Mr. Burlingame’s short history--for he was only forty-seven--reads like a fairy tale. Its successes, its surprises, its happy situations, occur all along, and each new episode is always an improvement upon the one which went before it. He begins life an assistant in a surveying party away out on the Western frontier; then enters a branch of a Western college; then passes through Harvard with the honors; becomes a Boston lawyer and looks back complacently from his high perch upon the old days when he was a surveyor nobody in the woods; becomes a state senator, and makes laws; still advancing, goes to the Constitutional Convention and makes regulations wherewith to rule the makers of laws; enters Congress and smiles back upon the Legislature and the Boston lawyer, and from these smiles still back upon the country surveyor, recognizes that he is known to fame in Massachusetts; challenges Brooks and is known to the nation; next, with a long stride upward, he is clothed with ministerial dignity and journeys to the under side of the world to represent the youngest in the court of the oldest of the nations; and finally, after years go by, we see him moving serenely among the crowned heads of the Old World, a magnate with secretaries and undersecretaries about him, a retinue of quaint, outlandish Orientals in his wake, and a long following of servants--and the world is aware that his salary is unbelievably enormous, not to say imperial, and likewise knows that he is invested with power to make treaties with all the chief nations of the earth, and that he bears the stately title of Ambassador, and in his person represents the mysterious and awful grandeur of that vague colossus, the Emperor of China, his mighty empire and his four hundred millions of subjects! Down what a dreamy vista his backward glance must stretch, now, to reach the insignificant surveyor in the Western woods! He was a good man, and a very, very great man. America lost a son, and all the world a servant, when he died. THE TEMPERANCE CRUSADE AND WOMAN’S RIGHTS (1873) The women’s crusade against the rum sellers continues. It began in an Ohio village early in the new year, and has now extended itself eastwardly to the Atlantic seaboard, 600 miles, and westwardly (at a bound, without stopping by the way,) to San Francisco, about 2,500 miles. It has also scattered itself along down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers southwardly some ten or twelve hundred miles. Indeed, it promises to sweep, eventually, the whole United States, with the exception of the little cluster of commonwealths which we call New England. Puritan New England is sedate, reflective, conservative, and very hard to inflame.