navigators had discovered the New World, has built in her whole career!

The same year witnessed a calamity almost as vast as the enterprise just referred to was astonishing. The event in question was the burning of Chicago. On the evening of the 8th of October a fire broke out in De Koven Street and was driven by a high wind into the lumber-yards and wooden houses of the neighborhood. The conflagration spread with great rapidity across the south branch of the Chicago River and thence into the business parts of the city. All that night and the next day the deluge of fire rolled on, sprang across the main channel of the river into North Chicago and swept everything away as far as Lincoln Park. The area burned over was two thousand one hundred acres, or three and a third square miles! About two hundred lives were lost and property destroyed to the value of two hundred millions of dollars. No such devastation by fire had been witnessed since the burning of Moscow. The ravaged district was the greatest ever swept over by fire in a city; the amount of property was second in value, and the suffering occasioned third among the great conflagrations of the world.

In the fall of 1822 the dispute between the United States and Great Britain relative to our northwestern boundary was settled by arbitration. The treaty of 1846 had defined that line as extending to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver's Island and thence southerly through the middle of said channel and of Fuca's Straits to the Pacific. But what was "the middle of said channel"? There were several channels, and the British government claimed the Straits of Rosario as the true line. The contention of the United States was for the channel called the Canal de Haro. After a quarter of a century the question was finally referred for arbitration to William I., Emperor of Germany. That monarch heard the cause, and on

the 21st of October, 1872, decided in favor of the United States, thus denoting the Canal de Haro as the international boundary.

President Grant was by education and habit a military man, a general of armies rather than a statesman. It was natural, from the conditions present at the epoch, that the military spirit should strongly express itself in the administration. Major-generals and brigadiers swarmed in the halls of Congress and thronged the White House. The President was not at all desirous of introducing military methods into the government; but on the other hand he had no sympathy with political methods and knew nothing of the arts of the demagogue. As a natural result he fell back upon the manners and usages with which he was acquainted. This, however, did not injure his popularity. He retained his hold upon the people, and with the approach of the presi dential election it was evident that he would be renominated by his party.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE political questions of the day were still those which had issued from the Civil War. The Congressional plan of reconstruction had been unfavorably received in the South and was attacked by the Democratic party. The raising of · the Negro race to the full rank of citizenship with the right of suffrage had created bitter opposition. In the South the civil government had been disorganized, and the attempt to establish military government in its stead virtually failed. The enmity of the Southern leaders and the greater part of the whites who had participated in the Confederacy was fanned to a flame by the presence of a governmental organization in which they did not, and would not, participate. A lawless secret society, called the Ku-Klux Klan spread through a greater part of the Southern States, its object being to harass and extinguish what were called the carpet-bag governments. These had been in large part instituted by political adventurers from the North, who had gone South at the close of the war with their politics and other fortunes in their carpet-bags! It was now discovered what the Northern statesmen had failed to apprehend, namely, that the freedmen of the South had, for the time, little or no capacity for self-government.

Such were the questions which divided the people in the quadrennial election of 1872. General Grant was renominated by the Republicans. Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, was chosen as the vice-presidential candidate in place of Mr. Colfax. On the Democratic side there was much confusion of counsels. It was foreseen that a leader of that

party on the issue presented to the American people would have small show of success against the great Union captains of the Civil War. Meanwhile a large number of prominent Republicans, dissatisfied with the administration, formed a Liberal Republican party, and nominated for the Presidency Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. After some beating about, this nomination was accepted and ratified by the Democratic party, together with the platform of the Liberal Republicans, which was anything else than Democratic in its character. Greeley had for more than thirty years been an acknowledged leader of public opinion in America. He had been the champion of human rights, advocate of progress, idealist, philanthropist, a second Franklin born out of due season. He had discussed with vehement energy and enthusiasm almost every question in which the people of the United States had any interest. Now, at the age of sixty-one, he was made the standardbearer of a party of political extremes marvelously mixed.

This strange candidate of a strange party went before the people and spoke on the questions involved in the contest; but everything was adverse to his prospects. His own utterances, his strange personality, his former bitter contentions with the Democratic party, and many other things were paraded against him. He was overwhelmingly defeated. Grant's majority was almost unprecedented in the political history of the country. Mr. Greeley, who had for the time. relinquished the editorial management of the Tribune, returned to his duties; but he went back a broken man, and died in less than a month after the election. With him ended the career of the greatest journalist which America had ever produced.

Just after the presidential election, the city of Boston was visited with a conflagration which, but for the recent burning of Chicago, would have been regarded as the greatest

disaster of its kind ever known in the United States. On the evening of the 9th of November a fire broke out on the corner of Kingston and Summer Streets, from which nucleus it spread in a northeasterly direction, and continued to rage with unabated fury until the morning of the 11th. The best portion of the city, embracing some of the most valuable blocks of buildings, was laid in ashes. The burnt district covered an area of sixty-five acres. Fifteen lives were lost, and property to the value of eighty millions of dollars.

In the meantime a dreadful incident had occurred on the Pacific slope. In the spring of 1872 Superintendent Odneal undertook to remove the Modoc Indians from their lands on Lake Klamath, Oregon, to a new reservation. The Indians were already imbittered against the government on account of the mistreatment and robberies to which they had been subjected by the national officers. At length, in November of 1872, a body of troops was sent to force the Modocs into compliance with the official order. They resisted, went on the war-path, and during the winter fixed themselves in an almost inaccessible region known as the Lava Beds. Here in the following spring they were surrounded. On the 11th of April, 1873, six members of the Peace Commission went to a conference with the Modocs, hoping to prevail upon them to yield to the demands of the government, and to cease from hostilities. The Modocs dissembled, and in the midst of the conference sprang up and fired on the Commissioners. General Canby and Dr. Thomas fell dead on the spot. Mr. Meacham was shot and stabbed but escaped with his life. The Modoc stronghold was then besieged and bombarded; but it was not until the 1st of June that General Davis, with a force of regulars, was able to compel the Indians to surrender. Jack himself and several of his chiefs were tried by court-martial, and executed in the following October.