THE VICTORIAN ERA IN AMERICA.

 Great as have been the changes, and marked as has been the advancement of the British Empire while Victoria has ruled as its Queen, the half century has been even more fruitful in the United States of America, where more than half of the English-speaking peoples are now gathered. To-day it is incontestably the strongest, and the wealthiest of civilised nations, the stability of its government is not only admitted but envied, and not only its material prosperity but its intellectual activity exerts a marked influence upon the world. When the Queen of Great Britain ascended her throne in 1837, the Republic occupied a very different position. It was still on trial, nor did that trial promise to be altogether successful. For though the vigour and energy of its citizens was unquestionable, and though the ability of its statesmen was likewise beyond dispute, yet it had still the crudeness of a youthful nationality, it was already threatened by the internecine feud which reached a climax in 1861, and the strength which now secured it from all molestation was barely sufficient to guard it in the conflicts which it constantly waged. Andrew Jackson, "Old Hickory," the defender of New Orleans against the British in the war of 1812-10, had vacated the White House only a few weeks when the Princess Victoria ascended the throne of the mother-land ; Van Buren had just been inaugurated president; this was the epoch of commercial panic, of fierce political strife, of foreign complication, and of wearing border war. Canada was in arms against the British, and her sympathisers disturbed the state of New York ; the boundaries of Maine were in dispute with England, and national feeling ran high ; on the Mississippi and on the Missouri the Indian still strove to beat back the pioneers of settlement ; Texas, flooded by American adventurers had just withdrawn from the Mexican Union; and in Florida, Osceola, the Seminole, was making his heroic but useless stand against the whites. True, the progress made since 1770 had been wonderful, The 3,000,000 of the thirteen colonies had increased to 13,000,000 forming twenty six States, together with 3,000,000 negroes. The North-Western frontier had been advanced from the Ohio to Lake Michigan and the Mississippi, and further South had oven crossed the great waterway. The light of the Republic to the "Far West," though disputed on the north by England, was otherwise clear, while the wresting from Mexico by Americans of political power in California already opened the path to the suzerainty which the Washington Government has since claimed and enforced on the Pacific Slope. There was absolutely no public debt, and the unquestioning resignation of power by successive Presidents had caused the doubtful world to cease to expect a dictatorship. But, as has been said, a most bitter sectional feeling was already noticeable, which then threatened to break up the union and to reduce the otherwise promising federation to the condition of the petty squabbling communities of Spanish America. For the first twenty-eight years of Victoria's reign the domestic history of the United States centres in the great question of homogenity versus heterogenity, the decisive settlement of which by the surrender of Lee at Richmond is an event whose importance can hardly be overestimated. The immense immigration movement which commenced 1840, the fiscal tariff question still unsettled, the slavery question, which William Lloyd Garrison was fifty years ago thrusting to the front, and the caste feeling which existed even more strongly between Southern planter and Northern farmer or artisan,than it does here between squatter and home-steader, all combined to force on the crisis that occurred. It was inevitable that that the Southern States should eventually attempt to exercise the "state rights" which many of them had always claimed ; and it has been the salvation of the English-speaking race in America, probably even of the supremacy of the English-speaking races generally, that the inevitable attempt was delayed until the Northern States had become invincible and until the northern people had acquired that national instinct which prompted them to maintain the Union at any cost.

The theoretic difference which has always divided Americans into two great political parties by no means accounts for the tendency to disintegration which marks the first half of the Victorian era. For although Jefferson, the father of the Democratic party, carried the idea of local self-government to a point where the opposing Federals, the centralisers, would not follow him, yet he by no means carried it so far as to hold that the union was simply an alliance of independent States. Nor did those who accepted his teachings, and they still include the vast majority of Americans, ever assert this dangerous doctrine save when party interest blurred their mental vision. President Jackson was a typical Democrat, as was Douglas, Lincoln's great rival, but both Jackson and Douglas staunchly opposed secession ; indeed, in 1837 the country was still excited over the prompt measures taken by the former to stamp out "nullification." The "nullifiers" were the pioneers of the secessionists of 1801 ; Jackson was the founder of the loyal Democracy which made common cause with Republicanism for the suppression of the rebellion.

