s. Gangs of loafers hung around our street
corners, insulting and threatening men and women. Carriages were held up
in the streets, the occupants robbed, and the vehicles stolen.
Kidnapping was known. Behind all this outrage of civil rights was
political outrage. The politicians were afraid to offend the criminals,
because they might need their votes in future elections. They were
immune, because they were useful material in case of a new governor or
President. It was a reign of terror that spread also in other large
cities. The farmers of Ohio and Pennsylvania were threatened if they did
not stop buying labour-saving machinery. They were not the threats of
the working-man, but of the lazy, criminal loafers of the country. It is
worth mentioning, because it was a convulsion of an American period, a
national growing pain, which I then saw and talked about. The nation was
under the cloud of political ambition and office-seeking that unsettled
business conditions. Every one was occupied in President-making,
although we were two years from the Presidential election. There was
plenty of money, but people held on to it.

The yellow fever scourge came down upon the South during the late summer
of 1878, and softened the hearts of some. There was some money
contributed from the North, but not as much as there ought to have been.
In the Brooklyn Tabernacle we did the best we could; New York city had
been ravaged by yellow fever in 1832, the year I was born, but the
memory of that horror was not keen enough to influence the collection
plate. What with this suffering of our neighbours in the South, and the
troubles of political jealousies local and national, there were cares
enough for our church to consider. Still, the summer of 1878 was almost
through, and many predictions of disaster had failed. We had been
threatened with general riots. It was predicted that on June 27 all the
cars and railroad stations would be burned, because of a general strike
order. We were threatened with a fruit famine. It was said that the
Maryland and New Jersey peach crop was a failure. I never saw or ate so
many peaches any summer before.

Then there was the Patten investigation committee, determined to send
Mr. Tilden down to Washington to drive the President out of the White
House. None of these things happened, yet it is interesting to recall
this phase of American nerves in 1878.

There was one event that aroused my disgust, however, much more