and open the European and North American line to St. John and Halifax, and possibly to Sydney, whence we can. reach the Cove of Cork in six days from Boston. Shall we confine this line to mails and passengers?

SUBSIDIES TO STEAMERS.

If no other nation gave subsidies to steamers, it might be wise for us to withhold them; but have we not seen the Cunard line, under a subsidy of $800,000 a year, grow from five thousand to sixty thousand tons, and launch magnificent steamers like the Scotia and Persia, and furnish some of them as frigates during the Trent affair, and prepare to use them against us? Have we not seen England build up her Peninsular and Oriental line, until it has put afloat a hundred sail of vessels, and extended its lines to China, Japan, and Australia; and have we not seen her increase her subsidy to two and a half millions, when France entered the field and reduced profits? Have we not seen England establish other subsidized lines to Canada, New Granada, St. Thomas, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Chili, and thus put afloat half a million tons of steam frigates, ready to pounce upon the commerce of any nation with which she may be at war?

Have we not seen France follow this example, and pay to her ships $ 10,000 a trip between the ports of France and New York? And in view of all this, are we to content ourselves with a monthly line to China and Brazil, and none to Europe, while England and France have twenty lines to America?

Our government has found it wise to grant subsidies to coaches for the carriage of the mail and who can run against them? But how can we, with all the burdens on our navigation, run successfully against the subsidized steamers of France and England?

In the late race on the Thames our boat was over-weighted, our oarsmen were weakened and deterred by some absurd theory from taking the advantages that were taken by their adversa

ries. In the great race upon the ocean we shall lose a race more important, unless we put our men who can win it on an equal footing with their opponents.

If Collins undertook too much, and sacrificed frugality to display, does it follow that others may not begin where Scotland has left off, and excel the prototype? Screw steamers of iron have been built on the Clyde, admirably adapted for the Pacific, to run under steam or sail, and thus avail themselves of the trade-winds, — steamers able to convey in twenty days 2,000 tons of goods 5,000 miles, with 400 tons of coal; and rich veins of coal have been opened at Sangalien, at the northern end of Japan. With such steamers and such coal-beds, we might at once triple our trade with China and Japan, if we were willing to remit unnecessary duties, and give necessary subsidies, to be returned eventually by postages.

At present we have but 1,199,000 tons propelled by steam, as shown by the following official tables :

-

In

our ancestors classed among "the great and inalienable rights of the United States," for which they fought and suffered, and not in vain, the fisheries for whales, cod, and mackerel. these were reared the men who fought the sea-fights of the Revolution, who ferried Washington on that stormy night across the Delaware, who manned the Constitution and the Essex, who blockaded the Southern coast. We should cherish these fisheries and all school-ships and other nurseries for seamen. Have we done so?

We give bounties to agricultural colleges; we have, doubtless, converted some cabin-boys, who would have made mates and masters, into farmers; but what have we done for our seamen? We have taken away their bounties, which Congress accorded, nearly a century since, to develop seamanship, and place our people on a footing with those of France and England. While we repeal bounties and merely remit the duty on salt, England liberates everything to her fishermen. Canada grants $ 4 per ton bounty to hers, and France $2 per quintal for every pound of codfish she exports to the United States; while our hardy fishermen are overweighted with duties, and find no weight in the currency. But we can do something for them by the remission of worse than useless duties, and it is time this remedy was administered.

Our shipping in the fisheries has dwindled from 332,000 tons in 1860 to 135,000 tons in 1867. The decline is principally in the whale and cod fishery, and with this decline has come a diminution in the number and quality of our mates and mariners, while England is improving her ships and her navigators.

Is it not a fact, that little has been done for seamen with the hospital money we have for the last eighty years deducted from their wages, and that we have left it to the benevolence of private citizens, like Robert B. Forbes and George M. Barnard, to provide them with houses of refuge and school-ships?

The decay of our shipping cannot

be ascribed to the exhaustion of our timber. It is still abundant in the Provinces, in Virginia, Puget Sound, Alaska, and our Northern States, and would be easily accessible under improved legislation. We have, too, iron of superior quality. It is well understood that such is the strength and tenacity of our iron, that we could reduce the weight of our iron ships 15 per cent below the English standard, and produce stronger and more buoyant vessels, which should be rated as high as are those of England; and Congress should appoint a commission to fix a standard for insurance.

Nor are we deficient in artistic skill. If our shipwrights command high wages, they bring to their work great intelligence and energy, and use implements so much superior to those of Europe, that they accomplish more for a given amount of money than foreign artisans.

We have inducements to build in the petroleum, which adds 300,000 tons to our exports, in our increasing crops of cotton, and in the 600,000 tons of grain which youthful California and Oregon now offer us for shipment. They tender us cargoes for voyages that must occupy a year before the ship can return to the Pacific, and in which she may often earn half the cost of construction.