Though the nullification movement does not belong wholly to the Victorian era yet it is impossible to understand fully the process of disintegration which then gathered strength without briefly dealing with its early history. It was the result of a fiscal dispute very similar in character lo that which has of late years been gathering head between the Eastern and Western States. At the commencement of the century the New England districts commenced an agitation for fiscal protection, and in this were opposed by the people of the South and newly settled West, who were, of course, compelled to export their main produce, as at present, and could only lose by the increased cost of manufactured articles. In 1824, however, an almost prohibitive Customs tariff was enforced, and in 1828 a still more illiberal measure roused the South to a fever of indignation. The West was settled mainly by New England era, and though opposed to the tariff, had too much fellow-feeling with the protectionist States to talk of secession, but some of the Southern States, accustomed to regard themselves as the mainstay of the federation, proud of the pre-eminence which their statesmen had long won for them, and always disposed to independence, were ill-disposed to submit. Their endurance ended when yet another Tariff Act was passed in 1832. It was hotly declared that these Acts were unconstitutional, as imposing undue burdens upon certain States for the benefit of others, that they were consequently "null" and void —hence the name of "nullifier"—and that it would be well to secede from the Union. South Carolina took the lead in the attempt to enforce these ideas ; Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, were sympathetic; but " Old Hickory' ordered ships and soldiers to Charleston, and announced that the Union should be maintained, and that no State should nullify an Act of Congress. Jackson was not a timid man, and he had imbibed the true western indifference to the means adopted so long as the desired end was reached. Behind him stood the great majority of the nation. South Carolina yielded. The fiscal question was compromised by another Act, passed in 1833, which provided for a gradual reduction of the tariff until 1842, when it would remain at the uniform level of 20 per cent. The storm blew partially over, but the ill-feeling then engendered between North and South was not so easily allayed. The old Federal party gave way to the Whig, which ultimately developed into the Republican, but the Southern Democracy never changed. It treasured up its grievances, and the abolitionist, agitation, directed against its peculiar institution, soon changed its grudge against the North into a bitter hatted. This was the outlook in America on 24th June, 1837.

The abolitionist agitation was six years old in 1837, but it was already recognised as a power by one side and dreaded as an uncompromising enemy by the other. Whittier had flung himself into it with all the enthusiasm of a poetic nature, and his burning verses had filled the North-country with a veritable frenzy against those who dealt in human flesh and blood. The Northern Churches, rankling under the vituperation which the support given by the Southern clergy to slavery had brought down upon such profession of religion, had mostly gone with the stream to swell the rising tide. In vain a section of the Northern Democrats, aided by the scum which in large towns is always ready for riot, endeavoured to meet enthusiasm by violence, and to quell the abolitionists by persecution. Garrison was mobbed again and again ; Whittier's office in Philadelphia was sacked and burned ; negroes were killed in disgraceful street riots ; but still the abolition movement prospered and spread. The abolitionists answered the bigotry of the slave-holders and their friends by a fanaticism which recognised no means, and stopped at nothing. Whittier himself, one of the mildest of men, endeavoured to persuade the citizens of Boston to shed blood to release from gaol an escaped slave whose surrender Maryland demanded. Wendell Phillips became prominent by his furious utterances. "No slaves within the Bay State" was shouted by frenzied men and shrieked by excited women, and was chanted from its native place to beyond the lakes and to the very beach of the Pacific. In Syracuse the populace defied the law, and tore a fugitive from the troops called out to guard him. And "The Underground Railroad" was organised to enable escaping slaves to be passed from the slave States to Canada and freedom. For the Government, at its wit's end to appease the South, had declared that slaves were "chattels," and as such could be recovered wherever found. The abolitionists, in reply, formed the most perfect escape-system ever planned, one only possible in a country where State officials at least owed their places to the popular vote. All along the Free State border, and thence at easy distances to the Canadian front, "stations" were established in the houses of sympathisers. Refugees were guided from point to point at night and hidden in the day, supplied with food and clothes and disguised, and even assisted in Canada by friends of the movement. Gradually, too, abolition crept into politics ; and with its growth the Southern States thought again of the secession idea, which Jackson had frustrated, but which they had never forgotten.

