← the texts · the dossier

From Texas — First Report to My Friends

Victor Considérant, Paris / Brussels, 1857. English translation of french_clean.md.

Considerant's post-colony report to the shareholders of the Colonization Society — written after his physical and mental collapse in Texas, defending his conduct and announcing that the enterprise's affairs have at last been "resurrected." The prose is deliberately anguished and dash-laden; the translation keeps that texture. Status: PILOT — PART ONE only (sections I–VI). Part Two to follow.

PART ONE

I

I take up the pen again after nearly three years of silence — a silence beside which that of death would have been sweet. I take up the pen again after three years, during two of which the greater part of the available funds of the Colonization Society, of which I was the founder and the head, were swallowed up, before my eyes, in operations not merely little in keeping with, but formally contradictory to, the plan proposed by me, adopted by you all, and to the spirit of the Statutes that had codified the ideas of that plan.

After these three years — which ought to have sufficed to launch our affairs into full prosperity, into the full development of mounting support, into the full realization of what I had held to be assured, and even to set them on the way toward all that I had considered ultimately possible — I take up the pen again, because I can at last tell you that the march toward certain ruin, toward a miserable collapse, toward the disastrous engulfment of the last resources and the last hopes that we had put in common in this common work, is at last halted!

When these two ideas — what I ought to have had to say today, and what today I must count myself happy to be able to tell you — when these two ideas rise up together and measure themselves face to face in my mind, there arises again so sudden a bitterness and so violent a shock within my soul that I am forced to drive them both off at once; to drive them off, for I have not yet been able either to soften the sharpness or to lessen the irritation of this conflict.

Yet I must come back to them — to those years, to that past, to that hell, whose mere memory still hisses within me like a red-hot iron plunged into living flesh.

For today, when I can and must begin again to speak to you, I could not do so without explaining to you, briefly at least, that past — that past which I cannot annihilate. When I break a silence that has lasted nearly three years, you must indeed know why I kept that strange silence. You are about to learn it.

I was crushed before I had so much as set foot again in Texas. What I suffered I will not even try to say. That I did not die a thousand times is what I cannot understand, now that, for two months past, I nonetheless find myself resurrected.

You know in what circumstances I left Europe. A matured plan, logically set out in its successive phases, adopted by all; an appeal answered with enthusiasm all along our lines; superb hopes. I, who all my life have so dreaded compromising others — even for the service of the cause to which my whole life has been devoted — no longer feared, this time, to push forward and to engage, body and goods, anyone. To recall that is, I believe, to say everything. With what I knew of the country to which I had summoned you, with the plan sanctioned by common adoption, with the movement already created — which I still regarded only as a point of departure and a setting-in-motion — I was sure of everything.

II

Before my departure it had been agreed that, the season still permitting it, there would be shipped at the same time as myself the elements proper to the creation of a nursery. Plants and seeds, put in the ground at some point or other where a provisional station would be established — a place to receive letters, to concentrate the first reports, a foothold necessary in any case — meant gaining a year for the introduction, acclimatization, and experimentation of these precious elements, which find their travel season only once in twelve months. I was the author of this idea, which seemed most wise, and which was the origin of all the harm.

I had moreover, myself, put forward and accepted the hypothesis that if, once on the spot, we could — and I then had reason to believe it possible — acquire at a good price Fort Worth, where I had seen buildings capable of sheltering 100 and perhaps 150 workers, gardens in full bearing, etc.; if we could likewise acquire four or five square leagues of surrounding land, and if Fort Worth turned out, as I then also supposed probable, to be at the base of some one of the great territorial acquisitions we should have to make — then nothing would prevent the first phase of colonial preparation, which in my plan was to fall to wage-earners hired in America, from being in great part carried out already by European pioneers, destined to become themselves integral elements of the colonization.

In these forecasts, we had studied our lists, marked the elements most suitable to figure in these operations, and I had left the Provisional Convention as "a protocol open to the adherence of our friends, and permitting them to make, from this day on, definite proposals, which are to be addressed in Europe to the Management, and in America to the executive Agency." (Au Texas, 2nd ed., pp. 314 and 321), so that, these forecasts being realized, the work of forming this nucleus might be found roughed out and as far advanced as possible.

Arrived in New York, I there met with serious disappointments. I quickly understood that the support on which I had thought I could count, from our friends in America, would amount to very little at the start and would wait, before declaring itself, until we had already succeeded. On the other hand, the law of the Reserve, the territorial consequences, the appropriations of the Peters company, etc. — all things of which I had not been informed in the least in Europe! — constituted, in the general circumstances, vexatious changes. You know these facts, treated in detail moreover in a pamphlet hastily written and published in New York, in which I had to try to make of them, in our interest — as also, without any doubt, in the well-understood interest of Texas — the best possible use. I pass over these facts — and over another that nonetheless caused me lively anxiety — because, after all, vexatious as they were, the one and the other, I saw in them nothing really compromising for our projects. No doubt these facts would entail a general rise in the prices of our first acquisitions; no doubt the great vacant spaces I had seen between the Brazos and the Trinity, which I had been assured would remain so for ten years more, and which I had considered as most probably where we should choose our first great sites, were no longer free and accessible as in 1853; but even on the hypothesis of that easy accessibility, there was, in that choice, nothing imperative. My project, conforming to the formal text of my book, and well settled in Europe, was — after spending only a few days at the place, whatever it might be, where our foothold would be — to set out from there with some of those I should find on hand, to visit the whole line of the West, from Corpus Christi on the gulf as far as the Red River.

There was therefore, in these new facts, only a certain probable increase in the prices of the first acquisitions, and more prior uncertainty as to where we should choose our first sites. These drawbacks could moreover be compensated by advantages due to the very movement that had produced them, and I knew very well that, after all, land would not fail us on the western frontiers. In sum, vexed as I was, I was not in the least shaken by these facts.

What, then, threw me to the ground, ground me down, crushed me — a breathing corpse, a state far worse than that of the dead corpse? — I am going to tell you.

III

Already, before my departure from Europe — despite the warnings of my book, despite all my words, despite all the efforts continually repeated and renewed to that end — I had seen with pain and some anxiety the haste with which a certain number of persons from Louvain had stubbornly resolved to leave. My remonstrances having been in vain — since, in the end, those leaving were all bachelors, most young, several well-off and the others carrying their means of existence in their own arms — I resigned myself to their departure, but not without taking my precautions with them.

I set out to them that they were leaving against my advice; that they were going to America because they willed it; that they would betake themselves to Texas if they saw fit, that they would go, as they pleased, anywhere else; that they were and would remain without any sort of engagement, explicit or implicit, with the Society or with me; that only, once we were ashore, since there would be plants and some materiel belonging to the Society to convey, those who judged it proper to join the expedition would then, and for that case alone, be subject to the directions of whoever had the charge and responsibility of the convoy with which it pleased them to travel. I did not content myself with setting this out verbally to all and each. I made it the object of a written instruction, which I read to them at Antwerp, where I handed it to Cousin — who was to leave with me, and whom, out of a feeling of solicitude for these people, easy to understand, I urged to embark with them. Cousin and the unfortunate young Deguelle were the only two persons who — once that departure, which I could not prevent, had been decided — left both of my full accord and at my impulse.

In this too I believed I had taken every precaution and compromised absolutely nothing. I was mistaken, and gravely. I ought to have foreseen the force of the impulses against which my printed instructions and my endlessly repeated words seemed to me, wrongly, sufficient guarantees; I ought to have foreseen that these impatiences — which I dreaded and pointed to as the one reef on which we might be wrecked — were bound, whatever care and force I might put into them in words, to be stopped, violently stopped, by some brutal fact that would say more than all the printed or spoken recommendations; that one must not yield them an inch of ground, even when it seemed without any intrinsic danger; I ought to have shown myself here absolute and absolutely rigid; I ought not to have given Cousin to that departure, even with the reservations I attached to it, nor to have entrusted to that ship either young Deguelle, or even a single plant, a single grain of seed belonging to the Society; to have protested categorically against that emigration, at least insofar as the persons were heading for a place dependent on the Society; to have sent an interdiction against receiving them there under any pretext whatever, and to have published that interdiction. — That is what I ought to have done; — and, to say it without further delay, it is in this order of principles that I fully intend to act, if I still have, as I think, anything to do. — That, no doubt, would have saved everything. … Be that as it may, at a given moment, not being even yet in Texas, being still in New York, barely knowing that we had just acquired, at a high price, a few scraps of land, and less certain than ever as to which regions would be favorable for the acquisition of great spaces — through the documents reaching me at once from Texas, from New Orleans, and from Europe, I saw rise up before me, already arrived on the spot, or on the road by land, or on the way by sea, a body of nearly two hundred colonists — men young and old, women, children, young ladies, etc.! — Reread but ten pages of my book: my plan was broken in my hand! — by my original fault, granted; I am quite willing to own it. But it was broken, broken from the very beginning, broken at the first step, and I, I fell thunderstruck and lay groaning beneath the rubble.

I make my confession; and despite the bitter irritation that still rumbles in me when I stir these memories — and which I confess as well — I make it with humility, there where I have cause to be humble. Among the faculties of the leader that I lack, foremost is the one the phrenologists call self-confidence. My strength is not in me subjectively; it is wholly in the facts, in which I exist only on condition of leaning upon my reason. Does a reason fail me — or, what comes to the same, do I say so to myself — I fall.

Now, here, my strength was wholly in my plan. Prudence, the gradual and assured advance of the beginnings, the success of the openings — slow if circumstances required, but certain — were an integral, capital part of it. I repeat: reread but ten pages of my book, beginning for example with the heading Determination of the preparatory milieu, and you will see that in fact, in place of my plan, or of something not departing too far from it, I had before me nothing but its formal contradiction. — Premature emigration, in a hurried and confused mode, and the certain ruin of any colonization enterprise: these two ideas made but one in my mind. I had set out the theory of this inevitable identity; I had, among a thousand, recalled the most recent examples of it; and the conditions suddenly imposing themselves on me were worse than those of all the disastrous examples I had cited — if only in this, that the field of action of those emigrations was at least secured, assured, or determined for them in advance!

I saw all too clearly the forced consequences of these premises; and amid all the ideas I was wringing, all the kinds of pain that hacked at me, the rages that boiled in my despairing thought, I was incessantly and invincibly brought back to the same point: to write to Europe that they should make an end of it by an immediate liquidation, and to make my own immediately. — And if I told all here, one might perhaps form some idea of the sweetness of a last refuge. — For the rest, whether I lent a hand to it or not, this personal liquidation seemed to me assured and near. What little strength remained to me, or its complete prostration — I do not know which — helped my reason not to follow the last appetite of despair. I tried to create illusions for myself by artificial reasonings; but I saw too clearly and could not succeed. In short, after having consummated, in my innermost self, the sacrifice of everything to which living human nature can cling, I thought I must leave to whatever should come my fate — and my person for what it might be worth; let myself be ground and dragged by fate as far as it would go; and I warded off, by means of a sleep forced on by morphine, an immediate physical end, the imminence of which was evident to me.

From that moment I considered my life only as a work of supererogation, destined — for as long as it lasted and for what it could do — no longer to lead a great enterprise blithely to success, but to lessen the disasters of an accomplished shipwreck.

I know all that can be said of such an abandonment; and since, in my own shipwreck, at least reason and judgment did not leave me, and I have learned to apply them to myself, I beg my friends to believe that I said all this to myself, omitting nothing. — I am not writing here, far from it, a hymn to my own glory; I do not even seek excuses. I know that a leader is, whatever happens, responsible for everything, and I know full well the irrefutable word with which one would cut off all retreat from him should he seek one. — I write so that you may know facts you ought to know, now that it is a question of deciding whether we are to do anything further in common; and meaning to tell you myself that, had I been of a harder temper, of a more complete organization, and endowed with that self-confidence which finds in itself its reason for being and its strength, I should undoubtedly, at far less cost and far sooner, have brought matters to where they stand today: that virile and noble faculty — which, ill-accompanied, makes fools, and which, exaggerated, makes the rash and often breaks them on the reef — would, here, have saved me from the agony, and would have played, and won, in perhaps half the time, the recovery of our affairs. My reason was constantly of this opinion; but, having at its service, to engage the game, only a machine exhausted by a violent illness — acute at first and later chronic — ravaged by the incessant jolts and explosions of a palpitating, deranged, and overturned nervous system, with unstrung muscles, a soul soured and slackened, ulcerated and cowardly — I was long compelled to abandon all thought of initiative, and to confine myself passively to mitigating the existing harm, leaving to other hopes, and to confidences I did not share, a field and a span of experience.

IV

If I make no difficulty about bringing to light my own shortcomings and miseries; if I feel no inclination to seek out and display, without necessity, those of others; if I am, in short, quite disposed to take upon myself the whole responsibility for all the real harm produced in an affair that I provoked, and that I originally organized myself as I saw fit — I am not at all disposed to pass condemnation on what does not deserve condemnation, and to let be taken for harm, or cause of harm, what was not so, what even had in its time the character of a remedy.

Under this head I range — and, if need be, I should be ready to justify by reason — most of the resolutions or counsels that, in the circumstances forced upon me, I was able to take or to give on the spot, beginning with the first of those acts: the settlement of the deplorable situation that I found there ready-made and worsening with each new arrival.

