repair their losses; the negroes gave me good reports of their condition; and my own reception and welcome in the old home helped no doubt to incline me towards the optimistic view. It was a pure happiness to meet again my parents, and to find in them no distress about my heresies; they were even reading my " Sacred Anthology" with satisfaction. In the old Methodist church I saw the silken white head of my father bent in prayer-in which I was surely thought of- and when next day the hour of my departure came he had disappeared. Courageous in everything else, he could not face the parting with one he loved. I never saw him again.

CHAPTER II

A witch hunt at Washington - Yellow Springs, Ohio - Cincinnati Judge Hoadly-Journey to Salt Lake City - John W. Young-Mormonism and human nature Elder Penrose as a preacher - Mormon

wives and Mormon husbands - The fate of repudiated wives.

T Washington I had a strange witch hunt! James Parker, once the body-servant of my father, to remain with whom he had actually fled from freedom with the Northern troops to the Confederate lines,—had settled with his family in Washington. He had a beautiful mulatto daughter who was employed by the wife of a high government official as her maid, but shortly before my arrival the girl (about nineteen) began to waste away. Her mistress was much attached to her, and the best physicians were consulted, but none could explain the ailment that was apparently carrying her to the grave. When I called on her she barely raised her head, saying, "I am sorry for you to see me in this condition." My effort to get from her some explanation was fruitless. When I asked her if she was in love she shook her head, and it was the same when I suggested religious trouble. But I saw that the ailment was mental, and on questioning her father closely he admitted, with some shame, that his daughter once said to him that she feared she was bewitched. With that clue I consulted her employer, and a searching investigation revealed a strange situation. The black cook, having become jealous of their mistress's devotion to the mulatto maid, determined to frighten her away. Knowing that the girl was sensitive and imaginative, she

sought to make her believe herself bewitched, and one morning the maid in making up her bed found beneath the mattress at each corner some bags of powdered glass, with scrawled letters and figures. The cook had kept her face of kindness, and on seeing the charms affected pity and said their fatal influence could not be escaped but by flight. The poor maid was ashamed to tell her mistress, and could not bear to leave her, and was gradually prostrated by terror. The cook being at once dismissed, the girl was soothed and restored by the affection of her mistress, and all went well.

This family was one that I had settled at Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1862. My dear friend, Mrs. Julia Lawrence, who resided there, had long seen after them for me, and when I met her on my westward journey, reported that though many had settled in other towns, those who remained were doing well.

In Cincinnati there was excitement about an approaching gubernatorial election. The quietest place I found there was the home of the Democratic candidate, Judge Hoadly, whose guest I was during my stay. His residence (on Walnut Hills) had shortly before been struck by lightning, which had penetrated solely to the drawingroom, which contained admirable works by Turner, Corot, Courbet, Frère, and others, but the thunderbolt had so well conducted itself that nothing whatever was touched except the gilded cornice, which was changed to a sort of gilt-toothed comb. This heavenly decoration had been preserved. In 1857 Hoadly had left his party and coöperated with the Republicans against slavery; that issue settled, the Democrats had now summoned him to be their leader. Hoadly was elected, and it was under his admirable administration that the Cincinnati jail was success

JUDGE HOADLY

39

fully defended against a mob of lynchers, which endeavoured to seize and murder a negro youth awaiting trial for murder.

I had some fear of my dear and intimate friend Judge Hoadly entering upon a political career. As a judge he had shown such ability that he really belonged to the United States Supreme Court. But the Democrats had need of him; they had votes enough to elect their candidate if they could find an eminent leader, but nothing succeeds like success, and although the Republican party had lost many virtues it had never parted from that of success. Hoadly was a Democrat on philosophical principles; he believed in the Declaration of Independence, and was such a Jeffersonian that when I asked permission to dedicate to him my "Life of Paine," whom he placed next to Jefferson, he consented, but with some anxiety lest I should repeat the exposure of Jefferson's duplicity given in my work on Edmund Randolph.

I made the most of this opportunity to obtain light on the subjects I had dealt with in my little book "Republican Superstitions." Judge Hoadly inclined to think that Paine, Franklin, and Jefferson were mistaken in opposing bicameralism in Congress. The Union being by the judge's theory a federation of nations, they needed a federal assembly in addition to a popular one, but he did not deny the anomaly I pointed out, that the Senate the House of these Nations (States) - should have a power over the purse of the people unknown to the House of Lords. Though an advocate of free-trade, always prevented by the Senate, the judge considered the chief defect of the Constitution to be in the words of its preamble"general welfare." In urging Congress and the President to eradicate slavery when it was trying to

destroy the Union, on the ground that the Constitution ordered them to "provide for the general welfare," few of us reflected that the phrase was double-edged and might be used to interfere with local self-government in the future or even with any individual liberty which a perhaps momentary majority of congressmen considered detrimental to the "general welfare." When I quoted this clause in England, as justifiying some policy of Congress, an able writer in the "Pall Mall Gazette," evidently a learned jurist, answered that the phrase was meant to exclude the federal government from interfering with state or municipal interests and to restrict it to the general (e. g. foreign or territorial) interests as distinguished from those of the States. This reply led me to examine the debates of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, but I was unable to discover that the phrase "general welfare " was discussed at all or introduced in that convention.

The steady encroachment of the federal government on personal liberty and on religious equality is traceable in the treatment of the Mormons. The persecutions originally left to mobs were adopted and systematized by our "general welfare" rulers at Washington. Although polygamy appeared to me as the outcome of an extreme biblical letter-worship, I had long recognized, with some of the ablest men I knew in London, that the congressional persecution of the Mormon Church was an unconstitutional policy animated by an immoral spirit under the mask of morality. The law against polygamy had been worded so that a man might maintain as many women as he pleased provided they were not conceded the dignity and legal protection of "wives."

I looked forward with dread to the five days and nights by railway needed to reach Salt Lake City, but it was