But it is a mistake to suppose that the South rashly or unthinkingly attempted to secede. They strove for the first twenty five years of our epoch to secure the supremacy in which lay the safety of their customs. And they might have succeeded, indeed they must have done so, had not the immigration movement which commenced in 1840 entirely overthrown all their plans and projects. They could keep pace with the natural growth of their Northern rivals, especially as the disfranchised slaves were counted in the construction of electoral districts, but they could not compete with the vast multitude which overflowed from Europe and poured itself upon the fertile soil of the great North-western States. It was this multitude which forced the hands of the secessionists just as it was this multitude which saved the Union in its hour of need.

In 1840 the Republic contained 17,069,453 inhabitants, of whom over 3,000,000 were coloured and mostly slaves, The slave States contained less than half of the total number, but aided by friendly sections of the free States they could still hold their own, and they had determined upon the plundering of Spain and Mexico, for the acquisition of more slave territory which would give them the control of national affairs in accordance with this plan the Texan revolt had been organised, and in spite of the protests of the Whig party the nation was embroiled in war with Mexico because that country refused to acquiesce in the annexation of the so-called Republic of Texas. Attempts upon Cuba were frustrated by the watchfulness of the Spanish, and the patriotism of the Hispano-Americans defeated the attempts of Walker, the filibuster, upon Nicaragua, but a second Mexican war had secured New Mexico and California. The Southern scheme looked prosperous, but the gold discovery of '49 flooded California with free white labour before it could be organised as a slave State; meanwhile, the abolition agitation had increased to a veritable fury, and the European millions, all freemen, poured in through the Northern ports. Less than 600,000 immigrants had arrived during the thirties, but over 1,000,000 entered in the forties, and over 2,000,000 in the fifties. The progressive movements which found vent in England in the Chartist rising, and on the Continent in the wild tumults of '48, had turned men's minds to the trans-Atlantic republic, and it was the best and bravest who migrated thither. The Germans and Scandinavians, for the first time since the Dark Ages, became prominent as swarming peoples ; between 1840 and 1860 over 1,500,000 of those nationalities entered the States, settling almost entirely in the North. By 1800, the total population had swollen from the 16,000,000 of 1837 to nearly double— 31,443,321. Settlement had made the north-west a third factor in the struggle for political power, and under the party name of Republican its people had made common cause with the abolitionists of the East. The South was hopelessly out-numbered. The star of abolition rose after a generation of furious agitation. It was plain that if the Union lasted slavery was doomed. That was how matters stood towards the close of the fifties

THE SECESSION PERIOD.

There is nothing more remarkable in the history of race movements than the sudden growth of Western America. In '37, Michigan and Arkansas had just been admitted as States, Florida, Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Kansas, which all look a prominent part in the war, and are now, with one or two exceptions, great and powerful, were then barely opened up, and, excepting Texan, hardly known. Chicago, in 1800 containing 112,000, and now over 500,000, people, was then an insignificant trading port, Milwaukee, unknown at the time of the Queen's ascension, sprang in the next decade to 20,000 inhabitants. St. Paul was a part of the untrodden prairie in '40, a trading port in '50, but a thriving town which sent two whole regiments to the front in '61. Indianapolis, Kansas City, Omaha, Sacramento, and San Francisco, also sprang into great cities as the immigration movement reached them. Older towns such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Buffalo, doubled, trebled, and quadrupled their in-habitants under the unprecedented flow. When South Carolina led the secession movement of '61, she drew ten States with her and 6,000,000 whites, but twenty-four States and 21,000,000 whites stood loyal, bore down the desperate resistance of the recessionists, and maintained the United States as a nation. If there is nothing in race movements to equal the influx into the Northern and Western States, there is also nothing in the history of national uprisings to equal the intensity of that great struggle.

