his time."
+The thinking that Hamilton did for the young American republic was of
+the most tremendous and vital importance to it. His services as a
+financier were not merely of a negative or saving character--they were
+positively constructive and permanently enduring; he "created a public
+credit and brought the resources of the country into active efficiency."
+It was Hamilton who founded the American system of business and finance.
+
+Yet it is altogether likely that but for an accidental circumstance or
+two Alexander Hamilton would never have come to the continental
+colonies. He was born on the Island of Nevis, in the West Indies, and
+upon that island, and upon St. Christopher and St. Croix, neighboring
+islands, his life up to the age of fifteen was spent. His father, James
+Hamilton, had proved "feckless and unfortunate," as a British biographer
+of Hamilton expresses it, and early ceased to provide for the boy, or,
+apparently, to take any interest in his education or welfare. His mother
+died early, and left him to the charge of her relatives, and as she
+bequeathed to them several other children, they had little thought about
+Alexander except to make him of some use and lighten their own burden.
+He was sent to school scarcely at all, and at the age of twelve was put
+into the shop or store of Nicholas Cruger, a general dealer at St.
+Croix, to earn his living as a clerk.
+
+There he remained for about three years. He has often been described as
+phenomenally precocious, and he certainly was, in the sense that his
+mind ripened early. But there was nothing of the quality of smart,
+self-satisfied immaturity about his genius. He read much, studied
+deeply, and received some good training at the hands of Rev. Hugh Knox,
+a Presbyterian minister.
+
+But all at once there occurred the accident which resulted in his going
+to the continental colonies. In the late summer of 1772 a fearful
+hurricane swept over the Leeward Islands. The boy Hamilton, then
+fifteen years old, had his full share in the adventures attending this
+calamity, and wrote a long and vivid account of it for a newspaper
+published at St. Christopher. By this brilliant piece of news work the
+entire West Indies were electrified. The people there had had plenty of
+hurricanes before, but none of them had ever been adequately "written
+up." Young Hamilton awoke one morning to find himself in the enjoyment
+of a fame which extended all the way from Jamaica to Trinidad.
+
+The immediate result of this notoriety was to convince Alexander's
+relatives that they possessed in him a prodigy, and to stimulate them to
+find means to educate him. They raised a fund forthwith without any
+particular difficulty, and shipped him, armed with a letter of
+introduction from Rev. Mr. Knox, to Boston, en route to New York.
+Lacking this assistance, it is unlikely that the youth would have found
+his way to our shores. Perhaps he would, in spite of everything, have
+risen to eminence in the West Indies. Very likely he would one day have
+drifted to Scotland or England, and he might have become a famous man
+there. But America would have lost him.
+
+There is still another and vital contingency associated with Hamilton's
+removal to the American continent. On its way to Boston, while in the
+open ocean, the ship on which he had sailed took fire. For some time it
+was in danger of destruction. But with great difficulty the flames were
+extinguished. If they had prevailed, the career of the West Indian
+genius would doubtless have been cut short by death.
+
+Thus, by the aid, first, of a tropical hurricane, and, second, through
+the efforts of the crew of the ship that bore him, in stifling a fire in
+the hold, Alexander Hamilton reached the American colonies just in time
+to be swept into the current of the movement for independence; to be
+made over anew into an ardent American, and to put his stamp forever
+upon the young nation which arose from the smoke of Bunker Hill. The
+dark-skinned, dark-eyed, exotic-looking student at King's College, whom
+the citizens of New York at first looked at askance as a very "queer
+West Indian," became a great leader, a commander, a guide, a magnificent
+constructive as well as restraining force.
+
+What this country would have been without him, or rather, what it must
+forever have failed to be, may be inferred from the things which it
+became that were owed to him. He was the inventor of American
+protection. American industry was founded upon his "report on
+manufactures." As the first and greatest of Federalists, he saved the
+confederation from disruption by supplying the idea of central
+authority. Others might labor for freedom--he labored for security. He
+put reason at the bottom of our commonwealth. Without his principles,
+the republic would have lacked a balance wheel. The States' rights would
+have been everything--the nation's rights nothing.
+
+All our national expansion was wrapped up in Hamilton's views. McKinley
+and Roosevelt have been his continuators. The sentiment which governs
+our republic to-day is Hamiltonian; and the war and discord that have
+afflicted us, as the result of the looseness of our confederation, must
+long since have wrecked the nation but for the balance wheel with which
+he supplied us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+IF LA FAYETTE HAD HELD THE FRENCH REIGN OF TERROR IN CHECK
+
+
+In every age of the world, and in every place, one voice has always
+commanded in the affairs of nations, peoples and communities. If
+oligarchies, legislatures, groups or cabals have seemed to bear sway, it
+has nevertheless been true that in each of these groups, from time to
+time, the influence of some individual has been preponderant. The freest
+republics are an organization of this principle--a willing submission of
+the many to the leadership of chosen men.
+
+In times of stress and strife and change it is impossible that strong
+men should not seize the reins of power, no matter what political system
+exists, no matter what anarchy tends to prevail. Change, indeed, makes
+the opportunity of the strong; and the fate of nations and continents
+depends upon the character of the strong man who is brought forth. If he
+is good, as Washington was good, his fellow-countrymen derive lasting
+and unmeasured benefit from his grasping of his opportunity. If he is
+bad, as Napoleon Bonaparte was bad, the evil harvest of his vices may be
+reaped through generations and centuries, as France has reaped, and is
+now reaping, an inheritance of strife and national decline.
+
+When the Revolution of 1789 came to France there were many people, of
+all parties and conditions, who believed that the country had its
+Washington. He was to be found, they thought, in the person of the
+Marquis de La Fayette. This man was Washington's friend. He had
+successfully copied many of his virtues. He was unselfishly patriotic.
+He believed in the liberty of the people, and wished to see them govern
+themselves. Though himself a nobleman, he believed in the abolition of
+titles of nobility. In his room, and afterward in his office as a public
+servant, he kept two frames hanging on the wall. In one frame was a copy
+of the American Declaration of Independence. The other frame was empty,
+but it bore the legend, "This space awaits the French Declaration of
+Independence."
+
+When the Revolution broke out, La Fayette was called by the people to
+the center of real power--the command of the troops in Paris. Both king
+and people trusted him. His power for good was almost absolute. He
+prevented anarchy and restored order in Paris after the overthrow of the
+Bastile. He gave the country a Bill of Rights and a Constitution founded
+on the American models. The quarrels of the warring factions were
+stayed by his hand. The mob dared not turn the king out. La Fayette's
+moderating influence was the ballast that kept the French nation, in
+spite of certain excesses, on a steady keel.
+
+Even when the Girondists and Jacobins rose and were ready to fly at one
+another's throats, the fear of La Fayette kept these factions from
+violence. If he had maintained this influence--if he had preserved the
+sagacity and boldness to side with the people and lead them--the French
+nation might have been saved from anarchy, reaction, the tyrannies of
+emperors and of mobs, and the slow degeneration that has followed its
+long diet of gunpowder.
+
+But in the test La Fayette did not exhibit this power. In 1792 he was in
+the field, in command of an army, resisting the Prussian invasion. The
+nation, aroused, was equal to the task of repelling foreign attack. But
+in Paris events were marching. The people rose and overthrew the throne
+and the royalist Constitution which La Fayette had made. But they turned
+still to La Fayette. They offered him the chief executive power in the
+new government.
+
+This was his opportunity to save France. He was not equal to it. He did
+not rise to the emergency. He not only refused the offer of power, but
+made his troops renew their oaths of fidelity to the king. Then the
+Assembly declared him a traitor; and La Fayette, taking with him a few
+followers, deserted his command, made his way to Bouillon, on the
+frontier, and rode out of France into a foreign land!
+
+No man can imagine Washington taking such a step as that. La Fayette
+suffered from it, and he afterwards served his country nobly. But the
+eternal mischief of his weakness had been done. Girondists and Jacobins,
+relieved from the fear of him, turned to mutual destruction and murder.
+The Reign of Terror was on. The nation was plunged in an orgy of blood.
+Four hundred thousand men and women were put to death. Liberty in France
+was assassinated in the house of its friends.
+
+One man, I have said, always comes to the top of things. With La Fayette
+gone, Robespierre, the man of blood, prevailed. Robespierre was the
+Terror. And after him, the Terror having appeased its fearful thirst,
+and Robespierre's head having gone into the basket with his victims',
+there came another man to take advantage of the paralysis the perverted
+Revolution had inflicted upon France. That man was Napoleon Bonaparte.
