Sir William Howard Russell

“ As a "sight" for a foreigner, nothing could be more striking than the vast saloon, brilliantly illuminated, with hundreds of people on sofas, chairs, and benches, reading or conversing in the intervals of the music, and presenting infinite varieties of type and class, yet all so orderly and well-behaved; and if you moved quietly through the crowd, your ear caught many strange languages interpolating the American speech—German, French, Polish, Russian, Italian, and, perhaps the natives would say, British. ”

“ His lectures are attended by crowded audiences, but, as an astute American observed, "they won't come to much, for, after all, people who do not believe anything can never get up a great enthusiasm. It is in believing something that the populace has faith."
Once more our eyes were rejoiced with the sight of the lovely plains of Las Vegas, wide-spreading fields decked with flowers and dotted with flocks, bordered with ranges of softly contoured mountains, the courses of the water streams indicated by bright vegetation and by growth of trees of many kinds. ”

“ I do not think there is in any other part of the world, or that there ever has been in any civilised country, such shootings as have filled the land to which I allude with bloodshed. It may be said with truth that there never have been and that there are not any similar conditions in the world. But the absence of any great abiding movement for the correction and suppression of violence and lawlessness cannot be so readily accounted for or excused. There appears to be a sort of admiration for these border ruffians among portions of the American Press and public. ”

“ When we look to the Far West and see, for instance, how Winnipeg has become the centre of a great network of river navigation, 300 miles in one direction, 600 miles in another, and that the Mackenzie River passes for 1200 miles through what is declared to be the future wheat region of the world, we may easily comprehend the anxiety with which the patriotic American is filled lest the future of such a State should fall into hands antagonistic to the principles in which his beau idéal of government has been founded and has prospered. ”

“ He is the companion of sportsmen, and he delights, free as mountain air, to hunt on the hillside and in the prairie in winter over the vast ranges of snowy fields which in the few short months of spring and summer teem with flowers, and the frosty lakes which yield fish to his spear and net. There are few or no railways through his reservations to vex his repose, no great trains of miners with pick and rifle to drive away the moose and the buffalo, and hand the native hunter over to starvation. ”

“ Admit that I can be as magnanimous as I am rich and cultivated! I am of your house, but I have transplanted all the good qualities of your race to American soil, and grafted them on the tree of liberty which towers aloft in all the splendour of Transatlantic luxuriance above us. ”

“ It has driven away the game, it has carried in proximity to their reservations all the enterprise charged with whiskey, revolver, rifle, and greed, which can be furnished by the offscourings of the world. In the Far West the miners in advance throng into the valleys, and break the silence of the mountain-ranges by the sound of their picks, the cattle-raisers spread out over the plains, the ploughman settles down on the fertile land. "What," asks the American philanthropist, and his question is echoed all over the world by humane and good men, "what is to become of the Indian?" ”

“ But to the Red Man as to the Black in many cases the White Man is worse than any wolf; far more bloodthirsty and rapacious than any tiger—a Cain of Cains. It was our own kith and kin who, landing on the shores of the North American continent, encroaching by degrees upon the tribes and at last encountering their hostility, spread their sway literally by fire and sword, and rooted out the Red Man wherever they found him established on land or by sea which they coveted. ”

“ Sometimes, doubtless, there are cases of very real suffering, sorrow, and poverty, to which exile in the United States affords a melancholy refuge. I was obliged to hear in one great city of a gallant soldier who, reduced to poverty by no fault of his own, had quitted England and given up the society of his friends, and lived in a small suburb of a town on the coast of the Pacific, his secret known only to one or two officials, shunning all contact with his countrymen and evading as far as possible all inquiries of his friends. ”

“ The inspection of the dreadful den in which the opium-smokers were to be seen suggested to my mind a train of thought in connection with the traffic which I would not willingly have communicated to my American friends. It will seem incredible some day to the awakened conscience of the nation that we should have ever sanctioned such a frightful crime as the opium traffic. "It only poisons about two millions of people," is the excuse, "and brings in one-sixth of the whole revenue of India." ”

“ The story of Leadville reads like a chapter out of some book of Oriental fable. It is a huge barrack of wooden houses, with some solid and 103 important buildings, with masses of tree-stumps cropping up in the centre of the main thoroughfares, pitched over an undulating, rugged, dusty ledge. In the midst of blocks of houses sprout up the chimneys of furnaces and mining works, the clang of machinery fills the air, which is thick with clouds of dust. ”

“ I hope it will not be imagined that I have any desire to cast obloquy on the grand efforts, supremely successful as they have been, to turn the prairie and the desert to the uses of civilised man and of the world, and to open up the Western Continent to 167 humanity and civilisation. I am too sensible of the courtesy, ready service, and hospitality everywhere accorded to the party of English travellers of which I was one, to write one word which I thought calculated to give pain or offence to any of our many friends or to any right-minded American. ”

“ I dreaded the passage of the Desert to Yuma; and indeed the heat was intense. No wonder that with the thermometer ranging from 100° to 104°, all the blinds in the car were pulled down, and we sprawled listlessly on the cushions. Our excellent attendants put forth all the resources of art in the shape of ice and preparations of limes and cocktails; but the temperature would not be baffled. We could just read, and were aware that we were living, and some of us had strength enough now and then to execute forays against flies with napkins to drive them out of the carriages. ”

