George Cary Eggleston

“ As The Last of the Flatboats passed the upper part of New Orleans, the boys were disposed to gaze at the strangely beautiful city. It was greater in size than any city that they had ever seen; for none of them had visited Cincinnati, though they had lived all their lives within sixty or seventy miles of it. New Orleans was different in architecture, situation, and everything else from Louisville and Memphis, cities at which they had looked up from the river, while at New Orleans they found themselves looking down, and taking almost a bird’s-eye view of the city. ”

“ On their return to Vevay a few evenings later, Ed said to his mother:—
“You were right, mother; responsibility has already worked a miracle in Phil’s character.”
“No, you are wrong,” said the wise mother. “It is only that you have never quite understood your brother until now. Nothing really changes character—at least nothing changes it suddenly. Circumstances do not alter the character of men or women or boys. They only call out what is already there. Responsibility and his great affection for you have not changed your brother in the least. ”

“ With the Mississippi on one side and the Ohio on the other, and with their floods united across country above the town, these helpless people have nothing in the world but an embankment of earth between them and death. ”

“ How I do hate shams and frauds and lies—and especially liars!”
“What bothers me,” drawled Irv, “is that I’ve been eating microbes all my life without knowing it. I here and now register a solemn vow that I’ll never again eat a piece of cheese—unless I want to.”
“Oh, the microbes are all right,” said Ed, “provided they are of the right sort. There are some microbes that kill us, and others that we couldn’t live without. There are still others, like those in cheese, that do us neither good nor harm, except that they make our food more palatable. ”

“ But if meat is low or corn high, they sell the corn.”
“And they know to the nicest fraction of a pound,” added Ed, “how much corn it takes to make a given amount of pork.”
“Well, even if we didn’t sell any corn at all to other nations,” said Phil, “I should think our crop would help them. We eat a great deal of it, and if we hadn’t it, we’d eat just so much wheat instead, and so we should have just that much less wheat to sell to them.”
“Exactly,” said Ed. “Every thing that feeds a man in any country leaves precisely that much more to feed other men with in other countries.” ”

“ Nobody could remember.
“Guess he sneaked it aboard as he did that jug,” said Phil, “and as he did his cramps.”
“Don’t be too hard on the fellow, boys,” said Ed, whose generosity was always apt to get the better of his judgment. “Remember he’s ignorant, and ignorance is always inclined to be suspicious. Probably he hasn’t more than a dollar’s worth or so in that carpet-bag; but as it is all he has in the world, he’s naturally careful of it. He’s afraid some of us will steal his things. If he knew more, he would know better. ”

“ It is the only mineral substance that men everywhere eat. All the rest of our foods are either animal or vegetable.”
“And that’s a puzzle,” replied Ed. “Man must have got a very early taste of salt, or else there wouldn’t be any man.”
“How’s that?”
“Why, the human animal simply can’t live without salt. He digests his food by means of an acid which he gets from salt, and from nothing else whatever. So he must have had salt from the beginning.”
“The Garden of Eden must have been a seaport then,” mused Phil. “Adam and Eve probably boiled their new potatoes in water dipped up from the docks.” ”

“ For in the very nature of things, countries that already have from twenty to twenty-five times our population to the [347] square mile cannot hope to grow as we inevitably shall.”
“But what if we don’t continue to stand for liberty and human right?” asked Phil. “What if we forget our national mission, and use our vast power not for freedom, but for conquest; not for the right, but for the wrong?”
“That is what every American citizen owes it to his country to guard against by his vote,” answered Ed.
“In other words,” said Irv “that’s what we are here for.” ”

“ And as a man, or even a commonplace boy like me, is fitter to live than a turkey, I think the slaughter of those innocents is all right enough.”
“You are entirely right, Phil,” said Ed. “A pound of boy is certainly worth fifty or fifty thousand pounds of turkey, because one boy can do more for the world than all [295] the turkeys that were ever hatched. And when a boy eats turkey he converts it into boy, and it helps him to grow into a man.”
“Precisely!” said Irv Strong. “It cost the worthless lives of many pigs, turkeys, chickens, sheep, and cattle to make George Washington. ”

