66

development. When I say that we need the money, I do mean the sort of money once demanded by an old Georgia farmer, who in the early days came up to Milledgeville to see General Robert Toombs, at the time a director of the State Bank. Robert," says he, the folks down our way air in need of more money." The profane Robert replied: "Well, how in are they going to get it?" "Why," says the farmer, "can't you stomp it?" "Suppose we do stomp it, how are we going to redeem it?" "Exactly, Robert, exactly. That was just what I was coming to. You see the folks down our way air agin redemption." We want good money, honest money, hard money, money that will redeem itself.

We have given hostages to fortune and our works are before you. I know that capital is proverbially timid. But what are you afraid of? Is it our cotton that alarms you? or our corn? or our sugar? Perhaps it is our coal and iron. Without you, in truth, many of these products must make slow progress, whilst others will continue to lie hid in the bowels of the earth. With you the South will bloom as a garden, and sparkle as a gold-mine; for, whether you tickle her fertile plains with a straw, or apply a more violent titillation to her fat mountain-sides, she is ready to laugh a harvest of untold riches.

I am not a banker, and it would be an affectation in me to undertake to advise you in your own business. But there is a point which relates to the safe investment of money, on which I can venture to express an opinion with some assurance that is the political stability, involving questions of law and order in the South. My belief is that life and property are as secure in the South as they are in New England. I am certain that men are at least as safe in Kentucky and Tennessee as women seem to be in Connecticut. The truth is, the war is over and the country is whole again, The people, always homogeneous, have a common National interest. For my own part, I have never believed in isothermal lines, airlines, and water-lines separating distinct races. I no more believe that that river yonder, dividing Indiana and Kentucky, marks off two distinct species, than I believe that the great Hudson, flowing through the State of New

York, marks off distinct species. Such theories only live in the fancy of morbid minds. We are all one people. Commercially, financially, morally, we are one people. Divide as we will into parties, we are one people. It is this sense which gives a guarantee of peace and order at the South, and offers a sure and lasting escort to all the capital which may come to us for investment.From a Speech Delivered Before the National Bankers' Convention at Louisville, Ky., in 1883.

THE RIVIERA.

ON a journey from Barcelona to Marseille, and thence to the Riviera, Nimes is a good stopover point. The Hotel de Luxembourg is an excellent hostelry, and there is much in the new-old French town to attract and interest the passing stranger, aside from the circumstance that it was the birthplace of Guizot and Daudet; the Maison Caree, for example, and the Amphitheatre, best preserved among pagan antiquities; the public gardens laid out on Louis Quinze lines after the Versailles suggestion; and finally, the Tour Magne, from which a famous view of town and country of wooded wild and watered valley, may be obtained. Nimes, indeed, is a splendid modern city, built upon and around the site of an original Roman colony in Gaul, by many centuries antedating the Caesars and the Christian era.

It has been many a long day and night since I had a controversy with a cabman. Even in New York and London my disposition to pay rather over than under the regular rates, perhaps a kind of nighthawk recognition and affinity, have secured me against the grosser forms of robbery. Once I gave my driver a fifty-dollar bill, meaning it for a five-dollar bill. He followed me into the hotel to insist that I had made a mistake. As the five was much in excess of the rightful fare, my purpose being to overpay him, I thought that was what he meant, and, it being the holiday season, drove him away with "it is all right, old man - Christmas comes but once a year, you know," and, though a little startled next day when I discovered the imposition I had thus

put upon myself, I have never regretted a penny of the money, and make no doubt it served some good end. Well, at Nimes I had an encounter which was less costly and more amusing, that is to Big Sis, Little Sis and me.