For this settlement I made incessant appeals to all the lights I could gather around me; I turned over, pressed, twisted every course; I devoted to this desperate labor all the forces of my reason, the only ones left to me; and — so long as I know only the criticisms that have reached me, or the one ought to have done this and that that have been offered up to now as solutions — I make bold to prove easily that, in the given circumstances, the one that was adopted was still, by far, the most reasonable and the least bad. — This combination, at least, permitted: 1° to liquidate the worst of states of things; 2° to give to a population, thrown into a country where it could as yet know nothing and understand nothing, the time to understand that country and to find its bearings there; 3° to gain the time needed to come to know that population itself; 4° to disengage the Society, regularly and gradually, from its heaviest burdens; it kept, finally, the door open, absolutely open, to everything that should later be judged possible, useful, good, or necessary. It permitted all that; and moreover it permitted all that to be done while engaging and compromising as little as possible, anew, the interests of the Society.

To be sure, it could not do the impossible; it could not transform into rightness, concord, and prosperity, conditions known and foretold to be of falseness, discord, and ruin. Nevertheless, the only intrinsically preferable course would have been to send back to Europe, and at the Society's expense, nine-tenths of the persons heaped up on the spot, and to write off as dead loss all the unrecoverable outlays. But to take that course, one would have had to be — and to feel oneself — in a state to master the disastrous effect that such a blow would then have produced both in Europe and on the spot, and to be assured of being able, very promptly besides, to find at such a beginning sufficient compensations. All that was lacking to me.

There was yet this other solution, very close to the preceding one: to reduce the works to what the Society could reasonably undertake, for its own sole and strict needs; to offer to the great number of hands present that small quantity of work, and to the very small number of Shares present their reimbursement in lands and in colonization values; to open no credit that was not guaranteed or covered; and to leave all those who could not find a place in this arrangement — the only one in conformity with the statutes — to their own initiative, as to their own account and their own fate. This solution, perfectly legal, and which would have made every burden disappear in an instant, seemed to me — given all the circumstances of the moment — the least acceptable of all. — In sum, the one I adopted without illusion, that I presented to the population for what it was, that I explained to it in its sincerity and without gilding it with hopes that, for my part, I did not share — this solution was, I am still convinced of it, the least compromising and the most elastic of the expedients to be applied in order to procure some somewhat orderly transition and some ways out.

V

I dragged myself on until autumn, looking on at the spectacle — harrowing for me — of the strange colonization that was replacing what I had believed I had to do in Texas; having before my eyes that frightful bastard, that monster without a father, or rather son of too many fathers, and to which I owed the name and the cares of my legitimate child! In short, my forecasts came true all too well, and the reality was little fitted to heal the blow they had dealt me.

The first cold weather having, however, restored some tone to my nerves, I took a little exercise; a little strength came back to me. I made use of this respite and set out for Austin, with no great hope of finding, before the legislature then opening, any compensation for our beginnings; but believing I ought nonetheless to make the attempt, and wishing, moreover, to push at last a reconnaissance into the Southwest. The distance from my field of torture, and a few glimmers that showed themselves, had on me a most salutary effect. I believed myself, for a moment, quite recovered, and I should really have been so had not the permanence of the causes that had laid me so low, and the continuation of their baneful productivity — aggravated still by new complications — soon seized their prey again.

At the close of the session I set out for the West; despite the harm that had so violently and so deeply attacked in me the organs of confidence and of hope, I brought back from it the feeling and the conception of a general way out for our affairs. Back in Dallas County, after an absence of five months, the state of things seen and well examined, my ideas were not slow to form themselves resolutely and to coordinate into a whole.

There, in the eyes of the simplest common sense, no illusion was any longer permitted. All the experiments had been made; the situation had borne all its fruits; it admitted of no further prolongation. The population had grown familiar with the country; it had made itself known. All that one needed to know was known, and what one had best do, for all the interests engaged, was manifestly to open the doors of exit.

The course to take seemed to me as clear in reason as it was indicated and motivated by circumstances. It consisted in doing up there — under conditions which it would then still have been possible to make broader and gentler — what is being done there easily and happily today. For a moment I believed I had managed to secure that way which I held to be the way of safety. I could thenceforth, secure on that point, follow up in Austin what had been begun there, and pursue in the West the openings of recovery and of future that I had found there. I even counted, for this last object and before the resumption of the session, on still finding time to visit other parts of the frontiers, which it might become important to know. — Thus the abyss was going to be closed; we were disengaging ourselves from a cursed past, and we could at last prepare and take — I do not say resume — a march forward! Well! that too was but a brief illusion; for, thanks to the legacies of that odious past, I soon had to find myself unable to leave the plan, on the spot, an organ of execution. It was as if fate had resolved that I should be struck down each time I rose again!

I can do myself this justice — and I do it — that there was never, in the motives of my torments, anything personal. What made the weight of the harm overwhelming for my strength was the very nature of its causes: your hopes, your interests, our common aim, all that I had thought I was serving and that was crumbling beneath me and upon me! That was what crushed me personally, and from the very start I had made all my mournings.

But there is a limit to everything, even to passive possibilities; and when, after doing here all that I believed I owed and was able to do — having written and traced out in detail the plan of all the necessary reforms, set the execution in gear, failed to find an organ to carry it on, asked Paris for a director, and entrusted the interim to an honest man whose devotion accepted that thankless task — when after that, I say, I set out anew for Austin and for the West, it was with an irrevocable resolution no longer to meddle directly in anything that touched that gibbet to which I had been too long nailed, and no longer even to reappear on that point until the reforms indicated should be in a state of execution, or an equivalent; and, should I be buried soon somewhere, to be buried at least elsewhere. — This resolution I state because I formed it. I set it down, declaring that no interest in the world, none — mark the word well — none whatever it might have been, could have made me break it. This resolution will be judged as one pleases — and so too, as one pleases, will my conscience; for I declare that the latter had, happily and unhappily, more motives than it required to feel itself, upon this resolution, perfectly at ease.

I had not resolved upon this abstention alone. I would still have given everything to be able to isolate my very soul, to drown every memory and every interest, to extinguish every solicitude, to cut off, finally, on that side, every preoccupation, and to absorb my thought exclusively in the search for the compensations and ways out to which I now wished to confine my part, to be pursued elsewhere for our affairs. Unhappily, this no longer depended on an act of will, and I had already experienced all too well my powerlessness to put on that liberating insensibility. My life was so wholly one with that of our affairs that, even in the name of the common interest which demanded the use of my strength, I could not effect the divorce necessary to its recovery. Far off as near, by day as by night, everywhere and ceaselessly, the cannonball that was attached to them, riveted to my heart, dragged me down to the bottom of the abyss. So long as that abyss gaped for them, I had no respite save the intervals in which it was granted me to reopen for them hopes that a serious reason could accept. Far be from me the vanity of believing myself an exception, even in the sad faculty of suffering — which I thought I had known already and which I hardly knew! But I do not think, nonetheless — and you must surely see that if I find perhaps in telling you of it a certain affectionate and moral satisfaction, I am far from finding in it any of pride — I do not think, I say, that ever a human personality was more completely and more painfully absorbed, drowned, devoured, in an external object. — Do what I might, I could not forget, abstract myself, and withdraw from the harm that went on calcining and carrying me off.

In the end, seeing no sign of the help that was needed and had long been asked for; a circumstance that I had foreseen and done everything to avert, aggravating on the contrary, and to the highest degree, my fears; feeling myself driven beyond all extremity, I held myself likewise discharged of everything, and had but one intimate idea: it was to complete as quickly as possible the territorial operations I had begun, and, once that task accomplished, to show you what I had acquired for you, on one point; to demonstrate, or at least to set down as my opinion, that this was worth to you what I now despaired of for what had been swallowed up on another; to give all the information proper to draw the best from the situation I should leave, and at the disposal of which I should moreover remain the time necessary for it to be regularly taken up; that done, to disappear and to bury myself no matter where and no matter how — this was more than a private and domestic affair. — Well! I saw myself stopped here again, or at least forced, by major causes equally independent of me, to suspend these efforts!

VI

Here I end this account. Pale as it is, softened and summary as I have meant to make it, I long believed that I should be spared having to afflict you with it — that I should spare it to myself — and that, even while speaking of you, of our affairs, and of everything, I should depart without farewells. That too was, no doubt, a cowardice of body and soul; but so it was. — I have therefore made you this sad account, because, happily, things have changed utterly; because the resurrection of our affairs has at last resurrected me completely as well; because I can and must today resume my communications with you, and because I have judged this account indispensable to the sincerity, the uprightness, and the dignity of these relations, as to the value of the fruits they may henceforth bear. I have not accused persons; not that I would shrink — painful as that role might be to me — from an expression of deserved blame, were it necessary, but because the harm came, above all, from circumstances; because these circumstances, once produced, were bound necessarily to engender ruins and deteriorations of every kind; because I was prepared for everything, and consequently for the worst, in every order; because, moreover, at least originally, all wills were good; and because, after all, placed each in the situations where they were bound to be and coming each in its time, persons — save that exception inevitable in human affairs, and which here was minimal — would have neither felt nor given serious grounds for complaint. — Circumstances do not excuse everything, I know; but individual imputation is often only a begging of the question, a vicious circle that leaves aside the deep causes in order to fasten only on those of an inferior or mediocre order, and that must be left to the judgments and minds of that order. I prefer, for my part, to tell you that of these very trials, what remains, on the whole, best proved for me, is the resistance of the intrinsic goodness of human nature, the multiplicity and power of its resources, the explicability of its distortions; and that our doctrines, in displacing original sin and transferring it from the fixed and intimate data of human nature to the external and mobile data of things, are radically and victoriously in the right against the old ones. — Let it therefore be buried under the benefit of these reflections, that odious past! To try to be able to forget and forgive it, I inscribe this one epitaph upon its stone. — And now let us turn toward the future.

[End of Part One. Part Two follows in the facsimile, p. 18 ff.]

PART TWO

I

Now my task changes. Happily! From the deepest of the harm, from the darkest, a dear voice said to me: "Hope! the extreme of disorder will produce the return to unity." De profundis clamabat. When blind and pitiless forces have twisted the best-founded forecasts and vanquished our strength, it happens to them sometimes to vanquish themselves and to be cast down in their turn. Fate grows weary of striking and may suddenly come to the aid of what it was touching with its harshest blows. These are the chances left, by the Providence of progress, to the fortune of human intelligence and perseverance. Thanks, then, and hail to the new turn of fate! For it is indeed fate that here drew deliverance out of what was bound to complete the ruin. It is fate, fate alone — there are acts of justice that must be rendered, and there are obligations even toward fate — which, out of circumstances made to lose everything, brought forth the one that was to make it possible to save everything. For my part, I will dispute nothing of it here.

It took an absolutely desperate state of things for what has been done to be done; for Cousin to be on the spot; for him to be chosen; for him to be able, and at the last moment, to close the abyss that would have devoured everything, to apply at once the reparative measures, to close the past, to set its liquidation well under way, and to leave henceforth the future alone open: — it is fate that decided and forced all this. Let us give thanks to it, then; and, that justice done, let us do another still more binding by thanking Cousin as well. — For what concerns me, I declare that, by his devotion as deep in reality as it was simple in its forms, his unpretentious good sense, his intelligence without rhetoric, and in executing on the very point where, for the reasons set out above — and others besides — I had long ceased all interference; in executing, I say, on that point where we were about to perish, the only possible measures of salvation, he has, in saving your affairs, saved for me much more than life — and that life into the bargain. Let him receive here my testimony, while awaiting that of your own gratitude — you owe it to him well.

II

I have already told you where, as soon as I had been able to leave my sickbed, to recover a shadow of strength, and to wish once more to hope a little, I had soon seen ways out toward a future for our affairs; I told you that from that time there were evidently two things to be carried out simultaneously on two points: on the one, to shut the door upon a ruin visibly growing and certain; on the other, to open it at last to the true conditions of our affairs. I tell you, now, that had it been personally possible for me, and granted to me, to conduct both these operations at once, by this hour those affairs would be in full prosperity.

I have just shown you by what stroke of fate the one man who could avert the last disaster had found himself at once on the spot, ready, possible, and chosen. Here now is what remains for me to tell you:

It is that, coming so late, this help from fate was perhaps insufficient by itself; but that happily, it appears, the luck had decidedly turned. By a second stroke of fate, in effect, it came about that the Reserve — which had become for us an evil so grave once we were so heavily committed in its very heart; whose lifting had been repeatedly and pitilessly rejected by compact and resolved majorities in both chambers; of which the governor would not hear; concerning which, a week before the vote, the members most well-disposed toward me and the best informed assured me there was not even a question of dreaming; — it came about, I say, that this Reserve was lifted unanimously!

By a third stroke of fate, of fate once more, it came about that our lands located [Texas land term, anglicism in the original] within the Reserve, and which might all have been taken from us, were encroached upon only in a few fragments.

By a fourth stroke of fate, here is that famous railroad for which the Reserve had been made, and which was not decided under the sway of that Reserve, now apparently being decided in earnest, today that the Reserve is lifted; and here moreover the engineers find, on the other routes, three million in savings over the one they are running across our dwellings, in our great farm down below, and through another important part of our lands — recently taken by Cousin to compensate for what had been taken from us out of the old surveys. — Should this project be realized, as appears very probable today, it will no longer be by double and triple that one must reckon the effective added value — ever increasing, moreover — of the lands of Dallas County and above all our own.