“ The better they learn that lesson, the more civilized they become.”
“Then the theorists are right who want the state to own everything and everybody to work for the state and be supported by it?” asked Phil.
“Not a little bit of it,” said Ed. “That would be simply to go back to the tribal plan that savages adopt when they first realize the advantages of working together, and abandon when they grow civilized. We have worked out of that and into something better. With us, every man works for all the rest by working for himself in the way that best serves his own welfare. ”

“ Well, let me tell you that the man you rescued from a horrible death up there in the Tallahatchie swamp is my brother-in-law, the woman you saved is my sister, and the children my nephew and nieces. Now you will understand that whatever you happen to want in New Orleans is yours, if I know of your wanting it. We should all be more than glad to do vastly more for such good friends as you if we could. ”

“ It would mean that the Great Republic, planted upon the theory of absolute and equal liberty, would so enormously outweigh all other nations combined, in numbers and in physical and moral force, that no nation and no coalition of nations would ever dare dispute our country’s decisions or balk her will. We should in that case dominate the world by our numbers, our wealth, and our productiveness. ”

“ You see now what power of malignity and destructiveness it has. This single flood has already destroyed hundreds of lives and swept away scores and hundreds of homes, and obliterated millions of dollars’ worth of property. Before it is over the hundreds in each case will be multiplied into thousands. Even now, right here at Cairo, a great disaster impends. Every able-bodied man in the town has been sent with pick or shovel or wheelbarrow to work night and day in strengthening and raising the levees. ”

“ The navigable part of the Yazoo is, as Phil said, one hundred and seventy-five miles long. Oh, by the way—”
“What is the thought behind that exclamation?” said Irv, when Ed paused; for Irv’s spirits were irrepressible.
“It just occurs to me,” said Ed, “that this wonderful river of ours, the Mississippi with its tributaries, is almost exactly one hundred times as long—in its navigable parts—as the greatest commercial river of the East.”
“In other words,” said Irv, “the East isn’t in it with us. Its great Hudson River would scarcely more than make a tail for the Mississippi below New Orleans. ”

“ It would take a day or two to send men by rail from Cincinnati to Memphis, while the fierce current of this Mississippi flood promised to take the flatboat thither within less than twenty hours.
After working out all the probabilities in his mind as well as he could, Phil called below for all his comrades to come to the sweeps. He did not tell them his purpose; they were too sleepy even to ask. But studying the “lay of the land” on either side, he steered the flatboat into a sort of pocket on the Tennessee shore, and to the bewilderment of his comrades, ordered the anchor cast overboard. ”

“ As the river is a public highway for purposes [68] of commerce, nobody can charge you for any legitimate use of it, or its shores below high-water mark, such use, for example, as landing in front of his property, a thing which may be absolutely necessary to navigation. But if a man or a city chooses to spend money in making your landing easy and convenient, say by building a levee or wharf, putting in posts for you to make your boat fast by, or anything of the kind, that man or city has a right to charge you, not for landing, but for the use of the improvements and conveniences. ”

“ Presently there was another little break in the fog-bank, and Phil saw what was the matter. Just ahead of the boat the levee had given way, and the river was plunging like a Niagara through a crevasse, already two or three hundred feet wide, and growing wider with every second. The boat had been caught in the current leading to the crevasse, and was now being drawn into the swirling rapid. ”

“ It is in the ‘struggle for existence’ that men advance most rapidly.”
“Wonder if that wasn’t what Humboldt meant,” said Irv, “when he called the banana ‘the curse of the tropics,’ adding that when a man planted one banana tree he provided food enough for himself and his descendants to the tenth generation, in a climate where there is no real necessity for clothes.”
“Exactly,” said Ed. “Somebody once said that ‘every man is as lazy as he dares to be.’”
“Well, I am, anyhow,” yawned Irv, “and so I’m going up on deck under the awning to make up some of that sleep I lost last night.” ”

“ As it is, your wrath is merely ridiculous. Of course a trapped bank burglar tries to buy his way out with his swag. Of course such a creature doesn’t know what honest people think or feel—he has no capacity to understand it any more than he could understand Russian. Go below, Constant, and watch that thief. Ed, you must recover yourself. Phil will come aboard presently, and I really don’t suppose you want to tell Phil precisely what has happened and leave him to—well, let us say to discipline Jim Hughes. ”

