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THREE BUSY PLACES:
HALIFAX, BRADFORD AND LEEDS.
(From THE SUNDAY AT HOME, 1898-99.)

IN visiting those places which are pre-eminently "manufacturing towns," one's attention is too apt to be concentrated on their commercial and present-day aspect, forgetful that this can be scarcely understood without some regards being thrown upon their deeper and wider foundations in the past.  When, therefore, our steps were lately led through these great centres of industry―Halifax, Bradford, and Leeds—we resolved to approach them exactly as we should any cathedral or university town, thinking first of the historic and human relations which have developed or directed their present industrial pre-eminence.

Halifax.  There is something rather quaint about Halifax.  It still has many corners which might belong to any sleepy provincial town.  The hills, too, "stand about Halifax" so closely that its streets literally clamber up them, and one of its special features are its flights of stairs, off whose wide "landings" one turns into little paved quadrangles, one above the other, offering, at least, safe playing-ground for the children, since no wheeled vehicle can intrude.  The "closes," too, are of similar construction.  Between the dwelling-houses of any of the main streets, one sees here and there a flight of twelve or twenty steps not wider than those of an ordinary house, and on mounting any of these, one again finds a little paved quadrangle, some of whose inhabitants are sure to come out to gaze with interest on the intruder.  Many of the houses in the east end of the town, near the Great Crossley Mills, enjoy magnificent prospects, and their bright windows, curtained and sometimes beflowered, give the great "lands" of flats a cheery and comfortable appearance.

    Halifax is an old place, for coats of arms in the parish church tell us that there were "vicars of Halifax" in 1274.  The parish church is a very stately building, with some singularity of construction, and with parts of great antiquity, though the whole was restored by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1878.  Its interior is dark with black oak, and it might be built of black stone, so systematically and thoroughly has the grime of the atmosphere covered it.  Its most interesting monument is that of Robert Ferran, Bishop of S. Davids.  He was a native of Halifax, and perished at the stake in Carmarthen in the last year of Queen Mary's persecution.  So stout of heart was he, so firm in his faith of divine upholding, that his last words were: "If I stir through the pains of my burning, believe not the doctrines I have taught."

    The name of Halifax is said to be derived from the old church roads―Holy-ways―fax being the Norman for such paths.  Popular legend, however, asserts that it comes from holy face, deriving from a representation of the head of John the Baptist, which in the remote past was kept in the chapel of the parish church, and was the object of much devout pilgrimage.

    In one or two of the older houses in the heart of Halifax, a little fine oak carving is still to be found.  We may note especially a certain mantelpiece bearing date 1581.  Above it is to be found the arms of the well-known Yorkshire family of Savile, one of whom, Sir Henry Savile, was Queen Elizabeth's tutor in Greek and mathematics.  He is further distinguished for bringing out a magnificent edition of St. Chrysostom's works.  The production of this is said to have cost £8000.—the pride of litterateurs of that period being in the expense of their labours, and not in their pecuniary profit.  He was assisted in his colossal task by the learned Dr. Boyse, who was one of the four scholars who were hired by the Stationers' Company to revise translations of the "Apocryphal Books" for an honorarium of thirty shillings per week while their task was proceeding.

    Lady Savile was jealous, as wives sometimes are, of her husband's absorption in his studies.  Poor woman!  She said she wished she was a book, as she might then receive a little attention, and all the comfort her husband gave her was the playfully ungallant answer that "he would fain have her an almanack that he might change her every year."  On another occasion she threatened, perhaps not quite seriously, to burn Chrysostom, declaring that her husband's studies were killing him.  "That were a great pity," remarked the gentle reviser Boyse.  Her response gives us the key to the whole position, for the ignorant cannot be the sympathetic: "Why, who was Chrysostom!" she asked.  "One of the sweetest preachers since the Apostles' time," was the answer.  "Then I would not burn him for the world," said she, instantly rebuked.  Had Sir Henry condescended to give some serious "attention" to the mind of the living woman beside him, who knows but it might have shed some light on his dusty tomes, as it would have certainly supported him by interest and admiration.

    In the time of the Wars of the Roses, Halifax was a mere village of twelve or thirteen houses.  But soon after, in the course of the reign of Henry VII., Flemish artizans and weavers settled in it, and the growth of its importance began.

    A strange, fierce, old law had from time immemorial existed in the district of Halifax (it can be traced to 1280), whereby any person in the district, accused and convicted of felony to the amount of "thirteenpence halfpenny," was beheaded in the market-place on one of the next market days.  The engine of execution was a sort of rude guillotine, and every spectator was expected to take hold of the rope, "or to put forth his arm so near to the same as he could get, in token that he is willing to see justice executed," so as to cause the axe to descend on the neck of the culprit.  Nay, if the theft had concerned ox, sheep, horse, or cattle, then even the animal itself had the rope fastened to it, and was made to join in the act of doom.

    The "trial" was conducted under the supervision of the lord bailiff and sixteen burghers.  Accused, accuser, and the subject of theft, were brought forward and confronted with each other.  No oaths were taken, but evidence was adduced.  If deemed sufficient, and a market was going forward, the offender was instantly executed.  If it was not market day, he spent the interval in the public stocks.  On the other hand, if the evidence failed to establish the charge he was at once set at liberty.  A thief who succeeded in escaping arrest till he got outside "the liberty of Halifax," was safe; he could not be brought back.  But if he ever returned, he was liable to the same punishment.  There is a cruel case recorded wherein a man who had spent seven years of honest living outside this dread boundary, was, on his coming back, made to suffer for his old offence.  A certain local phrase—"I trow not, quoth Dinnis,"— originated with another culprit, who succeeded in escaping after he had been condemned, and being met as he went away by country folk who asked if one Dinnis was not to be executed that day, he answered, "I trow not," and passed on his road.

    It can be readily understood that with an increasing town population, together with the growth of manufactures, whose nature and bulk offered more temptation to petty theft than did a fine young bullock or some logs of wood, these summary executions soon grew very numerous.  Between 1541 and 1650, forty-nine people were thus put to death in the market-place of Halifax, the greater number of these executions occurring in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.  But in this respect, despite its own special severity, Halifax is not likely to have been worse than any other part of England, since during the thirty-eight years of Henry VIII.'s reign, no fewer than seventy-two thousand perished on the scaffold.

    The last Halifax execution took place in 1650, when the bailiff received warning from headquarters that if another occurred he would be held responsible for it.  As capital punishment for theft and allied offences persisted till the second quarter of the present century, it is evident that the objection to the Halifax arrangement was not against the severity of the sentence, but against the summary and self-constituted court which pronounced it.

    It is said that the "engine" employed on the Halifax criminals furnished Earl Morton with the model for his famous "maiden," with which he wrought such havoc in Scotland, until he himself finally perished in her deadly embrace.

    The worsted and carpet trades form the staple of Halifax industry.  Crossley's carpet works, the largest in the world, employ five thousand hands.  We found the work-people, whom we met pouring out through the great gates, very ready to give information, and apparently proud of the extent and importance of their mills.  The women, clean and picturesque with their shawled heads, were pleasant mannered and comely.  One observed that many of these "factory girls " were well on in "the forties," explaining the phrases "t'owd lad " and "t'owd lass," so constantly heard in Yorkshire.  We were told that they earn, mostly by piecework, from 15s. to 20s. per week.

    The centre of the town is very concentrated with its bright well-stocked shops, fine new market-place, and handsome places of worship.  The newer part of the town, towards Skircoat, contains pleasant residences and large, well-timbered gardens.

    Halifax has four parks.  Savile Park, by Skircoat, is a large open moor.  Shroggs Park, and the Akroyd Park, both lie to the east of the town, the latter contains an art gallery and museum, and a branch library with fifteen thousand volumes, and on its margin stands the fine modern church of All Souls, erected by Mr. Edward Akroyd.  The People's Park, containing upwards of twelve acres, is not far from the centre of the town, and is the gift of the late Sir F. Crossley, the town contributing £300 annually for its up keep.

    Sir Joseph Crossley's former residence has been converted into a public library with 28,000 books, about 350 being issued daily.  There are also the libraries of the Literary and Philosophical Society, and the Mechanics' Institute, the former containing 20,000 volumes, the latter 12,000.

    Halifax is also well equipped educationally.  It is said that about two-thirds of the children come under the School Board.  The Blue Coat School provides for sixty boys and girls, and its almshouse shelters twenty-four old dames receiving a dole of five shillings weekly.  Each of the Crossley Brothers, Francis and Joseph, made special provisions for old folks.  Halifax further rejoices in a very unusual institution founded from money left to trustees by the late John Abbott.  This is the Abbott's Ladies' Homes, and consist of twelve four-roomed cottages, each of whose elderly or invalid inmates receives an allowance of fifty-two pounds per annum.

    The population of Halifax is now about 84,000.  It is said that its workhouse has room for 700 inmates, exclusive of vagrants.

    Nothing strikes one more in travelling through Yorkshire than the number of its towns, evidently of considerable magnitude and importance, whose names are quite unfamiliar outside the manufacturing and commercial world.

Bradford.  As we approached Bradford, one of its citizens, who was our fellow-traveller, proudly assured us that we should find there "some of the finest buildings in Great Britain," he "should not like to say how many storeys high."  The description did not greatly cheer us, nor did the appearance of Bradford much attract us.  One's impression is that it is all mills and business, and one wonders where the people live and indeed where they are, for in the intervals of going to or from work, the streets, many wide enough, but all gloomy through the height of the smoke-blackened buildings, seem well-nigh deserted.