So much for the upper part. Here now is the rest. — One year, bad already, is followed by another — this one, especially for that part of the West, detestable. This too belongs, certainly, to the realm of ungovernable circumstances, of forces beyond control, of fate. Well! the greater the harm, so much the better it will be for us, for our circumstances — for those, at least, which depend only on ourselves to bring about. The dearth of money, the need felt for it here, the temptations it gives even to the land speculators themselves, who see quick strokes to be made on everything that must now be imported; the inevitable disgusts for those who have just begun in these conjunctures without being solidly enough equipped, who gather little and whom their isolation and weakness deliver up to a hundred kinds of exploitation; the momentary discredit of lands that results from all these circumstances — all this already offers us, and will for a time continue to offer us, if we choose to profit by it, the most unhoped-for and finest chances, not only of recovering and properly re-establishing our affairs, but of taking up again, and at their finest, all our projects, all our hopes.

III

It is long since — hearing myself affirm that not all faith had been ruined in Europe by our desolating beginnings, feeling that I had sinned by failing so completely and so soon in faith myself in yours — that I was already calculating and establishing that, were one to recover, on the Dallas side, but half of what had been put in there — were one even to recover nothing at all of it — with the sole guarantee that nothing more lay buried there, and on the sole condition of being put in a position to push hard toward the openings found and to win them broad enough, one could easily, by making the general situation and the real balance well understood, still save everything. Well! despite the time elapsed since that period, despite the aggravations that this time had engendered — despite everything — but thanks to this decisive return of fortune at the supreme moment, the state of things is today, and the circumstances show themselves, on all points, beyond comparison and utterly transformed for the good of our affairs.

But this good, these reparative occasions, these resurrecting and unhoped-for circumstances — they must be seized and pressed for them to yield what they contain.

If, despite the will, the reverses of fortune strike down our enterprises, its most formal aids and its most generous returns are nonetheless, most often, at the price of that same will and require its concurrence. Our common aim has risen up again before us, it is true; but it is always for us to march in order to reach it. Success is now within reach, perfectly in view; the road that leads to it has been only too well lit and its reefs too well flagged by misfortunes made to carry an authority that it was not, it seems, granted to words alone to impress upon the most formal forecasts. Today, moreover, besides the experience these forecasts ought to have spared us from buying at our own expense and so dearly, a considerable sum of experience has been gained on a host of points where we had to learn. These are so many new guarantees of this success become possible once more. But, however well guaranteed it be, this success, we shall have it only if we will energetically to seize it, and if we act energetically to win it.

I tell you this very plainly, and because it is so: Let us stop today, let us make no new efforts, and today, despite everything, we are just as thoroughly ruined as we were yesterday — or nearly so. — Let us stop; let us go into liquidation, or merely let things drag, instead of pressing on with new and serious efforts: do that, and everything is lost anew — everything except me, this time. Except me, for these warnings given, I feel myself, and declare myself, personally saved whatever happens. — I feel myself saved whatever happens, not that I could not still — should we fail to profit by an occasion so fine for raising up what is so dear to us — feel deep regrets, bitter returns, cruel revolts of thought and of soul; I should lie were I to boast of it; but because, now that these words are said, and said in the situation you know, this would come about if you abandoned yourselves: it would come about that, instead of feeling myself crushed under the weight of ruins heaping up where all your hopes were piled, of disasters greeting the most ardent devotions, of a rout finally rewarding the calculations of intelligence and the efforts of valor, I should have only to wear the resigned mourning of the flag that falls because its defenders abandon it. That would be very painful and very sad still, no doubt; but it would no longer be, I feel it, the same thing for me. When you wished to win for yourselves a free homeland and to make it happy for yourselves, for your families, and for your ideas — and that on my initiative, on my promises, and with me marching at your head; to have seen all the combined conditions of success replaced suddenly, without my being able to do anything more about it, by those very ones that I had pointed out to all as the premises of an inevitable rout; to have seen that before being so much as on the field; to have gathered in this Waterloo before having so much as opened the campaign! That, and under such conditions! That would have laid out — struck down — men stronger than I, I think — had they at least felt as it was only too given to me to feel. I do not say, however, that I reproached myself with cruel personal reproaches; that too would be to lie. While accepting all responsibility and all judgment from without, and without being, I believe, of those who bring the most indulgence to judging themselves, there still remained to me enough of that indulgence to absolve myself within my own breast. The only reproach I made myself, and which terribly aggravated my suffering, was that of lacking strength enough to bear such a blow and to be able to reduce at least its disastrous consequences. — Now, this reproach, today I would make myself no longer, any more than that of having been the origin, if not the cause, of ruins that one would do nothing to repair, once they have become reparable; any more, finally, than I would feel the mortal grief of disappointing burning hopes, when, despite the field reopened to them and the air restored to them, these should show themselves extinguished. No! whatever happens, I will no longer suffer what I have suffered! I will no longer pass again through that hell! through that hell into which, were it needed to save the lives of all of you, to save humanity, the whole world, and God Himself, I would flatly refuse to re-enter. — I believed myself, toward my cause, toward that of humanity and of the universal good, capable of a devotion without limit and without bounds; I confess and declare that I found such; and I add that the certainty of being able henceforth never to be exposed to overstepping them, those bounds, is what I call "feeling myself today personally saved."

I tell you these things because in this I owe you the expression of my intimate sentiments; and because, where the custom is to cry out "but as for me, after all, I am of little account!" I do not do your hearts the injury of believing them so little concerned with what touches me. To say nothing of other thoughts far more violent, the simple idea of the pecuniary losses into which I should have led you has by itself made me suffer too much in you and through you for me to disregard the solidarity that binds us, or even to admit, by way of a phrase, that I am to you so little a thing. — Nothing of what I tell you is, moreover, useless to the body of resolutions you must take in full knowledge of the case.

We were, then, at this point: that everything would be lost anew, even today, without new efforts, and if we stopped. A hurried liquidation, under all circumstances here, and more than ever under the present ones, would yield us nothing at all. The acquisitions I have made, themselves, resold at once on the spot, would realize nothing; and they are not yet complete enough for it to be easy, even taking time, to make them yield much. The long-term liquidation of a business halted before maturity and abandoned is, moreover, always bad, and rarely does more than cover its costs. This case would very probably be ours in that hypothesis. — What remains certain is that, even should such a liquidation produce something, it would be so little that, with the time it would require, one might as well abandon everything and at once. — This course of voluntary and total ruin is absurd: you do not want it.

IV

There is another: to put oneself in a position to complete what I have begun and already much advanced here, with the limited intention: 1° of continuing the colonization (understood, of course, henceforth under the normal conditions of our Statutes and of my plan), on the first field that has been given over to it; 2° of opening to it the second without extension, as soon as it should have acquired, on the first, roots and forces sufficient to assure there its own and full development. — This course would be wiser already. The colonization continuing in the North would be for the Company the natural liquidation, good and fruitful for all interests, of its affairs on that point. The completion of the acquisitions begun here would deliver us a second field of action from which it would be easy for us to draw an excellent advantage for us and through us, and even a good advantage on any hypothesis. Were one — it is a case whose very thought would no longer present itself — were one to dispose of it one day for an external liquidation, that liquidation, freed by full possession from the costs of judicial divisions, complicated arbitrations, new surveys, etc. — all things subject to contestation and besides devouring by their very nature — that liquidation, henceforth made very manageable and very simple, would still become productive easily enough. Here the worst would still be tolerable, financially at least, and might even be good.

Well! this course, were you all present here, could I show you all what, recently and in the circumstances of a year truly disastrous for the country, I have just shown to five persons of whom four are known to you (1), this course would not get one vote, not one — I say, not one.

That at this distance, and in consequence of various discouragements — each of which would explain itself only too well — this middling, timid, and ineffectual course should find adherents, there would be no cause for surprise. Were it even to be adopted, although it would be only a sort of half-abandonment, and would strangle a future that one can today remake magnificent, I would not abandon the task that would be laid upon me of overseeing its execution; but I would march to it with the sadness of resignation to the abandonment of a great aim, a great thing, and a great cause, failed through a fatal discouragement, and through that discouragement alone, just at the best moment returned — or rather come — for securing them, for winning them! No! I will not think of it! I will not admit this possibility. I know, I know it only too well, that courage and confidence do not always come at the call of the will. I know it from myself; but, by God! it is not here that I set myself up, and must take myself, as an example. And which of you, besides, would have for excuse, here, the circumstances — terrible for a soul — that taught me to know discouragement and that explain my having fallen into it? — What! that today, when it is possible, easy, given to us; when it becomes unhopedly easy for our efforts to resurrect entire the future to which we had aspired; to revive what an absurd past — but henceforth conjured away, closed, walled up — has devoured of us; today when all the experiments, even those that need not have been made, are made; when the tribute to ill fortune has been, and so amply, paid; today when the luck turns and fortune offers us every indemnity for its rigors and for our faults — that we should lack the courage, the manhood — what am I saying? that we should lack, to remount and fully re-establish our affairs, the common intelligence, that ABC good sense which the first

(1) Bureau, Malibert, Willemin, and Mme Considérant. — I was anxious to have a woman's impressions as well.

peasant, the humblest seller of coconut-drink or of rabbit-skins, would know well enough to bring to his own affairs? No, that misfortune, after so many others, will be spared us, and we shall not undergo that shame.

No! I say; and if there be discouragements that these circumstances cannot raise up — these circumstances that have raised up me myself; me, fallen so low; me, so long drowned in a despair without name and without bottom; me, transformed so quickly, from the head of a fine movement full of promises into an emissary laden with the weight of all the misfortunes and all the faults, crushed by the sum of all the collective miseries and all the individual griefs, every ill accomplished reverberating within me, taking up residence there, echoing in the sickly and sonorous cavities of unbroken insomnia, fretting and multiplying itself through the pitiless clarities of a foresight without illusions and a thought without mercy; well! if there be among us any whom the circumstances that have fully resurrected me to the aim and the initial hope would not yet fully resurrect, I know, I feel, and I tell you that they will be few. We shall wait for them at the first halt, in the success now on its way to full realization. They will rejoin us. Let us prepare the road for them and march onward.

V

I have always proclaimed very loudly the theory that there are no indispensable men. Infallible in the general order, this theory is not so in special orders and particular enterprises, above all at a given moment when these have suffered great reverses. I felt it for a long time with pain, both for myself and for the things to which this feeling riveted me by a ring of iron; I felt it the more painfully because I said to myself this; I said to myself, "if I were to leave these affairs in the state in which they are, no one, in such a situation, aggravated still further by the effect of my withdrawal, will have the will to attempt their recovery, or the influence required to carry it out." This was not vanity; it was not even, in my eyes, a question of capacity; it was purely a question of position; it was an unhappy fact, and one about which, no more than about many others, it was possible for me to delude myself. And while everything was so black within me, I added: "The age in which we live knows only intelligence, morality, and the judgment of success. Success justifies everything, reverse kills everything. It is not, in Europe as in America, a place where, from a fall, one often rises only the higher. In Europe every fallen enterprise is very near to being dead, and every fallen man is a dead man. It is hard that the spirit of their age should not more or less rub off on the spirit of our own people. And then I am so far from them! though I seek it, though I find and open ways out, though there come even some extraordinary and unhoped-for help from circumstances — will they still listen to my voice?" — I have already confessed it to you, friends! — and this was perhaps my only true sin in all our miseries, as it long deprived me of the strength to master them — once the blow was struck, a defeat for a beginning become inevitable, I lacked faith in you, and, by a justice of reciprocity, admitted that it could soon be no otherwise, for me, with yours toward me! This double doubt, and this want of a replacement, constituted the vicious circle of impotence in which I writhed — and was dying.

Well! it is broken, that circle. You have held far more firmly than I had dared to expect. You have held despite everything, and despite my long and desperate and despairing silence, and I believe fully today in the voices that have never ceased telling me that mine, as soon as it made itself heard, would still find its echo in your souls.

There is more: it is that this silence has become today an enormous force for my words; for this silence has given you a great pledge.

Without false shame, I have spoken to you of the weaknesses of my constitution, of the cowardices of my nerves, of the miseries of my soul: without false shame, I speak to you of its superiorities and of its strengths. I made no difficulty about showing you the reverses; I will make no more about the good side; and I speak freely of myself because I know that I judge myself justly, which is not already so common, and that I render outwardly, with no disposition to alter it, intact, the judgment within. This silence, I say then, has become today a great pledge, for it proves two things of considerable value: it proves that it is no easier for me to delude myself than it is possible for me to deal out or to serve up illusions to others.

This silence, which made for me — the chief, and chief in the relations we had together — a position so compromising and so strange, which aggravated everything, whose disastrous bearing I understood perfectly, and which, despite the gravest motives and all advice, I could not for so long bring myself to break — whence came it? What was, at bottom, its cause? the capital cause? what was the cause of its other causes? It was that, on the one hand, I saw the reality too clearly, its characters, its forced consequences, and that I could no more delude myself than accept ready-made illusions in this regard; and it was that, at the same time, I could not, if I spoke, disguise the truth from you, or even merely lighten its gloom. Such was the impasse into which I was driven. To keep silence was a great evil and gave everything to be feared; to say what I should have said, the weight would have been too heavy and would have crushed everything. I weighed this dilemma, and judged that until the day, should it come, when I could, suitably for the interests with which I was charged, take up speech again, I must keep this crushing weight for myself alone. The Management itself went six months without receiving a single line directly from me. My thought here was in accord with my want of strength.

