A great institution was the vigilance committee of those early Western days.  They saved San Francisco, and Cheyenne, and Leadville.  I wish they had been in Brooklyn when I was there.  The West was not slow to assimilate the elegancies of life either.  There were beautiful picture galleries in Omaha, and Denver, and Sacramento, and San Francisco.  There was more elaboration and advancement of dress in the West than there was in the East in 1880.  The cravats of the young men in Cheyenne were quite as surprising, and the young ladies of Cheyenne went down the street with the elbow wabble, then fashionable in New York.  San Francisco was Chicago intensified, and yet then it was a mere boy of a city, living in a garden of Eden, called California.  On my return came Mr. Garfield’s election.  It was quietly and peaceably effected, but there followed that exposure of political outrages concerning his election, the Morey forgeries.  I hoped then that this villainy would split the Republican and Democratic parties into new fields, that it would spilt the North and the South into a different sectional feeling.  I hoped that there would be a complete upheaval, a renewed and cleaner political system as a consequence.  But the reform movement is always slower than any other.

I remember the harsh things that were said in our denomination of Lucretia Mott, the quakeress, the reformer, the world-renowned woman preacher of the day.  She was well nigh as old as the nation, eighty-eight years old, when she died.  Her voice has never died in the plain meeting-houses of this country and England.  I don’t know that she was always right, but she always meant to be right.  In Philadelphia, where she preached, I lived among people for years who could not mention her name without tears of gratitude for what she had done for them.  There was great opposition to her because she was the first woman preacher, but all who heard her speak knew she had a divine right of utterance.

In November, 1880, Disraeli’s great novel, “Endymion” was published by an American firm, Appleton & Co., a London publisher paying the author the largest cash price ever paid for a manuscript up to that time—­$50,000.  Noah Webster made that much in royalties on his spelling book, but less on one of the greatest works given to the human race, his dictionary.  There was a great literary impulse in American life, inspired by such American publishing houses as Appleton’s, the Harper Bros., the Dodds, the Randolphs, and the Scribners.  It was the brightest moment in American literature; far brighter than the day Victor Hugo, in youth, long anxious to enter the French Academy, applied to Callard for his vote.  He pretended never to have heard of him.  “Will you accept a copy of my books?” asked Victor Hugo.  “No thank you,” replied the other; “I never read new books.”  Riley offered to sell his “Universal Philosophy” for $500.  The offer was refused.  Great and wise authors have often been without food and shelter.