    The residential suburbs are rather remote from the centre of the town, and only to be reached by wide, but rather unattractive thoroughfares, off which are narrow openings mostly filled with tiny houses.  Here and there, however we find signs that, at no remote period, the "better classes" lived nearer to the heart of things.  These signs are little cloistral squares looking not unlike the precincts of convents or almshouses.  The dwellings here, without being large, are such as would have met the demands of well-to-do people half-a-century ago.  Many of these, now inhabited by people in some way connected with "social work," are nicely appointed and put the best face on matters.  In the little old squares one may still see the forgotten notice boards of a once exclusive gentility, proclaiming that anybody found walking there, except when going to the houses, "will be prosecuted."

    But though the Bradford of to-day shows few traces of antiquity, both it and its typical industries have a very early origin.  "The parish of Braforthe" is mentioned in very old charters, and woollen cloth making was practised there soon after the Norman Conquest, its market-day being fixed as Thursday in 1256.  In Henry VIII.'s time, Leland calls it "a praty quick market-town."  Charles I. sold the manor to the Corporation of London, but the Bradford people stood stoutly by the Parliament.  Twice it was besieged; it was converted into a royal garrison and its then existent prosperity was well-nigh destroyed.

    In those days nearly every house in Bradford had its garden, and unsophisticated country smiled around.  The situation is said to have been peculiarly beautiful, at the junction of three smiling valleys.

    When peace was again restored to the kingdom, Bradford took up the weaving of worsted—the peculiar woollen thread which gets its name from having been made by Flemish artizans who settled in the village of Worsted, Norfolk.  But the tremendous influx of labour and commerce which makes one authority say that "The real energy of Yorkshire settles in Bradford," only came in with the present century.  Its population was then little over 13,000, now it is 216,000.

    The Bradford of the gardened houses was the birthplace of John Sharp, who was archbishop in the reign of Queen Anne, and who has left some practical considerations on "Doing good in our lives," which are every whit as useful to-day as they were when he uttered them.

    "A man doeth good," said the archbishop, "not only by acts of charity properly so called, but by every courtesy that he doth to another . . . . by contributing in any way to make the lives of others more easy and comfortable to them . . . .  A man also doeth good when he makes use of that acquaintance or friendship or interest that he hath with others to stir them up to the doing of that good, which he, by the narrowness of his condition, or for want of opportunity, cannot do himself.  This is a very considerable instance of doing good, how slight soever it may seem: the man that exercises himself this way is doubly a benefactor, for he is not only an instrument of good to the, person or persons for whom he begged the kindness or the charity, but he does also a real kindness to the man himself whom he puts upon the benefaction, for God will not less reward his good will for being excited by another . . . .  We do good when we so carry ourselves in all the relations in which we stand as the nature of the relation requireth . . . .  We also do good by an honest and a diligent pursuit of our calling and employment."

    Bradford has erected statues to the politicians Sir Robert Peel, and "Education Forster," to Oastler, the friend of factory children, and to Sir Titus Salt, who is certainly entitled to ample recognition under Archbishop Sharp's last definition of a "doer of good," since Salt's shrewd recognition of a use for what had been hitherto regarded as a waste product―the wool of the alpaca—for many years furnished employment to hundreds of thousands.

    A significant hint as to the substantial damage which may be inflicted on industry by heedlessly varied fashions is found in the fact that Bradford soon proved that its labourers could have no reliance on making materials for feminine wear.  It was wisely careful to supplement these by the production of textile fabrics for men's use, furniture, cloths, and braids.

    Wesleyanism early laid a strong hold on Bradford, and remains its largest denomination.  The Independents follow next, the Church of England itself coming third, which is possibly explained by the fact that during twenty years of Bradford's most rapid growth no new church was built there.  That apathy has since vanished, the churches have multiplied, and Canon Bardsley, the late vicar, has done good and active service.  On the other hand, Nonconformity in Bradford, and even in Yorkshire generally, is said by some to be growing rather lax and apathetic; and to have lost not only the warmth and fervour of its first love, but also something of its moral and intellectual backbone.

    Bradford is well equipped with educational institutions and societies.  It has five parks, skirting the town, four of them being of considerable extent.

    The Yorkshire musical faculty finds evidence in the existence of eleven musical unions in Bradford.

    Further, the Bradford of this century—the Bradford of upspringing mills, of machine-smashing mobs, of labour competition, of poverty and gloom —still has its poet!  True, Preston was born in 1819, when the face of the country around was not quite marred; but that very date shows that his young manhood must have been spent in the days of Bradford's fiercest and angriest struggles.  He was a true poet, writing of his "ain folk" in their own homely tongue.  In his verse he often embalms fine old customs which the hard tread of modern days must soon wear out.  For instance, in the "Sacred Drawer," where the mother is turning over the little relics of her dead child, she wails

"I canna turn t' key wi' my bairn outside,"

an allusion to the tender old West Riding custom which left the house door unlocked for seven nights after a funeral—a usage which could scarcely be practised in the Bradford of to-day.

    We venture to quote a few of Preston's verses, interesting in dialect, and also as showing that the same love that is found in huts where peasants lie, does not forget the attics of the factory worker.

    The middle aged man is thinking of his boyish love.

Leeds.  Bradford and Leeds are as closely associated in their past history as in their present commerce.  Both are in the district which was dominated by the great Norman family of the De Lacier, who received from William the Conqueror the gift of one hundred and fifty Yorkshire manors, and who probably built that castle of Leeds which was besieged by King Stephen, during his desperate struggle with the Empress Matilda, filling the land with slaughter and dismay for nigh twenty years.  One writer says of the misery of that period "many abandoned their country: others forsaking their houses built wretched huts in churchyards, hoping for protection from the sacredness of the place.  Whole families, after sustaining life as long as they could by eating herbs, roots, dogs and horses, perished at last with hunger, and you might see many pleasant villages without one inhabitant of either sex."

    A little later Leeds Castle was one of the prison houses of Richard II. on his way to his mysterious end at Pontefract.  The castle has utterly disappeared; it is believed to have been situated on Mill Hill.

    Leland, who was the king's antiquary in 1533, alludes to Leeds as "a pretty market town, subsisting chiefly by cloaking."

    Leeds suffered sharply in the Civil War, but still more in the great plague, which had so baleful an effect on its activities, that it is said grass grew over the public highways.  Nevertheless, it presently got its share of the extraordinary advance made by the business of the whole kingdom immediately after the Restoration—which advance, by the way, is said to have been really due to wise measures taken during the Commonwealth!  For Cromwell had called together what was really our first Board of Trade, to consult how commerce and navigation could be best promoted and regulated.  Thus one sows, and another—haply his enemy—reaps, but good work always remains good, and worthy workers ask no other reward.

    It was about this time that Leeds Cloth Halls were founded—the forerunners of later edifices of allied purpose.  Charles II. gave Leeds a charter to protect its merchants and manufacturers from the frauds which certain adulterators were practising in the preparation of woollen cloths.  From this period the progress of Leeds has been steady.  But its enlargement has gone up by leaps and bounds during the present century.  This is shown by a certain account of Leeds as it was in 1806.

    "The manufacturers are dispersed in villages and single houses over the whole face of the country; they are generally men of small capitals, and often annex a small farm to their other business.  Great numbers of the rest have a field or two to support a horse and a cow, and are for the most part blest with the comforts, without the superfluities of life.  Of late years, however, manufactories of cloth have been established on a larger scale, in which the whole process of the making of cloth from the raw material to the finishing of the piece ready for the weaver is carried on."

    It was to such a Leeds as this that, some ten years earlier, Edward Baines, destined to be one of its most notable and useful citizens, had come, a printer's apprentice, trudging in on foot, with a trifle of money in his pocket and a bundle of small possessions in his hand.  He arrived, too, with something like an aroma of misfortune hanging about him.  For he had been apprenticed in a neighbouring town, and work had proved so slack, that the closing years of his indentures had been given back to him, and he had come to Leeds in search of some master willing to take up the remnant.  But there was courage and nerve and resource in the lad, who had already been the hero of the following curious occasion.

    "At Preston, at a festival of the Guild Merchants, held with great splendour every twenty years, the housetops had been covered with people to witness the procession, and when all was over, and the spectators had withdrawn, a man was seen asleep on the roof of a house, three storeys high.  It seemed almost inevitable that if he awoke he would fall from the roof in which case his death was certain.  There was no ladder and no visible means of reaching the roof to warn the man of his danger when young Baines climbed up the front of the house by a wooden spout, and laying hold of the man, gently awoke him and enabled him to place himself in safety."

    After Edward Baines had finished his apprenticeship in Leeds, he set up in business for himself in the Briggate, its old fashioned thoroughfare, often rising at three or four o'clock in the morning, to get his own business despatched by his own hands.  He married a woman of whom it is said that "her characteristic was outspoken sincerity" —that she was "a little given to over-anxiety, but very cheerful,"— all traits (since over-anxiety may well be but an exaggeration of foresight) which signify that she was a good helpmate, especially when we are further told that a stipulation before marriage was—not for privilege or pin money—but for "regular family prayer."