I had asked for a carriage at the Hotel de Luxembourg, and had been told that the charge would be five francs the hour. Of course this was double the legal fare, as I very well knew; but only requiring an hour's service, and thence to the station, I made no objection. The coacher proved a stupid fellow as well as an intentioned rogue. When the horses' heads were turned toward the Railway he went round-about and very slow, with the view of exceeding the hour, and thus laying foundation for a double charge. Long before we drew up at the Gare I perceived what he was up to and was ready for him. Promptly he demanded ten francs. I offered him six. He refused the tender. Then I called a Gendarme. The Gendarme had to choose between enforcing the law in favor of an entire stranger about to depart and a thieving neighbor, willing to divide his theft. He hesitated, refused to commit himself, advised me to pay the ten francs, and walked away. I made a second tender and received a second dix francs, mes'su." Then I left cabby standing on the curb and entered the station, bought my tickets unconcernedly, had my baggage weighed and checked, and leisurely got aboard the train. Outside there was a great chatter. Two or three gendarmes put their heads together. Presently my cabman appeared running up and down the line and peering into each of the carriages in search of his "party." I could easily have escaped him, but, not wishing to beat the rascal outright, I moved to the outer seat, and, seeing me just as the bell rang and the horn blew, he cried out breathlessly, "Six francs, mes'su, six francs," which I threw him, amid roars of laughter from half a hundred passengers who had witnessed the comical melodrama. "Monsieur is tres liberal," said one old gentleman in our compartment, "three francs were quite enough and more than the legal fare."

66

Happy the traveler whose adventures are bounded by a recalcitrant cabby and an incompetent copper!

LINCOLN, THE IMMORTAL.

From Cæsar to Bismarck and Gladstone the world has had its soldiers and its statesmen, who rose to eminence and power step by step through a series of geometrical progression, as it were, each promotion following in regular order, the whole obedient to well established and well understood laws of cause and effect. These were not what we call men of destiny." They were men of the time. They were men whose career had a beginning, a middle and an end, rounding off a life with a history, full, it may be, of interesting and exciting events, but comprehensible and comprehensive, simple, clear, complete.

66

The inspired men are fewer. Whence their emanation, where and how they got their power, and by what rule they lived, moved, and had their being, we cannot see. There is no explication to these lives. They rose from shadow and went in mist. We see them, feel them, but we know them not. They arrived, God's word upon their lips; they did their office, God's mantle upon them; and they passed away, God's holy light between the world and them, leaving behind a memory half mortal and half myth. From first to last they were distinctly the creating of some special providence, baffling the wit of man to fathom, defeating the machinations of the world, the flesh and the devil until their work was done, and passed from the scene as mysteriously as they had come upon it; Luther, to wit; Shakespeare, Burns, even Bonaparte, the archangel of war, havoc and ruin; not to go back into the dark ages for examples of the hand of God stretched out to raise up, to protect, and to cast down.

Tried by this standard and observed in an historic spirit, where shall we find an illustration more impressive than in Abraham Lincoln, whose life, career and death might be chanted by a Greek chorus as at once the prelude and the epilogue of the most imperial theme of modern times.

Born as low as the son of God in a hovel, of what

real parentage we know not; reared in penury, squalor, with no gleam of light, nor fair surroundings; a young manhood vexed by wierd dreams and visions, bordering at times on madness; singularly awkward, ungainly, even among the uncouth about him; grotesque in his aspects and ways, it was reserved for this strange being, late in life, without name or fame or ordinary preparation, to be snatched from obscurity, raised to supreme command, and entrusted with the destiny of a nation.

The great leaders of his party were made to stand aside; the most experienced and accomplished men of the day, men like Seward and Chase and Sumner, statesmen famous and trained, were sent to the rear; while this comparatively unknown and fantastic figure was brought by unseen hands to the front and given the reins of power. It is entirely immaterial whether we believe in what he said or did, whether we are for him or against him; but for us to admit that during four years, carrying with them such a pressure of responsibility as the world has never witnessed before, he filled the measure of the vast space allotted him in the actions of mankind and in the eyes of the world, is to say that he was inspired of God, for nowhere else could he have acquired the enormous equipment indispensable to the situation.

Where did Shakespeare get his genius? Where did Mozart get his music? Whose hand smote the lyre of the Scottish plowman? and stayed the life of the German priest? God alone: and, so surely as these were raised up by God, inspired of God was Abraham Lincoln, and, a thousand years hence, no story, no tragedy, no epic poem will be filled with greater wonder than that which tells of his life and death. If Lincoln was not inspired of God, then were not Luther, or Shakespeare or Burns. If Lincoln was not inspired of God, then there is no such thing on earth as special providence or the interposition of Divine power in the affairs of

men.