In bulletins, in war, in business, in the service of a party or of any cause whatever, one lies; it is accepted. Within a certain measure it is wholly without dishonor; in certain cases it is commanded, it may be salvation, even duty. — With our own people, with you, even in these cases, I cannot. — Had I felt myself that faculty, it would have given me resources and strength, I should not have fallen, I should have easily and sufficiently palliated the harm at the outset; the harm itself would not have gone so far; I should have found possible ways out and restored the affairs much sooner: and the return to success would have absolved me.

Well! even up there, even when I had to speak, for three days, to the assembled population, to explain to it the arrangement adopted; when so many motives demanded that this population be sustained, encouraged, roused; when it would have been easy to create illusions for it, salutary and good at least for the moment; when I should not even have had to create them, but only to take them ready-made and to seem to share them, I neither could nor would. I set out the situation; I showed that it bore to my plan only a relation of formal reversal; that it placed me under the terrible necessity either of abandoning nine-tenths of the persons — and precisely the least capable — to their resources and their fate, whatever these might be, or of committing an abuse of confidence, a veritable misappropriation of funds, by employing on the costs and hazarded advances of establishment for these people capitals that had been confided to me only to prepare that of their proprietors; that I, for my part, was taking on this mortal responsibility, and that they had, in their own hands, along with their own fate to make, that of these funds, that of the Company, and my own. I deduced the conditions of order, of devotion to the common good, of conscientious labor, of economy, of obligatory sacrifice of present appetites and satisfactions to the interests of the future, which alone made a favorable issue of the situation possible. I said many other things, all true, all austere, all in the key of that situation; nothing more, nothing beyond. I was not to close to anyone the field of hope and of confidence; I left it free and open, but I would not, in order to inspire the one and the other, color my words with their tints. I radiate only what I believe, and inspire only what I feel. It is not, good God! strength of soul; it is not the absolute imperative of an abstract duty served by a stoic resolution; it is, much more simply, a native repugnance for falsehood, supported by a very decided credo of my reason in the excellence of truth. — I was much blamed for what I have just recalled: I was reproached with not having "roused enthusiasm, etc., etc." Far from submitting to it, I rebuffed these censures as they deserved. In analogous circumstances, the same sentiments and the same principles would dictate my conduct again, and I intend, on this point, to die impenitent.

Certainly, I know to what straits one may see oneself reduced by forbidding oneself any way out that deviates from the line of truth; but I know also what forces one keeps in reserve for an enterprise by holding to that road all the same. At the risk and peril of ours, as of my own, I did it for it: and by thus keeping the wherewithal, today, to save it and to make it grow, I have deserved well of it, of you, and of myself; I record it as a fact. And if anyone finds this language very proud for a fallen man — fallen so low, and who avows it — I will answer that someone, that if there are men who fall through their bad sides — and who ought to keep silent — there may be those who fall through their good sides, who keep with them, however low they fall, the wherewithal to rise again and to raise what has fallen upon them, and that I am standing, with your affairs.

In the account of the circumstances that came to the aid of these affairs, I have rendered with integrity the share of chance and of fortune; with happiness, that of the two devotions which, the one in waiting, the other in closing, permitted and served these chances; I now render my own, for having reserved for us the faculty of drawing great advantage from these chances and these services. It is just, and moreover, it is useful.

We shall now examine together three questions, after which you will have, on all that it imports you here to know, my complete opinion, and will be able to form your own. These three questions, here they are:

Was I mistaken in the past? and to what degree did I deceive the legitimate hopes I had given you? Had I been deceived myself? and to what degree? Finally, am I mistaken today?

VI

I begin with the last of these questions, and on this one I have but a word to say. You have, in effect, in hand the elements of the present general situation; I set them out just now; you can judge them as well as I. It is an appraisal of simple good sense. For my part, I will repeat it, more than a year ago, when there was no probability of a prompt lifting of the Reserve — quite the contrary; — when there was no certainty that, even at the time of that lifting, the located lands would remain to us; when nonetheless the largest of our expenditures up there had been made; when I had as yet only in project, on this side, the things of which today a good part is already realized — conformably to my forecasts of that time; — when the general circumstances — and even certain local circumstances (1) — relatively above all to great new acquisitions, far from being what they show themselves today, could give grounds to foresee only the continuation of a rise that was outrunning us: in that situation, I wrote that, on the condition of halting the ruin at Dallas, and were one to lose half there, were one to lose everything, one could, with what I was about to do on this side and by following this road, soon restore the balance.

Now, today, what was then only a project, in hypothesis and in conditions to be fulfilled, is either executed or well on its way to execution; today, and for a time now opening, it is certain that, on the important side, the great side, the side

(1) Among others the railroad from the sea to San Antonio, decided last year, begun this winter, and which — always very happily for us if we profit by it — a fortuitous circumstance, a trifle, a word of the law, and a word still misinterpreted by the lawyers of New York, where the funds had been raised, came to suspend.

of the future, in short, one can still operate very largely, and at better cost than one could have reckoned last year. On the other hand, I know better the value of what we have already acquired and of what we can make of it, and finally, instead of counting as a dead loss, if need be, all that was swallowed up in Dallas County, the opinion of the previous director and that of the present director is that, conducted as it must and can be, the normal liquidation will there recover everything and will perhaps yield a profit to the Company. I ask for no so much, and will say no more of it. On this first question each remains the judge. Let us turn to the second: "Had I been deceived myself, and to what degree?"

VII

On this question, I have already told the disappointments I had met on arriving in New York. The chief was the subordination, to early successes, of the serious cooperation on which I had had to count from our American friends. This cooperation was more necessary to us then than today. It would always be excellent; but — I am not to be suspected of not having set a high value on it — I declare that we can do without it. Moreover, I have very good reasons to believe that, on condition of soliciting it directly and from within a position we can promptly make for ourselves, it would still come back to us abundantly and in several forms, if not all indispensable, at least very useful.

I will not number among my disappointments and yours my desisting from the request for land grants to the Texan legislature, and this for two reasons: first, because, although I had thought the thing possible, I did not bring it in, even as a probability, into our calculations; — had it been realized, we should have taken it as a bonus. The second reason is that, from the embarrassments and difficulties of every kind that grants of this sort have entailed, even in their best days, I have understood the causes of an opinion much credited here: namely, that in matters of colonization, and at the prices lands still command, it is better, for a Company, to buy its own than to receive them gratis from the government.

Let us take up a graver chapter, that of the real advantages, the serious resources, the basic conditions that the country offers to a well-conducted colonization. Was I mistaken on this chapter, and did I lead you myself into error?

On this capital point — save the changes in the territorial conditions that occurred during my stay in Europe; changes of which I have spoken and whose intrinsic value you can already appreciate; changes due, moreover, to the acceleration "of that movement of speculation and business that I pointed out to you as imminent in Texas," and which fortune seems today to suspend for a moment so as to offer us a revanche — save these changes, I have, on this capital point, nothing to retract from what I set out for you in my book.

Perhaps this opinion is already sufficiently supported by that of the two last directors of our affairs in Dallas County, which I reported just now; for that this opinion can be expressed after all we have undergone there and all we have done there, after so much sad labor and so many sad works, so much disorder and waste, one must indeed recognize, in the country itself, miraculous resources. But I have something better to say in citing accomplished facts. To find them, it suffices to travel through this country a little with one's eyes open.

Let one spend but two hours at Castroville, at New Braunfels, at Fredericksburg — these colonies of Europeans, barely ten years old; let one take a little account of the conditions under which all this was done, let one ask oneself with what resources it was founded and developed — and let one estimate the results achieved at their true worth! So much for European colonization. The populations here are Germans and French, the latter chiefly Alsatians.

As for the American movement, it is far more rapid still. When I came, in the autumn of 1855, from Dallas to Austin, I rejoined, at two-thirds of the way, the road I had followed from Fort Graham to that last town two years before. The part of the country to which this last third belongs is unquestionably one of the most arid in the State. Well! I recognized my road perfectly, such a river that I had crossed, such a line of woods where I had passed through; it was indeed, beyond doubt, my road. And yet, at moments, I doubted it utterly; and when we arrived at Belton, where, so short a time before, I had seen only a few wretched shanties, I asked myself whether it was not a dream, or whether we had not strayed from the old route. How could so many houses, great masonry constructions, so many changes, so much work, and such growth have been accomplished in two years! Roger, who was with me, was witness to my astonishment. I could not get over it.

On the road from Austin to San Antonio I did not feel the same surprises, because I had not seen this line before; but I found the country very populous, and I know now that the transformation accomplished in these parts within a few years is far more marvelous than the one I have just spoken of. Not long ago, between Austin and San Marcos, which was nothing, San Marcos and New Braunfels, that last town and San Antonio, one found nothing, nothing at all. Let one go and see now! No, the Europeans, the people who have never left the old countries, will not believe the dates of all these settlements, of all these creations, even when, traveling the road with them and showing them one by one, one gives them the dates.

And further west, on the Mexico road, from my first expedition to the Cañon of Uvalde to the second — less than a year — the banks of the Hondo have been peopled in a truly extraordinary way. At each new passage, a few months apart, there are new changes to bewilder you. It is the same, moreover, on a number of other watercourses, the Atascosa, etc., which two years ago, eighteen months ago, a year ago, were but perfect deserts. — And by whom this so prompt peopling of the solitudes of the West? By Americans; by people who leave the old States for this one, who know perfectly what they are doing in so acting, and who no longer come to Texas in a state of bankruptcy or as outlaws — as was frequently the case ten years ago — but often with all the arms and all the baggage of great property. Finally, without leaving San Antonio where I write this, a few months apart, whole quarters of the city plan are quite unrecognizable: the old ones through rebuildings or new constructions, others for having sprung up out of the fields.

Such facts speak. And what would one answer them? That the winter before last was very hard, last summer very dry — and July and August extraordinarily hot? That this spring was detestable, for the vegetation at least, through its lack of rain and its returns of late frosts? This summer dry again, and that, in consequence of such a chain of excesses and mischances, the aspect of the countryside is desolate over whole districts.

All that is true, and I confess I did not expect such departures from the average year. One likes to believe what one desires: yet I recall very well that, in examining at Brussels, with a friend far more competent than I in horticulture, the temperature tables published at the end of my book, and seeing there recorded colds of 11° below zero, I had some difficulty in admitting that the cultivation of tropical plants would require here only a few light winter shelters. But the cacti, the sensitive-plants, a number of plants grown only under glass in Europe, and which here cover the prairie, abounding in the woods and along the waters, inclined me to that pleasing hope; and we reasoned on the idea that the gusts of Norther do not last more than three days — an idea I had brought back from my first voyage, because everyone had agreed in telling us so. In the winter of 1855–56, the Northers followed one another almost without interruption for six weeks, and the thermometer fell at times to 15° or 16°. Certainly, I had in no way expected the possibility of such a season in this country, and I should this time, unhappily for tropical cultivation, be more firm in my resistance. I must say, however, that I have asked countless questions about such an anomaly, and my information does not mislead me. Well! in the memory of the oldest inhabitants of the country, there has been no such winter in Texas; one must go very far back to find any approaching it.

The heat we had to endure last summer at Austin excited there in turn violent complaints, and as of an abuse, although the heat is reputed to be there always stronger, and above all more trying, than at San Antonio — eighty miles farther south — and perhaps even than on the most extreme points of the Gulf frontier, which are no more than three degrees from the tropic. What is certain is that neither the summer of 1853, nor that of 1855, nor this one — which make three out of four I have seen in Texas — has anything comparable to those two months at Austin last year. — As for the last winter, it showed itself here a truly magnificent season. A few gusts of Norther, blowing hard during the first hours, dropping on the second day, barely indicating the direction of the wind on the third, to give place on the fourth to the south breeze, and giving, the first and second night, under a sparkling sky, a few lines of ice on the standing waters — such were its greatest rigors: from the end of October to the beginning of March there were five or six of these Northers, all equally regular, all alike. Except for the few days they took up — and which were for the most part still very fine winter days — all the rest, left to the Gulf breezes, were superb days like May in Europe, inviting one to bathe in the so beautiful waters of the San Antonio, and always temperate so long as they are not too far from their source (2nd winter and summer). — The cold showed itself longer, and still rather rigorous in the upper country, where there occurred the singular phenomenon of a ten-day glaze of ice. The difference of the season, much less marked in the winter of 1855–56, showed itself this time very considerable between the two latitudes.

It is certain that, save at points exposed to the South and well sheltered by mountains, one must, even at the latitude of San Antonio, give up the cultivation of tropical plants under the easy conditions I spoke of just now, by means of which we strove to believe it possible. Nevertheless, even at the height of Dallas, sugar cane, treated as in Louisiana, and the banana can, in an average year, succeed very well.

Five years ago, M. Guilbeau planted here two little banana roots. The plant did very well; but the winter killed the stalks that were to bear the fruit the following year. His gardener had the idea of laying them down for that season in beds covered with a foot of earth. Instead of rotting, the stalks thus heaped up go on slowly vegetating all winter and yield abundantly new shoots and superb bunches the following summer. There are now thousands of banana plants in the town, descended from those two roots. I carried some myself to Dallas, in a box the size of a head — nine plants, of which seven, set in the great garden, have developed admirably, and which, treated by the very easy method I have just described, will have introduced into the upper country this plant so beautiful and so rich. — Here, the late frosts of March and April, which carried off the peaches and the other fruits, also reached almost all the bunches up there that had come out of the ground or were near coming out. They will have fared better up there, if the more rigorous season dictated more prudence and made them prolong the underground stay. Despite this abnormal spring, the fruiting shoots are, of course, the only ones compromised.

