Children of the Market Place | Page 2

to furnish
that faithless nation with power to overcome England in some future
crisis? Perhaps this very moral governance that I was taught to believe
in wished this to happen. But if the World Spirit be nothing but the
concurrent thinking of many peoples, as I grew to think, the World
Spirit might irresistibly wish this American supremacy to be.
And now at eighteen I am absorbed in dreams and studies at Oxford. I
have many friends. My life is a delight. I arise from sleep with a song,
and a bound. We play, we talk, we study, we discuss questions of all
sorts infinitely. I take nothing for granted. I question everything, of
course in the privacy of my room or the room of my friends. I do not
care to be expelled. And in the midst of this charming life bad news
comes to me. My father is dead. He has left a large estate in Illinois. I
must go there. At least my grandmother thinks it is best. And so my
school days end. Yet I am only eighteen!

CHAPTER II

I am eighteen and the year is 1833. All of Europe is in a ferment, is
bubbling over in places. Napoleon has been hearsed for twelve years in
St. Helena. But the principles of the French Revolution are working.
Charles is king of France, but by the will of the nation first and by the
grace of God afterward. There is no republic there; but the sovereignty
of the people, the prime principle of the French Revolution, has
founded the right of Charles to rule.... And what of England? Fox had
rejoiced at the fall of the Bastille. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey
had sung of liberty, exulting in the emancipation of peoples from
tyranny. Then they had changed. Liberalism had come under the heel
again. Revolution was feared and denounced. Liberal principles were
crushed.... But not for long. We students read Shelley and Byron. They
were now gone from earth, eleven and nine years respectively. They
had not altered their faith, dying in the heyday of youthful power.
Would they have changed at any age to which they might have lived?
We believed they would not have done so. But what of England? It is
1833 and the reform bill is a year old. The rotten boroughs are
abolished. There is a semblance of democratic representation in
Parliament. The Duke of Wellington has suffered a decline in
popularity. Italy is rising, for Mazzini has come upon the scene.
Germany is fighting the influence of Metternich. We students are
flapping our young wings. A great day is dawning for the world. And I
am off to America!
What is stirring there? I am bound for the Middle West of that great
land. What is it like? Shall I ever return? What will my life be? These
are my reflections as I prepare to sail.
I take passage on the Columbia and Caledonia. She is built of wood
and is 200 feet long from taffrail to fore edge of stem. Her beam is
34-1/2 feet. She has a gross tonnage of 520 tons. She can sail in
favorable weather at a speed of 12 knots an hour. I laughed at all this
when, something more than twenty years after, I crossed on the
_Persia_, 376 feet long, of 3500 tonnage, and making a speed of nearly
14 knots an hour, with her 4000-horse-power engines.
It is April. The sea is rough. We are no sooner under way than the

heavy swell of the waves tosses the boat like a chip. The prow dips
down into great valleys of glassy water. The stern tips high in the air
against an angry sky. The shoulders of the sea bump under the poop of
the boat, and she trembles like a frightened horse under its rider. I have
books to read. My grandmother has provided me with many things for
my comfort and delight. But I cannot eat, not until during the end of the
voyage. I lie in a little stateroom, which I share with an American. He
persists in talking to me, even at night when I am trying to sleep. He
tells me of America. His home is New York City. He has been as far
west as Buffalo. He gives me long descriptions of the Hudson River,
and the boats on it that run to Albany. He talks of America in terms of
extravagant eulogy. The country is free. It has no king. The people rule.
I have read a little and heard something of America. At Oxford we
students had wondered at the anomaly of a republic maintaining the
institution of slavery. I asked him about this. He said that it did not
involve any contradiction; that