ventures of Robin Hood (1883), popularizing a folk-lore and setting a new standard with his own illustrations. Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) added a new child to the personages of fiction. St. Nicholas (1873) and Harper's Young People (1879) began to produce much of the new children's literature in periodical form, and were accepted in England nearly as freely as at home. mania' A search for local color carried Mark Twain to the western fringe of civilization, where Bret Harte found treasures of a similar character, and where Helen Hunt "EthiopioJackson found the materials for Ramona (1884). The South was rediscovered at the same time and an "ethiopiomania" ran its course through the early eighties, as negro songs and music had their day. The cult expressed itself sometimes in doggerel: "Piano put away In de garret for to stay; De banjo am de music dat de gals am crazed about. Am 'spired by de colored muse, An' de ole kind o' poeckry am all played out." Sometimes it was revealed in the popularity of negro players and of white actors masquerading as such. Haverly's Mastodon Minstrels, with forty men in the cast, held the stage at Drury Lane in London in 1884, forty years after the first minstrel troupes had made their appearance, and serious students of negro lore took the trouble to debate in public whether the banjo was or was not the negro's in strument. Joel Chandler Harris brought the negroes into letters on a higher plane when he collected their folk-lore in Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1880). His popularity was shared by George W. Cable, whose Grandissimes (1880) portrayed the creole life in old New Orleans. Cable soon had the descendants of the creoles buzzing around his ears, but the portrait seemed true to life to the rest of the country, and readings by the author were welcome everywhere. Judge Albion W. Tourgée's A Fool's Errand (1880) Dialect gave a less benevolent view of Southern life than Harris and Cable did, and was used as a campaign document against the mild treatment of the South begun by President Hayes. America continued to be entertained by dialect literature such as Lowell had exploited long since in the Biglow Papers, and by professional humorists like Peliterature troleum V. Nasby and Artemus Ward. James Whitcomb Riley stopped painting signs in Logansport and gave up his travels with a patent medicine troupe, and brought out in 1884 The Old Swimmin' Hole, and Seven More Poems. He soon began a long career upon the platform reading his dialect verse. In 1886 he traveled in company with Edgar Wilson (Bill) Nye, founder of the Laramie Boomerang (1881), and one of the most successful humorists. Provincialism The taste of the eighties was the product of the common schools inspired somewhat by the literary reputations of New England and led here and there by graduates of the aspiring new colleges. It made up in avidity what it lacked in discrimination and standards. When Richardson built Trinity Church in Boston for the congregation of Phillips Brooks, his adaptation of the romanesque was imitated west to the Pacific. There was still enough provincialism for the United States to be keenly sensitive to what Europe thought about it. James Bryce since the early seventies had been a repeated and welcome. visitor as he gathered his materials for the American Commonwealth (1888). Thomas Huxley found ready audiences as he discussed "The Evidences of Evolution" on his American trip of 1876. Herbert Spencer, whose Principles of Sociology (1876) invented the science of that name, was welcomed in 1882. Matthew Arnold, in 1883, found "the blaring publicity" of New York beyond his expectations, but was grateful for "the kindness and good-will of everybody." The English historian Edward A. Freeman wrote Some Impressions of the United States (1883), after a lecturing trip in 1881. He spoke at Lowell Institute in Boston, a century after the surrender at Yorktown, upon the English people in their three homes: Germany, Britain, and America; and gained wide notoriety a little later through his suggestion that "this would be a grand land if every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it." American curiosity was wide open, and there was a welcome even for Oscar Wilde, who lectured in 1882 on the English renascence in "a fine æsthetic jargon. ... knee breeches, pumps, a white waistcoat, and white silk stockings." The self-consciousness that led the United States to be interested in what others thought of it evoked a new curiosity as to the meaning of American history. The Historical Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 writing was part of a series of patriotic centennials that continued until, in 1889, the one-hundredth anniversary of the inauguration of Washington was celebrated. The early years of this period brought out a flood of oratory on the Revolution, and Bancroft revised his History of the United States in a centennial edition. Interest was turned to other