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Charlotte M. Yonge - "The Pillars of the House, V1"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Man in Gray

T >> Thomas Dixon >> The Man in Gray




And he succeeded.

The odds against him sharpened his powers, made keen his mind, toughened
his muscles.

The Southern planter, on the other hand, represented the sharpest
contrast to this mental and physical attitude toward life. He came of
the stock of the English Squire. And if he came from Scotland he found
this English ideal already established and accepted it as his own.

The joy of living, not the horror of life, was the mainspring of his
action and the secret of his character. The Puritan hated play. The
Southerner loved to play. He dreamed of a life rich and full of
spiritual and physical leisure. He enjoyed his religion. He did not
agonize over it. His character was genial. He hated fear and drove it
from his soul. He loved a fiddle and a banjo. He was brave. He was loyal
to his friends. He loved his home and his kin. He despised trade. He
disliked hard work.

To this hour in the country's life his ideal had dominated the nation.

The Puritan Abolitionists now challenged this ideal for a fight to the
finish. Slavery was protected by the Constitution. All right, they burn
the Constitution and denounce it as a Covenant with Death, an agreement
with Hell. They begin a propaganda to incite servile insurrection in
the South. They denounce the Southern Slave owner as a fiend. Even
the greatest writers of the North caught the contagion of this mania.
Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and Emerson used their pens to blacken the
name of the Southern people. From platform, pulpit and forum, through
pamphlet, magazine, weekly and daily newspapers the stream of abuse
poured forth in ever-increasing volume.

That the proud Southerner would resent the injustice of this wholesale
indictment was inevitable. Their habit of mind, their born instinct of
leadership, their love of independence, their hatred of dictation, their
sense of historic achievement in the building of the republic would
resent it. Their critics had not only been Slave holders themselves as
long as it paid commercially, but their skippers were now sailing the
seas in violation of Southern laws prohibiting the slave trade. Our
early Slave traders were nearly all Puritans. When one of their ships
came into port, the minister met her at the wharf, knelt in prayer and
thanked Almighty God for one more cargo of heathen saved from hell.

Brown's whole plan of attack was based on the certainty of resentment
from the South. He set out to provoke his opponents. This purpose was
now the inspiration of every act of his life.

A group of six typical Northern minds had fallen completely under his
power: Dr. Samuel G. Howe, Rev. Theodore Parker, Rev. Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, Frank B. Sanborn, George L. Stearns and the Rev. Hon. Gerrit
Smith.

Gerrit Smith was many times a millionaire, one of the great land owners
of the country, a former partner in business with John Jacob Astor, the
elder, and at this time a philanthropist by profession. He had built a
church at Peterboro, New York, and had preached a number of years. In
his growing zeal as an Abolitionist he had entered politics and had just
been elected to Congress from his district.

He was a man of gentle, humane impulses and looked out upon the world
with the kindliest fatherly eyes. It was one of the curious freaks of
fate that he should fall under the influence of Brown. The stern old
Puritan was his antithesis in every line of face and mental make-up.

Smith was the preacher, the theorist, and the dreamer.

Brown had become the man of Action.

And by Action he meant exactly what the modern Social anarchist means
by _direct action_. The plan he had developed was to come to "close
quarters" with Slavery. He had organized the Band of Gileadites to kill
every officer of the law who attempted to enforce the provisions of the
Constitution of the United States relating to Slavery. His eyes were now
fixed on the Territory of Kansas.

There could be no doubt about the abnormality of the mind of the man who
had constituted himself the Chosen Instrument of Almighty God to destroy
chattel Slavery in the South.

He was pacing the floor of the parlor of the New Astor House awaiting
the arrival of his friend, Congressman Gerrit Smith, for a conference
before the meeting scheduled for eight o'clock. It was a characteristic
of Brown that he couldn't sit still. He paced the floor.

The way he walked marked him with distinction, if not eccentricity. He
walked always with a quick, springing step. He didn't swing his foot. It
worked on springs. And the spring in it had a furtive action not unlike
the movement of a leopard. His muscles, in spite of his fifty-four
years, were strong and sinewy. He was five feet ten inches in height.