+
+Bonaparte freed La Fayette from captivity. Bonaparte held him in
+contempt, calling him a "noodle." It was not so bad as that. But
+Napoleon despised a man who had had his chance and failed to grasp it.
+
+Had La Fayette proved equal to that opportunity, France would have been
+organized as a constitutional republic. The Terror would not have been.
+Napoleon's ambition might have been held in check. The balance in Europe
+would have been maintained, but the leadership of France would have been
+consolidated and become immortal. The nations would have followed her
+example. Monarchy would have died of dry rot. The dream of a United
+States of Europe might have been realized--perhaps with a city of La
+Fayette, the capital of the vast confederation, the European equivalent
+city of Washington, smiling down, it may be, from the neutral shores of
+the Lake of Constance to east, to west, to north, to south, with a
+benediction of peace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+IF GILBERT LIVINGSTON HAD NOT VOTED NEW YORK INTO THE UNION
+
+
+How many Americans of the present day realize that the State of New
+York, at the time of the adoption of the national Constitution, was
+radically and overwhelmingly opposed to entrance into the Union which
+the Constitution proposed, and was at last forced into the league of
+States only by the demonstration that the State would be isolated and
+cut off from its neighbor States if it did not join, with a tariff wall
+raised against it? It is indeed hard for New Yorkers to realize, as
+they live to-day under the Stars and Stripes, having forgotten what
+their State flag is, and being among the most zealous supporters of the
+Union, that their State led the opposition to the Constitution, and that
+but for the influence of a very few men in two other States, New York
+might have prevented the consummation of that "more perfect union."
+
+The contingency that prevented the State from dismembering the Union at
+its start was a narrow one, but it had been provided for. Hamilton and
+the Federalists had laid their plans well. They first furnished the
+Southern States, and the smallest States in the North, with an
+interested reason for joining the Union. They gave the men of the South
+representation on their slaves. They made the little States equal with
+the great States in the Senate. Then they provided that when nine States
+had ratified the Constitution it should become effective, and a
+confederation should be formed by those nine States, if there were no
+others.
+
+Then the ratifications began. The game was to get nine States. Little
+Delaware said "Yes" first. Franklin and Wilson had a firm hold upon
+Pennsylvania, and that State entered next under the pressure they
+exerted. New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland and
+South Carolina followed. This made eight States. Then things stuck fast.
+Would there be a ninth?
+
+Two thirds of the delegates in the convention of New York were firmly
+opposed to ratification. They believed the Constitution meant an end of
+the liberties of the States. They saw a royal throne looming up for
+America. They feared, they said, a great central power which should
+oppress and overtax the people of the States. Governor Clinton led the
+opposition to ratification. Hamilton's able arguments had no effect. New
+York would not come in.
+
+All the remaining States were believed to be also opposed. New Hampshire
+had refused to comply with the requisitions of the Confederation; why
+should it look with more favor on the Constitution? In Virginia, Patrick
+Henry led the opposition to ratification with impassioned eloquence.
+Richard Henry Lee, William Grayson, George Mason and James Monroe, all
+great men in the State, were unalterably opposed to ratification. It
+certainly looked black for the Union.
+
+But in this moment of apparent triumph, while the New York convention
+was in session, Governor Clinton and his party in the convention heard
+surprising news. New Hampshire, under the influence of Massachusetts and
+of the wiser counsels of some of its own leaders, ratified the
+Constitution on the 21st of June, 1788--more than nine months after the
+adoption of the instrument by the Constitutional Convention at
+Philadelphia.
+
+This event put a new face on the situation in New York. The Union was
+now decreed. If New York did not enter it, she must be prepared to stand
+alone, as an independent nation. Could she do that? The new
+Confederation would hem her in on both sides. To it would belong New
+Jersey, which flanked her only seaport on the west, and Connecticut and
+Massachusetts, which walled her in on the east. The shape of the State
+adapted it very badly indeed for an independent position. Moreover,
+influences were known to be at work which would precipitate a hostile
+tariff against the States which remained out of the Union. A few months
+later such a tariff was actually adopted against Rhode Island, which was
+treated as a foreign country in the levying of duties on imports.
+
+New York could not stand that. Gilbert Livingston and a few others
+changed their votes under a distinct announcement that the pressure of
+"sister States" had made it impracticable to continue the opposition.
+But even at the last, the Constitution was ratified by a majority of
+only two in a vote of sixty! Gilbert Livingston held the fate of the
+State in his hands, and he, though pledged against the Union, put New
+York into the Union by his vote.
+
+One vote would have kept New York out.
+
+We have noted the fact that New York's position was unfavorable for an
+attempt at independence. But the fact that the voice of but one man
+prevented the attempt shows that the other opposing delegates were not
+much afraid of making the leap. Supposing Gilbert Livingston had voted
+the other way, and the vote had been thirty-one to twenty-nine against
+ratification, instead of the same figure in its favor? What would have
+resulted?
+
+Let us see. Two other States were radically opposed to the
+Constitution--Rhode Island and North Carolina. Very likely they would
+have been glad to form a defensive alliance with New York. Virginia
+ratified a few days after New Hampshire, but she might easily have
+retracted her ratification, for she had no heart in it. With Virginia,
+the malcontent States would have had (census of 1790) a population of
+1,550,306, against 2,378,908 for the remaining colonies, including
+Vermont, which was not yet in. This would not have been an utterly
+hopeless foundation for a new league, constituted on the easy terms upon
+which, and upon which only, these States were willing to enter the
+Union. The want of contiguity of territory would have been the worst
+objection to the formation of the league.
+
+But the real effect of New York's self-exclusion, so narrowly prevented,
+would have been a negative one. It would have prevented all cohesion in
+the new Union. It would have driven a wedge straight through the new
+republic, from west to east. Worse, it would have erected secession into
+a principle from the start. Ere long we should have had at least three
+republics instead of one, and probably more. Politically we should have
+been what Central and South America are now. Real progress would have
+been barred. Wars would have been probable between the States. European
+political influences would have penetrated the weaker States, or
+alliances of States.
+
+In short, the "American idea," government of the people by the people
+and for the people, would probably have been stillborn. By his change of
+vote, Gilbert Livingston signed the death warrant of the principle of
+secession. Not only did he set going the unifying influences which
+prevailed over State sovereignty, but he decreed the Empire State,
+destined to be a bulwark against disunion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+IF THE PIRATE JEAN LAFITTE HAD JOINED THE BRITISH AT NEW ORLEANS
+
+
+After the battle of New Orleans, on the 8th of January, 1814, General
+Andrew Jackson, the victorious commander, called before him a certain
+officer, of dashing and Frenchy appearance, and publicly thanked him for
+the important part which he had borne in the battle. To judge from the
+signal honor done to this man, the credit for the victory was in no
+inconsiderable part due to him. And, indeed, this was the case.
+
+The man to whom the victor's thanks had been thus conspicuously awarded
+was Jean Lafitte, the Baratarian pirate. That the success of Jackson in
+defeating and virtually destroying the army of Pakenham, consisting of
+the very flower of the Duke of Wellington's soldiery, hinged, in an
+important sense, upon this extraordinary corsair and buccaneer, has
+never been adequately acknowledged in American history.
+
+Jean Lafitte, the foremost of the three pirate brothers of Barataria,
+was a man of extraordinary influence and popularity among the French and
+other Latin inhabitants of Louisiana and New Orleans. He was a native of
+France, and a brave and chivalrous corsair, as corsairs go. A price had
+already been put upon his head by the American governor, Claiborne. But
+so secure was Lafitte in the affections of the Creole people, whom he
+served in many ways, that he frequently attended parties and receptions
+in New Orleans. Arriving, on such occasions, in the full splendor of his
+outlaw state, and bringing joy to the heart of every lady in the room
+by his attractive manners as well as by his fame, the pirate chief would
+practically defy the authorities to lay a hand upon him. If agents of
+the law were sent to arrest him, he knew of it, through a hundred spies,
+long before they reached the place, and withdrew at once to some near-by
+hiding place which was well known to him. In New Orleans he had a
+hundred safe places of refuge.
+
+Under his command was a force of pirates who were many or few, according
+to the exigencies of the moment; for they could masquerade as peaceful
+fishermen if necessary, or they could, upon occasion, muster a force of
+several hundred at a word's notice--always perfectly armed, perfectly
+drilled, thoroughly redoubtable.