Violence did not begin suddenly, but, just as the nullification doctrine of the Jackson period had paved the way for the secessionist doctrine of the eleven Southern States, so the abolitionist movement had long before the firing upon Fort Hunter grown into a veritable guerrilla warfare in certain sections. For in pursuance of its fixed design the slave power, embodied in the Democratic party of the South, had endeavoured to acquire the trans-Mississippi country by claiming the right of slave-holders to move thither with their "chattels." This the abolitionists stubbornly opposed, but a compromise was effected by dividing the territory latitudinally, the division being known as Mason and Dixon's line. In 1856 Kansas entered the Union as a State. It was claimed by the still dominant Democrats that owing to its doubtful position its first Legislature would have the power to proclaim it slave or free, and to secure it for the slaveholder thousands of young Southerners hastened to settle there. The abolitionists accepted the implied challenge. A crusade was preached from pulpit and platform. From New England, from the lake country, and even from the new north-west, an overwhelming number of fiery Republicans migrated to Kansas. The famous "Free soil war" ensued ; it seemed as though this border State had been chosen as the arena of the settlement of the quarrel. Open battles took place; a "Free Soil" army held the field for the abolitionist ; a pro-slavery army declared illegal the legislature which in '56 decided against "the Institution ;" "the sky was red with burning homesteads, and the soil wet with blood." President Buchanan, elected in 1856, the last slave-holder president, denied the authority of the Free Soil Legislature. In the very Hall of Congress, Brooks, of South Carolina, assaulted and nearly killed Sumner, the greatest of the abolitionist orators. The world looked on expectantly ; the aristocracies of Europe waited to see the disintegration of the great Republic, and they had good ground for their expectancy. Still, the abolition sentiment increased in spite of pro-slavery efforts to stem it even in
the North. While the New York Herald denounced the Free Soilers, Henry Ward Beecher urged his congregation to support them, and raised the famous collection for the ransom of the slave-girl, into which women threw their earrings and men their watches. The tumult reached fever heat when John Brown and his sons crossed into Virginia and called on the slaves to arm for freedom. John Brown and his sons were hung, but his famous raid was immortalised in the hymn-like doggerel which for five years cheered the North in defeat and rallied it for victory. By 1860 the Republican party, pledged to abolition, had over-shadowed the Whigs and the now almost forgotten "Know Nothings," while the Democracy had split into two distinct factions ; one strong in the Southern States, and talking secession boldly, the other comprising the majority of the Northern Democrats, willing to tolerate slavery in the South, but opposed to its extension, and generally loyal to the Union. The Presidential nominees were Lincoln, Breckenridge, and Douglas ; also Bell, the last of the Whigs. Lincoln, the Republican, the chief of the Western abolitionists, carried every one of the free States, excepting New Jersey. On the popular vote he was in a minority of the whole, though far ahead of any individual opponent. Directly the result was known the Southern leaders resolved to secede; Douglas waited on his victorious rival and voluntarily pledged himself to sink all differences for the sake of the nation. North and South, free States and slave States, waited the upheaval ; the former with foolish confidence in their numbers, the latter silently preparing for a determined fight for independence.

The details of the War of Secession are known to every schoolboy. Less understood is the shock which went through the North, when the stars and stripes were first fired upon at Fort Hunter, and the sudden rush of the free States to arms. The emotional agitation of the abolitionists had worked like leaven, but besides this a generation had sprung up, fostered by the migration movements, which cared little for any individual State, but looked to the whole Union as its country. The slavery question was lost right off in the unreasoned but heartfelt instinct that the union must be preserved, and this feeling was strengthened at the outset by the idea that a subjugation of the rebellion could be easily effected. Then came overthrow after overthrow, defeat after defeat, the skill of the Southern generals and the devotion of the Southern people making amends for the odds against them. The North was stung. Had it counted the cost it might have let the South go peaceably ; being in the contest it fought sullenly on and saved the English-speaking race. Lincoln prayed and joked, wept and hoped ; Grant rose ; Gettysburg was won ; after five fearful years the slaves were free, the South was crushed, the secession principle was drowned in blood.