These frosts, for the rest, showed how far the obstinacy of vegetation goes in this country: the china trees, and other species, have twice, and the vine as much as three times, renewed their blossoms before our eyes. Cousin wrote me the same fact, by which he had been struck up there as I have been here. The autumn wheat, caught well advanced by these frosts, still gave a half-harvest, and the spring wheat, wherever it was re-sown over the first, a full harvest. The pomegranates, of which hedges are made, and the fig trees, with which the Spaniards had covered the country, put out new growth despite the little water fallen since last year, as if to avenge these repeated checks and soon efface their traces. So it is with everything that has any depth of root in the ground. It is certain that if this climate, young and still unruly, has its fits or its excesses, the soil, by its prodigious fertility, the vegetation, by its indomitable obstinacies, living nature, finally, by the energies of its own youth, are strong enough to stand up to it, to master its aberrations, and, in any case, soon to repair the ravages of even its most abnormal outbursts.

Yes, I have seen, in this country, the harshest winter that can be there, preceding the hottest and driest summer, itself followed by a rainless winter, by a spring always dry and desolated by its returns of frost in March and April, and followed again by a summer drought thus far complete; it is not worth reckoning the water that has fallen at San Antonio and its surroundings since autumn. Well! such as it is, with the possibility one must indeed admit of the return of similar chances, even linked one to another and thus multiplying tenfold, by their concurrence, the effects of their hostility; such as it is, with these chances — admitted for what they ought to weigh — I say that of all the fine countries where one can reasonably think today of colonizing with Northern races, this one is still, in my eyes, among the most favorable and the best. I add that, were we not engaged in it, were we free — with all I know at this hour — I would seek no other.

Texas is, wholly and preeminently, a country for the production and raising of cattle, horses, hogs, all domestic animals. One must see how all the species have multiplied there, how they thrive, develop, and prosper! And at the cost of what care? God knows! none. If there is in the world an established fact, it is that one.

Well! here is a series of circumstances so concatenated that, here, over a fairly large radius, even in spring, grass is wanting! that in summer the prairie, ordinarily so thick, so full, so green, shaved, black or yellow, far worse than in the heart of winter, offers to the eye nothing but a flayed and parched earth, and that the herds must be sent to feed in the West, beyond Castroville, on the Seco, on the Sabinal, on the Frio, as far as the Nueces, and others to the South or East, where the grass is fine and green because rain has fallen there. — And one would have me take fright at such a state of things? Were it that the conditions which brought about this state could easily recur, could show themselves a little frequently and widely, would this country be what it unquestionably is, one of the most favored countries for the raising of cattle and of all those animals which, from the winter of 1855 to this moment, have had so much to suffer?

For my part, I am delighted to have seen these successions of excesses and extremes of which I have been witness for two years. I now know the climate and the country at their worst. And when I see what one can do there and what one has there under such conditions, in the wake of such a combination of such circumstances, I hold myself more than reassured as to all possible cases. You shall judge of it.

One must know that, under Spanish domination, the flat and very open valley through which the San Antonio flows was, over long stretches, furrowed with asequias, or irrigation canals, several of which still subsist and still work; the others, half filled in, are easy to restore. The state of war begun in the country in 1810, not to cease until the recognition of Texas as a member of the American Union, destroyed this system. This fine creation of unity, due to the action of the Spanish missionaries, being neither in the traditions nor in the habits, nor even in the spirit of the new masters of the country, abandonment continued the work of war.

But if the eye is saddened to see, on the territories belonging to the town and to the old missions ranged along the San Antonio, so many cultivations still so flourishing at the beginning of the century, transformed today into immense fallows, the parcels placed under the action of the asequias that still swarm, and the marvelous contrast they offer this year with the surrounding countryside, by the lesson they make burst forth, by the idea they impose of what one can do in this country, of what, in any event, one can assure there by assuring water — these amply compensate me, for my part.

I have just been again to see some gardens placed under the asequia of the San Pedro, cultivated by Germans, and where everything is gathered together: our cabbages beside the okra of Louisiana, our lettuces near the bananas of the Antilles, our parsley, our celery, our onions, our melons, beans, the beans of Mexico, the watermelons, the tomatoes, the sweet potatoes, the peppers, enormous tubers from the Sandwich Islands whose shield-shaped leaves reach a meter long by seventy centimeters wide, maize tall as trees, then graceful cannas, flowers, lianas — what do I know? everything that could be put there or that put itself there. Well! it is a forest of vegetables drowned in floods of greenery, a tropical exuberance, a veritable orgy of vegetation. And this, this year, after all you know of it, in full summer, when it has not seriously rained since autumn, and when, until the beginning of May, everything that was green was three times pitilessly killed by violent frosts.

All the maize fields reached by irrigation hold the same language: With irrigation one can do anything; and, to speak only of what is still the sole basis of a cultivation emerging from fifty years of abandonment, irrigation assures, whatever happens, seventy-two bushels of maize to the acre. — It was from Mexico, beyond the Rio Grande — a country of irrigation — that the maize came this spring, in long days' journeys by oxen, to make up here for the deficit of the last harvest.

The corporation (municipality) of San Antonio has, however, begun the restoration of the asequias on its territory. Thanks to a new charter, prepared and obtained from the last legislature through the offices of my friend Supervièle, member of the senate for Bexar County, it is to be hoped that it will complete its work. Nevertheless, the Americans, with the closed-in habits and that love of isolation so characteristic of them, of frontier men, are still far from calling upon irrigation as a resource and a system of cultivation. They even reject it, or rather deliberately leave it aside. "Irrigation," they say, "always assures very fine harvests, that is certain; but the ordinary conditions and the common chances suffice for us. The good years compensate well enough for the accidents, and we succeed very well, without imposing on ourselves works that would require more clustering and closer neighborhoods than we usually choose, to give us the temptation of undertaking them. To each his fashion — and his method." — The American, besides, takes pleasure in chances: the sociability that the town-dweller enjoys not flowing to the frontier settlements, I really do not know whether most of these advanced sentinels of the civilized lands are not, without realizing it, satisfied to meet at least with chances in the elements and to preserve them in nature.

Be that as it may, with water one can do anything. Counting only on that of the sky, one can still do much. And even, at the outset, on condition of not chasing after the absurd — of not rejecting, for example, the native plants, the vegetables whose varieties grow naturally and those whose hardiness in the local conditions is already established, in order to force from the first all the sowings and all the products of Europe, to wear oneself out and absorb oneself in hazardous experiments with superfluities while neglecting the tried and sure necessities — on these conditions of simple good sense one can very promptly fulfill all that a good program requires. Perfection, great multiplicity, the luxury of species and varieties, will come later.

The banks of the San Antonio and of the San Pedro are green, in every season, with the finest watercress: the acres of water which, in places, are covered with it, thick and packed like the densest fields of peas or lucerne, and which feed herds in winter, have, I think, nothing that can be compared to them, nothing approaching them in the finest watercress-beds of France. All this came from a little pinch of seed that a Frenchman, M. Marchant, cast some years ago on a thread of water at one of the springs. — One can do as much everywhere, at the heads of all the streams, of all the rivers, at all the springs.

There is no drought that prevents any turned earth from covering itself with fine purslane. Several species of evening-primrose and other plants to be eaten as salad, as asparagus, or as spinach, grow just as vigorously of themselves. So it is with several good varieties of onion, of which the woods and fields are full. The okra, which is used at every age and in ten ways, which offers so many resources to planters and of which nothing was known or willed to be made up there, bears at four or five feet its clusters of fine leaves, flowers, and fruits, without demanding care. The artichokes, where they have been put, hold on like weeds. The watermelons re-sow themselves along the roadsides and grow in the fields without anyone's troubling about them. All sorts of melons, gourds, excellent pumpkins, come just as easily. I have before my eyes a plot where an asparagus bed had once been made. The previous tenants plowed it and put it to maize. The plow has passed several times; the maize has been harvested; the ground has fallen back to fallow; the cows and horses have passed over it: the asparagus is still there; it persists in reappearing, in shooting up again; we have eaten of it, and, with a little care, one would certainly restore the bed to a satisfactory state.

In short, and without enumerating all the resources that a horticulture, even a rough one, can promptly and in any year yield in this country, I say that a simple sowing of eight or ten plant species, which would grow there like couch-grass in any scratched soil, would amply suffice for the needs of people not too easily alarmed at leading, for a year or two, the life of pioneers. What is certain — if it can serve as a measure — is that Mme Considérant, her mother, and I would content ourselves with it very well. But let us break off this subject — on which there would still be much to say, and to which I reserve the right to return. The countries where one finds everything are not countries to colonize; and when one seeks them for colonizing, one must not so much ask oneself what one will find there as what one will be able to put there. A country that is the finest in the world for the cultivation of cereals and for the raising of all useful animals; where cotton prospers beside maize and wheat, and where sugar cane itself can be successfully harvested — such a country looks to the future with confidence. — This sentiment is settled here; and if it is not possible to obtain land grants from the government, if the traditional benefit of preemption has itself been withdrawn, it is because there is not one of the representatives of the country who does not profess that the country no longer needs to make any gift to draw people to it. This theme has been developed and repeated a hundred times in the recent legislatures and has not there found a single contradictor. But let us break off this subject, I said, and conclude with this single observation, namely: that it is still easy to occupy here fine and large sites, on which, without departing from the most ordinary means, a colonization sufficiently clustered and distributed as the tastes and conveniences of Europeans require would not fail to create, in a given time, fine networks of irrigation. — That suffices, and answers everything and for everything, for a future one is free to make for oneself.

So much for the productivity of the country. As for its salubrity, here too I have nothing to change in what I said in my book; I have only to add this: that as one moves away from the Eastern frontier, the points where it would be, in any country, compromised by purely local circumstances, become more and more rare. To find, in the West, fever-ridden localities, one would have to go looking for them. The country in the mass is as favorable to health as one could desire — more salubrious and more wholesome, there is no hesitating to say it, than all that I know of France, where — to say nothing of the fever-ridden regions — from the small to the great, from head-colds and sore throats to rheumatisms, to inflammations of the lungs, etc., etc., one is forever among misadventures, drugs, and doctors. Here one scarcely sees any but the maladies one may call, in a manner of speaking, voluntarily brought on.

Nor have I any more to modify in my first publication as regards the agreeableness of the climate and the chances of existence it offers to man. I do not think that, from this point of view, there are any finer, and at the same time better suited to the races of Northern Europe. I have seen there the most violent winter and a very mild winter. This last, with the ordinary temperature of the latter half of autumn and the first of spring, suffices to correct the muscular slackening that summer labors to produce, and which would soon become chronic and would lead Northern races to a degeneration through enervation, were it not for that sure periodicity which each year brings the thermometer back toward its zero and makes it descend below from time to time. — As for this terrible winter, what after all did it consist of? six weeks of great cold, of which a few days were foggy and snowy; others, in greater number, exposed to winds that delicate lungs would not be prudent to face; but, for perhaps five of those six weeks, the weather was clear, the sun splendid, and a walk out of doors, in a winter overcoat, healthy, fortifying, invigorating, as they say here by an expression we lack, producing that sensation of manly pleasure the body draws in as it assimilates an air charged with tonic elements, re-stretching its fibers and restoring their strongest temper to all its organs.

No doubt, ah! no doubt, a population transplanted before the time and the necessary preparations, lodged in open boxes, between gaping boards, in fireless holes, where the thermometer marks just the same degree as in the open air, where the wind blows hard enough to put out the candle, where European cattle would shiver and where in Europe one would not leave them, discontented besides, and with a thousand reasons to be so, at least three-quarters demoralized — no doubt such a population must suffer much from such a season and even show itself very little apt to take its good side, which demands, I will not say energy, but a certain blithe disposition, or a will of reason. I admit that; only, for the future at least, I do not admit this situation; I maintain on the contrary that it is easy to build here, at very little cost and in a few days — I say a few days — dwellings which, however provisional one chooses to hold them, would completely and perfectly shelter their inhabitants from all these rigors; would furnish them very wholesome, clean lodgings already meeting all the conditions of what I will call the first degree of the comfortable, or the comfortable of the first degree — I say comfortable, for the merely necessary, for pioneers, does not ask so much.

I write this facing a jacal of 9 meters by 4.50, divided into two rooms, and built by a Frenchman six or seven years ago. Its style of construction deserves the name elegant — I mean that, were only the openings otherwise placed and proportioned, its appearance would be very pleasing and architecturally irreproachable. — Do you want the estimate? 10 to 12 dollars of wood; 10 to 12 days' work of two men, say 15. Besides, the price of doors and windows. — As recently as last year, the governor of Texas was lodged in a little plank house which, neither in space nor in comfort, was worth this jacal. It is certain that with a few trifles — a few trees, a few climbing plants, or matting at 25 sous the square meter, packing-case boards for flooring, and a little taste — one would give oneself, in this kind, charming dwellings, very wholesome, warm in the cold and cool in summer. M. Poinsard, who had built this jacal for himself, now makes rammed-earth (pisé) constructions still more economical than this one, at least where raw timber, as here in town, is dear. The Americans too have been building much, for some time now, in concretes made with stones, sand, and from 1/20 to 1/40 of lime; Coignet's concrete, moreover, is perfectly practicable here, and with one or the other of these processes one will be able, as soon as one wishes, in suitably chosen localities, to build permanently at little cost. The materials are everywhere: there is only labor to be put in.