+
+Lafitte preyed impartially upon all the commerce of the Gulf of Mexico,
+and, when pursued, ran into one of the numerous mouths of the
+Mississippi or some inlet of the Gulf--into Barataria Lake, into Bayou
+Lafourche, or into Bayou Teche. There it was vain to follow him, for the
+intricacies of these passages were known only to his men or to the
+dwellers along their shores, who were in sympathy with him.
+
+When the British descended upon New Orleans in the autumn of 1813, they
+offered Jean Lafitte a captain's commission in the British naval
+service, thirty thousand dollars in money, a full pardon for past
+offenses and rewards in money and lands for his followers if he would
+join them in making war on the Americans. He could easily have done so.
+The French people of Louisiana had no keen loyalty for the Stars and
+Stripes at that time. As Lafitte went they might have gone. The British
+knew this, and made their bait a rich one.
+
+But Lafitte, although Claiborne's price was on his head, and his brother
+Pierre in prison in New Orleans, refused the offer. Instead, he sent
+the letters from Captain Lockyer, of the British navy, making this
+proposition, to the Louisiana legislature. Later, after Pierre had
+escaped, he actually joined General Jackson's nondescript army with a
+force of riflemen. He seems to have acted from a very honest love for
+the young American republic.
+
+Jackson, at first, under a misapprehension of the circumstances, had
+refused to accept the aid of these "hellish banditti," as he had called
+Lafitte's men in a proclamation on his arrival. But when he found that
+the British were upon him, and that a considerable proportion of his
+poorly equipped militia were without flints for their muskets, he not
+only accepted the flints that Lafitte sent him, but gave the pirate an
+important command on his right wing. There Jean and his men performed
+signal service.
+
+If Lafitte had joined the British with his men and ships, there is
+little likelihood that the Americans would have had in this fight the
+powerful aid of the vessels of war _Carolina_ and _Louisiana_, on the
+river. Nor is it likely that they would have had the passive support of
+the French population. Nor that they would have found any substitute for
+the flints with which Lafitte supplied them. And it is very likely that
+the British assault upon Jackson's intrenchments would have been
+attended with a different result.
+
+Jackson, indeed, might have been crushed very much as Windsor had been
+crushed at Washington, not long before.
+
+Such a result at New Orleans would not have affected the outcome of the
+war, for a peace favorable to the American arms had already been
+declared at Ghent. But how profoundly a defeat would have influenced the
+personal and political fortunes of Andrew Jackson and all the events in
+American history which hung upon his subsequent career!
+
+General Jackson won the presidency in 1828 because he was the military
+hero of the day. His popularity was due to the brilliant victory that he
+won at New Orleans. After his defeat in 1824, a spectacular visit which
+he made to the field of the 1814 battle renewed the souvenirs of the
+great fight and intensified his popularity; and in 1828 he was
+triumphantly elected. If he had been defeated in battle by Pakenham, and
+New Orleans had been taken, his fame would have been extinguished then
+and there.
+
+And without Jackson--should we ever have had machine politics? It was he
+who introduced these into our government. He was the inventor and
+discoverer of the spoils system. "To the victors belong the spoils" was
+the maxim of his lieutenant, Marcy, and his own principle of action. We
+have never been able quite to shake off the system which he fastened
+upon the country. Patronage has been the curse of our politics from that
+day to this.
+
+Then there was his determined and disastrous assault on the United
+States Bank. Upon this institution, which was founded by Alexander
+Hamilton, and whose position somewhat resembled the present position of
+the Bank of England, the financial system of the country depended.
+Jackson attacked it as a "wicked monopoly," as a concrete expression of
+the "money power." He succeeded in wrecking the bank, in bringing on the
+panic of 1837, which wrought untold ruin and disaster to the people, and
+in inaugurating in its place the system of wildcat State banks and
+currency chaos which lasted up to the Civil War.
+
+But Jackson attacked more than the United States Bank and the principle
+that public office is a public trust. He attacked nullification.
+Nullification meant that the States could refuse to recognize or obey
+the laws of the United States. He struck that dictum hard, when it made
+its appearance in South Carolina, and paralyzed it to such an extent
+that the portion of the nation which did not believe in secession was
+able to get its preponderant growth, and organize its strength, and
+prevent disunion, when the test finally came.
+
+Jackson saved the Union by stunning the nullification snake until the
+republic was big enough and strong enough to trample it under foot. And
+that, no doubt, was the greatest event that hung on the contingency of
+Lafitte's choice of sides at New Orleans.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+IF JAMES MACDONNEL HAD NOT CLOSED THE GATES OF HUGOMONT CASTLE
+
+
+According to the Duke of Wellington himself, the success of the allies
+at the Battle of Waterloo turned on an amazingly slight contingency,
+namely, the closing of a gate or door of wood in the wall of a building.
+This fact was conclusively brought out when, years after the battle, an
+English clergyman, Rev. Mr. Narcross of Framlingham, died and left in
+his will the sum of five hundred pounds simply "to the bravest man in
+England." The executors of the estate were completely nonplussed. Who
+was the bravest man in England? Doubtless many would have come forward
+gladly to claim the distinction and the legacy, but who was worthy of
+them? In their trouble, the executors applied to the Duke of Wellington
+for an answer to the question.
+
+The Iron Duke was not a man to be beaten by any question whatsoever,
+least of all by a military one. He went back a little in his
+recollections--until he came to the battle of Waterloo. Then he wrote to
+the executors of the Framlingham parson that that battle was the
+greatest that had been fought in recent times. "The success of it," he
+went on to say, "turned upon the closing of the gates of Hugomont; these
+gates were closed in the most courageous manner, at the very nick of
+time, by Sir James Macdonnel; and he is the man to whom you should pay
+the five hundred pounds."
+
+Thereupon the executors went to Sir James with the money; but he said
+to them: "I cannot claim all the credit of closing the gates of
+Hugomont. My sergeant, John Graham, seeing with me the importance of the
+step, rushed forward to help me; and by your leave I will share the
+legacy with him." The request was granted, and the fact was to this
+extent judicially established that Sir James Macdonnel and John Graham
+had closed the gates of Hugomont Castle, thereby settling the issue of
+the battle and the fate of Europe.
+
+Let us see what events hinged upon this act, and how they depended on
+it. The army with which the great Napoleon faced the miscellaneous
+assortment of British, Prussians, Hanoverians, Dutch and Belgians at
+Waterloo was smaller than that of the Allies, but vastly more efficient
+as a whole. Most of the troops of the Allies were raw, and some of them
+were poor stuff indeed. Napoleon's soldiers were hardened, practiced,
+brave and splendidly commanded.
+
+Napoleon had forced the Allies back at Quatre Bras. He captured their
+position at La Haye Sainte. He perceived that the strategic key to the
+whole field of battle was the hill crowned by the old stone _chateau_ of
+Hugomont. If that could be taken, Napoleon would be able to attack and
+turn Wellington's right flank. That accomplished, a junction of Bluecher
+and his Prussians with the English would be prevented; the forces of the
+Allies would be split in two, and Napoleon would in all probability
+defeat them in detail, according to his time-honored method. The emperor
+could easily have finished off the Austrians in their turn, as he
+planned to do; and the combined European attempt to oust him would have
+been frustrated. Thus the Corsican would have been, probably for so long
+as he lived, the master of France at the least, even if the checks he
+had already received had restricted his mastery of the rest of the
+continent.
+
+Knowing well that upon this cast his fate was staked, Napoleon hurled
+his best troops, under Prince Jerome, against the little old _chateau_
+on the hill. Again and again they assaulted it. Twelve thousand men were
+launched against the half-dilapidated castle, which had been pierced
+with loopholes for the British riflemen. And now and here came the
+crucial incident whose importance was rated so high by Wellington. At a
+moment when the chief defence of the _chateau_ was entrusted to the
+Coldstream Guards, under Colonel James Macdonnel, the French were within
+a hair's breadth of taking it. They pushed against the gate of the
+castle, and had actually forced it open, when the Coldstream Guards
+charged out with their bayonets, forcing the advance rank of the French
+back a little.
+
+But the French were pouring up, and could no longer be held back at the
+point of the bayonet. It was at this instant, when a slight leeway had
+been gained, that Colonel Macdonnel and Sergeant Graham, under a galling
+fire from the French, stepped forward and with their own hands closed
+the _chateau_ gates, barricaded them, and thus enabled the troops to
+resume their fierce rifle fire from within.