    In due time Edward Baines became editor of the Leeds Mercury, a paper which gave him an immense field whereon to advocate his truly progressive principles of peace, civil and religious liberty, and national economy.  Afterwards he sat in the House of Commons as member for Leeds, taking his seat with the declaration: "My own judgment and conscience shall be my guide, and the general happiness of the people my aim."  He died in 1848, and may take his place in our memories as showing how a man, without extraordinary advantages or shining gifts, may, by sheer industry, energy, and worth, achieve a position of useful influence which far outweighs more sensational forms of success.

    The cause of the poor factory children

found some of its prominent champions in Leeds, and among its manufacturing class.  There was Tom Sadler, both by culture and birth something of an aristocrat, being descended from Sir Ralph Sadler, one of Queen Elizabeth's ministers who was deputed to carry to James of Scotland, the news of his mother's execution.  There was Robert Hall, a learned lawyer, also enlisted in the children's cause.  Above all, there was Richard Oastler, known as "the factory king" whose statue we had seen in Bradford.

    Those were "the days when no law prevented mill-owners from exacting fourteen and fifteen hours of monotonous toil daily from tender frames of young children whose ages were sometimes barely half as many years."  In detailed fact, the Cotton Mills Act of 1819, fixed the working age of children as nine and their number of working hours per week at seventy-two!  Even the Saturday half holiday was not exacted till six years later.  Yet it must be remembered that a high authority asserts that between 1800 and 1850 the wealth of the country increased more rapidly than in all the previous eighteen centuries since the coming of Julius Caesar!  It was a wealth founded, alas on bitter pain and poverty.

    Richard Oastler was born in Leeds in 1789, the son of a worthy merchant who had often hospitably entertained John Wesley, and who liked to tell how, on the great preacher's last visit, he had taken little Dick in his arms and had solemnly blessed him.  The boy was educated at the Moravian school at Fulneck.  His first public work was to earnestly support Wilberforce in his advocacy of negro emancipation.  Some of his political views were so unpopular, that he was roughly handled by his opponents, and on one occasion his coat was torn from top to bottom.  With some grim sense of humour, he afterwards persisted in wearing this garment in public processions.  By 1825, he was actively engaged in pleading the wrongs of the factory children.  His claim was indeed modest enough; he asked only that their working day should be limited to ten hours!  It is said that groups of these suffering children sometimes attended his meetings, listening with premature intelligence and adding the pathos of their shrill voices to the applause.

    In one of Oastler's speeches there occurs the following awful sentence, a terrible indictment of fatherhood, when tempted by indolence and cupidity—"I have seen full-grown athletic men whose only labour was to carry their little ones to the mill long before the sun was risen, and bring them home long after it had set."

    Oastler himself fell on evil days, for he was sent to prison for three years for a debt which he declared had been contracted in the service of his employer and for his interest.  He received a great deal of sympathy and the sum was eventually paid by public subscription.

    Despite the earnest and continued efforts of Lord Ashley (afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury) and the good men we have named, there was no really sound factory legislation till 1847, when a "ten hours' Bill for women and children" was passed, as it happened, while Lord Shaftesbury was not in Parliament.

    Since that period factory legislation has steadily advanced on the wise and just lines of protecting the weak and undeveloped so that they may have opportunity to become the strong and useful.

    We reached Leeds on a Saturday, and of course found the places of business closed—and the streets, especially the Briggate and Boar Lane, so thronged with people that we could scarcely make our way.  All the shops in these thoroughfares were open, brilliantly lit and abundantly stocked.  Large crowds were waiting in front of the theatres, whose advertisements seemed all of melodramatic pieces.  Trams and buses were going to and fro, crowded with people, and one very popular public conveyance was a kind of waggonette with an awning overhead, something like the vehicles used in Canada.

    In all the crowds in the thoroughfares named, we saw absolutely no drunkenness.  It struck us that most of the people were young, rather undersized, but well-fed, well-dressed, and in the best of spirits.  We noticed, however, many poor, starved looking children, of very tender years, hanging on the skirts of the crowd and trying to sell flowers, small wares, and above all newspapers recording the result of a great football match.  The wall advertisements of all the local papers dwelt emphatically on athletic and sporting news.  We also observed many groups of elderly men of that terribly loafing type one sees in the East End of London.  The Briggate is, in the main, a very modern street, but here and there one finds a timbered house-front or a quaint old shop which tell of the earlier time.

    On Sunday, we found harvest services going forward everywhere, and we noted that even Methodist chapels, of apparently all shades of Methodism, announced musical services, vocalists, and selections from Oratorios.  Many also advertised the subjects of sermons.

    From the point of view of the antiquarian, the most interesting church in the town is St. John's in the Briggate, which was consecrated in 1634.  It is said to be an excellent specimen of a "Laudian" church, and still retains its original fittings.

    The parish church of St. Peter, in the Kirkgate, was rebuilt in 1840, under the auspices of the famous Dean Hook, who was then Vicar of Leeds.  Less than half-a-century old, its exterior is already blackened by the atmosphere, and its interior is sombre with dark oak and rich stained glass.  The yard about it is paved with old grave-stones, and is enclosed in a neat and pleasing precinct comprising a Church House, a Church Club, a Church Ladies' Club, and allied institutions.

    Since the time of William the Conqueror there has always been a church on this spot, and tradition has it that there was one even in the time of the Saxon Heptarchy.

    Returning from church to the centre of the town, down the highway named "The Calls," and "Swine Gate," we passed through a poor neighbourhood, whose corners and byways abounded with unkempt Sunday morning loafers.  We noticed that nearly every third or fourth house had an open way through it, no wider than an ordinary house passage.  These opened into little paved back courts, some bright and neat, others utterly squalid.

    The most modern part of the town, where the great warehouses and public buildings are, is built in a pretentious Renaissance style, but local authorities frankly admit that "the universal coating of grime spoils even the finest buildings."

    Ruskin tells us that "we cannot all have our gardens now nor our pleasant fields to meditate in at eventide.  Then the function of our architecture is, as far as may be, to replace these to tell us about Nature; to possess us with memories of her quietness, to be solemn and full of tenderness, like her; and rich in portraitures of her: full of delicate imagery of the flowers we can no more gather, and of the living creatures now far away from us in their own solitude."

    In the light of such words, what are we to think of some of the "architecture" in Leeds?  The favourite decoration seems to be stone half-figures chiselled as bent and writhing under the weight they are made to support.  In one horrible instance, the pediments are formed of crouching shrinking dogs, on whose bodies stand, as columns, human figures, their own heads bowed forward, that the weight of the building may seem to rest on the nape of their necks!  We hope that a day of better feeling and taste has dawned, that these horrid fantasies of cruelty will pass away, and that none like unto them will be added to their number.

    Before we left Leeds, we knew it as well as it is possible, in a few days' visit, to know a place of nearly four hundred thousand inhabitants—the city fifth in population in the whole of England.  It is well equipped in many ways, with thirty-four churches, and more than eighty chapels.  Its municipal buildings include a reading-room, a free library and a fine art gallery.  It has other public libraries.  Its Mechanics' Institute offers many advantages—we were struck by its attractive list of lecturers.  It has a fair range of philanthropic work of every kind.

Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds, from the West.

    One of the favourite "outings," of the Leeds people is to Kirkstall Abbey.  This lies to the west of the town, and is reached by a road, the greater part of which is Dantesque in ugliness.  Presently one or two pleasant terraces are reached, and the river comes to view.  At last the town ends quite abruptly, and one finds oneself in sight of the old Cistercian abbey.  It is in itself of great beauty and interest, but its exterior has been stripped so bare of ivy and tree, that at first sight, at a little distance, it looks uncommonly like a wrecked factory.  There has been much local lamentation over the destruction of one particularly noble old tree—a doom accorded, it is said, lest gales should uproot it, to the possible damage of the fragile ruins.

    Down great highways, into which on either hand opened streets of monotonous houses (many of them built back to back), we drove to Roundhay Park, bought for public purposes by the Leeds Corporation for £140,000.  It is indeed a beautiful treasure for any city to possess, consisting as it does of 800 richly-wooded and softly-undulating acres, while being on the unsmoky side of Leeds, it gets little or no damage from its grimy proprietor.  But alas, it is nearly four miles from the centre of the town, and half a mile's walk beyond the tramway terminus.  That means that it is further still from the denizens of the crowded courts of Swine Gate.  So what of the poor old folks and the pale little children?  Where have those to sit and rest?  And where have these to go and play?

    Lockhart, the biographer of Sir Walter Scott, said that if the history of any one family could be faithfully written, it might be as generally interesting and as permanently useful as that of any nation however great or renowned.  We have tried to prove that the same holds true of places, even of those which are generally thought to be bare of romance and suggestion.  Good and unselfish lives are to be found everywhere, glorifying even factory chimneys, and softening furnace fires.  The true direction of wealth is in furnishing fit conditions for such lives.  In the struggle with the difficulties and darknesses of modern civilisation, it is helpful to remember that the Kingdom of Heaven has been presented to our minds by prophet and apostle, under the symbol of a city.  By the vision of brightness and beauty which their words bring, we begin to learn what our own duty is, if we dare to look for answer to our daily prayer.  "Thy kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven."

I. FYVIE MAYO.

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SHEFFIELD, YESTERDAY AND TODAY.
(From THE SUNDAY AT HOME, 1898-99.)