The conditions of good housing, for summer, are quite as easy — and more so — to achieve as those that winter requires. It is simply a question of intelligence. — But first one must give up the system of Northern towns, stupidly transported and slavishly copied everywhere in the South. All the towns of this country are already, or must become a little sooner or a little later, for at least two or three months of the year, unbearable to live in. These blocks of houses, most often badly oriented, masking the air from one another; whose sash windows receive only half, often less, of the little that comes; which throw out, like burning mirrors, scorching reflections, and which the wind, as soon as it freshens a little, drowns in whirlwinds of dust where they sometimes disappear entirely — these realize, at the height of summer, a veritable hell. Such, despite the width of its streets, have I already found Austin in certain quarters, in heats, it is true, extraordinary even for that spot — Austin, a locality ill-favored, as I have said, in this respect, though so admirable in many others, and where it would have been so easy to correct this defect and adopt an excellent plan by merely consenting to follow faithfully a ground marvelously broken and so magnificently disposed for the site and development of a capital.

The summer question, for dwellings — it was already well explained in my book — is only a matter of site, of orientation, and of sufficient isolation. Any dwelling open full south, or better still, inclined 10 to 15 degrees to the east, a little raised above the ground or set on a ground itself a little raised and sloping toward the south; protected, on that side only if one wishes, by a light veranda, even were it but of canvas; kept, always on the same side, at sufficient distance from a too beaten and dusty neighborhood; shielded from the reflection of other houses too near: any dwelling, under these conditions, easy to bring together if only one has set them oneself in time, will make a good summer dwelling. Let it be, instead of planks, of tree-trunks, of rammed earth, of concrete, or of stone; let it have a thatched roof somewhat neatly made, or a simple ceiling of canvas whitened with lime under a shingle roof; give it shutters or blinds, climbing plants on the veranda posts, shade-trees — which one can, were it only with the pretty china trees, procure already very fine and very thick in three years, if the chosen site were not already provided with them in advance; and let a little taste have presided over these easy arrangements, and you will have a cool and pleasant dwelling, where the breeze that, one may say, never fails during the day, sifted in the shade and governed as one pleases, will let you pass the hottest hours very well, and await without impatience those charming evenings and those delicious nights that our Northern climates do not let us know — those nights that make souls sing, and that would make such fine gatherings for a population of gay character and somewhat artistic tendencies, if only it found some grounds for contentment besides.

Here we are at 29½° of latitude, six degrees from the tropic, in the heart of summer — the first days of August. — Well! work is neither suspended nor slowed. Many people, I grant, in absurd shops, in suffocating and broiling holes in the center of the town, wipe from their brows the sweat and often all the dust for five or six hours in the middle of the day. But this is not the fault of the climate or of nature. Neither one nor the other is guilty of this huddle of hovels; both counseled, both ordered the contrary. Work in the open air is not suspended, and does not even seem slowed. The houses under construction rise just as rapidly as in spring or during winter: Germans, French, Mexicans, Americans, Italians, Poles — there are here people of all homelands — cut and saw the stone, do the carpentry, the masonry, dig the wells, water the gardens, etc., etc., in full sun. Those who work in the shade and the wind do not complain; those whom the sun beats down on complain of it, but acknowledge that the breeze is good. In short, I repeat, there is no perceptible slackening in the workshops, on the building sites, in the courses of labor, on account of the season, any more than one hears of an increase of illness in their persons. The sanitary state of the whole population is very satisfactory, and yet the year is favored by no exceptional softening, by no temperature lower than usual, by no refreshing rains — quite the contrary.

Such facts speak. A country where, not by months, not by weeks, but by days, in an average year, outdoor work is never of necessity suspended on account of the rigor of the weather, summer or winter; which gives cold enough in that last season to keep the organism of Northern races in tone; breeze enough in summer for the sun, often veiled besides, to be braved with impunity; and, after the hottest days, refreshing and restorative nights; such a country is judged. Health it lavishes; well-being, agreeableness, charm, it does not assure at every moment, directly, without exceptions or conditions, but it contains all the elements of them; nothing is easier than to shelter oneself against the brief exceptions, and to realize all the conditions it asks for guaranteeing these benefits. I repeat, it is for the development of human life a superb field; and, although not yet refined and finished, although still young and wild, subject to excesses, to abruptnesses, to outbursts that have exceeded what I expected in that kind, a magnificent climate. Without discussing for the moment what this climate may become, what in my view it will become through the peopling of the State and of its Northern neighbors, and once one has put water everywhere it is wanting on the surface — with artesian wells, which is beginning to be done, or, far more simply and more economically still, by means of plain wells fitted with Franchot pumps worked by the windmill of the same maker — I take it as it is and declare myself well content with it. — You may believe me: that, after all I have suffered in this country, and all the hold that the debilitating conditions in which I found myself so long gave to its aberrations over my nerves, I do not hold it in horror and keep in disgust — rather, again, the contrary — the memory of our climates of rain, of fog and of cold, of mud and penetrating damp, of dark, dreary, or detestable foul weather, of fine weather always doubtful and almost always so short, of head-colds, of rheumatisms, etc., etc. — for this one to be in reality singularly beautiful; — and it is.

VIII

I come to the first of the three questions posed just now, the only one that remains for us to examine: "Did I deceive myself, and to what degree did I deceive the legitimate hopes I had given you?"

I will first make an observation, which is that there are in my book two parts: the part of what I was able to see or verify myself, and the part of what came to me through information that I could not even gather directly and that had to be translated for me. These two parts are kept separate. I told you what I had seen as having seen it; I told you what I had learned through information as having received it through information and under the conditions in which it came to me.

For the first part, I defy anyone whatever to point out the least error — not even on a few minute details, which have been carped at, that I gave as facts, that were facts, that I maintain for what they were, and whose apparent contradiction with others, gained by experience, I would easily resolve, were it necessary to dwell on it.

I had said, for example, in describing the gardens of Fort Worth and Fort Graham — the only ones I had occasion to visit with any information — that in June, and without anyone's having taken pains over them, they were remarkably free of weeds, while all the useful plants developed there magnificently. On the other hand, we had, up there, much trouble with weeds in our own gardens. The two facts are true. What they prove — and what is established by much experience — is that weeds require certain conditions to spring up, and that it often happens that they do not appear in the first cultivations on virgin soil, while they develop vigorously in the following ones. What I had said was true; what happened in the great garden — soils previously turned and cultivated, moreover — was equally true; and I should certainly have preferred, for our gardeners' sake, to have been mistaken in asserting the contrary. The two facts are opposed; they are in no way contradictory. A farmer by profession would have attributed no significance to the one I had seen, and would, in my place, have neglected this detail, or explained it to himself. I am no less convinced that the officers of the two forts were as ignorant as I and as much in good faith in showing me the fact, as I was in reporting it.

As for the things that came to me by the other route, what you know today suffices to show you the share of the Texan exaggerations. In my view, that share bears on nothing capital; its correction has in no way to affect a project of the nature of ours, which it touches seriously in no essential element.

The changes that occurred in the territorial conditions during my absence, and of which I was informed only on my return to America, do not constitute errors on my part. They belong, on the contrary, to an order of movement that I had pointed out as near, imminent, I said, in Texas; and if they proved very troublesome for us, it is far more in consequence of the circumstances that engaged us so heavily and so inopportunely in the heart of the Reserve and of the lands recently appropriated in its vicinity, than by their own intrinsic effect. Had not the accessory — the minute accessory, the minute and unimportant provisional matter — become, even before my arrival, the principal thing, and had I had time to search, to choose, and to acquire elsewhere, nothing would have been seriously compromised, nothing at all.

But, without taking up again here points sufficiently noted above, I come to the capital matter, capital above all from the point of view of the present and of the future reopening before us, and I broach it with this question: Did I say to you, "Follow me, I have my star. I guarantee success whatever is done and whatever happens. I shall master all circumstances. Success depends on my person. Have faith in me, I answer for everything"? Did I hold this language to you? Re-read my book. What is written is written; scripta manent.

No! I presented to you a plan studied, detailed, matured, foreseeing and predisposing point by point the successive and progressive operations that constituted a particular procedure, a determinate system of colonization; a system that it depended on us, on us alone, to execute in all its essential elements, and whose essential conditions themselves were independent of all external circumstances. I dwelt with such force, with such minute care, on the logical development of these conditions, that I thought I had in some sort to excuse this excess of insistence and rigor by justifying and sanctioning it through the expression of its supreme motive — a motive so imposing, an expression so formal, so decisive and imperative itself, that I judged it adequate, and more than adequate, to the guarantee it was meant to assure to the common work. — "A reason," I said, "far more powerful, mark it well, is that a rigorous method alone can give to the revelations of good sense, to the indications of instinct, the value of rules, of imperative laws, of formal conditions of success, which the instigators and the cooperators of the work firmly resolve from that point to observe, and to which all wills won over to the cooperation themselves feel and accept the necessity of submitting by common accord." (Au Texas, 2nd ed., p. 105.) — Read again, if you wish, for fuller edification, the ten lines that come in the book after this passage.

I had, then, in no way attached success to my personality, to my own and independent strengths, to my superiority, to my invulnerability, to my star, in short.

That to which I had attached success, that to which I had promised, assured it, was a determinate plan — elastic, no doubt, as every good plan must be, but which, for the beginnings above all, absolutely required respect for its capital conditions. It is to that, and to that exclusively, that I had attached the guarantee of success.

There is more: I have already recalled it, and the ten lines of my book that I advised you just now to read would suffice by themselves to establish this: that if I had with the greatest care deduced the positive conditions, that is, those willed for success, I had just as formally pointed out the negative ones, that is, those to which, in any case, if one engaged in them, attached the certainty of confusion and of defeat. Why! had I not so well calculated their effect in advance, the foresight of their consequences would not have struck me so suddenly, nor so violently; and this misfortune — of a leader paralyzed from the opening of the campaign — would not have been added to so many other causes of reverse.

On these determinate conditions I promised you the prosperity of the common work: on other, equally determinate conditions, I announced to you certain rout. — In what was I here mistaken, and in what, here, did I deceive your legitimate hopes, that is, those that derived from my words?

Our hopes were not realized, that is certain. But my words were only too formally confirmed in and by circumstances whose disastrous bearing I believed I had shown all too well to everyone for me to be able, in embarking at Ostend, to leave behind me the fear of them; what am I saying? for me to be able to fear that they would outstrip me even before my arrival on the field! No, unhappily! I was not mistaken; any more than I deceived hopes categorically attached to determinate conditions — which were replaced, in fact, by their formal contradiction.

I shall be told that, since the events that were so surely to entail a ruinous beginning did come, and since after all I was the leader of the movement, it is my fault; that it was for me to have done anything whatever, but a something that would have, de facto, forestalled these events. — Be it so! I have already accepted that; I accept it still. I am responsible here by my very position, and solely responsible. Nevertheless, here is what I say: I say that in the matter of responsibility there are, as in every other affair of this world, degrees and measures. That said, I have nothing to add, for the rest concerns you. I judge, in effect, that you have in hand, to measure here my degree of culpability, elements that suffice; and the judgment to be rendered is no longer, for each, anything but a matter of personal logic, of intimate dispositions, and of character. For my part — who am perhaps not a good judge in the cause — given what prudence requires in human affairs, and seeing that there are to all forecasts legitimate bounds, I am so near to granting myself a bill of full indemnity that it is not worth saying how little is wanting to it. — And I confess that I scarcely expect, from those to whom I address myself and whose opinion is dear to me, a sensibly more severe judgment.

Be that as it may, the most important thing for the future that is to be taken up again — and which we ought to take up only with the same plan — was above all to establish that it is in no way what I had proposed to you, and what you had adopted as sensible and judicious, as good and sure, that failed. What failed is, quite simply, what reason and a hundred experiences, of which I had cited the most recent, had made us — you in reading my book as I in writing it — hold to be absurd and ruinous.

As for the proposed plan, it is not touched in the least. I say further: in the three years since it was written, and after two and a half years of experience of the country and of things, of information and of study on a field where colonization and the peopling of the solitudes go on permanently under every form, I have not one modification, not a single one, to make to this plan. I almost regret it, in a way. I should like to be able to point out to you today some weak point and to propose its correction. I have always welcomed the occasion to show that good faith of good sense and that good sense of good faith, which cost certain persons so much, it seems, and which have always seemed to me far more apt to deserve and to strengthen confidence than a blind and foolish obstinacy, exclusive of all progress upon oneself, or those systematic airs of infallibility that so many authorities in this world affect — small or great, real or imaginary. — Open to every happy modification, quite ready to accept such if anyone more perspicacious or more competent should present any, I still see none to be made.

Thus our original plan is not touched. Three years of reflection, of experience of things and of practical study have done, in my view, nothing but confirm it. For our reason at least — for you who adopted it, for me who had conceived it — that is a satisfaction and a serious ground of confidence.

If you wish, as I count on, that we march henceforth forward, we have, to repair the past and rebuild the future, only to continue returning as far as possible into the agreed plan at the point where the force of things had overturned it, and to apply it faithfully, rigorously, to the new fields to be opened.

