mation and the troops produced quiet by the 19th, but the disorder spread west and north to the Pennsylvania lines at Pittsburgh.

In Pennsylvania a new administrative rule for doubleheader trains requiring only one crew to do the work of two aggravated the trouble produced by wage reductions, and Thomas A. Scott, president of the road, became the object of attack. Governor Hartranft ordered the rioters around Pittsburgh to disperse on July 20, by proclamation attested by Matthew S. Quay, then Secretary of the Commonwealth; and on Saturday afternoon, July 21, General Brinton's Pennsylvania militia engaged the rioters in a pitched battle as they tried to clear the tracks in Pittsburgh. The next day was, indeed, a "bloody Sunday" in Pittsburgh, with mayor and sheriff helpless, the militia generally impotent, and the mob burning and shooting. The union depot was destroyed that afternoon.

In the next week the wave of unrest spread to the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western and west to Chicago. The · New York Central was held loyal by a judicious bribe of $100,000 which William H. Vanderbilt, who had just succeeded to the control of the great estate of his father, the "Commodore," had promised his men. In Chicago, on the 26th, the week ended in a pitched battle in Turner Hall, where the police broke up a meeting of alleged communists and ejected them from their meeting-place.

Through these eleven days the railroad riots advertised the opening of a new industrial epoch and affected every class of society. Labor leaders, while only occasionally defending violence, were united in denouncing the use of troops. A grand jury in Pittsburgh, instead of hunting out mob leaders for punishment, tried to secure conviction of the militia officers whose commands, bewildered and badgered, had fired upon the rioters. It was observed that the militia were often unequal to the tasks of riot duty, whereas federal proclamations, supported by a mere handful of regulars, produced order at once. Republican leaders in general ceased for a time their attacks upon Hayes to

castigate the South for its weakening of the army. Conservative citizens, fearful that this was only the opening gust of a social cyclone, regretted the lack of a stronger national government.

The strikers themselves went quietly back to work after their effort had wasted its strength in blind explosion. The bottom of the financial depression had been reached, and hereafter conditions generally improved for the men at work, while the dangerous army of the unemployed lessened as new jobs drew off its more industrious units. It was a squall, but not a revolution; the stability of government was affected not at all; and the opponents on both sides turned directly to popular institutions to record their claims. The operators appealed to legislatures to admit a doctrine of public responsibility for property lost through mob violence; the unionists for more favorable labor and militia laws. The "moral instinct of the people" had been the real vindicator of law and order.

Socialism

The railroad strikes of 1877 gained nothing immediately for the workers but publicity and a keener feeling for the identity of their interests. Their leaders moved on along the course of superior organization, and a new order, the Knights of Labor, which had existed in seclusion since 1869, raised its head above the surface as a coördinating body. New immigrants added their influence to what agitators described as the war of classes, and many of them speedily rose to places of leadership because the workers of Europe had thought out the problems of social order more penetratingly than had Americans. Socialism, against which Germany, Russia, and France were raising their weapons, entered America as an adjunct of the labor movement. Even the Roman Church, through an encyclical of Leo XIII in 1878, attacked "that sort of men who, under the motley and all but barbarous terms and titles of Socialists, Communists, and Nihilists, are spread abroad throughout the world and, bound intimately together in baneful alliance, strive to carry out their purpose . . . of uprooting the foundations of civilized society at large."

...

