A.D. 1872.] AMERICAN JOURNAL. 233 I parted with my friends at Cheyenne, and took the train southwards to Denver City, a new town at the foot of the mountains in Colorado, which is now a great mining district. I discussed Indian troubles with an American officer on the road, and learnt that departments in America are as dilatory, as weak, and as obnoxious to those who serve under them in the New World as they are in the Old. . . . At 8.30 P.M. I left Denver by the Kansas Pacific Railway for the East. I soon found out an Englishman, a Mr Teal, the manager of the Terrible Mine, who was going to look for his wife and family in New York. They had telegraphed their departure from England, and the message reached the clerk at his station on the 9th. He was drunk for a fortnight, and did not deliver it until the 21st. The ship arrived on the 19th, and the family are staying somewhere, Mr Teal does not know where, in New York helpless. Great is our indignation at the misuse of whisky. We smoked several pipes together in the drawing-room inveighing against it, and we were calmer after the smoke, and slept soundly. Wednesday, Oct. 23.-Nothing but rolling prairie for miles and miles. Everybody is looking for the buffalo, and we saw many, alive and dead. They are certainly grand animals, and it seems cruel to shoot them simply for the pleasure of hunting, without using the meat.1 We 1 This noble animal is now extinct, save for a small herd preserved in the Yosemite Park. Twenty years ago it existed in migratory herds of countless thousands; but the combined avarice and cruelty of man, aided by repeating-rifles, has prevailed to destroy the species off the face of the earth. The bisection of the buffalo prairies by the Canadian-Pacific Railway no doubt contributed to extermination, for it interfered with the annual migration saw antelopes, prairie-hens, and wild turkeys in great numbers; but for the first 300 miles every station at which we stopped for water-there were no passengers-was protected by one or two soldiers, who had formed for themselves a sort of underground miniature fortress. The winds here are so tremendous, when they blow over the prairie, that men are glad to excavate, dig out the earth, and form a habitation which cannot be blown away. We looked into one of these underground huts, of which walls, roof, and everything were earth, and although it was very rough, it showed the occupier was well-to-do. There was a profusion of firearms, saddles, &c., and one or two large American trunks, holding clothes, &c. Towards afternoon a tree or two became visible, and we approached a small stream of water. Then large herds of cattle, some three or four thousand in a herd, took the place of buffalo, and wooden shanties became almost frequent. At 10 P.M. I arrived at Junction City, where I had to leave the Pacific train in order to go south to Emporia. The names are great, and the laying out of streets implies great expectations; but at present backwood cities do not come up to the Old World ideas of what constitutes cities. Here and there a brick-and-stone house, a clay-built one, thirty or forty wooden shanties, and a good many open spaces covered with weeds, and there is the city before you. But there is always a milliner or two to be found, several lawyers, a dry-goods store, and a schoolhouse. Here this epistolary journal comes to an end, and the next letter is from New York. of the herds. Buffaloes have been known to destroy themselves by charging a railway train in blind fury. At the present day the only traces left of them are piles of whitening bones and horns. A.D. 1872.] one. AMERICAN JOURNAL. 235 Nov. 5.-My journey from Kansas was rather a hard I was anxious to get on, and although the country is interesting and part of it very beautiful, I am very glad it is all over, and that I am now sitting down as it were. waiting for the door to be opened to let me in to England. I got to Washington on Friday afternoon. . . . Mr. Russell Gurney went with me to call on President Grant, with whom I had some minutes' conversation.1 His secretary took me round the city afterwards, and in a few hours I saw everything that was worth seeing . . . Mr Froude is here, and I have been out with him this morning to see the polling at the elections going forward to-day. It is very interesting, and the police here are very careful of us; but I must tell you when I see you-not long after you get this. . . . ... 1 After Smith's return to England, Mr Russell Gurney, writing from Washington, says: "I was amused with the account of a conversation yesterday at a party of very intelligent Americans. The question was raised whether there were any great men in America. The conclusion was pretty soon arrived at that neither in the Senate nor the House were there any, though some doubt was expressed as to Schurtz, who is, as you probably know, a German. At last it was settled that there was one, and only one, and he was Grant. I am so glad that I took you to him, as it would have been a pity if you had gone away without seeing the one great man in the country. I fear you were scarcely aware of your privilege." 236 CHAPTER IX. 1873-1874. INCREASING UNPOPULARITY OF MINISTERS-IRISH UNIVERSITY BILL-DEFEAT AND RESIGNATION CONSERVATIVE THE first Administration of Mr Gladstone now entered upon its fifth year of existence with the shadow of unpopularity deepening on its course. So many apprehensions had been aroused, such powerful interests harassed, that it might have seemed to Ministers that their only chance of conducting affairs towards the natural term of the Parliament lay in avoiding sensational enterprise in legislation and in allaying rather than rousing opposition. Aliter visum! In a fatal hour for the Govern A.D. 1873.] IRISH UNIVERSITIES BILL. 237 ment the Prime Minister plunged once more into the troubled tide of Irish politics. Already he had prevailed to destroy the Irish Church and revolutionise the tenure of Irish landed property; there remained a third question, the settlement of which he had in his electioneering speeches of 1868 declared to be essential to the conciliation of Irish disaffection. Perhaps in doing so he had yielded to the temptation, irresistible to less experienced orators, of casting rhetoric in a triple mould it is difficult to assign any other reason for his having discovered in the state of Irish University Education a grievance more crying than the irreconcilable variance of the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches in temporal matters. Although he can hardly have calculated on the complexity and multiplicity of opposition which was to be called into existence by the mere mention of this question in the Queen's Speech, it has ever been a characteristic of this remarkable statesman never to be so happy as when dragging hesitating and even reluctant followers through the turmoil of parliamentary war to an issue which they would fain avoid. Such was the task he undertook in tabling his Irish University Bill. The event proved that in essaying to satisfy the claims of the Irish Roman |