We are opening a new trade with China and Japan. These populous regions call with a voice that echoes across the continent for the cheap flour, fruit, and quicksilver of California, for the silver bars of Nevada, and the timber, fish, and furs of Alaska, and they offer return cargoes of tea, sugar, and spice. We require their low-priced labor for our mines and cotton-fields, and their skilled gardeners for the gardens and vineyards of California. These sons of Asia may not become permanent residents, nor can they be naturalized under our laws, but they will add to our stores of the precious metals by their patient industry. They employ both sailing-vessels and propellers, and the country will secure a

valuable accession in a supply of fullgrown and frugal laborers whom it has cost nothing to educate or produce.

We shall have taken a most important step towards the recovery of our shipping, if we induce our legislators to go back to the duties on metals, manufactures, cigars, and spirits which preceded the war. They may then strike from the statute-book half our taxes and revive our drooping naviga

tion by removing the incubus under which it is wasting.

England encourages navigation, and protects her ships by exempting them from all taxes local or general; why may not we do the same, and thus revive navigation as well as lighten freights? If we did so, we should still have our tonnage duty, and not exempt one per cent of our whole property from other taxes. E. H. Derby.

I

-

T is an odd sort of fortune to have lived an out-of-the-way or adventurous life. There is always a temptation to tell of it, and not always a reasonable surety that others share the interest in it of the conteur himself. It would, indeed, be a nice problem in the descriptive geometry of narrative to determine the exact point where the lines of the two interests meet, that of the narrator and that of the people who have to endure the narration. I cannot say that I ever hope to solve this problem; and in the present instance, especially, I would respectfully submit its solution to the acuter intellects of others. Those persons, for example, who were good-natured enough to read in the last July number of this magazine the account of my juvenile experiences as a negro minstrel can decide for themselves whether it is worth their while to accompany the same adventurous youth across the ocean, with such scant provision for the voyage and for a two years' sojourn in the Old World as they will see stated in the title of this paper. There is certainly some merit in telling the truth, for it is hard work when one is his own hero, and not what is sometimes termed a moral hero at that. I can claim this merit from the start, with a meekness almost bordering

on honesty; since it happens that I am forced into veracity by the fact that there are scores of people yet in the prime of life who are cognizant of the main events of this narrative.

I cannot tell when the idea of going abroad first came into my mind, but, in a little journal kept in my thirteenth year while travelling with the minstrels, I find the fact that I was going to Europe alluded to as a matter of which there was not the shadow of a doubt. There is a jolly sort of beggar in San Francisco who says hope is worth twenty-five dollars a month. It must be that I shared with him his principal income during the four years of college life which almost immediately succeeded my wanderings as a minstrel, and which launched me again on the world at twenty. What else besides the hope of Continental travel sustained me during those four years I cannot now say. My pecuniary resources for that whole period were so small that they have tapered entirely out of my remembrance. Leaving college, I had served, I recollect, but a few months in the post-office of Toledo, Ohio, when I took a deliberate account of my savings one morning, and was gratified. I found in my possession too large a sum to permit of deferring the realization of my long-cherished dream

another day. Counting my money over and over, I could make no less of it than one hundred and eighty-one dollars, in new United States treasury notes; and I resigned "mine office," not with the heart-broken feeling of Richelieu, in the play, but still, like him, with the lingering cares of Europe on my mind.

Not the smallest fraction of this vast sum, I had resolved, should be squandered on the ephemeral railroads of our younger civilization. My treasury notes were to be dedicated, green, votive offerings, on the older shrines of our race. But the city of Toledo is situated about seven hundred miles from the sea, and it now became an interesting question how this distance was to be compassed for — nothing. То а good-natured friend of mine in one of the railroad offices I explained, at considerable length, and with no lack, I flatter myself, of boyish eloquence, the great advantage that would accrue to me from a residence in Europe which the liberality of the companies, in the matter of furnishing passes, would tend to prolong. I think he became my convert, for he came to me, several hours afterward, with a long face, and gave me to understand that the railroad officials were in the habit of building no dreams of æsthetics that were not founded on a ground-plan of dollars and cents. At this I became I do not know which to saydesperately vindictive or vindictively desperate. Any way, the unfeeling conduct of those corporations induced, then and there, a state of mind which led me into an adventure the least calculated, probably, of any in this history to establish my claims as a moral hero. The next morning I brought my trunk down to the depot and had it checked through to New York. The rules seem not to have been so strictly observed then as they are now. The baggagemaster in this instance, at least, taking for granted that I had already secured my ticket, did not ask me to show it; and I was at liberty to stroll about the station all day, listlessly. Just before dusk a cattle-train arrived from the