“ The welcome which an Englishman who is entitled to admission into good society receives all over the States, in the best houses, and from the best men, is as gracious and warm as ever. It seems as if a reaction against the suspicion, jealousy, and harshness which marred the political relations of the Republic and Great Britain in times gone by, moved those who behave with so much courtesy to Englishmen, and that they seem to say, sotto voce, "Come and see how I forget the wrongs done to the United States by the Ministers of George III. and his successors! ”

“ There, in a basin of rock, it collects its scattered forces, under cover of eternal spray and cloud, and then takes another header of 434 feet to a barrier of granite, against which it rages for a mad moment, till it swells over and escapes from control by another spring of 600 feet sheer down—and now it is free, and rushes past at our feet, a joyous flashing stream. ”

“ I shall not attempt to describe my own feelings, far less can I pretend to tell what others, probably far more susceptible of the beauty and grandeur of what we beheld than I am, may have felt at the succession of the awe-inspiring revelations of the tremendous grandeur of the Valley which came upon us. What is the use of rolling off a catalogue of names and figures?—even the brush of the painter, charged with the truest colours and guided by the finest hand and eye, could never do justice—that is, could never give a just idea of these cliffs and waterfalls. ”

“ There is a want of reverence on the part of children towards their parents which is very striking. Americans who have admitted and deplored this have sought to account for it by the school system, wherein the 156 State usurps the place of the parent, and teaches the young idea to mock at any authority but that of the schoolmaster. It would be lamentable to have to admit that free education is associated with the weakening of parental influence. Theoretically, there is nothing in the American system to prevent the teaching of religious and moral duties by parents at home ”

“ Schurz, "has tried to protect the Indians in good faith against encroachments, and has failed. It has yielded to the pressure exercised upon it by people in immediate contact with the Indians. When a collision between Indians and whites once occurred, no matter who was responsible for it, our military forces were always found on the side of the white against the savage. How was Government to proclaim that white men should for ever be excluded from the millions of acres covered by Indian reservations, and that the national power would be exerted to do so?" ”

“ By enormous trunks of trees, by piles of timber, through deep cuttings in the rock, plashing over watercourses, descending swiftly into river-beds, and splashing through the fords over boulders, then climbing up steep hillsides, on and on, it seemed as though the night would never come to an end, and we inwardly, and audibly too, expressed our regret that we had not started a little earlier ”

“ Woodpeckers of many different species uttered their quaint notes in jerky flight from tree to tree, or peered at the travellers from the shelter of the branches. Firs, pines, and spruces of enormous size, and trees to me unknown, formed a dense forest on each side of the road; but now and then we caught glimpses of the stupendous ranges of the alps beyond. It was lamentable to see the waste and wreck wrought in this wondrous wealth of timber—reckless, wicked waste. Charred trunks stood with leafless arms 28 withered and black, or lay prone among the ferns in myriads. ”

“ A very distinguished officer and politician said to me that he had at one time been a most eager and ardent adherent of the policy of the Native American Party, but that when he saw how earnestly and devotedly the Irish had come forward in defence of the Union, how brilliantly they had fought, and how recklessly they had sacrificed their lives, in 1861, he felt constrained to abandon his principles, and to admit their free right to all the privileges of American citizenship. ”

“ Every one we knew seemed to have visited San Francisco. There we all submitted to inevitable fate, and left our negatives behind us, but the Duke was captured by a rival photographic institution, and had a sitting all to himself.
The aspect of a crowd in a large American city differs from that of the passers-by in the street of an English town, most of all in the appearance of such a large proportion of coloured people. ”

“ Not a car to be found, that I could see; but there were a few porters, and the agent of the hotel at the pier; and, commending my luggage to his care, I walked to the establishment. It surely cannot be quite an unaccustomed event for a steamer to arrive at Queenstown at that time of night! The last train for Cork had gone; and it might have been expected that lighted rooms and some sort of preparation would have awaited the travellers; for every vessel that touches at Queenstown, coming from America, surely lands a few people needing rest and refreshment? ”

“ If there were not a distinction between knowledge and morality, they would be justified; but the Evil One tempted us to eat of the fruit of the tree which brought sin into the world, and if Americans are to be trusted as authorities, the result of the largest and most liberal system of education ever devised is not as happy in practice as it ought to be according to theory. ”

“ It may be corruption of political life leading to want of faith in free institutions; it may be the rival energies and the opposing interests which Washington foresaw as likely to array the East against the West—the Atlantic States against the inland States, and it is calculated by some sanguine people that before this century is over there will be eighteen, or possibly twenty, States admitted into the Union formed out of the Territories which are now under the central Government at Washington. Upon such influences as these alien immigration may be expected to act with prodigious power. ”

“ The spurs of the hills come down very sharply to the valley, and the road is carried round by a series of very severe gradients following the contour of the mountain-chain, so that at one time there is a deep gorge on your left, and then, as the road leaves that spur with the valley on that side and crosses to another spur, there is a great descent on the right, so that you are continually passing along by a series of precipices, to which, in our case, the fast gathering gloom imparted additional horror. ”

“ The recital of wrongs, most of which have been long ago redressed, still reaches the ear and touches the heart of the American public, and if the Irish population had not in many ways provoked or excited the antagonism of the native Americans in the towns, and of the Teutonic element which exercises such a powerful influence in the country, there would be far greater sympathy for the supposed oppression of the Sister Island by England. ”