WHEN we visited Sheffield—passing through the romantic country which still lies around the metropolis of steel, marred only by the low smoke clouds which hide the blue heavens—a rich autumn sunshine had just strength enough to strike out some Turneresque effects upon the thickened atmosphere out of which the great chimney-stacks rose, like huge masts from a befogged sea.  But we could not resist asking ourselves:

"What of the gloomy weather?—and the winter days?"

    This is the penalty which Sheffield pays for the great industry which has made her name known throughout the civilized world—and the uncivilized too—Sheffield knives and other cutlery having found their way everywhere.  Of these goods, the reputation was made neither to-day nor yesterday.  For Chaucer, in his "Reve's Tale," tells of the miller:

the "whittle being evidently stuck in his stocking, after the fashion of Highlanders with their dirks, and needing no commendation beyond the mere name of the place where it was made.

    Chaucer died in 1400.  But Sheffield had had plenty of time to build up the character of its work before that period.  Nor is its history all comprised in the skill of clever artificers.  For its name (derived from the river "Sheaf" and from the cleared land on which trees have been felled) emerges in the remotest periods of our island story.  It is believed that a Roman camp once existed in what is now the very heart of the city—the bleak-looking graveyard which surrounds the fine old parish church of St. Peter.  Certain it is that Sheffield was the capital of the Saxon district of "Hallamshire"—the domain of the Saxon earl, whose father, "Siward" avenged the Scotch king Duncan's death upon the murderer Macbeth.  His wife was that Judith the Norman conqueror's niece, whose jealous family pride and ambition eventually betrayed her spouse to death, and plunged her own closing days in misery.

    The history of Sheffield is entwined with that of a Norman family who may have come in the train of the Lady Judith, and who, settling near Sheffield, presently became great and powerful landed proprietors furnishing the district with monastery, hospital, market and mill.  The marriage of the last daughter of this house of De Lacy carried its possessions and influence into another family, which numbered among its members a Crusader who fought by the side of Richard I. at Acre, and a staunch supporter of Henry III. against his insurgent barons.  Sheffield suffered severely at this time, being well-nigh destroyed and most of its inhabitants put to the sword.

    Again and again this line which seems to have discharged its lordly duties, according to the best of feudal lights—changed its course through ending in only daughters.  It was one such who finally merged the race in that of the great Earl of Shrewsbury, that hero of scores of victories, who received check at the hands of the mysterious maiden Joan of Arc, and eventually died, still fighting against France, in his eightieth year.

    The Shrewsbury line continued its connection with Sheffield till it once more ended with a daughter, who married into the family of the Dukes of Norfolk.  The fourth Earl of Shrewsbury built that "Sheffield Manor," of which nothing remains but a fragment of restored ruin.  In that house, in the days of its glory—and the earls of Shrewsbury lived sumptuously—Cardinal Wolsey spent a few of his last sad days, pausing there in the course of the suffering journey which ended with his death at Leicester.

    It seems to have been this fourth Earl of Shrewsbury of whom Archbishop Parker tells a story which, though in this instance on the side of the Englishman, yet conveys a lesson which Britons themselves often require to consider both at home and abroad.

    It seems that to the court of Hendry VIII. there came a pert French ambassador, very fluent in speech, but with no better manners than to criticise his hosts, dwelling on the "gluttony" of the English race, and then dilating on the superiority of the French language, then of almost universal use in the courtly world.  There sat at the table, Lord Shrewsbury, an agèd man, shaking with palsy, contracted in many arduous adventures.  The ambassador singled him out for condescending notice, saying "that surely it was a great lack to such a man's nobility that he did not speak the French tongue."  An English lord who was talking in French to the discourteous guest, asked permission to translate his remarks to the old earl, and then proceeded to do so in as pleasant a manner as possible.  But we must tell the rest of the story in the Archbishop's own words:—

    "When the earl heard it, where before his head, by the great age was almost grovelling on the table, he roused himself up in such wise that he appeared in length of body as much as he was thought ever in all his life before.  And knitting his brows, he laid his hand on his dagger, and set his countenance in such sort, that the French hardie ambassador turned colour wonderfully.  'Saith the French fellow so?'  saith he, 'marry, tell him if I knew I had but one French word in all my body, I would take my dagger and dig it out, before I rose from the table.  And tell that varlet that howsoever he hath been hunger-starved himself at home in France, that if we should not eat our beasts and make victual of them as fast as we do, they would so increase beyond measure, that they would make victual of us, and eat us up.'"

    Thus do thoughtless words stir up wrath, even as soft ones turn it away, and who knows how often thoughtless words, in ever increasing aggregate, may have solidified into those national and racial hatreds and antipathies which finally explode in terrible warfare, leaving behind the melancholy debris of ruined homes and broken hearts?

    Surely this grim Earl of Shrewsbury would not have been, as was the sixth earl, unable to manage his own wife!  To this sixth earl was entrusted by Queen Elizabeth, the very ungracious task of acting custodian to her captive "cousin," Mary of Scotland.  The Scottish queen spent the greater part of her fourteen years of English imprisonment in this same "Manour of Sheffield."  Some authorities seem inclined to blame the royal prisoner for the dispeace which broke out between her noble goaler and his spouse.  Mary had certainly wrought havoc wherever she moved, but in this instance it must be remembered that the Countess of Shrewsbury had been already three times a widow, and that bishops spoke of her as "that sharpe and bitter shrewe."  At any rate, she enlisted Queen Elizabeth's sympathy with herself as against her lord, so that a year after Mary of Scotland's execution, Elizabeth apportioned the earl five hundred pounds a year, and put all the lands and revenues in the power of his wife.  The aggrieved husband wrote piteous letters on the subject.

    "Sith that her majestie hath sett dowen this harde sentence against me, to my perpetual infamy and dishonour, to be ruled and overawne by my wief, so bad and wicked a woman: yet her majestie shall see that I obey her commandemente, though no curse or plage in the erthe cold be more grievous to me."

    The poor man rests at last among his ancestors in the "Shrewsbury Chapel" of the old parish church.  There is something of humour in the fact that the inscription on his monument was written by Foxe, the commemorator of martyrs.

    His countess lived an active bustling life, superintending her estates (she inherited from more than one of her husbands), developing their resources, pulling political wires, and patronising wits.  She survived to the age of eighty-seven, leaving behind immense fortunes, and the evil repute of being "a proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling woman."  What a pitiful failure for a human life!

    A very different life also has its memorial in this fine old church of St. Peters.  James Montgomery, one of the gentlest of men and of poets, though born in Scotland, spent all his working days as a journalist in Sheffield—then neither so prosperous, so big nor so gloomy, as it is now.  His life and story make us think of a dove caught in a storm.  For not all his gentleness and conciliatory spirit—these being coupled with truth and justice —could save him from being regarded as "a political offender" in that agitated period of the great French Revolution.  In 1794, and again in 1795, he found himself imprisoned, fined and bound over to keep the peace.  His first "offence" was publishing some verses written by a clergyman exulting over the demolition of the Bastille: his second, his printed censure on the conduct of a Sheffield magistrate, one Colonel Athorpe, in firing on a crowd.  How many have learned to love Montgomery's simple verses, "Sow in the morn thy seed," or "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire," or "For ever with the Lord," or the jubilant "Hail to the Lord's Anointed," unknowing that this sweetness of devotion was distilled from a, soul which had passed through experiences that might have embittered and hardened some, but which only saddened and softened him.  It is pleasant to know that nearly fifty years after these "contradictions of sinners," James Montgomery could say:—

    "All the persons who were actively concerned in the prosecutions against me in 1794 and '95 are dead, and, without exception, they died in peace with me.  I believe I am quite correct in saying, that from each of them distinctly in the sequel, I received tokens of goodwill, and from several of them substantial proofs of kindness. . . . I mention the circumstance as an evidence that, amidst all the violence of that distracted time, a better spirit was not extinct, but finally prevailed, and by its healing influence did indeed comfort those who had been conscientious sufferers."

    Sheffield can boast of another poet, but of a very different calibre.  Ebenezer Elliot—the "Corn-Law Rhymer," had "Border" blood in his veins, but was born in Yorkshire, and drifted to Sheffield in his maturer years.  He had a hardy, rugged, yet not unhappy childhood, but though he records that his schoolmaster was "one of the best of living creatures,—a sad-looking, half-starved angel without wings," the boy was set down as a hopeless dunce.  He showed no sense nor diligence where books were concerned, yet half a century later he could dwell on the habits of birds which he had watched during his walks to and from school.  He was clearly one of the many victims of educational systems which treat all minds as of similar formation.  He was quite glad when, partly as a punishment, he was early sent to work in a foundry, for then he says he found that he "could at least equal others in manual labour."

    He afterwards ran some risk of falling into the greater dangers of ill-regulated young manhood.  He was saved by a providence which roused and directed the love of nature lying latent within him.  A widowed relative showed him "Sowerby's English Botany," and he took to copying its plates, and better still, to gathering plants for himself.  His consequent wanderings leading him aside from the alehouse and idle company, soon, says he, "made me acquainted with the nightingales in Basinthorpe Spring, where, I am told, they still sing sweetly, and with a beautiful green snake (he calls it "this beautiful and harmless child of God"), which on the fine Sabbath mornings, about ten o'clock, seemed to expect me at the top of Primrose Lane.  It became so familiar that it ceased to uncurl at my approach."