West and brought with it a lucky thought. I scanned the faces of the drovers till I found one that looked benevolent, and the owner of it I engaged in conversation. He was going on East with his cattle the next morning, and I made a plain statement of my case to him. When I had done, he patted me on the back in such a cordial and stalwart manner, that as soon as I could get my breath - I took it all as a good augury. And so it was. I wish I could reproduce more of the dialogue which took place between this honest Westerner and myself, at that first interview. Some of it, at least, I never shall forget, it impressed me as so extraordinary at the time. I can, however, convey no idea of the contrast between his mild, kindly face and his harsh bovine voice. It may help you to a kind of silhouette view of the situation, if you will take the pains to imagine the frequent excursions of my puzzled attention from his face to his voice, during the scene which immediately followed. He had given me to understand that he had eight car-loads of live stock, and that he was entitled to a drover's pass for every four carloads. Then he suddenly paused, thrust both hands into the pockets of his longskirted coat, and, feeling about in those spacious alcoves for a silent moment as if in search of something, he asked, in an abrupt bass which seemed to issue from the depths of the coat-tails themselves:

"How air you on cattle?"

That was before the days of Mr. Bergh and his excellent society; but, having consulted the speaker's benevolent face and not his voice, as the last authority on the meaning of his question, I answered that I was very kind to cattle as a general thing. That, he assured me, was not exactly what he meant; he wanted to know whether I had ever done any "droving." On my intimating that, although I had not had much experience, I was perfectly willing to be of service, “Never mind, never mind," he said; "but can you play cards?"

"No," was my ingenuous reply. "Now that's bad," and he scratched his head vigorously. "Can you smoke,

then?

"A little," faltered I.

My new-made friend seemed much pleased by this response, and continued:

"All right; you jist git a lot of clay pipes and some tobaccy, and I'll git you a pass!"

a

As I was turning in utter bewilderment to have his strange prescription filled, "I say, look a here," he said; "take off all that nice harness, or you can't pass for no cattle-man ! I '11 lend you some old clothes and a pair of big boots. These stock conductors is right peert, they air. You'll have to smoke a heap, and lay around careless in the caboose or they 'll find you out." The next morning I took my seat in what he called the "caboose," sort of passenger-car at the end of the train. When we had been under way about an hour, the burden of my own conscience, or of my friend's boots, or the contemplation of my unsightly disguise, or the amount of tobacco I had smoked, made me deathly sick, — which, on the whole, was rather a fortunate circumstance. It explained to the conductor why I did not get out at the way-stations to tend my cattle, and it also enabled me to hide my face from the conductor, to whom I happened to be known. I found, as most boys do, that I could smoke better the farther I got from home. What with stopping to let our cattle rest and other delays, it took us nearly a week to reach New York; but before three days had passed I could perform the astonishing feat of putting my friend's boots out of the car window, and of smoking serenely the while, without touching my pipe with my hands. All the hotels at which we stopped along the route seemed, like the Crêmeries of Paris, to exult in the importance of a spécialité; and that was that they were supported almost entirely by drovers, and assumed, without a single exception that I can call to mind, the device and title

of "The Bull's Head." There was a smack of old times in the homely comforts as well as in the moderate charges of these quiet taverns. My expenses on the whole journey from Toledo to the sea were, if I recollect aright, a little over three dollars.

At New York I found that I should be obliged to pay 130 for exchange on my money. This I did, after buying a through third-class ticket to London for thirty-three dollars in currency. My memories of a steerage passage across the Atlantic are rather vivid

than agreeable. Among all my fellowpassengers in that unsavory precinct I found only one philosopher. He was a British officer who took a third-class ticket that he might spend the difference between that and a cabin fare for English porter, which he imbibed from morning to night. He announced as his firm belief, after much observation upon the high cheekbones of our countrymen, that the Americans in a few years would degenerate to Indians, the natural human types of this conti

nent.

It was during the World's Fair that I arrived in London. My whole life there might be written down under the general title of "The Adventures of a Straw Hat," for the one which I wore was the signal for all the sharpers of that great city to practise their arts upon me. They took me for some country youth come up to see the Exhibition, and the number of skittle alleys and thief dens into which they enticed me was, to say the least, remarkable. Through the friendly advice of a police detective, I was finally prevailed upon to purchase a new English hat, and with this, as a sort of ægis, I passed out of the British dominions, without being robbed, and, indeed, without much of which to be robbed.

At Paris I witnessed the magnificent fêtes of the Emperor, and took the thirdclass cars for Strasburg and Heidelberg. At this latter city, with a sum equal to nearly eighty dollars in gold, I proposed, for an indefinite series of years, to become a student of the far-famed