IX

Be it so! someone will perhaps say to me, and the objection is legitimate — be it so! we admit that success would have crowned a faithful execution of this plan and that it would crown it still. But who guarantees us this fidelity of execution? You wished it three years ago, as you wish it today. You had proclaimed it necessary, indispensable, as you proclaim it today. Circumstances thwarted your resolution, as they overturned the vain barrier of your remonstrances: the same case may arise. Where is the guarantee?

The guarantee? This time I give it, and I give it with good title because I hold it. The same case cannot recur this time, because, this time, I judge everyone forewarned in such a manner that no kind of possible case, no consideration of the safety of persons or of the moral interests of the Company, can make me deviate from the line.

Among all those who came, in the first batches, up there, there is one — the poor fellow! — toward whom I was armed. That one had written to me twice when I was still at Brussels, insisting strongly on setting out promptly. I answered him twice that it would not be before a year or two that he could think of coming, and that I would call him when it was time. Despite this he set out. He arrived, wounded in the foot, dragging a sorry nag that carried his effects and having spent almost all his ready money. I had known him from his childhood. He had been, as a small child, raised in my father's house and cherished by all my family. He was the only one of the colonists with whom I had ties as affectionate and of as long standing. He was certainly worth, besides, as a colonist, the average of the others; he had handled the plow a little; he had left in Europe a liquidation in the care of his wife, who was to come and join him. — Others were announced as coming, again spontaneously, from various points, to ask us for a roof and advances of subsistence. Had I admitted this one, personally and repeatedly forewarned as he had been, I should have had no reason left, in the logic of justice, to refuse anyone. — "You received my letters," I said to him? — "You know well I did." — "You came against what I told you?" — "What would you have? I thought..." — "You are going to leave here this very instant!" — "Let me at least a few days; you see the state I am in." — "Not an hour. You will sleep tonight as you slept yesterday, on the prairie; you will go to Dallas; you will go wherever you like: you will not stay here." — "But if I go to Dallas I shall catch the fever there: in the state I am in you are sending me to my death! You, you? oh! that is not possible!" — "I send you to your fate; to the fate you willed and made for yourself." — He left in despair. He nearly died at Dallas; and his heart is so good that some months later, returning to Europe, he came — as affectionate as in the days of his childhood — to embrace me, to bid me farewell, and to ask me my errands for my sisters. — I do not know whether there are people to whom such executions come easily; this one tore my heart.

But here is what I know: that henceforth, were it only through the publication of this writing, I hold each and all to have received more than two explicit letters from me, and to be better forewarned still than poor Mique had been. I hold that, after such warnings, there is no longer any error, any thoughtlessness, any personal blindness — however extenuating its circumstances may be or seem — that can, in my eyes and in my conscience, engage the sentiments of humanity, the moral interests of our Company, and command or excuse, even in the presence of questions of life or death for persons, violations of the rule or simple deviations from the spirit of the Statutes. I know that, after such warnings, those who would expose themselves to arrive as burdens must count on having to carry themselves, and themselves alone; and that, in order to be able to help and serve the establishment of those who will come under the regular and normal conditions of the Company, and to invest them with the fullness of their rights and their due, not a straw would be diverted to save from any misery whatever those who, braving warnings of this order, should believe they would find with me a roof, a table, and national workshops opened for them at others' expense.

I say more: that the revolt of my mind against proceedings henceforth so immoderately inexcusable would endow me with a perfect insensibility, and that the cruelest executions in their consequences, should any be met with to perform, would cost me nothing at all anymore.

All that I could write, all that I could say of the certain dangers of a blind precipitation, of the deplorable consequences of any pressure tending to obtain premature departures, going so far as to force them, to carry them out spontaneously, without waiting for the signal of opportunity and the initiative that were to come from the field of action — all that was in vain. I wished — it is here, I repeat, that my fault lay, and where, in my view, all my responsibility lies — I wished to spare the Company every failure and persons every misfortune at once; and I believed, in my simplicity, that it sufficed to have pointed out, as energetically as I had done, the consequences of this precipitation — evidently destructive, besides, of the common plan — for it to be no longer to be feared. Such was my fault — an enormous fault in its results, in its consequences, objectively, and of which, subjectively, in its principle, in its origin, and in the dimensions of the frame each makes for himself of what human foresight requires, each can weigh the weight in his own balance — such, I say, was my fault. I will not commit it again. I change my system; nothing is simpler.

Instead of so much recommending prudence, of so much preaching the necessity, for each, of waiting for his time and the signal, henceforth I spare myself all that. I dispense with all urging. Each is free, each may come without being called: the sea is open, and there is no need of a passport to enter Texas. Only, I hold each forewarned that the Company has no special engagement with anyone, and that I myself shall hold myself bound only by the direct engagements I may have entered into.

I will work to open and prepare the regular and common conditions, as was agreed. I will give all useful information; I will make known progressively the progressive state of things. Let come who will, without my advice, without having exactly informed me of his resources, his abilities, the family establishment with which he counts on settling, and without knowing whether the moment, for him, has come; without even knowing whether there is any chance of any place at all, possible for his particular position and already opened by the normal course of the colonization. Such a one will know only, in advance, that not a straw will be disturbed nor a centime diverted from the line of the general interests of the Company to open the least hole for him.

He will have his rights, such as they result from the shares he holds, if he is a holder of shares. He will have the use of these rights in the proportion and the nature of what is accessible to all at the moment of his arrival. He will have, besides, the counsels, the advice, the benefits of the experience acquired, the common advantages, the good will that the Colonization Agency owes to all and in which the executive Agent has failed toward no one — it is not by deficiency that he errs on that side; — he will have nothing more. If there is no shelter ready for him, had he in hand a hundred thousand francs in shares, he will make one for himself or wait his turn, and, until then, he will sleep on the prairie. — If there is no work where he can be seriously employed for the regular objects of the Company, and he has neither ready resources nor shares to be reimbursed, the river will offer him drink, and he will find where he can credit for food. If he falls ill and no compassionate soul has the leisure to give him free care, it is not at the Company's expense that he will receive it; and, were he in the case of a repatriation judged necessary, he will not have, to help with it, a penny from the relief funds. — The optional and costly relief measures, of whatever nature, will be exclusively reserved for those who, subordinating themselves to the conditions dictated by the general interest of the Colonization, will not have forced the order dictated by that higher interest; who will have inquired; who will not have claimed for themselves capacities for work, abilities, and usefulnesses that they would not show at the task; and who, on the exact and sincere description of their real position and on the communication of the conditions they would find ready for them, judging these conditions opportune for themselves, will have been regularly forewarned that their arrival is judged opportune for the common work itself.

What I mean by regularly forewarned is — for the points to whose colonization I shall directly preside — having my direct assent, or being strictly comprised within the frame of a precise instruction emanating from me. And what I mean by strictly and precise is that if, for example, I say there is room and work, on such conditions, for five carpenters, and ten come, or five come accompanied by women, daughters, children, or aged parents, I shall concern myself with keeping the said conditions for five carpenters. Five of the ten, or the unagreed family accompaniment, will fall into the category of persons come at a venture.

It is not only the most elementary sentiments in us all that must give us, and that effectively impress upon us, the ardent desire, the violent will, if one may so say, for the success of the particular establishments, for the success, the conquest, the well-being and the contentment of persons. It is clear as day, in effect, that even abstraction made of the sentiments of benevolence, of humanity, and of all the sympathetic ties that unite us — considering only the material interest, the bare and crude interest of the Company — its bases, cast in our principles of solidarity, are such that the interest and the success of persons are the integral and necessary elements, the only true elements, the only possible means of the success of the Company itself. And happily it had the principle of solidarity for its foundation!

The consequences of these premises, equally clear in themselves, are that the persons who shall have consented to wait for the good conditions of their own establishment, of the prosperity of their own enterprises, will be the true elements of the prosperity of the collective enterprise; that the others can only be destroyers of it; that the sacrifices made to soften the harshness of positions taken lightly or madly can only be made to the detriment of the collective interest and of the particular interests that well deserve it; that these false positions and these false sacrifices alone can set the personal interests of the two kinds at odds with one another and with the general interest (the whole history of our miseries up there, individual and collective, is in this last clause); that there is, then, but one resolution to take and to hold, namely:

To proclaim, as I do, the Company irresponsible outside its Statutes;

To proclaim, as I do, that every individual who comes onto the field without having in hand shares or a regular paper attesting the nature of the conditions that have been set out to him and that he has declared he accepts, signed by him and to be delivered into the hands of the executive Agent or of his representatives, will be, whoever he may be, treated as a stranger, and, according to the case, as an intruder;

To proclaim, as I do further, that every shareholder who comes without a paper of the same kind will have a right only to the reimbursement of his shares under the conditions publicly declared as being then open to all without distinction;

To proclaim, finally, that there will be, in the eyes of the Company, two categories of immigrants — those who shall have assured, so far as human foresight can do, the success of their establishment by the use of the regular channels, and who will furnish on the spot the written proof of that use, — and those who shall have come at a venture; — that all, of course, will have the right to settle at their own expense, risk, and peril; but that the available time of the Company's agents, their special care, all the optional advantages and the relief of the Company, will be exclusively reserved for the first.

The prosperity of these last, identified with the collective prosperity, will have a right to every kind of possible assistance. As for those of the other category, the separation is from now on made. If they succeed, so much the better; everyone will be glad of it, and the Company itself will find its account in it. If they compromise or ruin themselves, so much the worse, but this time so much the worse for them alone. Their recriminations, their grievances, all their speeches are annulled in advance. The Company, at least, will have nothing to suffer or bear on their account. — They are free; but they are forewarned that their misadventure may go, with no relief to receive and no legitimate claim to be able to put forward, as far as utter collapse, as far as death.

Why did I not, seeing more deeply, take from the outset this rigorous attitude! Our affairs would today be in full prosperity, and could already have received and settled, to the satisfaction of each and all, with very few exceptions, all those who came too soon, and many others who aspire to come.

Be that as it may, such is my answer to the very natural objection that has already been made to me more than once: "As soon as you begin something again, the same circumstances will tend to recur; how will you forestall them?" — I will not forestall them. I renounce forestalling circumstances; I confine myself to having forewarned persons — and I record it as a fact — that every compromising and disastrous circumstance will remain to the account of him who shall have produced it.

That if anyone ships me goods whose dispatch I had not requested or accepted — even were I able to turn them to advantage — for the keeping of the principle I will refuse them and leave them to the account of the shippers, whoever they may be.

If persons reach me under the same conditions — save the common right resulting from shares one might hold, and as that right would then be open — I will leave these persons to the account of themselves and of those who shipped, invited, engaged, or recommended them, the one and the other to manage as they can.

All facts of this kind will be immediately posted in the colony where they may have occurred, and inserted in the next Bulletin.

On these conditions, let come who will, or what one will, from where one will and as it may please; I guarantee that, on my part, neither the Company, nor its reasonable members, nor I, shall have any longer to suffer the consequences.

On these conditions, and if they suit you — and that seems to me certain — I am ready, as at the beginning, to take up again the work of colonization under my direction, with my full responsibility, and better prepared than then on most of the points where experience had to be gained. — And if, by an impossibility, it were otherwise — should you judge a pause to be unfortunate — I would hold myself at the Company's disposal to continue acquiring lands for it during the time necessary to find me a replacement and to bring him up to date; for these conditions, for me, admit of neither middle terms nor modifications of any kind. In their principle, and for an affair such as this, they are elementary; their rigorous expression and their thoroughgoing execution have become necessary to the success of the work as to the responsibility of its conduct, and it would not be sincere of me to let it be believed that, in this case, I hold myself open to the discussion of better means. There is, for me, no occasion to put anything here up for discussion; all this, besides, is so imperatively commanded by the experience of the past that I could, I believe, have neglected to state it.

Will you believe a thing? You now know those circumstances in which, for more than a hundred and fifty persons who had come — if not with wisdom, at least with good-faith illusions — abandonment would have been despair, for many of them a misery usque ad mortem perhaps, and, for the Company, a collapse that would then have dealt it the mortal blow. Well! will you believe that, for having, in these circumstances, taken upon my responsibility to employ in hazardous advances — with a view to furnishing persons the means of existence and of establishment — funds that had been confided to me to prepare the establishment of their lenders, and that, after having explained this, deduced the motives and the character of this resolution, the positions and the obligations resulting from it, will it be believed, I say, that less than a year afterward, on my return from Austin, I found these concessions exorbitant, this flagrant violation of the spirit of the Company's Statutes, of their principle, of the conditions most formally set forth all along the book that serves them as basis — all the enormities, in short, that I had consented to in order to avoid worse — erected into a normal, permanent, and in some sort obligatory state of things on the Company's side! and this, when there was no kind of obligation that one could so much as ask of the other party, and when, for want of any real guarantee, the prospect of a minimum of order, of useful labor, of accord and of productivity, had ceased to be admissible, replaced as it was by the aspect of a ruin in progress! Did people not undertake to maintain to me the regularity of such a state of things, its perfect conformity with the Statutes and with the views of a project whose subjective principle, ceaselessly brought back before the reader's eyes, was that the colonization shall be carried out at the expense, risk, and peril of the colonists, and not at the expense, risk, and peril of the Company. For the rest, if the state of things whose maintenance was wanted was regular, the practice of it too was very satisfactory; — and, although those who might have been excusable in believing themselves interested in this maintenance had — it is a justice to render them — the good fortune to recognize it as impossible, or even deliberately to want no more of it — the best use I could make of the Company's funds was to go on throwing them into that abyss — so regular and so satisfactory!