+
+After this the French made many more assaults on the heavy gates, but
+could not force them open again. Wellington meanwhile commanded a
+general advance, following a fresh repulse of the French onset; and the
+French line was thrown into confusion. He knew that Bluecher was now at
+hand--it was by this time half-past seven in the evening--to support
+him. Bluecher, indeed, arrived, and attacked and crushed the broken
+French right, forcing Napoleon to retreat in disorder. Thus was
+completed the victory which the heroic defence of Hugomont had made
+possible.
+
+The crushing of the British right wing on this occasion, had Napoleon
+been able thus to effect it, would have reversed a vast deal of history.
+It is not necessary to take an extreme view of the situation to realize
+this. On the immediate field, the British, Dutch and Hanoverians must
+have been forced back upon Brussels, and Bluecher would have been unable
+to maintain a front against the French. Even if the remnants of the
+allied armies had escaped, and made another stand, Napoleon must
+instantly have regained a degree of prestige and position that would
+have enabled him to consolidate his power at home and make excellent
+terms abroad. Even after Leipsic, when he had seemed to be utterly
+beaten, the powers had been willing to give him France's "natural
+frontiers"--namely, the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees.
+
+It is likely that Leipsic and Elba had already taught the emperor wisdom
+which would have deterred him from attempting to carry the boundaries of
+his domain once more to the Baltic, or to parcel out the rest of Europe
+among his relatives and dependents. But within the frontiers I have
+named, and west of the Rhine, he must have remained impregnable; and all
+the momentous consequences which resulted from his defeat must have been
+thwarted and turned aside.
+
+Out of the victory of the Allies at Waterloo came, first, the banishment
+and early death of Napoleon Bonaparte; the placing of Louis XVIII on the
+throne of France; the complete subduing of the Revolution; the creation
+of the joint kingdom of Holland and Belgium (which meant the modern
+intensely industrialized Belgian state, and Leopold, and the Congo); the
+aggrandizement and lasting leadership of Prussia in Germany; the
+foundation of the modern Italy through the annexation of the Genoese
+republic to the Piedmont kingdom; the enlargement of Switzerland by
+three cantons taken from France; the taking of Norway from Denmark and
+its bestowal upon Sweden; the absorption of what was left of Poland by
+Russia--and some other reparceling of territory in an arbitrary sense
+which has nevertheless for the most part endured. There is scarcely a
+political articulation in Europe to-day which does not date from
+Waterloo; new tendencies still operate which had their inception then!
+
+Indirectly the consequences were momentous. The aggrandizement of
+Prussia prepared the way for the unification of Germany and the gradual
+atrophy of Austria as a German state. As I have said, the enlargement of
+Piedmont foretokened a united Italy, and built up another power which
+has contributed to the enforced shrinkage of Austria. The two great
+constructive European statesmen of the nineteenth century, Bismarck and
+Cavour, were both the children of Waterloo.
+
+All these tendencies might have been working just the other way if
+Colonel Macdonnel had not succeeded in closing the _chateau_ gates! Yet
+more still was in store. Moral and intellectual consequences of greater
+moment, perhaps, than the political results, impended. The victory of
+the Allies was followed by a period of severe repression of popular
+tendencies in Europe. The Holy Alliance, which became a league of
+Continental monarchs against liberal ideas, was a direct consequence. It
+inaugurated reaction everywhere. And reaction bred in its turn new and
+insidious radicalisms. Lassalle, Marx, St. Simon, and Fourier,
+Socialists, and Bakunin and Proudhon, first of the Anarchists, were the
+offspring of the Holy Alliance, nurtured in the dark corners of
+Repression's jail.
+
+The course of events in Europe would have been far otherwise indeed if
+Napoleon's veterans, forcing their way into Hugomont and splitting the
+British strength in two, had prepared the way for a long lease of the
+power of that adroit and calculating master, who knew so well how to
+meet popular demands and still hold his personal sway. In its practical
+expression, his system was liberal. Every peasant proprietor in France
+to-day holds his acres by virtue of Napoleonic legislation.
+
+That does not mean that all would have been good in France; far from
+that. A strange falsity, a theatric insincerity, lay beneath all the
+Napoleonic sentiments and ideals. These qualities color the thought of
+France still. Will she ever be able to escape them? These tendencies
+would have been many times more powerful if Napoleon had entrenched
+himself upon the throne. More than that, they must have passed to other
+countries. The shadow of his eagles might lie athwart even our America,
+his insidious ideas expressing themselves in our politics and our
+intellectual and moral life, if that moment's vast contingency had gone
+Napoleon's way at Waterloo.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+IF ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FATHER HAD MOVED SOUTHWARD, NOT NORTHWARD
+
+
+The two sections in the Civil War in America were led by two men,
+Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, the one President of the United
+States and the other President of the Confederate States, who were born
+within about one hundred miles of each other in the State of Kentucky,
+and within nine months of each other in point of time. For it was in
+June, 1808, that Jefferson Davis first saw the light in Christian
+County, Kentucky, and in February, 1809, that Abraham Lincoln was born
+in Hardin County, in the same State.
+
+Samuel Davis, the father of Jefferson Davis, and Thomas Lincoln, the
+father of Abraham Lincoln, were men of the same English-American origin,
+and the families were originally of virtually the same class, though
+Thomas Lincoln, doubtless as the result of the death of his father at
+the hands of the Indians, when Thomas was a child, had fallen somewhat
+in the social scale. Both men became dissatisfied with material
+conditions in Kentucky at about the same time, and both emigrated with
+their families. But Samuel Davis went southward into Mississippi, while
+Thomas Lincoln went northward into Indiana.
+
+That the sons of both these Kentuckians had in them the fire of genius,
+the history of their country has abundantly proved. Each was destined by
+the compelling force of his character and gifts to play a great part.
+Like all other men, each was molded by his environment. The illiterate
+Thomas Lincoln was credited by his immortal son with the intention, in
+emigrating, to escape from a slave State. But is it not probable that
+the son, deeply preoccupied as he was in later years with the subject of
+the emancipation of the slaves, had projected backward, by a psychologic
+habit common to all mankind, this idea from his own mind into that of
+his father? In all probability no other motive than that of accident or
+convenience--for Thomas Lincoln was a poor and rather "shiftless"
+man--impelled Abraham Lincoln's father to go to Indiana instead of
+following the trail which so many of the more enterprising Kentuckians
+were taking to Mississippi or Louisiana. It was to that section that
+enterprise beckoned, for agriculture was carried on in the Southwest
+upon a large scale, and broader plantations were open to the adventuring
+settler. Indiana, on the other hand, was a "poor man's country."
+
+What if Thomas Lincoln had possessed a little more energy, and a few
+more shillings, and had gone to Mississippi instead of to Indiana and
+afterwards to Illinois? What if he had become a plantation and slave
+owner, and had thus subjected his boy Abraham to the overmastering
+influence of a southern environment? So far as I can recall, Mississippi
+never produced an anti-slavery man.
+
+In this event, there would have been for the national cause, for the
+saving of the Union, for the emancipation of the slaves, no Abraham
+Lincoln. On the other hand, the tremendous power and patience of
+Lincoln's nature, the majesty and greatness of his character, the
+resources of his intellect, would in all likelihood have been added to
+the sum of the statesmanship which was enlisted on the Southern side.
+
+It is even conceivable that Lincoln, rather than Davis, would have been
+the president of the Southern Confederacy. Only a combination of the
+most extraordinary circumstances made him the nominee of the Republican
+party for the presidency in 1860. If he had been the leading statesman
+and politician of Mississippi, his path to the Confederate presidency,
+as the success of Davis proved, would have been comparatively easy.
+
+Without Lincoln, the anti-slavery agitation would have gone on just the
+same. The Republican party would have been constituted just the same.
+Everything up to the 18th day of May, 1860, when Lincoln was nominated
+for president at the Wigwam in Chicago, would have gone on just the
+same. But lacking Lincoln, what a world of things afterward would have
+happened differently!
+
+In the first place, it is probable that Seward would have been nominated
+for president. Very likely he would not have been elected; and as it was
+Lincoln who "smoked out" Douglas, it is probable that Douglas would
+have prevailed over all other Democratic candidates and been nominated
+at Charleston and elected president.