His head was remarkable for its small size. The brain space was limited
and the hair grew low on his forehead, as if a hark back to the
primitive man out of which humanity grew. His chin protruded into an
aggressive threat. His mouth was not only stern, it was as inexorable as
an oath.

His hair was turning gray and he wore it trimmed close to his small
skull. His nose was an aggressive Roman type. The expression of his face
was shrewd and serious, with a touch always of cunning.

A visitor at his house at North Elba whispered one day to one of his
sons:

"Your father looks like an eagle."

The boy hesitated and replied in deep seriousness:

"Yes, or some other carnivorous bird."

The thing above all others that gave him the look of a bird of prey was
his bluish-gray eye. An eye that was never still and always shone with a
glitter. The only time this strange light was not noticeable was during
the moments when he drew the lids down half-way. He was in the habit of
holding his eyes half shut in times of deep thinking. At these moments
if he raised his head, his eyes glowed two pin points of light.

No matter what the impression he made, either of attraction or
repulsion, his personality was a serious proposition. No man looked once
only. And no man ever attempted undue familiarity or ridicule. His life
to this time had been a series of tragic failures in everything he had
undertaken. A study of his intense Puritan face revealed at once his
fundamental character. A soul at war with the world. A soul at war with
himself. He was the incarnation of repressed emotions and desires. He
had married twice and his fierce passions had made him the father of
twenty children before fifty years of age. His first wife had given
birth to seven in ten years and died a raving maniac during the birth of
her last. Two of his children had already shown the signs of unbalanced
mentality.

The grip of his mind on the individuals who allowed themselves to be
drawn within the circle of his influence became absolute.

He was a man of earnest and constant prayer to his God. The God he
worshipped was one whose face was not yet revealed to the crowd that
hung on his strangely halting words. He spoke in mystic symbols. His
mysticism was always the source of his power over the religious leaders
who had gathered about him. They had not stopped to analyze the meaning
of this appeal. They looked once into his shining blue-gray eyes and
became his followers. He never stopped to reason.

He spoke with authority.

He claimed a divine commission for action and they did not pause to
examine his credentials. He had failed at every enterprise he had
undertaken. And then he suddenly discovered his power over the Puritan
imagination.

To Brown's mind, from the day of his devotion to the fixed idea
of destroying Slavery in the South, "Action" had but one
meaning--bloodshed. He knew that revolutionary ideas are matters of
belief. He asserted beliefs. The elect believed. The damned refused to
believe.

Long before Smith had entered the room Brown had dropped into a seat by
the window, his eyes two pin points. His abstraction was so deep, his
absorption in his dreams so complete that when Smith spoke, he leaped to
his feet and put himself in an attitude of defense.

He gazed at his friend a moment and rubbed his eyes in a dazed way
before he could come back to earth.

In a moment he had clasped hands with the philanthropist. Smith looked
into his eyes and his will was one with the man of Action. He had not
yet grasped the full meaning of the Action. He was to awake later to
its tremendous import--primitive, barbaric, animal, linking man through
hundreds of thousands of years to the beast who was his jungle father.

Smith did not know that he was to preside at the meeting until Brown
told him. He consented without a moment's hesitation.



CHAPTER XII


On their way to the hall on the Bowery Gerrit Smith and John Brown
passed through dimly lighted streets along which were drifting scores of
boys and girls, ragged, friendless, homeless, shelterless in the chill
night. The strange old man's eyes were fixed on space. He saw nothing,
heard nothing of the city's roaring life or the call of its fathomless
misery.

He saw nothing even when they passed a house with a red light before
which little girls of twelve were selling flowers. Neither of the men,
living for a single fixed idea, caught the accent of evil in the child's
voice as she stepped squarely in front of them and said:

"What's ye hurry?"

When they turned aside she piped again:

"Won't ye come in?"

They merely passed on. The infinite pathos of the scene had made no
impression. That this child's presence on the streets was enough to
damn the whole system of society to the lowest hell never dawned on the
philanthropist or the man of Action.

The crowd in the hall was not large. The place was about half full and
it seated barely five hundred. The masses of the North as yet took no
stock in the Abolition Crusade.

They felt the terrific pressure of the problem of life at home too
keenly to go into hysterics over the evils of Negro Slavery in the
South. William Lloyd Garrison had been preaching his denunciations for
twenty-one years and its fruits were small. The masses of the people
were indifferent.