It was something more than war, this great struggle ; it was a contest pregnant with interest to our race, a wrestling of rival principles, a battling to the death of the New World against the Old. Into it were thrown the old ideas which had dominated the world for ages, from it emerged a true democracy, a nation of citizens, imperfect still, but welded together for good or ill, and free to work out the social problems which now constitute their politics. It was a pitting of the aristocrat against the democrat, of the slave-holder against the free white worker, of the man whose property was sacred against the man whose principles were more sacred still. It was a fighting-out upon the battle grounds of America of the world-wide quarrel, which in various forms was convulsing Europe. The northern papers boasted in '60 that they were the gentry, the cavaliers, the descendants of rulers, and that the "Yankees" were the plebeians, the Puritans, the descendants of the ruled. Nor was this altogether a vain boast. The South was controlled by the landed proprietors ; the North drew its strength from the artisans of the East and from the homesteaders of the West. The South had held the reins and power for well-nigh ninety years, and had sworn to break the Union rather than surrender them to others; the North won its claim to office at the ballot box and proved it in the battlefield. And more than this, even more important than the submission of Lee, the gallant gentleman, to Grant, the farmer's son, even more important than the vindication of the Republican axiom that the majority must rule, be the majority what it would, was the consolidation of the continent, the destruction of the disintegration movement which threatened to fill the New World with rival powers and hostile States. Since 1865 the United States has been recognised as a nation and a Power. Its democracy has been admitted ; its solidity has been unquestioned. And it has become of weight ; it influences modern thought ; secure from foreign intrusion and safe at last from sectional broil, it holds a unique position among the nations. When Victoria ascended the throne the United States was the favourite target for English humour, and its term of life was calmly discussed by European writers. To-day it is the abiding place of Science, the home of Letters, the centre of advanced ideas. Every State in the world looks to it and unconsciously imitates it. But had it not crushed secession it would have made of America another Europe, nothing more. More than half of the Victorian era in the United States is filled with this consolidation movement ; the remainder is almost equally filled with the industrial movement which has not yet reached a climax.

THE SOCIAL QUESTION.

The North fought out the consolidation question under most peculiarly favourable circumstances, and of this the most favourable was its continued growth. Its mining and manufacturing industries had developed immensely in 1800 whilst its agricultural operations had already made it the chief granary of the world. The great west country needed no felling of trees or clearing of underwood. It was ready for the plough ; in six months the unbroken prairie could be made to yield a crop. And whilst the war raged the torrent of immigration poured in and on ; filling the gaps which the fearful slaughter made in the youths of the free States, swelling the army, flooding, the towns, and, year by year, increasing the output of the soil. Nearly two millions of Europeans entered the Atlantic ports between the firing on Sumter and the surrender of Lee. When the Federal troops were mustered out, civilisation had made its way up the great Western rivers to the Rocky Mountains, and was closing in over the great gaps which lay between. And during this five years of war a feverish excitement, an intense desire for speculation, possessed the nation. The gigantic operations of the armies were imitated by the gigantic operations of capitalists ; the sounds of martial music and the smell of gunpowder seemed to nerve the people which for the first time was possessed by the idea of an indissoluble nationality. The army contracts, the bounty moneys, the buying up of horses, mules, and provisions made money cheap even while the "green-back" sank in value, And when the disbanded Federals flocked home it was to return to peaceful industry and to swell still higher the "boom." To meet the immense war debt of nearly 85,000,000,000 the Customs tariff was raised ; there was no South to object, for it was some time before "reconstruction" was complete and the West was propitiated by the inclusion of raw materials, although indeed the sentiment was so prevailingly Republican throughout the North, that the Government could do well-nigh as it pleased. These high duties established a vast number of factories, while at the same time yielding a large revenue, and in the first flush of prosperity the evil of the system was hardly seen. Mechanical invention multiplied amazingly; railroads were projected all over the country, tying the Atlantic and the Pacific together; prosperous seasons off-set temporary depressions, and the growing discontent of Eastern districts was lost in the contemplation of the advancement of the West. In '73 the "boom" broke, and a commercial panic ensued. It was the story of "over-production," now so old, but then comparatively new, and the economists of the day put down the disaster to the inflated currency, and to the wild speculation so long continued. Landed properties fell in many places from 50 to 75 per cent. in value ; manufactured articles were drugs in the market, only the farmers could sell for export, and the farmers were pinched because wheat sold at low prices, while other prices were still high, and while the mortgagees were pressing. Gradually the country recovered and another "boom" ensued only to be followed in 1877 by another panic, and this time there appeared that fierce discontent among the industrial classes which is now a feature of United States society. The railroad men led the way, seized the railroads at Pittsburg, a great railroad centre, roused sympathetic risings in other cities, and, taking to arms, defied the authorities "Anti-monopoly" became a growing idea among the masses ; then anger and discontent found vent in strikes which spread across the continent. It suddenly dawned upon everybody that the old equality of the North had passed away, that a great gulf had opened between the rich and the poor, and shrewd men recognised even then that in a country where education was free to all, where the ballot was the arbiter, and where there was an underlying vein which prompted in extremity such desperate measures as a civil war and such an astounding confiscation as that of slave property, it was impossible to expect that the masses would submit contentedly to the glaringly and increasingly unjust division of wealth.