+
+In which case there would have been no secession, and very likely no
+war, either at that time or later. Slavery would have become intrenched,
+to yield, perhaps, in the end only to economic influences, the operation
+of which had already doomed it.
+
+But if Seward had been nominated and elected, secession would have taken
+place and war would have resulted. The sort of leader that the Union
+would have had in Seward may be inferred with perfect certainty from the
+famous, or rather infamous, proposition entitled, "Some Thoughts for the
+President's Consideration," which Seward solemnly laid before Lincoln
+less than a month after his inauguration. This extraordinary document,
+one of the most senseless and wicked programmes ever prepared by a man
+of state, advocated a change of the national issue from slavery to a
+foreign war; it advised that war be at once declared against France and
+Spain, and "explanations demanded" from Great Britain and Russia! In
+order that this brilliant programme might be carried out successfully,
+Seward suggested that he himself be made Dictator!
+
+This scheme, I repeat, illustrated the sort of alternative material that
+we should have had, lacking Lincoln. Chase, indeed, who was also a
+leading candidate for the presidency, would have been wiser. But in no
+position that he ever held, after 1860, did Chase bring forth any of the
+fruits of genius. Cameron, of Pennsylvania, was a greater man, but did
+not command general support. Neither did Edward Bates, of Missouri, also
+a western candidate for the presidency.
+
+The great soldiers who finally triumphed in the field as the
+instruments of Lincoln's policy and fought their way to victory for the
+Union--Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Meade, Sheridan--would have been ranged
+on the Northern side just the same whether Lincoln or another had been
+at the head of affairs. But it is doubtful whether another president
+would have found them out. Lincoln made his own grave mistakes regarding
+men. But he put forward no general because that general was _his man_.
+He observed and waited. A man of the people himself, grandly simple, he
+somehow nosed out the men of the same type. All the generals who proved
+great were his discoveries.
+
+The structure of Lincoln's achievements was not, however, the result of
+negative circumstances. It did not rise because things were not just so
+and so. It was a positive thing--the result of the active operations of
+a powerful genius, which the people recognized before the politicians
+and the writers did. In the people's mind, the war was "Old Abe's" war.
+It was Old Abe who stood at the helm. Congress did not know it, but it
+was really working Lincoln's will. The cabinet did not always know it,
+but it was Lincoln who really had his way. He kept his own counsel. He
+carried out his plans.
+
+The people were right. It was Old Abe who was doing things. And without
+him the most important things would have gone undone. He was an original
+creation--as Lowell said, a "new birth of our new soil, the first
+American." Nature, for him, threw aside her old-world molds,
+
+    And, choosing sweet clay from the breast
+    Of the unexhausted West,
+    With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,
+    Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
+
+Yet what could be clearer than that Abraham Lincoln, who by birth and
+inheritance was of the South, not the West, might have turned his
+strength to the support of quite a different cause if the accident of
+fate had sent him southward, not northward, in his childhood?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+IF SKIPPER JENNINGS HAD NOT RESCUED CERTAIN SHIPWRECKED JAPANESE
+
+
+Toward the end of the year 1850, Captain Jennings, of the American bark
+_Auckland_, trading in Asiatic waters, picked up the shipwrecked crew of
+a Japanese fishing vessel, somewhere off the coast of Japan. The captain
+was then bound for the new port of San Francisco, which the California
+gold-diggings had already made an important city. He continued on his
+course, and in due time--that is to say, very early in the year
+1851--landed at San Francisco with his party of refugees.
+
+Here the bright little Orientals were more than a nine days' wonder.
+Few Americans had ever before seen a Japanese. That country was at the
+time more a "hermit nation" than Korea herself. Whalers and other
+sailors who had been wrecked on the Japanese coast had been put to cruel
+deaths. No white men except the Dutch had been permitted to trade with
+any of the Japanese cities, and the Dutch trade had fallen into decay.
+Japan seemed as far from our lives as is the planet Mars.
+
+But the Japanese whom Captain Jennings had humanely rescued were kindly
+treated by him, and on the homeward voyage they had endeared themselves
+to him and his crew. He landed them at San Francisco with very favorable
+reports of their character, conduct and intelligence. The free-handed
+miners of that town wanted nothing better than somebody or something to
+lionize. So for a considerable time the shipwrecked Japanese had the
+best of everything in San Francisco, until an opportunity arose to send
+them, fat and happy, back to their own country.
+
+A full account of the incident and of the refugees was published in one
+of the San Francisco papers. It fell into the hands of just one man who
+was capable of perceiving the momentous possibilities that lay in the
+occurrence. This man was a commodore in the United States navy; and his
+name was not Perry, as the reader may at first surmise, but John H.
+Aulick. He was a Virginian, then in his sixty-second year; he had had a
+long and very honorable service, and was keen and statesmanlike in his
+ideas.
+
+What Commodore Aulick saw in the incident was this: The kind and
+friendly reception of the Japanese waifs in America, contrasted with the
+ordinary treatment of white refugees in Japan, might be taken advantage
+of to open friendly relations with Japan. To effect this result, a
+naval expedition should be sent to Japan. If properly conducted, the
+expedition not only might secure friendly treatment of American whalers
+on the Japanese coasts, but might open up trade relations with the
+country which would be highly profitable.
+
+Filled with his idea, which was really a great one, Commodore Aulick
+obtained permission to lay it before the secretary of state, who was
+none other than Daniel Webster. He had an interview with Mr. Webster at
+Washington on the 9th day of May, 1851.
+
+Webster saw the point at once. At his instance, President Fillmore
+ordered the navy department to prepare a small expedition for the voyage
+to Japan; and when the ships were ready--they were headed by the sloop
+of war _Mississippi_--Commodore Aulick was put in command. He actually
+sailed on the voyage; but he was entrusted with the task of taking the
+Brazilian minister as far as Rio Janeiro on the way, and some trouble
+having arisen with this functionary for which Commodore Aulick was
+blamed, he was superseded in command of the expedition by Commodore
+Matthew Calbraith Perry, in command of the _Hartford_.
+
+It was Perry, therefore, who "opened up Japan." His name will be
+associated, as long as the story of the two nations is told, with the
+event. But it was Aulick's idea, not Perry's; and it all hung upon the
+luck which those Japanese fishermen, waifs upon a boundless ocean, had
+in being picked up by a generous Yankee skipper, and in finding their
+way to so wholehearted and so hospitable a city toward "Mongolian"
+wanderers as San Francisco was--then!
+
+If this incident had not suggested and been followed by the Aulick-Perry
+expedition, what then? Russian authorities have claimed that Russia was
+preparing a similar expedition at the time when Secretary Webster--"too
+zealous," according to their view--sent the United States ships on their
+way. There is good reason to believe that the Russian government would
+have been slow in making such an infinitely clever move as the Perry
+expedition constituted. Yet if the United States had not taken the step,
+Russia would have stood next in the line of logical inheritance to the
+idea. And if Japan had been opened under Russian auspices, its doors,
+instead of standing open toward the East, and consequently toward _our_
+West, would have opened toward the Asiatic continental West, which would
+have meant toward St. Petersburg.
+
+If the Japanese had, under Russian initiative, adopted the material
+adjuncts of western civilization, as they finally did under ours, that
+civilization would have taken on a distinctly Muscovite color. The
+Japanese would never, indeed, have been able, under such auspices, to
+organize an effective resistance to Russian arms, for long before they
+had acquired the requisite training they must have been held firmly in
+the grip of the Russian military system.
+
+That is to say, Japan would have been, step by step, annexed to the
+Russian empire. The Russo-Japanese war would never have been, since
+there would have been neither hope nor occasion for it. Most of the rich
+fruits of Japanese art and industry would have drifted toward Russia.
+The Russian empire would have been enormously enriched by the Japanese
+trade, and the importance of that empire immensely magnified in the
+history of our epoch. A reflex orientalizing influence would have rolled
+over Russia itself, and the course of Russian internal development
+altered in a degree now almost incalculable.
+
+If Russia had not been reasonably prompt to take the step, the eyes of
+British statesmen must sooner or later have been opened to the
+opportunity. The method by which British intervention proceeds in
+Asiatic countries is well known. It has always had but slight regard for
+native sovereignty, no matter how high the state of social or artistic
+or intellectual development on the part of the native races affected.