aspects of American history. In one field Francis Parkman was bringing to a conclusion his studies on the French in America and their struggle with the English in the eighteenth century. Henry Adams, lifting history to a new level of instruction at Harvard in the seventies and studying the lives of Albert Gallatin and John Randolph, settled down in the eighties to his nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1889– 91). In 1883 the first two volumes of the History of the People of the United States appeared. The author, John Bach McMaster, an obscure instructor in engineering at Princeton College, became immediately the holder at the University of Pennsylvania of one of the earliest chairs in American history to be created, and started in the United States a school of historians who saw the realities of history in the whole life of the people rather than in the doings of kings and courts. In the autumn of 1884 a group of students interested in the historical revival, led by Herbert B. Adams, of Johns Hopkins University, and Andrew D. White, organized the American Historical Association. The next year a Cleveland business man, James Ford Rhodes, who had already made himself financially independent, turned his affairs over to his brother-in-law, Marcus A. Hanna, and set out to write the story of the Civil War under the title A History of the United States Since the Compromise of 1850. The frontier of history was pushed down through the nineteenth century under the new impulse. Its quality rose from the level of antiquarianism and the defense of democracy, that inspired most of the writings before the Civil War, and bore the impress of the higher scholarship of the graduate seminary at Johns Hopkins and the superior teaching elsewhere. A treatise on Congressional Government (1885), by Woodrow Wilson, one of the Johns Hopkins students, received immediate recognition. Another of the group carried the standards of scholarship into the West. Frederick Jackson Turner produced in Wisconsin in 1893 his essay on the Significance of the Frontier in American History with such compelling logic as to force a complete restatement of the facts in American history in the next quarter-century. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The works cited above in the text constitute the best bibliography for this chapter. M. A. De Wolfe Howe, The Atlantic Monthly and Its Makers (1918), throws light on the Atlantic group. Sara Norton and M. A. De Wolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (1913), and Norton's Letters of James Russell Lowell (1894), are also of great value. Gustav Pollak, Fifty Years of American Idealism (1915), traces the story of the New York Nation. George Haven Putnam, Memories of a Publisher (1915), and J. H. Harper, The House of Harper; A Century of Publishing in Franklin Square (1912), are useful special works. Henry Watterson, Marse Henry (1919), is the autobiography of the most picturesque and the last survivor of the great journalists of the seventies. Albert Bigelow Paine, Life of Mark Twain (1912), has few equals in American biography. Compare also Julia C. Harris, Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (1918). CHAPTER IV SPECIE PAYMENTS, 1879 "MARK TWAIN inflicted indigestion on Boston," said the Chicago Inter-Ocean, in comment upon his speech at the Whittier dinner, "and the silver dollar has driven Silver and New York to almost hopeless lunacy." The in- greenbacks vasion of the West in the fields of letters and history was paralleled by an eruption of border problems that demanded adjustment from the party leaders. Among these the emergence of a silver issue attracted the attention of Congress in 1877 and 1878. The American silver dollar was in truth the "dollar of our daddies" in 1878. It had rarely been seen in circulation since Jackson's act in 1834 established its relative weight, or coinage ratio, at sixteen to one with gold. The original attempt of Hamilton in his financial report of 1791 to establish a bimetallic money, in which two metallic coins should circulate at the same value, was frustrated by the inability of the two metals selected, gold and silver, to maintain an unchanging commercial ratio with each other. Hamilton provided for their coinage at the ratio of fifteen to one, at which weights the gold dollar was a few cents more valuable than the silver dollar, and was speedily withdrawn from circulation. The ancient Gresham law, to the effect that bad money drives out good, or, otherwise stated, that when two moneys are in existence with the same nominal value, but with different intrinsic value, the more valuable will be hoarded, and the less valuable will remain in circulation and fix the value of the coin, was fully borne out by the experience of the United States under both Hamilton's law and Jackson's. The change of coinage ratio to sixteen to one in 1834 was designed to bring it closer to the commercial ratio in order to keep both metals in simultaneous circulation. The |