    These pursuits led him to the discovery that even books held some things worth the learning.  He set himself to make up, as well as might be, for lost time.  But long afterwards he owned that he knew no rule of English grammar, though by study of the best masters he could write English correctly.

    In due time, he went to Sheffield and went into business for himself, once unsuccessfully, the second time, when he was forty years of age, with very considerable profit.  Much of his gains, however, were snatched from him when the panic and revulsion after the operation of the Corn Laws made a very evil epoch for the United Kingdom.  At this time, he, having already attempted literature, burst into a fiery popularity by the stormy verses which earned him the name of the "Corn Law Rhymer."

    It is hard to say whether his genius lost or gained by this special application of it.  What he lost in breadth, he possibly gained in force.  "Half Battles" were some of the words he wrote, and without doubt they did their share in combating the evils they denounced, and in calling for greater consideration of much that was wrong in the lot of the labourer.

    Ebenezer Elliott is essentially a Sheffield figure, for his trade of ironmonger associates him with the peculiar industry of a city whose "arms" have for supporters Thor and Vulcan.  In Elliott's best-known verses, beginning

he actually draws a poetical image from his calling wherewith to enforce a practical lesson.

    In the beginnings of Sheffield—while its neighbourhood abounded with deer, and venison was the common food of those who could afford meat—the grinding wheels and small workshops were sprinkled about amid much that still remained countrified.  They were rough buildings—seven or eight yards long, and four wide, seven feet high to the spring of the roof—the walls plastered with clay the floor of mud, hens roosting in the rafters.

    In 1570, many artizans from the Netherlands, fleeing from the Spanish tyranny there, settled in Sheffield.  Still, in 1615, Sheffield contained little more than two thousand two hundred people, and of these more than a thousand were children, and only ten families could afford to keep a cow.  The Cutlers' Company, though practically existent much earlier, was only formally incorporated in 1624.  Its early records shed an interesting light on the labour questions and combinations of that period.  Those who are inclined to resent some of the modern trades'-union restrictions, may be interested to hear that these old-fashioned "cutlers" made it a punishable offence for work to be done at all for several weeks during a certain period of the year.  Eight or ten years of apprenticeship were required.  Each apprentice lived with his master, who fed and clothed him, and gave him six weeks' holiday annually, to attend "ye writing school."  During this long apprenticeship, there was no salary beyond a trifling yearly present.

    The wives of the Sheffield masters were called "dames," and made all social and domestic arrangements for the 'prentices, and, indeed, they seem to have fulfilled many of the conditions of Solomon's wise women.  There has been a Sheffield saying that there have been no good doings since so many fine mistresses came into fashion, and the good old dames were supplanted.  Their domestic value seems to have earned a recognition it does not always receive, and they were not ignored in other relations.  Once, when the master cutler gave festivity to his brethren, his wife followed it up with festivity for the ladies.  On one occasion, the "beadle" of the Company was a woman.  And the Company carefully guarded the interests of women, by its concession known as "The Widow's Right," now we understand in process of extinction.

    The "Sheffield Grinders" have been a class by themselves.  Elliott drew one from the life:―

    At one time, the conditions of grinding were such that the grinders died at the age of twenty-nine.  Despite the opposition of the men, who feared lest any removal of the noxiousness of their work might introduce more competition and cut down their wages, considerable improvement has been made, and some of the grinders may now hope at least to attain middle age.  It seems that the "dry grinding" required for table forks is the deadliest work.  We should shudder to have weapons from a battlefield laid down amid our household meal; yet, in truth, our household implements seem well-nigh as fatal to human life!

    It struck one oddly, when in Sheffield, to notice how a population who from time immemorial, even at the cost of their own length of days, have been welding weapons of war to take the lives of folks they have never seen, should be themselves of the kindliest and most hospitable temper, so that it was a pleasure to be a stranger in the place, and to throw oneself upon the courtesies so readily extended to one.  How well will it be for the world, when the Divine Spirit so harmonises each man that he will be all of one piece, and will not stretch out the long arm of gain, to do to those out of his sight what his own hand would never do to the neighbour at his side.

    Sheffield has not been always the wealthy city that it is to-day.  About, two hundred years ago, master cutlers, when they had saved £500, retired from business and took to farming.  In 1794, the common wage of a journeyman cutler was two shillings a day, a few superior workmen earning three.  But, in those days, meat was only threepence or fourpence per pound, and other necessary commodities were cheap in proportion.

    Sheffield stands on so hilly a site that it has a somewhat irregular appearance.  Many handsome buildings have been lately erected, and these, towering over low old houses, or beside still vacant "lots," somewhat remind a travelled visitor of certain colonial cities such as Ottawa.  Some of the lower parts of the town are very squalid and gloomy.  The old parish church, which dates from 1154, but was thoroughly restored and enlarged in 1880, would be very handsome could its architecture be appreciated under the blackness with which the local atmosphere has clothed it.

    This church has two quaint stories about it.  One, that a girl, falling asleep during service, awoke to find herself deserted and locked in.  Her imprisonment might have lasted for days, had she not hit on the clever device of arresting the swinging pendulum of the clock, stopping it, and thus calling attention to the building and its prisoner.

    The other story has in it an element of mystery and pathos.  It concerns a blank and broken tombstone, which may be noticed near the vestry door, and has long been a favourite leaping place for the Sheffield boys.  It appears that long, long ago, an unknown visitor arrived at an inn in Sheffield High Street.  He went to his bedroom.  In this chamber there was an unused door-window opening straight upon the yard.  It had been accidentally left unbolted.  The stranger opened it, and, believing he was stepping into a passage, fell on the stones below and was killed on the spot.  In those days, when communication over the country was slow and difficult, his identity was never discovered, and doubtless there were those who watched for him for years—and may have even felt bitter doubts of him when he "came not back."  As he had a considerable sum with him, he was handsomely buried; but it is believed that his tombstone got cracked in a thievish effort to move it, owing in to a report that some of his gold had been interred with his corpse.

    Most of the other numerous churches and places of worship in Sheffield have been built within the last fifty years.  The preaching of John Wesley and his earlier followers, gave an immense impetus to the spiritual life of Sheffield.  Several of the latter "testified" there, not only with their lips, but by the meekness and courage with which they endured persecution.  One of them had a bucket of bullock's blood thrown over him as he walked through the street in his best clothes.  Wesley himself is known to have paid thirty-two distinct visits to Sheffield, though others may not have been recorded.  Of Norfolk Street Chapel it is recorded that "John Wesley preached for the first time in the Newhouse on 30th June, 1780."  It is believed that his latest surviving hearer died as recently as 1873.

    Sheffield, despite its smoke and squalor is in many ways a specially well-equipped city.  It has six parks, one of them given by Mark Firth, also the founder of Firth College, designed to provide university training for many who could not otherwise enjoy it.  In another, Weston Park, is the noble picture gallery presented and equipped by the Mappins, containing many masterpieces among its permanent treasures, and offering houseroom to a succession of loan collections of high type.  Incorporated with this gallery is a museum of old pottery, and local natural history, industries, and antiquities—the collection being large enough to be varied and interesting, while not so large as to be overwhelming.  On the afternoon of our visit, we found many visitors, nearly all of the working class.

    A two miles' journey through small streets with wooden shuttered parlour windows, or low rows of humble shops, brings us to the pleasantly-wooded and undulated Meersbrook Park, with the quaint buildings which house the "Ruskin Museum" which the St. George's Guild has loaned to Sheffield for twenty years from 1890.  This museum is intended as a type of the collections which Mr. Ruskin desires to see established throughout the country for studious culture of all that is noble in art and beautiful in nature.  He considers that such local educational museums are necessary to train the people to appreciate the unique treasures of any worthy national collection.  As it is also his wise opinion that "a collection should never be increased to its own confusion," only a limited number of examples—especially of art objects—are on view at a time.  The collection includes rare minerals, a collection of exquisite drawings in natural history, casts taken by Mr. Ruskin in Venice and Rouen, architectural studies, rare editions of classical literature, engravings after Turner, magnificent illuminated ancient manuscripts, and fine Greek and English coins.

    Sheffield has many excellent educational institutions, its Grammar School dating from 1604.  Its Band of Hope Union comprises 160 societies, and its Sunday School Union has on its roll 32,000 scholars.  It has learned societies of every form, and a free library which in its two departments contains nearly 50,000 books.  It has institutions for the relief of every form of physical suffering, and with all these arrangements for the needs of the future and the present, it is more careful than are many cities of the claims of the agèd, there being several establishments for their reception and other endowments for the distribution of annuities.

    One left Sheffield with regret.  Yet with all its industry and wealth, one felt conscious of deterioration and loss when one came—as one often did—in the midst of some mean monotonous street, upon an old thatched or tiled gable and a few gnarled trees bearing mute witness to the vanished times of the old world masters, and of rural life.  One cannot bring oneself to accept to-day's smoke and ugliness as finalities.  They must be but part of a process evolving some beauty and order not yet apparent, unless indeed foreshadowed in the frank warm-heartedness of the "folks."  May we not see this new order already beginning—very tentatively—in the parks and museums and galleries?  Dare we hope that we have at last seen the worst of our factory and furnace towns, and that henceforth, the science and invention and enterprise whose progress has made them what they now are, will turn attention to making them all they should be?

ISABELLA FYVIE MAYO.

――――♦――――

 
THE STORIES OF FAMOUS SONGS.

(The GIRL'S OWN PAPER, June, 1888.)
 