Monopolies existed to some extent before the war, but never rose to prominence until later. The fortunate speculations which placed millions of money at the disposal of keen but unscrupulous men ; the immense distances which afforded unlimited scope to such railroad kings as the first Vanderbilt ; the concentration so characteristic of American communities; the absolute freedom of the individual and the absence of all laws regulating enterprise; the freedom from foreign competition given by high tariff ; together with the gross misconduct of the Grant Administration, 1869-1877, all enabled those Napoleonic financiers so numerous in America to become millionaires, some a hundred times fold. Then schemes were gigantic ; their success has been phenomenal. The Vanderbilts secured control of the northern line of railroads, from the Mississippi to New York ; Gould, the telegraphic system and the Central Railway system ; the Stanhopes, the first Trans-continental system others, the river boats ; others again the lake steamers. And while individuals thus enriched themselves, not so much by enterprise as by sheer, cunning manipulations of stocks, other millionaires formed "rings," and " cornered," and plundered the helpless consumers right and left. There was a great iron ring in Pennsylvania, as well as a great coal ring and a great oil ring ; wheat rings in Chicago ; a copper ring on Lake Superior, and a silver ring in Nevada. Spreckles, controller of the Pacific Steamship Company, had his great sugar ring, for which he bribed Congress ; the cream of the nations wealth was skimmed industriously by these men, the astounding products of the competitive system. And lower down in the scale the untiring race for wealth drove the many to the wall and left the control of industry in the hands of a few. Large retail stores replaced the smaller shops ; seven story factories with their 10,000 hands, the more modest buildings of the generations before. In all this there was much good, a prodigious saving of labour resulted, but unfortunately this saving, and far more, went into the pocket of the monopolist and benefited the masses not at all. For when a great railroad had swallowed up a competitor by running below cost until it had ruined its opponent, freights and fares rose exorbitantly, if a wheat ring "cornered" the breadstuff it forced prices to their limit; it was the same with the iron, the oil, the coal, the copper, and the lumber rings. The land was appropriated in vast tracts by the railways under the land-grant building system, and even where not appropriated the farmers became almost their serfs, for they had to use the railroad and its owners could charge what they liked. The substitution of capitalistic enterprise and mammoth businesses almost closed the door to the private worker who worked to get on. In the West there were still chances for poor men in '77, but they had almost ceased in the East and are now as scarce everywhere.

While this state of affairs developed driving a wedge through the industrial world, crushing the workers and raising those above, there was little sympathy between employers and employed. Occasionally it existed, but very rarely ; men came to be regarded as animals upon whom as much profit should be made as possible, the masters as leeches who preyed upon those who toiled. The farmers, too, imbibed a bitter hatred of the monopolies, but naturally did not move to Radicalism as rapidly as the town labourer. The latter began to question the right of those who had acquired property by monopoly. Then it was that Socialism began to spread in America. The Germans had brought Socialism with them, for among those who reached the States were many political refugees, whose offences were red Republicanism and a belief in Karl Marx. Many had thought that in free America social troubles would be ended ; to their surprise they found individualism more aggressive there than in Germany. The Trade Union also had begun to gather strength. Then came the second panic of '77, an attempt to reduce wages, already wretchedly low, and the railroaders' raising of the red flag at Pittsburg in 1877. In another country, under similar circumstances, such a rising might have meant revolution ; but the United States Government met the danger at once and crushed it after some desperate fighting. It was nine years before such another danger threatened—not until the Gould railway strikes of a year ago — and then wiser heads controlled the mob. But in the meantime the gulf between rich and poor grew even deeper ; in 1880 the Knights of Labour appeared and spread their organisation like wildfire, until to day it is said to number over 3,000,000 members. It takes part in many industrial matters, but its aim is socialistic, though not pronouncedly so ; its weapon is the "boycott," the social ostracism ; it accepts all who will work for the advancement of "Labour," and it controls by far the greater part of the American trade societies. Among the farmers various grange associations have some considerable influence. The industrial movement already begins to influence politics.