+British administrators, or, if Japan had retained its nominal
+sovereignty, British "residents" or agents, would really have governed
+the country through the Tycoon or the Mikado, or both--preferably the
+Tycoon, for he was a military ruler, and affairs could have been handled
+more readily through him.
+
+Events in Japan must have anticipated the subsequent history of Egypt,
+on a much more magnificent scale. Again, though there would have been a
+readier entrance for American and European trade than in the case of
+Russian intervention, the best of everything Japanese would certainly
+have gone to England. And once again, the free, independent, powerful,
+masterful Japanese empire of the present day, thrilling with a new life
+in which all the civilization of the Occident is made the handmaid of an
+ancient and undaunted Asiatic people, would not have been.
+
+In the unlikely event that the Japanese, in default of Perry's
+expedition, had been left quite alone for another generation or two,
+their case would not have been better in the long run. They would simply
+have missed the chance they got. Left a "hermit nation," they would
+sooner or later have fallen under the influence of one Western country
+or another, and been so seriously retarded in the race of civilization
+that they could never have caught up.
+
+America was the only country that could have opened to them the
+wonderful career that they have had. The high noon of the nineteenth
+century was the golden moment for the commencement of their development
+along the line of Western civilization. If the hour had not struck then
+for them it would not have struck at all. Time, the helping hand, the
+protecting influence of an unselfish friend among the nations, and the
+golden gift of destiny, were all represented for Japan in the rescuing
+sails of Skipper Jennings's bark, that lucky day in the wide Pacific.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+IF ORSINI'S BOMB HAD NOT FAILED TO DESTROY NAPOLEON III
+
+
+Edward A. Freeman wrote, after the fall of the second Bonaparte empire:
+"The work of Richelieu is utterly undone, the work of Henry II and Louis
+XIV is partially undone; the Rhine now neither crosses nor waters a
+single rood of French ground. As it was in the first beginnings of
+northern European history, so it is now; Germany lies on both sides of
+the German river." This was not by any means the whole of the work
+wrought by that adventurer on an imperial throne, Napoleon III, through
+his disastrous war against a united Germany. He accomplished also the
+slaughter of five hundred thousand men, and the impoverishment of
+millions. He sounded the death knell of monarchical adventuring in
+France, which was indeed one good result of the Napoleonic _debacle_,
+but he also fastened militarism, in the form of excessive and
+progressively increasing peace armaments, upon Europe, and magnified
+public debts and taxation to the limit of endurance.
+
+Every event here mentioned was a direct development, not of Napoleon
+III's original seizure of the French throne, but of the final years, and
+the eventual overthrow of his power--the overthrow itself due to the
+Franco-Prussian war. A single event, criminal in its character, might
+have prevented these results. That great benefits sometimes eventuate
+from men's crimes is no news, and no longer a marvel, to the
+philosopher, who, when good comes of evil, is apt to repeat the words,
+"God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform."
+
+The evil deed to which I have here referred, which would have saved the
+lives of five hundred thousand people and left the river Rhine still
+washing the confines of France, was the aiming of Orsini's bomb on the
+evening of the 14th of January, 1858. This bomb was designed to take the
+life of the emperor of the French. If the attempt had succeeded, and
+Napoleon had died as Alexander II of Russia and King Humbert of Italy
+afterward died, there would have been no Franco-German war. The throne
+of the baby Napoleon IV, who was then less than two years old, very
+likely would not have endured long; but whether the third republic had
+immediately arisen, or whether the Orleans Bourbons had been restored to
+the throne, it would have been found easy to preserve the peace with
+Prussia and Germany.
+
+For Napoleon III deliberately, and with malignant ingenuity, provoked
+war with Germany in 1870. There is now no doubt that Bismarck desired
+such a war. He afterward confessed that he deceived the aged King
+William in such a way that all chance of peace at Ems was lost. But
+nevertheless the provocation of Napoleon was direct and deliberate.
+
+His grievance was that the Hohenzollern prince, Leopold, had consented
+to become a candidate for the vacant throne of Spain. King William
+withdrew Prince Leopold's candidature. This really destroyed Napoleon's
+pretext for bringing on a war. But he desired a foreign war in order to
+forestall revolutionary opposition at home, which threatened to become
+irresistible. Napoleon thereupon caused his ambassador, Benedetti,
+insolently, and in a manner quite unbearable, to demand personally from
+King William a declaration that no Hohenzollern should ever be
+permitted to become king of Spain. King William treated this insolence
+as it deserved, and France, thereupon, declared war against Prussia.
+
+What followed, the world knows. The consequences were tremendous. France
+was maimed of Alsace and Lorraine. Half a million of the flower of the
+manhood of both nations perished. France taxed herself with five
+millions of francs of indemnity, and though she has paid the debt to
+Germany, she still owes it to her own citizens. The difficulties of
+French government and finance were increased prodigiously and
+indefinitely by the war and the empire's delinquencies.
+
+And all as a result contingent upon the failure of a criminal act!
+Felice Orsini meant to kill Napoleon III, and he and his two companions
+did kill ten innocent persons, and did wound one hundred and fifty
+others. Yet the man for whom their bombs were intended--the adventurer
+who had once been their comrade as a member of the Italian secret
+society, the Carbonari, but who had afterward betrayed the cause of
+Italian independence by leading an army into the peninsula and restoring
+the papal power--escaped unharmed, to wind the trail of his infamous
+conspiracies through European politics for twelve years longer. If the
+bomb had done its direful work, one man, utterly without character or
+conscience, would have died, and five hundred thousand men, mostly
+honest, good and true, would have lived. As it happened, the one man was
+spared, to make a vast holocaust of human life twelve years later.
+
+It is, indeed, strange that the averting of a single crime may sometimes
+precipitate a myriad of other crimes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+IF PRESIDENT BUCHANAN HAD ENFORCED THE LAW IN NOVEMBER, 1860
+
+
+Speaking of the lighting of the fires of civil war in this country in
+the years 1860 and 1861, Charles Francis Adams said, in 1873, "One
+single hour of the will displayed by General Jackson would have stifled
+the fire in its cradle." The metaphor in the last phrase is peculiar,
+and strangely Celtic for a Yankee, but the history is true.
+
+Montgomery Blair expressed the idea with greater plainness and vividness
+in that same year, 1873, in these words, "If we could have held Fort
+Sumter, there never would have been a drop of blood shed." Both these
+remarks were made by men who had been in some sense actors in the events
+to which they referred, and made after years of reflection upon the
+circumstances.
+
+It does not seem to Americans of the present generation that there was
+ever a moment, after the election of Abraham Lincoln, when the Civil War
+could have been averted. It appears, in retrospect, to have been
+absolutely inevitable. Yet there was certainly one moment when, if
+President Buchanan had had the courage to apply the general views which
+he himself advanced in his annual message to Congress of December 3,
+1860, and his special message of January 8, 1861, which explicitly
+denied the right of secession, a halt might have been called to the
+growing rebellion.
+
+The secession movement was at first concentrated in the State of South
+Carolina. That State, all through the winter of 1860-1861, was
+presenting to the rest of the South an object lesson of successful
+nullification.
+
+In 1833 South Carolina had ordained nullification, but its ordinance was
+so instantly and heavily repressed by President Andrew Jackson that the
+State was absolutely unable to carry it out, or to move hand or foot.
+But now, in 1860, it did not merely ordain nullification--it enacted it.
+Every Federal judge, every judicial servant, and nearly every Federal
+official, in South Carolina, resigned, and the nation was left without
+an agent to enforce its laws, for no new ones were sent in. The United
+States authority in the State was at an end, save for the custom house
+at Charleston and Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor.
+
+As long as South Carolina was let alone, her case plainly said to all
+the other slave States, "You see we can withdraw from the Union; we have
+withdrawn from the Union; and the Union takes no step to keep us in;
+you can do the same thing."
+
+At this time North Carolina and Virginia were opposed to secession.
+Governor Sam Houston, of Texas, stood like a rock against it. Kentucky,
+Maryland, Missouri, never seceded. Other States were wavering. A great
+deal depended on the degree of success which South Carolina, the leader
+in the revolt, might have. And it was Buchanan who permitted South
+Carolina's success to become apparently complete, though in the message
+to which I have referred the president declared that secession was
+"wholly inconsistent with the Constitution," that "no human power could
+absolve him (the president) from his duty to enforce the laws," and that
+the danger of national disruption was upon the country. Buchanan, in his
+December message, actually quoted Jackson's solemn denunciation of the
+doctrine that a State had a right to separate itself from the Union.