T has been aptly said that "the making of the song of a people is a happy accident. . . . It must be the result of fiery feeling long confined, and suddenly finding vent in burning words or moving strains.  Great national lyric is the result of the conjunction of the hour and the man."

    There is no better illustration of this than the popular American war song, "John Brown's Body."  There is literally nobody who claims its authorship.  Words and tune "grew" together in the early days of that great war between the Northern and the Southern States which settled the question of American slavery for ever.

    Yet there is no song which has a better story to tell.  And as there is seldom any historical period so misty to our minds as that which immediately precedes the date of our own personal histories, we are sure that there are many girls who will thank us for a glimpse of the heroism and romance which wrought out a great national drama in the days when their fathers and mothers were the young folks of the world.

    We are not ambitious enough to attempt any history of the rise and development of slavery in the United States of America.  We shall only attempt to set forth, as simply as we can, a few facts necessary to explain its existence and the varying influences that surrounded it, and that finally brought about its extinction.

    Let it suffice to say that slavery—that supreme crime against humanity—originated in the States when they were a British colony.  Therefore, the worst indictment we have any right to bring against them in this matter is, that they did not all come to a full realisation of the heinousness of this evil quite so soon as did the mother country.

    Now, at the very outset of this paper we must caution our readers against an error which we would not imagine could be fallen into by educated people, had we not proved it to be so.  They must realise at once that the Northern and Southern States are alike in North America, different parts of the Republic of the United States.  These have nothing whatever to do with the continent of South America, with all its varying empires and republics, mostly Spanish in origin and development.  We should have thought such a caution quite unnecessary, had we not heard a friend from Buenos Ayres being constantly asked "Whether the party feeling between the Northern and Southern States had now entirely passed away?"—the questioners being presumably educated people and filling respectable and indeed honourable positions in British society.

    Having explained this much, we may go on to say that from the earliest days of the British colonisation of North America a vital difference arose between those States called the Northern and those afterwards grouped as the Southern.

    The Northern States were founded by "The Pilgrim Fathers," who were themselves exiles from Britain for the sake of civil and religious freedom.  In the communities under their influence certain religious and political theories were made of the first importance from the very beginning.  They started on the path of moral progress, though the struggle for existence and the greed for material wealth soon entered in, to warp the nobler aims.

    The Southern States, on the other hand, were colonised by aristocratic English adventurers, often of high character and courtly manners, but whose first aim was the profit and comfort of their immediate followers, without any special sense of responsibility towards the community at large.  Thus in these Southern States a wide gulf soon yawned between the upper and lower classes.  "Below the great landholders came a population largely tainted with pauperism and crime."  Further, the development of the natural resources of these Southern States required masses of specially cheap labour.

    How was this to be supplied?

    At first, the forced labour was of white people, "criminals, beggars and vagrants" being transported there from the mother country.  Orphan or friendless children became the victims of family cruelty or mercenary greed.  But still the supply was insufficient for the demand.

    Then these our colonies in the Southern States resolved to follow the example of our colonies in the West Indies, and to encourage the importation of negroes.  The first shipload was landed in 1620, at Jamestown.  In 1662, the Royal African company was incorporated, with the English King Charles II. and his brother as its chief directors, its main business to be the exportation of negroes from Africa to slavery in the plantations.  The black slave soon supplanted not only the white bondservant, but the white labourer of every kind.  The Southern States became the home of a white aristocracy, a black slavery, and a desperate ruffiandom.

    In 1772, a slave named Somerset, brought to England by his master, was, on account of ill-health, turned adrift.  When, through the charity of Mr. Granville Sharp, he was restored to health, his master again claimed him.  A suit resulted, which, mainly owing to the energy and determination of Mr. Sharp, ended in a decision that slavery could not exist in Great Britain.

    Owing to the revolt against sundry British impositions, the United States declared their independence of Britain in 1776.  They were recognised internationally as a distinct Government in 1783; and in 1787, the American Congress passed an unalterable article forbidding slavery in that part of their territory north-west of the Ohio.  This put the Northern States on the same footing that Great Britain had already attained, while slavery still persisted in the Southern States of the Republic as it did in those West Indian colonies which remained in British possession.

    Slavery finally terminated in all British possessions between the years 1833 and 1838.  Its extinction cost the British nation £20,000,000.

    It still lingered in the Southern States of America, and in its most frightful form.  In the slavery of the antique world the masters had been content with the possession of their human chattels, often employed as tutors and guardians, and frequently attaining high rank in philosophy and learning.  In Oriental slavery there had been hope.  The slave to-day was often Grand Vizier to-morrow.  But in America they sought to deprive the human chattel of mind, soul, and affection.  To educate him was penal.  He could have no family ties.  The Courts of Justice were closed against him, and the curse of slavery pursued the least drop of African blood, however diluted it might be with that of the ruling race.

    The advocates of slavery had two or three arguments on which they laid great stress.  One was that the slave in the Southern States was generally well-treated and content, in evidence of which they told stories of domestic attachments, and brought forward his merry plantation songs.  Of course, it would be going too far to say that the large majority of slaves were treated with personal violence and cruelty.  They were only entirely at the mercy of their master pro tem., and away from the kindest owner they might be sold any day, either at his own will, or at the will of any creditors or trustees into whose hands he chanced to fall.  Among the women, wifehood and motherhood were only other names for shame and agony.  It was the cruellest wrong of all if they were kept in such a low condition as to be unable to realise all the bitterness of their lot.  But that many of them did escape this crowning ignominy is proved by the wildly pathetic hymns in which they cried out to God for His help and support.

    Another Southern argument was, that the Northerner, though not a slave-holder, held the negro in such bitter contempt and abhorrence, that his free life in the Northern States was lacking in many of the alleviations which he often found in his Southern slavery.  There is no denying this indictment.  But neither do two wrongs added together amount to one right!  In excuse of the Northerner, it can be pleaded that this savage nation had been poured upon his country, not for his benefit, but for the interests of his Southern brother; that the negro was a portentous appearance in those States where white labour abounded, and competition was already fierce enough.  Furthermore, the negro stood to the Northerner as the outward and visible sign of the Northerner's own subjection.  For Southern voices were predominant in the councils of the nation, and it was mainly through, and for slavery, that such predominance was jealously maintained.

    On the side of the North we may justly urge, that whatever might be popular prejudices, it was in her States, and under influences that had made her what she was, that all true and loving help for the slave originated; the voices of the North were ever on the side of freedom.  We all know Longfellow's "Poems on Slavery."  Perhaps not quite so many of us are equally familiar with those of John Greenleaf Whittier, the American Quaker poet, who, like so many of his sect, threw himself heart and soul into the cause of the slave.  It is characteristic of the man, and his deathless faith and hope, that he called his outpourings "The Voices of Freedom."  One of the best known of these is "The Christian Slave," founded on an incident at a slave auction in New Orleans, where the auctioneer recommended the woman under the hammer as "a good Christian."  The indignant poet breaks forth:

    We should quote from Whittier more largely, for his works (save his translation front the German of "The Angel of Patience ") were but little known in Britain a few years ago, but we refrain, since they are now widely circulated and easily procurable.

    The poet Lowell, and the philosophers Emerson and Thoreau, were also active and consistent in their advocacy of the slave.  But the subject of American slavery was first brought before the whole world in a strongly picturesque form in 1852, by the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," written by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.  The enthusiasm of sympathy which it created was immense.  One result was an appeal from the women of England to the women of America, which was headed by the mother of the present Duke of Sutherland, and obtained nearly six hundred thousand signatures.  From that time the subject was never left at rest.  Special cases of fugitives were constantly before the Northern courts.  The "border" States were kept unsettled by perpetual "risings" and skirmishings between the slave party" and the abolitionists.  One such struggle in Kansas, and of considerable importance, brought to the front that indomitable hero whose name is now embalmed in the great rough Yankee war-song.

    That name is

JOHN BROWN OF OSSAWATTOMIE.

    It need hardly be said that he belonged, by descent, to the stern Puritan stock which had colonised the Northern States.  He was born in Connecticut, but he was only five years old when his family moved to Ohio, then a wilderness filled with wild beasts and Indians.  There he lived the hardy adventurous life of a healthy lad in a new country.  By the time he was twelve years old he was often sent off alone more than a hundred miles with companies of cattle.

    It was during a brief war between England and the United States (which broke out in 1812) that he was brought under influences which decided the current of his life.  His father sold cattle to the American troops, and in his capacity as assistant he saw a good deal of military life, "more, perhaps, than if he had been a soldier, for he was often present at the councils of the officers."  This was to prove an important element in his training for the future, but the immediate result was to disgust him with military life, so that he refused to train, and was fined in consequence.  "He then resolved that he would have nothing to do with any war, unless it were a war for liberty."  It was at this same period that there occurred the incident which we prefer to tell in his own words, as we find them in an autobiographical fragment written for the benefit of a young friend:—

    "John was staying for a short time with a very gentlemanly landlord, once a United States Marshal, who held a slave boy near John's own age, very active, intelligent and good feeling, and to whom was under considerable obligation for numerous little acts of kindness.  The master made a great pet of John, brought him to table with his first company and friends, called their attention to every little smart thing he said or did, and to the fact of his being more than a hundred miles from home with a company of cattle alone; while the negro boy, who was fully if not more than his equal, was badly clothed, poorly fed and lodged in cold weather, and beaten before his eyes with iron shovels or anything that first came to hand.  This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition of fatherless and motherless slave children, and, in the end, made him a most determined abolitionist, and led him to declare or swear eternal war with slavery," so that at last he believed he "held a commission direct from God to act against it."