But a man was pushing his way to the platform of the little hall
to-night who was destined to do a deed that would accomplish what all
the books and all the magazines and all the newspapers of the Crusaders
had tried in vain to do.

Small as the crowd was, there was something sinister in its composition.
Half of them were foreigners. It was the first wave of the flood of
degradation for our racial stock in the North--the racial stock of John
Adams and John Hancock.

A few workingmen were scattered among them. Fifty or sixty negroes
occupied the front rows. Sam had secured a seat on the aisle. Gerrit
Smith rose without ceremony and introduced Brown. There were no women
present. He used the formal address to the American voter:

"Fellow Citizens:

"I have the honor to present to you to-night a man chosen of God to lead
our people out of the darkness of sin, my fellow worker in the Kingdom,
the friend of the downtrodden and the oppressed, John Brown."

Faint applause greeted the old man as he moved briskly to the little
table with his quick, springing step.

He fixed the people with his brilliant eyes and they were silent. He was
slow of speech, awkward in gesture, and without skill in the building of
ideas to hold the imagination of the typical crowd.

It was not a typical crowd of American freemen. It was something new
under the sun in our history. It was the beginning of the coming mob
mind destined to use Direct Action in defiance of the Laws on which the
Republic had been built.

There was no mistaking the message Brown bore. He proclaimed that the
negro is the blood brother of the white man. The color of his skin was
an accident. This white man with a black skin was now being beaten and
ground into the dust by the infamy of his masters. Their crimes cried
to God for vengeance. All the negro needed was freedom to transform him
into a white man--your equal and mine. At present, our brothers and
sisters are groaning in chains on Southern plantations. His vaulting
metallic tones throbbed with a strange, cold passion as he called for
Action.

The vibrant call for bloodshed in this cry melted the crowd into a new
personality. The mildest spirit among them was merged into the mob
mind of the speaker. And every man within the sound of his voice was a
murderer.

The final leap of the speaker's soul into an expression of supreme hate
for the Southern white man found its instant echo in the mob which
he had created. They demanded no facts. They asked no reasons. They
accepted his statements as the oracle of God. They were opinions,
beliefs, dogmas, the cries of propaganda only--precisely the food needed
for developing the mob mind to its full strength. Envy, jealousy, hatred
ruled supreme. Liberty was a catchword. Blood lust was the motive power
driving each heart beat.

Brown suddenly stopped. His speech had reached no climax. It had rambled
into repetition. Its power consisted in the repetition of a fixed
thought. He knew the power of this repeated hammering on the mind. An
idea can be repeated until it is believed, true or false. He had pounded
his message into his hearers until they were incapable of resistance. It
was unnecessary for him to continue. He stopped so suddenly, they waited
in silence for him to go on after he had taken his seat.

A faint applause again swept the front of the house. There was something
uncanny about the man that hushed applause. They knew that he was
indifferent to it. Hidden fires burned within him that lighted the way
of life. He needed no torches held on high. He asked no honors.
He expected no applause and he got little. What he did demand was
submission to his will and obedience as followers.

Gerrit Smith rose with this thought gripping his gentle spirit. His
words came automatically as if driven by another's mind.

"Our friend and leader has dedicated his life to the service of
suffering humanity. It is our duty to follow. The first step is to
sacrifice our money in his cause."

The ushers passed the baskets and Sam's heart warmed as he heard the
coin rattle. His eyes bulged when he saw that one of them had a pile of
bills in it that covered the coin. He heard the great and good man say
that it was for the poor brother in black. He saw visions of a warm
room, of clean food and plenty of it.

He was glad he'd come, although he didn't like the look in John Brown's
eyes while he spoke. Their fierce light seemed to bore through him and
hurt. Now that he was seated and his eyes half closed, uplifted toward
the ceiling, he wasn't so formidable. He rather liked him sitting down.

The ushers poured the money on the table and counted it. Sam had not
seen so much money together since he piled his five hundred dollars in
gold in a stack and looked at it. He watched the count with fascination.
There must be a thousand at least.

He was shocked when the head usher leaned over the edge of the platform,
and whispered to Smith the total.

"Eighty-five dollars."