It has often been wondered at that the American masses have so tardily begun to carry their grievances to the ballot box, but the slowness with which great numbers of men arrive at the same conclusion on most points is notorious. We have seen that it was thirty years before the abolitionists carried even the Free States against slavery, and the abolitionists had this advantage—that able and prominent men espoused their cause. But the clever labourer, the man who should have guided his fellows aright, was usually lost in the throng of struggling speculators, or degenerated into a mere politician and office-seeker. Those higher up the ladder had for long no sympathy with the wage-workers. The political parties were controlled by those interested in maintaining the clique in office, or by those interested in substituting another clique. The civil service was controlled by the Government and openly used for the bribery of supporters. The memory of the war also affected the parties. The Democrats dominated the South, and the Republicans were, for a decade, supreme in the North. But in '72, a defection of democratically-inclined Republicans to the Democracy which in that year nominated Horace Greely against Grant, did much to restore the old balance of parties, so much so that in 1876 the election was contested. This growth of the Democracy was mainly due to the support given it in the Northern towns, where the workers bitterly inveighed against the monopolistic proclivities of the Republicans. In 1884, and aided by a section of the best Republicans, they returned Grover Cleveland, a comparatively advanced man, and one of unimpeachable integrity. Under his administration the Inter-State Commerce Bill, to control the railroads, and an Arbitration Bill to settle peacefully industrial disputes, have become law. There had existed for some twenty years in America a party which is now merging in the United Labour party, called the Greenback, its main feature being a proposition to substitute a national paper circulation for the national bank paper. By law banks must purchase United States bonds to the extent of the paper they wish to issue, and deposit them in the Washington Treasury. There they draw 4 per cent. in addition to the interest received on the paper-money circulated. This was regarded by many as a great injustice, and the Greenback Party, which drew its strength mostly from the farmers but also from the radical towns, made a very distinct mark in the 1876 election. Since then it has waned. Various socialistic associations had taken part in some local elections, but not to such an extent as to attract particular attention until within the last year ; the trade societies in some towns had previously succeeded in securing representation on the State Legislatures. Last year, after a series of "booms" and depressions, unprecedented hard times and persistent reductions of wages on the part of the capitalists deepened the now endemic discontent. The Knights of Labour assumed control of the industrial movement, and for the first time made the power of labour organisations fully felt in America. The industrial upheaval lasted for some months, and attracted universal attention ; the excitement was intensified by the throwing of dynamite bombs at Chicago; and at the fall elections Henry George was nominated by the combined labour organisations of New York for the mayoralty of that city. He was barely defeated, polling a vote which at once gave the labour organisations a standing in politics. In many other towns labour candidates were nominated, with varying results, but always securing heavy votes. A United Labour Party has been since organised, and may be said to be the coming party in American politics. Already the Republicans and Democrats have been forced to combine in Chicago in order to prevent the election of a Socialistic mayor, and this combination may become general. The Victorian era in America closes upon individualism and socialism preparing for a desperate struggle, just as it opened upon the commencement of a similar struggle between abolitionists and slave-holders. Events move rapidly in America, chiefly because of the general diffusion of education, thus increasing the influence of its writers ; so that with the shaping of its industrial movement George and Gronland have had most to do.

But while the industrial movement overshadows all other matters since the war, just as the consolidation question did before it, the assured unity of the Republic has freed the Washington Government from much anxiety and trouble, and has enabled it to conduct its foreign policy generally with dignity and despatch. The Geneva arbitration was a triumph of modern humanity ; the purchase of Alaska was in keeping with the Monroe doctrine ; the humble submission of Napoleon III. to the demand of the United States for the withdrawal of French troops from Mexico, showed how the issue of the war had raised the Republic in the eyes of the world. And the strength of unity was shown even in the disgraceful squabble over the elections of '76, as it was in the maintenance of public order under the regime of Andrew Johnson. To-day, the United States of 1837, with its 16,000,000 inhabitants, and its territory settled only to the lake country, has grown to 55,000,000, and is populated more or less thickly from ocean to ocean. It has settled one great question satisfactorily, and it is now flinging itself passionately upon another.

Brisbane Courier (Qld. : 1864 - 1933), Saturday 18 June 1887, page 1