+
+But while he was making these terrible admissions of his own duty, what
+was Buchanan doing? Instead of holding up the hands of the nation's
+representatives in South Carolina, he was weakening them. Instead of
+strengthening the Federal garrison in Charleston harbor, he permitted
+it to dwindle until it was powerless to take a single step. Not one act,
+indeed, did he perform, but contented himself with calling on Congress
+for legislation to meet the emergency. And out of Congress, of course,
+he could get nothing, for the Southern representatives would vote for no
+such legislation, and the Republican members were bent upon waiting
+until Lincoln, who had been elected president, came in in March, and the
+northern Democrats were paralyzed with pusillanimity.
+
+So South Carolina went on proving to the other slave States that it
+could "go it alone." One after another these other States seceded from
+the Union. Northern arsenals were stripped of arms. Southern officers
+went out of the army one by one, and made ready to organize the army of
+the new Confederacy which was forming under the president's nose.
+
+It was a time for the strong arm, and for quick, decisive, Jacksonian,
+and not at all squeamish, action. But no such action was taken. The
+golden moment was lost, and when, three months afterward, Lincoln came
+in at last, war, with all its horrors, was upon the country.
+
+If the young rebellion had been truly nipped in the bud, as it might
+have been, by a rigid enforcement, in November and December, 1860, of
+Federal judicial processes in South Carolina; if the laws of the United
+States had been enforced in that State at the point of the bayonet, if
+need be; if a Federal functionary, sustained by an ample force of United
+States troops, had torn South Carolina's ordinance of secession into
+shreds on the steps of the capitol at Columbia, with no tender regard
+for South Carolina's interpretation of the Constitution, is it likely
+that South Carolina's sister States would have been so prompt at
+seceding?
+
+Very likely it might not have been necessary to do any of these things.
+If Buchanan had merely stood up and said, as Jackson did in 1833, "I
+shall enforce the laws of the United States in spite of any and all
+resistance that may be made," there might well have been no more of
+secession in 1860 or 1861 than there had been of real nullification in
+1833.
+
+And if this step had been taken, and there had been no war, what then?
+What about slavery? it may be asked. Is it conceivable that northern
+sentiment would have permitted chattel slavery to continue? Was not war
+inevitable on that main question alone? Let us see. The sentiment for
+absolute and sudden emancipation was the product of the war. Lincoln
+was not an Abolitionist. The Republican party was not Abolitionist.
+
+Without war, but with the Southern States held within the Union,
+sentiment in the North would have been favorable to a compromise which
+would have prevented the extension of slavery; and events would surely
+have brought about a gradual liberation of the blacks in the South, as
+events soon ended slavery in Brazil and Cuba. The institution was
+doomed, morally and economically.
+
+But there would have been no negro suffrage. That was enforced by
+conditions which grew out of the war. The South would not have been
+impoverished, and it could have afforded a gradual education of the
+negro in such a way as to fit him for free industry, and, in a limited
+way, for the exercise of the suffrage. There would have been no
+disturbing reversal of the position of the two races, to be followed by
+a violent restoration of white supremacy and an accompanying
+development of inveterate hostility between whites and blacks. The
+sections would not have drifted apart in industrial conditions and
+social constitution as they did under the influence of the war; we
+should not have had, perhaps, a money-mad North to counterbalance a
+ruined, desolated, disheartened South.
+
+And where, at Antietam, at Gettysburg, at Fredericksburg, at
+Chattanooga, and on many humbler fields, the flags wave over the even
+ranks of myriads of soldier graves, the mocking-birds would sing in
+thickets which the bullet's hiss and the shriek of the shell had never
+profaned, while their teeming populations of dead men would either be
+alive to-day or entombed among their loved ones after lives of peaceful
+usefulness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+IF THE CONFEDERATES HAD MARCHED ON WASHINGTON AFTER BULL RUN
+
+
+There have been a great many attempts to excuse or minimize the failure
+of General Joseph E. Johnston to follow up the tremendous Confederate
+victory won by his second in command, General G. T. Beauregard, at Bull
+Run, July 21, 1861. That the Federal army was beaten literally to a pulp
+there can be no doubt. General Irwin McDowell, who commanded the Union
+forces, officially reported, after the battle, that all his troops were
+in flight "in a state of utter disorganization." "They could not," he
+wired on July 22d, "be prepared for action by to-morrow morning even
+were they willing. The larger part of the men are a confused mob,
+entirely demoralized." They were actually running away in such a state
+of panic that they could not get away, for commissary and ammunition
+wagons, congressmen's and other spectators' horses and carriages,
+artillery and sutlers' wagons were blocking the road, and panicstricken
+soldiers were falling over one another. When General McClellan came to
+take command after McDowell had been superseded, he reported this state
+of affairs: "I found no army to command--a mere collection of regiments
+cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others
+dispirited by defeat."
+
+To reach the spot where the beaten raw recruits were thus cowering,
+General Johnston and General Beauregard had to advance only twenty
+miles, over a road every foot of which was well known to them. That the
+Federal army was in ignominious flight they were well aware, for they
+reported it joyfully to the government at Richmond. Why did they settle
+down into utter inaction and allow McClellan to fortify the capital and
+organize, drill and inspire with hope and confidence a great army?
+
+There are a good many "ifs" in connection with the actual fighting of
+the battle of Bull Run, but this "if" that comes after it--if the elated
+and triumphant Confederate army had immediately advanced to the Potomac,
+invested the intrenchments at Arlington Heights and, very likely,
+effected a crossing above or near the Great Falls of the river, and
+flanked the capital of the Union--is the greatest and most interesting
+of them all.
+
+General Beauregard actually commanded at the battle on the 21st, because
+General Johnston, who ranked him, had but just arrived on the scene and
+was unfamiliar with the ground and the disposition of the troops. But
+he, Johnston, became responsible for the further prosecution of the
+campaign, once the battle was won. It was in large measure his fault
+that the fruits of victory were not reaped.
+
+The commonly accepted explanation of the matter is that the Confederates
+were "almost as much disorganized by victory as the Federals were by
+defeat;" that they had no fresh troops and no cavalry with which to
+pursue, and that Arlington Heights were too well fortified to be
+attacked.
+
+But General Beauregard, sore at the attempt to rob him of the laurels of
+victory, has been able to show that all of the Confederate brigades of
+Ewell, Holmes, D. R. Jones and Longstreet, and two regiments of Bonham's
+brigade, were perfectly fresh and unharmed after the fight; that Early's
+brigade had hardly been under fire; that new regiments had come up
+during the day; that the fresh troops in all numbered at least fifteen
+thousand; that more than half the Confederate army, in fact, had not
+been engaged--a very unusual proportion after an important battle. "The
+remaining forces, after a night's rest," says Beauregard himself, "would
+have been instantly reorganized and found thoroughly safe to join the
+advance."
+
+Apparently nothing but shame on the Northern side, and an unwillingness
+on the Southern side to discredit their great generals, has prevented a
+full acknowledgment of the fatal tactics which prevented an advance on
+the Potomac after Bull Run.
+
+Now let us see what would have resulted from a Confederate investment of
+Washington in the summer of 1861. Federal troops had already been
+attacked in the streets of Baltimore. That city was preponderantly
+disloyal, and had to be garrisoned with Union troops. Missouri had not
+yet been won to the Union. Maryland, Delaware and Kentucky, all of
+which were necessary to the maintenance of the Northern position, were
+slave States, and their loyalty was doubtful. If the capital of the
+Union had been taken, all these States, in spite of their previous
+unwillingness to join the secession movement, would probably have been
+impelled by strong self-interest to range themselves on the side of the
+other slave States; and the Confederacy would have been strengthened by
+the addition of at least four States.
+
+There was an important party among the Confederates from the western
+Southern States--it was led by Postmaster-General John H. Reagan and
+included General Albert Sidney Johnston--who believed in advancing at
+the very outset into Kentucky and making the Ohio River the first line
+of Southern defense. The plan was rejected by Davis and his advisers. It
+was an unfortunate rejection. The Confederacy was finally beaten
+because it was flanked in the west and cut in two at Vicksburg. But if
+Washington had been captured or invested after Bull Run, it is certain
+that the Confederate line would have been pushed to the Ohio, and it
+would probably have been held there. The advantage gained by McClellan
+in West Virginia would have been lost, for he would practically have
+found himself within the Confederate lines and would have been compelled
+to withdraw into Pennsylvania.
