The Exiles and Other Stories | Page 2

all to
study are those in which the savage and the cultivated man lie down
together and try to live together in unity. This is so because we can
learn from such places just how far a man of cultivation lapses into
barbarism when he associates with savages, and how far the remnants
of his former civilization will have influence upon the barbarians
among whom he has come to live.
There are many such colonies as these, and they are the most
picturesque plague-spots on the globe. You will find them in New
Zealand and at Yokohama, in Algiers, Tunis, and Tangier, and
scattered thickly all along the South American coast-line wherever the
law of extradition obtains not, and where public opinion, which is one
of the things a colony can do longest without, is unknown. These are
the unofficial Botany Bays and Melillas of the world, where the
criminal goes of his own accord, and not because his government has
urged him to do so and paid his passage there. This is the story of a
young man who went to such a place for the benefit he hoped it would
be to his health, and not because he had robbed any one, or done a
young girl an injury. He was the only son of Judge Henry Howard
Holcombe, of New York. That was all that it was generally considered
necessary to say of him. It was not, however, quite enough, for, while
his father had had nothing but the right and the good of his State and
country to think about, the son was further occupied by trying to live up
to his father's name. Young Holcombe was impressed by this fact from
his earliest childhood. It rested upon him while at Harvard and during
his years at the law school, and it went with him into society and into
the courts of law. When he rose to plead a case he did not forget, nor
did those present forget, that his father while alive had crowded those
same halls with silent, earnest listeners; and when he addressed a
mass-meeting at Cooper Union, or spoke from the back of a cart in the
East Side, some one was sure to refer to the fact that this last speaker
was the son of the man who was mobbed because he had dared to be an

abolitionist, and who later had received the veneration of a great city
for his bitter fight against Tweed and his followers.
Young Holcombe was an earnest member of every reform club and
citizens' league, and his distinguished name gave weight as a director to
charitable organizations and free kindergartens. He had inherited his
hatred of Tammany Hall, and was unrelenting in his war upon it and its
handiwork, and he spoke of it and of its immediate downfall with the
bated breath of one who, though amazed at the wickedness of the thing
he fights, is not discouraged nor afraid. And he would listen to no
half-measures. Had not his grandfather quarrelled with Henry Clay, and
so shaken the friendship of a lifetime, because of a great compromise
which he could not countenance? And was his grandson to truckle and
make deals with this hideous octopus that was sucking the life-blood
from the city's veins? Had he not but yesterday distributed six hundred
circulars, calling for honest government, to six hundred possible voters,
all the way up Fourth Avenue?--and when some flippant one had said
that he might have hired a messenger-boy to have done it for him and
so saved his energies for something less mechanical, he had rebuked
the speaker with a reproachful stare and turned away in silence.
Life was terribly earnest to young Holcombe, and he regarded it from
the point of view of one who looks down upon it from the judge's
bench, and listens with a frown to those who plead its cause. He was
not fooled by it; he was alive to its wickedness and its evasions. He
would tell you that he knew for a fact that the window man in his
district was a cousin of the Tammany candidate, and that the contractor
who had the cleaning of the street to do was a brother-in-law of one of
the Hall's sachems, and that the policeman on his beat had not been in
the country eight months. He spoke of these damning facts with the air
of one who simply tells you that much, that you should see how terrible
the whole thing really was, and what he could tell if he wished.
In his own profession he recognized the trials of law-breakers only as
experiments which went to establish and explain a general principle.
And prisoners were not men to him, but merely the exceptions