Sam glanced sadly at the two rows of negroes in front. There wouldn't
be much for each. He took courage in the thought, however, that some of
them were well-to-do and wouldn't ask their share. He was sure of this
because he had seen three or four put something in the baskets.

Gerrit Smith announced the amount of the collection with some
embarrassment and heartily added:

"My check for a hundred and fifteen dollars makes the sum an even two
hundred."

That was something worth while. Smith and Brown held a conference about
the announcement of another meeting as Sam whispered to the head usher:

"Could ye des gimme mine now an' lemme go?"

"Yours?"

"Yassah."

"Your share of the collection?"

The usher eyed him in scorn.

"To be sho," Sam answered confidently. "Yer tuk it up fer de po' black
man. I'se black, an' God knows I'se po'."

"You're a poor fool!"

"What ye take hit up fer den?"

"To support John Brown, not to feed lazy, good-for-nothing, free
negroes."

Sam turned from the man in disgust. He was about to rise and shamble
back to his miserable pallet when a sudden craning of necks and moving
of feet drew his eye toward the door.

He saw a man stalking down the aisle. He carried on his left arm a
little bundle of filthy rags. He mounted the platform and spoke to the
Chairman:

"Mr. Smith, may I say just a word to this meeting?"

The Philanthropist Congressman recognized him instantly as the most
eloquent orator in the labor movement in America. He had met him at a
Reform Convention. He rose at once.

"Certainly."

"Fellow Citizens, Mr. George Evans, the leading advocate of Organized
Labor in America, wishes to speak to you. Will you hear him?"

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" came from all parts of the house.

The man began in quivering tones that held Sam and gripped the unwilling
mind of the crowd:

"My friends: Just a few words. I have in my arms the still breathing
skeleton of a little girl. I found her in a street behind this building
within the sound of the voice of your speaker."

He paused and waved to John Brown.

"She was fighting with a stray cat for a crust of bread in a garbage
pail. I hold her on high."

With both hands he lifted the dazed thing above his head.

"Look at her. This bundle of rags God made in the form of a woman to be
the mother of the race. She has been thrown into your streets to starve.
Her father is a workingman whom I know. For six months, out of work,
he fought with death and hell, and hell won. He is now in prison. Her
mother, unable to support herself and child, sought oblivion in drink.
She's in the gutter to-night. Her brother has joined a gang on the East
Side. Her sister is a girl of the streets.

"You talk to me of Negro Slavery in the South? Behold the child of the
White Wage Slave of the North! Why are you crying over the poor negro?
In the South the master owns the slave. Here the master owns the job.
Down there the master feeds, clothes and houses his man with care. Black
children laugh and play. Here the master who owns the job buys labor in
the open market. He can get it from a man for 75 cents a day. From a
woman for 30 cents a day. When he has bought the last ounce of strength
they can give, the master of the wage slave kicks him out to freeze or
starve or sink into crime.

"You tell me of the white master's lust down South? I tell you of the
white master's lust for the daughters of our own race.

"I see a foreman of a factory sitting in this crowd. I've known him for
ten years. I've talked with a score of his victims. He has the power
to employ or discharge girls of all ages ranging from twelve to
twenty-five. Do you think a girl can pass his bead eyes and not pay for
the job the price he sees fit to demand?

"If you think so, you don't know the man. I do!"

He paused and the stillness of death followed. Necks were craned to find
the figure of the foreman crouching in the crowd. The speaker was not
after the individual. His soul was aflame with the cause of millions.

"I see also a man in the crowd who owns a row of tenements so filthy,
so dark, so reeking with disease that no Southern master would allow a
beast to live in them. This hypocrite has given to John Brown to-night
a contribution of money for the downtrodden black man. He coined this
money out of the blood of white men and women who pay the rent for the
dirty holes in which they die."

A moment of silence that was pain as he paused and a hundred eyes swept
the room in search of the man. Again the speaker stood without a sign.
He merely paused to let his message sink in the hearts of his hearers.

"My eyes have found another man in this crowd who is an employer of wage
slaves. He is here to denounce Chattel Slavery in the South as the sum
of all villainies while he practices a system of wage slavery more cruel
without a thought morally wrong.