"It is a good sign," commented Lyman Abbott in the Christian Union, "that the Church of Christ, both Protestant and Roman, is turning its attention to the problems of social and political life." American society had ahead of it a long period of education and study before it could understand the appeal of the workers or readjust its government to the needs of modern life.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A clear, running view of the problems of peace may be found in Harper's Weekly, the Nation, the Christian Union, and the Independent, all of which were conducted through these years with intelligence and information. Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (1881), gives a sentimental and sympathetic view of the Indian problem, which may be checked by Nelson A. Miles, Serving the Republic (1911), O. O. Howard, Nez Percé Joseph, An Account of his Ancestors, his Lands, his Confederates, his Enemies, his Murders, his War, his Pursuit and Capture (1881), and F. L. Paxson, Last American Frontier (1910). A. L. Haydon, Riders of the Plains (1910), pictures the Canadian Indian problem. The strikes are described in detail in volume VIII of Rhodes, who follows J. A. Dacus, Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States (1878); and there is useful material in John R. Commons (ed.), Documentary History of American Industrial Society (1910-11). A literary sensation was created by the anonymous novel Democracy (1880), whose authorship was later avowed by Henry Adams and his friends; The Bread-Winners (1883) was also anonymous and revealed the reactions of contemporary society to the labor movement. It was later conceded to be the work of John Hay.

CHAPTER III

POST-BELLUM IDEALS

THE genuine spirit of America is elusive in the black days of financial stress and moral discontent that extended from the panic of 1873 until after the railroad strikes of 1877. The historian turns in vain to any single set of actors to reveal it. Astor, Stewart, and Vanderbilt, dying within. a few months of each other and leaving their millions to self-conscious heirs, are but partly representative of their contemporaries. The statesmen of the day, bewildered

by the new ethical standards that arose to vex them, reveal few elements of leadership. The universities, struggling to acclimate a new ideal within a medieval shell, did not yet touch the masses of the people; and Eastern men of letters, whose leaders were about sung out, could rarely get their heads above the confusion of the present. Too high or too low, each of these groups failed to reveal the spirit of the nation as it entered upon its second century of independence, but there was a spirit, none the less, conscious and clear of vision, and gathering up itself for a new attack on life. Its records are in a literature that emerged from this period of transition, and in none of its figures was the embodiment fuller or finer than in Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), writing at leisure in his quaint octagonal study on a knoll at Quarry Farm, and putting on paper in the summer of 1874 the first draft of Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi.

The pessimism of James Russell Lowell and Edwin Lawrence Godkin and their doubts as to the success of democLiterary racy were inspired by their realization that all periodicals America was not like New England and were intensified by ideas from the West and South that looked to them like repudiation and decay. The Atlantic Monthly, founded in 1857, had become, full-blown, the literary ve

hicle of New England men of letters.

There had been

nothing like it in the past, and it had no rival. Its standards were those of the best intelligence the United States possessed, but its circulation, like that of the New York Nation, hardly reached beyond the acquaintances of its contributors. Lowell edited it at first, then Fields, and Howells, and in 1880 Thomas Bailey Aldrich took it in hand. Less literary, but more lively, its rival, Harper's Monthly, shared with it in the later seventies the leadership in American letters. The field was enlarged when in 1881 the old Scribner's Monthly became the Century Magazine under the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland, and then of Richard Watson Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson, whose inspiration sustained the new periodical for forty years. Scribner's itself was revived in 1886 to complete the quartette.

The broadening of public taste, revealed by the literary periodicals that it supported, called soon for literary gossip as well as literature. The Dial was founded in Chicago in 1880, to purvey this gossip. The Critic began a year later with its office close to the centers of literary information in the East. The Book-Buyer, revived in 1884, was something more than a trade journal, and catered to the same new interest, while in due time Current Literature (1888) and the Bookman (1895) broadened and intensified the field.

American literature in the century just ended was limited in its appeal and its accomplishment, but "the only position that has ever been acknowledged cheerfully by the American people," as some one wrote in the Atlantic in 1881, "has been the small circle of first-class historians, poets, and scientists, Prescott, Motley, Ticknor, Agassiz, Bryant, Longfellow...." The spirit of democracy tended to recognize an intellectual aristocracy even if it refrained from reading all its works, but the aristocracy was now one of old men with a gap in years between them and the oncoming generation.

The contrast between the old and the new in letters was so sharp at times as to be embarrassing. A dinner given