    His education was purely that of practical life.  He learned nothing of grammar, nor of arithmetic beyond the first four rules.  He had never danced; he had never used a pack of cards.  But he was fond of reading, and he felt that "by reading the lives of great, wise and good men, their sayings and writings, he grew to a dislike of vain and frivolous conversation and persons."  He was very familiar with the Bible, and had a most unusual memory for its contents.  In business he was diligent and shrewd, but with a keen sense of honour, so that he refused to sell his leather while it retained a particle of moisture, lest his customers should be cheated in value or weight.  In the course of his business he visited England.  But though he was ever increasing in social weight and importance, such a man was not likely to make money.  Indeed, from the year 1839 he cherished the hope of some organised attempt at the delivery of the slaves, and "from that time he engaged in no commercial speculation which he could not honourably and without serious loss to his family wind up on short notice."

    As we have said already, he became prominent in the border warfare of which the State of Kansas was the arena in 1855-7.  Neither the property nor the life of anybody suspected of being an abolitionist was safe, and brutal outrage on the one side occasionally provoked stern reprisals from the other.  In John Brown's camp the strictest order and discipline prevailed, "no man of immoral character was allowed to stay, except as a prisoner of war."  The great leader said: "He did not love warfare but peace—only acting in obedience to the will of God, and fighting God's battles for His children's sake," and therefore "he he would rather have the small-pox, yellow fever, and cholera together in his camp, than a man without principles."  A favourite remark was, "One man in the right, and ready to die, will chase a thousand."

    The fortunes of this warfare constantly varied, but with an ever-growing force of public feeling on the abolitionist side.

    It is impossible for us in this paper to follow in detail the events which led to John Brown's raid on the Arsenal of Harper's Ferry, which was to be the starting-point for a general rising of the negroes, and which he hoped, if successful, would banish slavery from the Southern States, while, if unsuccessful, he trusted at the worst to be able to force his way with his followers to British ground in Canada, and thus, at the least, to secure freedom for a large multitude.

    Many of his most faithful adherents considered the scheme hopeless, but seeing that he was not to be turned from it, "could not give him up to die alone."

    Before the raid, John Brown himself wrote a letter which states his own motive and expectation, and which, viewed in the light of subsequent events, seems like a prophecy.

    "I have only had this one opportunity in a life of nearly sixty years. . . God has honoured but comparatively a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty and soul-satisfying rewards.  I expect nothing but to endure hardness, but I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson."

    The attempt was made and ended in—failure!  It is said that the immediate cause of this was Brown's consideration for the interests of some prisoners who fell into his hands, and for whose sake he delayed in the carrying out of his original plan.  He himself fell wounded, and was made prisoner, and of his little following of twenty-two, ten were killed in the conflict, five escaped, and seven were captured, tried and hanged.

    History contains nothing grander than the account of John Brown as he lay in his prison awaiting trial and death by the law of his country.  He had thoroughly counted the cost of his attempt beforehand, for even years earlier he had actually written—

    "The trial for life of one bold, and to some extent successful, man, for defending his rights in good earnest, would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than three millions of our submissive coloured population."

    His most adverse critics say "that the authorities hurried through his trial for treason, conspiracy, and murder with an unseemly precipitancy, almost calculated to make him seem the accuser, and the commonwealth the trembling culprit."

    Meanwhile the agèd and suffering prisoner was calm and content.  The women whom he had left at home—his wife bereaved of several of her sons, and his daughters widowed of their husbands—did not grudge their own share in the great sacrifice.  They had thrown no obstacles in its way.  They had learned from him to make the cause of the oppressed their own, and had been reared in the atmosphere of the simple couplet which he had taught them all, down to the youngest, a wee maiden of five—

    Wonderful were the letters which they received from the husband and father in his condemned cell.  He could cheer them by writing—

    "I cannot remember a night so dark as to have hindered the coming day, nor a storm so furious or dreadful as to prevent the return of warm sunshine and a cloudless sky."

    He was ready with advice for the future of his young unmarried daughters, reminding his wife that he had "always expressed a decided preference for a plain, but perfectly practical, education, for both sons and daughters," meaning thereby "enough of the learning of the schools to enable them to transact the common business of life, together with that thorough training in good business habits which best prepares both men and women to be useful though poor, and to meet the stern realities of life with a good grace.  You well know," he writes, "that I always claimed that the music of the broom, wash-tub, needle, spindle, loom, axe, scythe, hoe, flail, &c., should first be learned at all events, and that of the piano, &c., afterwards.  I put them in that order as most conducive to health of body and mind, and for obvious reasons, that, after a life of some experience and much observation, I have found ten women as well as men who have made their mark in life right, whose early training was of that plain, practical kind, to one who had a more popular and fashionable early training."

    He strove to guard his family against any wrong deductions from the interest felt by most Northerners in their present tragic position.

    "Let me tell you that the sympathy that is now aroused in your behalf may not always follow you.  There is but little more of the romantic about helping poor widows and their children than there is about trying to relieve poor 'niggers.'"

    And so little did he regret the sacrifice of his own life for the cause of freedom, that in his very last letter home he solemnly enjoined on his children, "to abhor with undying hatred, that sum of all villanies—slavery."

    He made a friend of his very gaoler, and enjoyed his present opportunity of impressing his own views on the minds of many of the slavery party who visited him in prison, where he lay in the blood-stained clothes in which he had fought.  He would take no credit for his own cheerfulness and fortitude, only saying with a smile, "Some can bear more than others, and not suffer so much. . . . it is only a constitutional difference, and I have been trained to hardships. . . . I have always been more afraid of being taken into an evening party of ladies and gentlemen than of meeting a company of men with guns."

    Nor can there be anything more touching than the simple account of the last scene of all, when, on the 2nd of December, 1859, John Brown was led out to die.  As he left the gaol, he said, "I can endure almost anything but parting from friends; that is very hard."  He had refused the ministrations of clergymen since none could reach him but those who were believers in the institution of slavery, and who, therefore, as he said, stood more in need of his prayers than he of theirs.  He had remarked that if he had a choice, he would prefer to be followed to the gallows by a few poor negro children than by any such chaplain.  Just as he passed the prison door, a negro woman held up her little child, and then, as Whittier sings—

'The Last Moments of John Brown', by Thomas Hovenden.
Source Wikipedia.

    The procession moved on.  As John Brown came upon an eminence near the gallows, he was observed to take his last look over the beautiful landscape, following with his eye the windings of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance.

    "This is a beautiful country," he remarked.

    "You are a game man, Captain Brown," said the undertaker who rode by his side.

    "Yes," he answered, "I was so trained up it was one of the lessons of my mother.  But," he reiterated, "it is hard to part from friends, though newly made."

    "You are more cheerful than I am," said his companion.

    "Yes," he replied, "I ought to be."

    They kept the old man standing blindfold on the scaffold while the troops in attendance went through sundry military manoeuvres.  What did it matter?  It was but the last cruelty which slavery could inflict upon him who (little as it seemed then) had given it its deathblow.
    Then all was over.

    The hero's body was given to his family, and was taken back to the neighbourhood of his home within sight of the Adirondacks, where by his own desire his name was simply placed upon an old tombstone which already bore that of his grandfather.

John Brown in 1859 by Black and Batchelder:  Library of Congress.
Source Wikipedia.

    From his portraits—not idealisations of loving reverence, but engravings from homely photos—John Brown looks at us with a grave face, which yet seems quivering with tender humour.  It is said that in a bust of him a strong likeness comes out to Michael Angelo's ideal of "Moses," the great leader of another enslaved people.

    Among John Brown's last words to his wife had been these

"Those that are dead to this world are angels in another,"

and very shortly afterwards Thoreau, the philosopher, wrote—

    "Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one who had not died. . . I never hear of any particularly brave and earnest man, but my first thought is of John Brown, and what relation he may be to him.  I meet him at every turn.  He is more alive than he ever was.  He has earned immortality.  He is not confined now to North Elba or Kansas.  He is no longer working in secret.  He works in public in the clearest light that shines in the land."

    And though on the dreary night of his execution there was wailed about the streets of Boston a dismal lament—

yet it was singular how soon the realisation of his persistent vitality entered into the popular idea.  The Southerners soon discovered the truth of a poet's prophecy—

    Never again were the Southern States permitted to dominate the Union.  Early in the following year, Abraham Lincoln, a Northerner by descent, by character, and by principle, was returned to the presidential chair, whereupon the Southern States, unwilling to obey where they had ruled so long, raised the standard of rebellion, and there broke forth the long fierce war between the Northern and Southern States, whose most striking feature was the total and entirely unconditional abolition of slavery in 1862, barely three years after John Brown's execution!

    Nobody seems able to tell exactly how

developed into the rudely grand "marching song":

    One Northern military man asserts that the song was put together by a quartet of men in the second battalion quartered at Boston harbour, in April, 1861.  These four men, it appears, re-enlisted in the Twelfth Massachusetts Volunteers, commanded by a Colonel Webster.  It is an undoubted fact that Webster's regiment first adopted it as a marching song, singing it down Broadway, New York, as they went out to the front is the summer of the same year.  Before a year later, the tune had been taken up by the nation at large, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were marching forward with the name of John Brown on their lips.