"I say this in justice to the man because I know him. He hasn't
intelligence enough to realize what he is doing. If he had he would
begin by abolishing slavery in his own household. This reformer isn't
a bad man at heart. He is simply an honest fool. These same fools in
England have given millions to abolish black slavery in the Colonies
and leave their own slaves in the Spittalfield slums to breed a race of
paupers and criminals. Why don't a Buxton or a Wilberforce complain
of the White Slavery at home? Because it is indispensable to their
civilization. They lose nothing in freeing negroes in distant Colonies.
They would lose their fortunes if they dared free their own white
brethren.

"The master of the wage slave employs his victim only when he needs him.
The Southern master supports his man whether he needs him or not. And
cares for him when ill. The Abolitionist proposes to free the black
slave from the whip. Noble work. But to what end if he deprives him of
food? He escapes the lash and lands in a felon's cell or climbs the
steps of a gallows.

"Your inspired leader, the speaker of this evening, has found his most
enthusiastic support in New England.

"No doubt.

"In Lowell, Massachusetts, able-bodied men in the cotton mills are
receiving 80 cents a day for ten hours' work. Women are receiving 32
cents a day for the same. At no period of the history of this republic
has it been possible for a human being to live in a city and reproduce
his kind on such wages. What is the result? The racial stock that made
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts a civilized state is perishing. It is
being replaced from the slums of Europe. The standard of life is dragged
lower with each generation.

"The negro, you tell me, must work for others or be flogged. The poor
white man at your door must work for others or be starved. The negro is
subject to a single master. He learns to know him, if not to like him.
There is something human in the touch of their lives. The poor white man
here is the slave of many masters. The negro may lead the life of a farm
horse. Your wage slave is a horse that hasn't even a stable. He roams
the street in the snows of winter. He is ridden by anybody who wishes a
ride. He is cared for by nobody. Our rich will do anything for the poor
except to get off their backs. The negro has a master in sickness and
health. The wage slave is honored with the privilege of slavery only so
long as he can work ten hours a day. He is a pauper when he can toil no
more.

"Your Abolitionist has fixed his eye on Chattel Slavery in the South. It
involves but three million five-hundred thousand negroes. The system of
wage slavery involves the lives of twenty-five million white men and
women.

"Slavery was not abolished in the North on moral grounds, but because,
as a system of labor it was old-fashioned, sentimental, extravagant,
inefficient. It was abolished by the masters of men, not by the men.

"The North abolished slavery for economy in production. There was no
sentiment in it. Wage slavery has proven itself ten times more cruel,
more merciless, more efficient. The Captain of Industry has seen the
vision of an empire of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He has seen
that the master who cares for the aged, the infirm, the sick, the lame,
the halt is a fool who must lag behind in the march of the Juggernaut.
Only a fool stops to build a shelter for his slave when he can kick him
out in the cold and find hundreds of fresh men to take his place.

"Two years ago the Chief of Police of the City of New York took the
census of the poor who were compelled to live in cellars. He found that
eighteen thousand five hundred and eighty-six white wage slaves lived in
these pest holes under the earth. One-thirteenth of the population of
the city lives thus underground to-day. Hundreds of these cellars are
near the river. They are not waterproof. Their floors are mud. When
the tides rise the water floods these noisome holes. The bedding and
furniture float. Fierce wharf rats, rising from their dens, dispute with
men, women and children the right to the shelves above the water line.

"There are cellars devoted entirely to lodging where working men and
women can find a bed of straw for two cents a night--the bare dirt for
one cent. Black and white men, women and children, are mixed in one
dirty mass. These rooms are without light, without air, filled with the
damp vapors of mildewed wood and clothing. They swarm with every species
of vermin that infest the animal and human body. The scenes of depravity
that nightly occur in these lairs of beasts are beyond words.

"These are the homes provided by the master who has established 'Free'
Labor as the economic weapon with which he has set out to conquer the
world.

"And he is conquering with it. The superior, merciless power of this
system as an economic weapon is bound to do in America what it has done
throughout the world. The days of Chattel Slavery are numbered. The
Abolitionist is wasting his breath, or worse. He is raising a feud that
may drench this nation in blood in a senseless war over an issue that is
settled before it's raised.

"Long ago the economist discovered that there was no vice under the
system of Chattel Slavery that could not be more freely gratified under
the new system of wage slavery.