+
+Even as matters were, the position of the Union was highly precarious
+all through the summer and autumn of 1861. There were signs of a demand
+for peace in the North. Lincoln's own party was turning against him. The
+sympathy of Europe was rapidly passing over to the Confederacy. But so
+long as Lincoln stood firm in the White House and Congress sat at the
+capital, "the government at Washington still lived," and the people
+felt it. The truce so kindly, so inexplicably permitted by Davis and Lee
+and Johnston enabled McClellan to organize and drill a great army, to
+fortify the capital, to spread renewed confidence in the North, and, in
+short, to establish a fulcrum for future victory.
+
+This was not the last time that opportunity knocked at the door of the
+Confederacy. It knocked again, and loudly, as will be shown in the next
+chapter, the same year. Either event, taken alone, appears decisive. For
+as we contemplate the events of the 21st of July, 1861, it quite appears
+as if the flag of two republics--three, perhaps, and conceivably
+four--might have been flying over this great American domain to-day if
+Johnston had pressed his advance down the Warrenton turnpike early
+Monday morning, July 22d. Wars, divisions, European intrusion,
+retrogression and darkness would have been America's fate, instead of
+that imperial advance, with liberty and union, which has dazzled and
+heartened the whole world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+IF THE CONFEDERATE STATES HAD PURCHASED THE EAST INDIA COMPANY'S FLEET
+IN 1861
+
+
+In the preceding chapter I have noted the disastrous consequences of the
+rejection of John H. Reagan's plan, urged at Montgomery at the very
+foundation of the Confederacy, for the prompt occupation of the south
+bank of the Ohio River as the advanced line of defense, and the equally
+unfavorable result of the failure of Johnston to press on to the Potomac
+after the great success at Manassas. Gettysburg was a pivotal combat,
+also; for if Lee had been supported by Stuart's cavalry on that
+occasion, there is at least a possibility that the war's tide might have
+been turned then and there.
+
+But there was a narrower contingency than either one of these. To a
+positively decisive extent, the success of the National forces in
+subjugating the Southern States turned on the sea power. The conquest of
+the Confederacy was in fact a matter of supreme difficulty as it was;
+and if the South had possessed a respectable navy, and had been able to
+keep its ports open and steadily exchange its cotton in Europe for the
+materials and munitions of war, the conquest would not have been
+possible at all.
+
+The chance for the establishment of such a navy lay within the grasp of
+the Confederate statesmen, and was by them let slip. Neither they, nor
+any one else at the time, realized how easy the thing would have been.
+
+It is first necessary to explain in what situation the National
+government was, at the outset of the war, in the matter of a naval
+force. Nominally the United States navy consisted of ninety vessels, but
+of these fifty were utterly obsolete and unusable except as supply
+ships. Of the other forty, twenty were in a state of hopeless
+unreadiness. Several of the best ships were in the remotest corners of
+the world. The home squadron was composed of twelve ships, of which only
+seven were steamers! Nearly fifty years after the invention of steam
+navigation, the United States depended principally upon sailing vessels
+for its defense. Only three trustworthy warships were left in Northern
+waters for the defense of such ports as New York, Boston and
+Philadelphia.
+
+As between the North and the South, the chance to wield the sea power
+lay with the one of the two rival governments which should first put on
+the water even a very small fleet of ironclad, steam-driven vessels. The
+Confederacy proved afterward what power could be exerted in this
+direction with but one single ironclad, when the _Merrimac_ destroyed or
+scattered all the ships in Hampton Roads, for a moment threatened
+Washington and the Northern cities with ravage, and was checked at last
+only by the almost providential appearance of another ironclad,
+Ericsson's little _Monitor_, on the scene. And the _Alabama's_ armor of
+chains made her for a time almost a match for the United States navy.
+
+By what means could the Confederacy have forestalled the North in the
+provision of a really effective navy? The chance, as I have said, was
+offered, and declined, with fatal want of foresight. It lay in the ten
+steamships of the English East India Company, which in 1861 was winding
+up its affairs. These ships were offered to the Confederacy at a fair
+valuation. They were very good vessels, and capable of prompt armoring
+in at least as effective a style as that in which the _Alabama_ was
+afterwards armored. The East India Company was prepared to make such
+terms as the Confederate government could have met.
+
+British outfitters were perfectly willing to trust the Southern
+statesmen. The ships could have been armed in a few weeks; there was
+nothing to prevent their entrance into Southern ports, for the blockade
+was not made effective until one year after the war broke out. The
+_Otero_, renamed by the Confederates the _Florida_, had no difficulty in
+taking on her men and guns in the Bahamas.
+
+Possessed of ten good steam vessels, commanded by such men as Maury,
+Maffitt of the _Florida_, and Semmes of the _Alabama_, the Confederacy
+could have quickly overcome its lack of mechanics and workshops by
+importation from Europe. It was the command of the Mississippi, the
+Cumberland and the Tennessee rivers which "broke the back of the
+Confederacy"; and does any one imagine that the wooden ships of
+Farragut could have entered the Mississippi, compelled the abandonment
+of New Orleans, and secured the possession of not only the seacoast but
+the inland river waters which commanded the Confederacy from the rear,
+if there had been any good ships to resist him?
+
+The start which these ten ships would have given a Confederate navy
+would have more than put the South even with the North on the sea. It
+must be remembered that up to 1862, even as it was, the South could do
+better in the courts and exchanges of Europe than the Union could. Why?
+Because the South had the cotton, upon which the mills of Europe
+depended. The continued chance to market cotton would have saved the
+situation for the South. _Alabamas_ in any requisite number would have
+issued from British shipyards.
+
+As it was, several powerful rams were under construction for the
+Confederacy in 1861 and 1862 in the yards of the Lairds. But the
+continued insistence of Minister Adams on the unlawfulness of this
+proceeding, joined with the fact that the Confederates had no
+recognizable navy to back up their purchases, at last compelled the
+British government to take these rams over and add them to its own sea
+power.
+
+President Jefferson Davis declined the offer of the East India ships for
+the apparent reason that the military necessities of the Confederacy
+pressed hard upon the financial resources of the new government. Every
+member of his government was quite thoroughly convinced that the
+National power could not successfully invade the South, provided a
+strong army were quickly put into the field. The ready material for good
+soldiers was much more abundant in the South than in the North; nearly
+all Southern men were horsemen, hunters, marksmen, out-of-door men. On
+the other hand, the first levies from the North were mostly city men,
+unaccustomed to firearms, strangers to exposure, flabby of physique.
+Manassas amply illustrated the great superiority as soldiers of the
+first comers from the South over the first comers from the North.
+
+The Confederate leaders counted upon making permanent the advantage
+which they were confident of gaining in the field at the outset. To
+purchase out of hand ten steamships, from resources that were yet to be
+created, and with the manhood of seven States demanding to be armed,
+looked, indeed, like madness. And yet this was the very card which, if
+played, would have saved the Confederacy's game.
+
+Conceive for a moment the Union navy debarred from entrance into the
+James or any of the navigable waters of Virginia, to support military
+operations in the direction of Richmond. Conceive Wilmington, N. C.,
+which was an easily defensible port, and which really remained open to
+the blockade runners for almost two years after the beginning of the
+war, rendered a fairly safe point of departure for European trade
+throughout the war. Conceive the Mississippi, from Cairo southward to
+its mouth, continuously under the power of the Confederacy, with a fleet
+of river gunboats backed up by a Gulf squadron. Does any one imagine
+that in that case the North could have made either any warlike or
+commercial use of the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, or even the
+Mississippi from Cairo up to St. Louis?
+
+Freed from the unceasing coast menace and from the danger of being cut
+in two along the rivers, the effectiveness of the land forces would have
+been more than doubled. Leaving out of the account the possibility of
+offensive operations against Washington and the cities of the North,
+the defense of the seceded States could have been made so secure that
+the people of the North would have called loudly for peace; the border
+slave States would have cast in their lot with the Confederacy, and
+England and France would have openly sided with the South; secession
+would have triumphed definitely before the end of the year 1863.
+
+With the English East India Company, it was a case of "take our ships or
+leave them." The South left them, and with them it left its chance for
+independence and for putting two mediocre American republics in the
+place where one great one, after that decisive moment, was bound to
+stand forever.
+
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IFS OF HISTORY***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 34086.txt or 34086.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/4/0/8/34086
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://www.gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+