    Let the simple song and its hero's brave story help to keep up our own faith and hope even when the days are darkest and triumph seems on the side of wrong.  For there are still struggles to be fought out.  We must not allow ourselves to think that all the giants of evil in this world are already slain for us, and that we have nothing to do but to enter into the fruits of others' victory.  Evil is hydra-headed.  Slavery was but one manifestation of human selfishness, and while that root remains, other manifestations as evil will spring up only the more deadly if they are less defined.  Each heroism of the past is but one more stone laid in the foundation of that Kingdom of God for whose coming we all pray, but for which we must also live and labour.  And let us not forget to consider the homely women who stand in the background of this national tragedy—the good mother who reared her son hardily, the good wife and daughters ready to endure hardship and accept sorrow, but not to hinder the hero in his work.  It is not for us to reckon whether our tasks in life be great or small, whether they shall succeed or fail.  We need answer but one question: "Ought they to be done?"  If the answer is "Yes," then let us do them with our best powers.  The rest is God's business, not ours.

ISABELLA FYVIE MAYO

Ed.—it might interest the reader to to know that slavery was practiced in Scotland until the end of the 18th century. Thus Samuel Smiles on the subject:

". . . . the magistrates of some of the larger towns did not hesitate to kidnap and sell into slavery lads and men found lurking in the streets, which they continued to do down to a comparatively recent period.  This, however, was not so surprising as that at the time of which we are speaking, and, indeed, until the end of last century, there was a veritable slave class in Scotland—the class of colliers and salters—who were bought and sold with the estates to which they belonged, as forming part of the stock.  When they ran away, they were advertised for, as negroes were in the American States until within the last few years.  It is curious, in turning over an old volume of the 'Scots Magazine,' to find a General Assembly's petition to Parliament for the abolition of slavery in America almost alongside the report of a trial of some colliers who had absconded from a mine near Stirling to which they belonged.  But the degraded condition of the home slaves then excited comparatively little interest.  Indeed, it was not until the very last year of the last century that prædial slavery was abolished in Scotland—only three short reigns ago, almost within the memory of men still living."

Samuel Smiles . . . . Roads in Scotland Last Century.

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"SOMETHING ACCOMPLISHED."

(From THE SUNDAY AT HOME, annual edition, 1898-99)

SOME sides of life seem to receive so much more attention than others.  How much is written of the loves of young hearts, so often fickle, wilful, and unworthy, how much compared with what is told us of the strong affections of maturer years, which trial has purified from dross, and which time and experience have welded into faithful and selfless devotion?  So, too, we hear much more of the beauty and delight of "youth in its aspiration" than of the dignity and joy of age in its accomplishment.

    There are reasons for this.  The orchard blossoms make a braver show in spring than do its fruits in autumn.  For there are so many blossoms which never arrive at fruitage, while sometimes the fruit can scarcely be seen unless sought for, or revealed by the shrinking of the leaves under the breath of early frosts.  So with aspiration and accomplishment.  It remains true, as Schiller sang:

    Yet after all it is only the "accomplishment" of maturity, be that large or small, which gives any value to the aspiration of youth.  The greater interest gained by the latter is perhaps mainly due to the element of uncertainty in this very matter of fulfilment.

    It should be the crowning blessing of matured or fading life that it sees behind it that "something accomplished, something done, which earns a night's repose."  This is in the order of the will of God.  He ordains alike seed-time and harvest, and the last is the time of ingathering and festival.  His will has been set aside somewhere if life's autumn brings us "nothing but leaves."

    We are all conscious that noble rest and satisfaction and joy should clothe the souls of those who have accomplished great things in any sphere of righteous human activity.  We all recognise the supreme blessedness of the venerable Bede, dying in the freshness of his joy, over his completed translation of St. John's Gospel.  Boerhaave, a physician and scientist of last century (so famous that a Chinese mandarin directed to him a letter with the large address of "Europe") took his last parting from the botanist Linnaeus with the words: "I have lived out my time, and have done what I could.  May God preserve thee, from whom the world expects much more."  And we feel that his whole nature was beaming with simple, thankful serenity as remote from self-complacency as from "the pride which apes humility."  Pleasant, too, is it to think of Sir Christopher Wren, varying his quiet, contemplative life in his peaceful country house by occasional visits to London to view his great work at St. Paul's Cathedral, thankful and happy in his triumph, saying, "If I glory, it is in the singular mercy of God who has enabled me to begin and finish my great works so conformably to the ancient model."

    Even deeper thankfulness and joy must fill the hearts of those who live to see the realisation of great moral ideas which they have helped to launch upon the world—such as the abolition of slavery, or the recognition of the rights of children.  It does not lessen this joy that no one man can ever claim such ideas for his own.  It is at such moments that one recognises the solidarity of mankind, the "communion of saints," the "joy in heaven" over every restitution that begins on earth.  It is indeed in triumphant and worthy effort of any kind that we best realise that no man lives or dies for himself.  We have seen how, even in science and art, Boerhaave committed the future to his young admirer; and how Christopher Wren acknowledged his debt to the past.  We know how Woolman and Clarkson and Sharp and Wilberforce, Macaulay, Garrison, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, and hundreds of others, all contended for the freedom of the slave, and how many had to pass away before even the commencement of the victory, which is not completed yet.  So Oastler and Ebenezer Elliot and Lord Shaftesbury and Mrs. Browning struggled for the rights of the enslaved infants of our own country, and in neither case was it to those who had struggled longest and hardest that the hour of victory came.  But what did that signify?  Every one of them could enter into Whittier's noble words:—

    Its foundation is the most important part of any edifice, and foundation-stones are ever laid deep, dark, and low out of sight.

    Neither do the joy and peace of accomplishment belong only to great doings and sublime thoughts.  Tennyson's "Northern Farmer, Old Style" was a hard, rough man, with a very narrow horizon.  Yet there was some reason in his self-satisfaction that at least he had "stubb'd Thornaby waäste."  We remember seeing a labouring man point to a stone-dyke and say, "My father put that up, and good sound work there is in it."  There is joy and pride for the old dame who rescues bright scraps from the waste-bag and turns them into a cosy quilt.  The humblest lives can be—and often are—enriched by true achievements.  Two young Scottish peasants, Alexander and John Bethune, wrote some sweet verses and some clever essays, and because they did thus the world has chanced to hear that they also, with their own hands, built a cottage for their parents, putting stone upon stone in their scanty leisure.  After all, this was their best work, and this might have been accomplished without their literary gifts, only then it would not have been heard of—or at least not beyond the glen, where, we may be sure, it would long have been pointed out as a good example.  It is very likely that the brothers looked on that rough stone hut with a secret satisfaction as deep and sweet as filled Wren's heart at sight of his stately cathedral.  Why not?  It would be no less acceptable in the sight of God Himself.  It is but vulgar chat," wrote Cicero, "which only approves that for laudable that is glorious by the public voice."

    But it is true that there remain some of us who in our own homely words "never seem able to get anything done."  We have to cook meals which are scarcely eaten before another must be prepared.  We have to mend clothes and darn stockings, which are worn out again next week.  Or we must earn our bread by adding up columns of figures which never come to full and complete end, even at stock-taking time.  And we have to do these things so perpetually that we can attempt little else; there is scarcely any time over in which even "to get our resting done," as the old, Scottish servant expressed it.  Even our Sunday class may be in some shifty city neighbourhood, where we seldom see the same faces twice!

    Yet even to such of us the joy of accomplishment may be vouchsafed in full measure.  Our daily living, whatever it be, can produce nothing better than human character.  All the time that we are doing whatsoever our hand finds to do we are building up character, we are clothing our souls with good qualities or the reverse.  On level lands richest crops may grow, and the lives which go on from day to day, mid ever recurring, never-finished duties, may become fit soil for the rarest graces and the sweetest attributes.  Nowhere can patience and humility and selfless beneficence flourish so readily and abundantly.  Which do you imagine to be the greater achievement—to complete a noble sculpture—or to mould a good life?  Whoever lives, whoever enjoys God's gift of years and months and days, has in his hand all the material for that greatest Work of the World—a Life after the Will of God.  "The years of my past life, there is no one who can take them from, me," runs the quaint Spanish saying.

    There is no vain-glory, no Pharisaic complacency in the peace which follows completed labours or accomplished life.  The greater the achievement the greater is the consciousness of how much more it might have been.  We know that Wren's architectural conception was not realised in its entirety.  As Longfellow observed: "Every man is in some sort a failure to himself.  No one ever reaches the heights to which he aspires."  Yet the very last lines which the poet himself wrote were:—

    Strenuous effort and earnest endeavour, by bringing us to the heart of the mystery that we are at one with forces greater than our own, soothe us with a sense of the reserved strength and triumph of which we are the heirs, though it may be that our "coming of age " is not yet.  We know that the Apostle Paul did not forget his bigoted youth, his persecuting manhood, nor the humiliation of his "thorn in the flesh," yet they did not check his joyful outburst: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me," no mere "reward''—which were a base idea since even the pagan Seneca could recognise that "the reward of a thing well done is to have done it"—but, "the-crown of righteousness," the power equal to the yearning, the aspiration raised to achievement, the endeavour transformed into deed, and—"The glory of going on!"

I. FYVIE MAYO.

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