“ The hero is the man who, in pursuit of any worthy purpose,—though it be only to make more money for the support of his family,—calmly faces the risks, endures the hardships, and performs the tasks that fall to his lot. The highest courage imaginable is that which prompts a man to do his duty as he understands it, with absolute disregard of consequences to himself.”
That night Phil read his newspapers very diligently. ”

“ Craig’s Landing is the nearest there is to all of them, and they can all get their produce there quickly. I propose that every boy in the crew take his foot in his hand early to-morrow morning, and that we visit every farmer in the list and persuade him to send his stuff to the landing at once. I’ve already seen Captain Wright,—saw him in town to-day,—and he promises me thirty barrels of apples and seventy bushels of onions with some other things. ”

“ Ed laughed, and continued:—
“Well, the war damaged New Orleans, of course, not only by shutting up the port for some years, but by impoverishing the southern states which New Orleans supplied with provisions and goods and from which it drew cotton. Then, again, New York had and still has most of the free money there is in this country, the money that is hunting for something to do. You know that money is like a man in this respect. It always wants to earn wages. Now, when the western farmer sells his grain and the like to a country merchant, he wants money for it. ”

“ As the boat neared Louisville, Ed suggested to his brother that he had better land above the town, and not within its limits.
“Why?” asked Phil. “We’ve got to get some provisions as well as hire a falls pilot, and it will be more convenient if we land at the levee.”
“But it will cost us five or ten dollars in good money for wharfage,” replied Ed.
“But if we land above the town, how do we know the man owning the land on which we tie up won’t charge us just as much?” asked Irv Strong, who had never seen a large city and wanted to get as good a glimpse as he could of this one. ”

“ No ordinary farmer keeps any account of his crops of that kind. Not one farmer in a hundred could tell you at the end of a year how many dozens of eggs or how many pairs of chickens he had sold. Still less could he tell you how many of either his family had eaten. So it must all be guess-work about such crops, while practically every bushel of wheat, corn, and oats and every bale of cotton or hay, and every pound of tobacco is carefully set down in official records. ”

“ So The Last of the Flatboats tarried in the bend above Cairo, waiting for the worst of [113] the drift to run by before again venturing upon the bosom of the great flood.
“I say, Ed,” said Phil, looking out upon the vast waste of water with its seething surface of wreckage, “nothing in all that you have told us about the river has given me so good an idea of its tremendous power as the sight of that,”—waving his hand toward the stream.
“Of course not,” replied the elder. “Nothing that anybody could say in a lifetime could equal that demonstration of power. ”

“ No, I’m not sorry that we’ve been able to render [195] so great a service to the public, and I’m not going to pretend that I am.”
“You’re right, Phil,” said Ed.
“Of course he is,” said Irv; “and as for Jim Hughes, he will get only what he deserves. If there were no laws, or if they were not enforced by the punishment of crime, there wouldn’t be much ‘show’ for honest people in this world.”
“There wouldn’t be any honest people, I reckon,” said Will, “for honest people simply couldn’t live. Everybody would have to turn savage and robber, or starve to death.” ”

“ The farmers of New York and New Jersey used to grow all the wheat, and all the beef, mutton, and pork that were eaten in the great city, and they made a good living by doing it. But the time came when the western states could raise wheat and beef and all the rest of it much more cheaply than any eastern farmer could. This threatened to drive the New York and New Jersey farmers out of business, and naturally, if they could, they would have made their legislators pass laws to exclude this western wheat and meat from competition with their crops. ”

“ For no pilot would think of running in such a cloud after finding any shore to which he could make his boat fast.”
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“But how can a steamboat find the shore when we can’t?” asked Will.
“Because she can keep running till she finds it; and if she runs slowly she can back when she finds it till she makes an easy landing. She has power, and power gives her control of herself. We have none, except what the sweeps give us. In fogs like this steamboats always hunt for the shores and tie up till the fog lifts. ”

“ But he had some backwoods volunteers, and he enlisted all the merchants he could in New Orleans, and all their clerks, all the ragamuffins of the city, all the wharf rats, and all the free negroes there, and armed them as best he could. Half of Pakenham’s force had moved from Lake Borgue to a point a few miles below the city. Without waiting for a force fit to fight them with, Jackson cried ‘Forward’ to his motley collection of men, and on the night of December 23, 1814, he attacked the great veteran English army in the dark. ”