And do you believe that is all? No. I had still to turn out, to drive from the place, persons who, almost alone, being shareholders, had real rights upon that place, because, persisting wrongly and maliciously in refusing to acknowledge what was regular and satisfactory in the state of things, these would have none of it for anything in the world, allowed themselves to speak of it with very little sympathy, and demanded for themselves conditions more in conformity with their tastes, with the Statutes, and with the promised liberty! "If our money is used," said these, "in advances of establishment for persons who have no right to it, let us at least be allowed to employ what may remain of it to settle ourselves as we please." It was very wrong of me to find this reasoning just, this claim legitimate, and to wish that it should be granted. — Is that all? No! The crowning touch is that I was threatened with an appeal against my misdeed... to yourselves!

You understand well that I do not cite this opinion to complain of it, any more than to incriminate whoever may have professed it; I even made a point of reporting the stroke that crowns it, because it expresses so naïvely the unreason that it would remove all hold even from one inclined to seek one. This opinion is of those one has not to combat, but simply to set aside; I cite it, and I could point out other claims of various kinds, to show what, by the most benevolent accommodations and the best-attested concessions — attested as such and as most evident — one exposes oneself to reaping. No, one must not expose oneself to gratitude for concessions; and the stiffest positions, but which avoid them, are worth a thousand times more than gentler ones that make them necessary.

For the rest — and this I ought to say, for, no longer having me before their eyes, I must indeed forewarn you — one does not pass through trials like those I have undergone without coming out somewhat different from what one entered. Well! I must tell you that I do not feel myself corrected of any of my real faults (or rather of those I recognize in myself) of temperament, of character, of nature; that, on certain sides which have earned me advice or complaints, invitations or sermons, I do not admit as well-founded the bases of the criticisms, and I deliberately maintain my dispositions. The only point where I feel a change in myself — and it will be a worsening in the eyes of all those who already found me obstinate and too set in my ideas — is a very decided disposition to be so all the more. There is more: I do not combat this disposition in myself; my judgment here approves the change that has come over my character, and supports it on a formula whose lack of humility I do not disguise: it tells me that, in casting up the account of my follies since the age of reason, I find one in ten due to my own inspiration; nine for having yielded, against my own feeling, to opinions, counsels, or outside influences, or else to slopes I had not made myself; it adds that it is reasonable to wish notably to diminish the proportion of those of the latter kind. — I shall be told that I make here only a simple reckoning, and that, for it to have, in form at least, the figure of a good account, one would have to add to it the blunders that good counsels have spared me. — I answer that I have very often in my life been enlightened by good counsels, but that I do not think it has frequently happened to me to fail to recognize such. It is certainly not the lights, nor the useful advice, nor counsels in general that I feel disposed to set aside. When I have an opinion, and a better one is offered me, and I adopt it, I do not call that yielding. — To yield is, in a spirit of concession to another opinion or to facts of which one is not the author, to act contrary to the feeling that remains one's own, or to make too cheap a bargain of it. Well! it is that verb which, throughout the whole sphere of my responsibility, I no longer feel disposed to conjugate in the future. In other words, if I have gained nothing on the side of that subjective self-confidence that draws its force from itself, I have gained a more pronounced feeling of the solidity of my judgment, of the reach of my view, of the value of my experience, and, if it must be said, in the matter of reasons compared, a reflected and very decided superiority of relative esteem for my own.

A declaration of self-confidence, when it is not ridiculous, passes very well in the world. To declare the soundness of one's judgment and one's belief in the superiority of one's own reason over many others' has fewer chances; I know it well; and if my aim were to court chances or to capture suffrages, I should have wit enough to abstain from it. Let those who would so judge it then say that pride is taking hold of me; I am willing: let them say what they will, provided at least that I have deceived no one.

In short, I shall be found less accommodating than formerly; and everywhere that my responsibility is engaged as chief, it is as responsible chief that I shall act, above all, myself. This being bound to constitute some difference in our bearing, it was right that one should be forewarned of it, and I judge that I owed you, besides, to set out frankly the cause.

X

You have now, friends, on the past and on the present, as well as on the country and on the possibilities of the future one can make for oneself there — if one wills it — my present opinion; and you have besides, along with the means of judging me, those of judging the value of that opinion.

For my part, I feel myself completely disengaged. Here I am, returned into communication with you, and I return into it with my most intimate friends, with my family, with the world — of which I was no longer a part, and have, you may believe me, no desire to engage you anew in the disappointments, nor to re-engage myself in them; I paid for the first too dearly. That said, I will sum up my opinion. Hear me well.

If, three years ago, we had known this country as well as we do today; if the climatological tables published in my book had belonged to years even exceptionally excessive, recording colder spells more sustained and four or five degrees lower, such as those of the winter of 1855–56; if I had known and told you that the ants were not the only enemy of crops; that the gardens had to deal with various insects — which the uncultivated neighborhood multiplies, and which diminish as cultivation extends and develops; — that it had been seen that migrating locusts swept down in autumn on the sprouting wheat and forced the sowing to be done over again; in short, if the defects of this country had been more precisely specified in my book than I was able to do in 1854 — I ask you whether this would have weighed seriously in our resolutions and hindered an enterprise of the nature of ours?

Have not all the states situated to the North and Northeast of this one given rise to the finest developments, to the most flourishing establishments of the European races, and is there one, a single one, that combines the conditions of climate, of salubrity, and of fertility that one finds easily united in this one — a single one that approaches that triple combination? Let one go and see the winters and summers of the Northern States and of the Eastern ones, so full, so prosperous, so rich — and the springs? Does one think one is exempt there from returns of frost, such as those we have witnessed this year here? Far from it: they are more to be feared and far harsher. And the Western States, that march today so prodigiously, Missouri and its neighbors? Six weeks of Northers, like those we saw here in 1855–56, would make there an exceptionally mild and exceptionally short winter. In summer, there are scorching heats, most often without breezes. The days there are stifling and the nights frequently unbearable. — For all that, the Germans, the French, the Irish flock there and the country marches with giant strides.

No, surely! these imperceptible shadows, compared to the breadth and beauty of the lights, would not have stopped us, for we are not great children; and surely, again, had we not found other obstacles in our own faults — which alone, besides, kept us from mastering these — they would have been blithely crossed and victoriously fought through.

And if, now, the territorial conditions of 1853 had been those of today, would that, again, have stopped us? Certainly, immense free spaces, to be chosen and covered with certificates, had these been at 40 sous, that was convenient and very tempting for our projects. But if I had told you that I could acquire for you, at 40 sous to 80 sous, at 1 dollar and 1 dollar and a half, lands all patented, free of location and survey costs; that I could still bring together for you, at these prices, very fine spaces; if, instead of telling you that, superior to the Indian Territory in fertility, yet as a fine country Texas was generally inferior to it, that the prairie there was even often very monotonous, etc.; if I had been able, instead of that, to describe to you, from having been there and as being accessible to you, valleys more regularly, more amply, more classically beautiful still than those that had so charmed me in that Indian Territory; readier still for man's dwelling; where down to the sheets of water, the dams, the sluices, and the spillways, everything seems to have been prepared, sometimes even finished, by a lavish and splendid nature; where all the materials needed for the first wants of establishments are gathered to hand — such, in short, as the one whose ownership is already in great part secured to you at an average price of about 60 sous; I ask you whether, in these circumstances, which are the reality of today, you would have hesited any more to engage in the path to which I was calling you? — No, surely.

You knew there would be experience to acquire, lessons to learn, faults to commit; I had, moreover, well forewarned you of it; but if we could have thought that it was precisely the great, the gross, the heavy faults, pointed out in advance, that would be committed, then you would not have come at my call, or, to put it better, I certainly would not myself have called you. Had we known that this experience — which we were to acquire on a small scale, at small cost, progressively, and without hazarding anything grave — would cost us so dear in coin of every kind, we should with reason have undertaken nothing.

But now that the experience is amply acquired, however costly it may have been, the price paid is a thing done; there is no going back on it; and I ask whether what would have been a legitimate reason for not advancing — had one seen it ahead of one — could be a reason for stopping now that, bad step, abyss, chasm, or whatever one will, this point of misfortune is crossed and lies behind? And is it the case to stop, above all if, by stopping, the abyss calls back the prey that had escaped it and seizes it this time never to let go, while by advancing we are certain to repair all the damage, and surer than ever of grasping the goal we wished to reach?

A question posed in these terms to men is settled. It would be settled, in this country, by children. There is not one of their elementary books that does not contain the lesson of Pray again. — "You did not succeed? begin again!" — If I was not the king of fools or the most brazen of impostors in proposing to you what I proposed in 1854, and you, in accepting it, a herd of imbeciles; if we could, with good sense, then conceive and decide upon the enterprise, there are certainly, all things weighed, far more motives and far more security and reason to continue under the present circumstances than there were at that time to begin.

But I speak of beginning again! We have nothing to begin again. For my part — slowly and under the conditions you know — I have only begun my task, my task as I had proposed it, understood it, and as I had taken charge of it. — Thrown, smashed, into a hole, nothing that I was able to attempt there to draw our affairs out of it was in my program. There is nothing in common between what happened in that hole and what we had to do. What we had to do is what I have done on this side; it is what I had begun to do up there, with MM. Henry, Bessart, and Reverchon; what Cousin is doing there today, and which, despite the facts that had made the position very complicated, very heavy, and very bad in every way, he declared very easy to execute.

Now, what I have done has secured you fine lands, at a good price; what Cousin is doing liquidates, beyond hope, your liabilities and your past. — Had M. Henry, of whom I have just spoken, waited for the time that would have opened a field to the various industries for which he is apt and skilled; had MM. Bessart and Reverchon been preceded only by a wholly ordinary state of things, and could one, on their arrival, have given them, at half price, without friction and without the cost of waiting, what it was long, costly, and painful for them to obtain — they would have been very content; and certainly, nevertheless, it would not have been difficult, in a normal situation, to do better to satisfy them.

The direct execution of the plan, here, has thus prepared for you a very fine, extensible field, which would long since have been wholly secured to you and open, had I been able to attack it from the outset with all the forces and all the resources of the beginning. The return, up there, into the conditions of this plan, has cut short the unproductive and absurd expenditures, stopped the ruin dead, freed the position of its last burdens, and opened the way to the regular, productive operations in which individual responsibility — the essential basis of all the combinations admitted by this plan — will henceforth play its part.

Strictly speaking, then, we have in no way to begin again. We have to resign ourselves to an accident, to a blow that had struck us, to a reverse that had thrown us into a hole, and, out of that hole henceforth, to continue on the path determined and adopted by our reason, and shown to be good, today, by all that experience has already taught us of it.

We now march with a sure step. In Dallas County, it is no longer a question of immobilizing funds, or rather of burying them in unproductive operations; it is a question of recovering there the value of what was put in; — and you have seen how the new circumstances permit it.

Whatever, moreover, the circumstances on this point — whether they permit more or permit less — that changes nothing, nothing at all, in the dictates of good sense, which command us to seek to recover from there all we can by regularly doing there what we had proposed to do.

On this point, the colonization is open. We there possess lands, cattle, woods, supplies, cleared and fenced fields, gardens in full bearing, etc., and we have settled colonists. Cousin will soon be able to send to Europe a regular cadastre, with the quoted prices of the lands, and to make known the conditions offered today to new establishments. Let an understanding be reached on this subject; let a series of town lots, of fenced fields, of prairies, etc., be put up for sale at these first prices; let the shareholders disposed to emigrate, or to send farmers on their own account — wishing only to take immediate, certain guarantees through a determinate possession — have the faculty of paying for these lots by the amortization of premium shares, or by the reimbursement of dividend shares; and let one march in this open path so as soon to add serious increases of value, of our own making, to that which the natural peopling of Dallas County and the rapid progress of the surrounding country give every day to our holdings in that locality. Here we do not have all the added value to make; let us make only, for our part and on our lands, as much as the movement around them brings them daily of itself, and I am content.

There, then, we are ready, and it is for us to make there the fortune of our affairs. Let there come only personal responsibilities — direct or by representation; — let individuals establish themselves either singly or at any degree whatever of association; — provided these be associations of reciprocal convenience and of particular responsibilities, at the cost and on the account of their own members, and not on that of the government — on these conditions they may very well succeed and prosper. In any case, being autonomous, they would always be free to take whatever course experience should suit them to. Association at no degree is absurd. What is absurd at every degree is association without the requisite conditions; and what is more so still is association in its counter-conditions. But let us break off this point, which is not the question of the moment and which will be taken up in due time and place. — The only thing to say here, not to teach it but to recall it, is that any combination, however absurd it may be, is perfectly free to put itself into practice as soon as it has its partisans, and provided these realize it at their own expense. What I do not admit is that one should concede to the hobbyhorse of some the right to ruin the others.

In short, things having returned to their normal state, our Dallas County lands peopling themselves, the operations being henceforth without cost, or at least without unproductive cost — on this side there is only to put me, by sufficient credits, in a position to complete the acquisitions I have begun and to seize good occasions to make new ones. And here again, what have we to fear? Let us only arm ourselves with the means to make enough of these acquisitions, and, were all that we are to possess toward Dallas to be swallowed up by an earthquake, I promise you that, within a time not far off, the loss of it would be, financially, scarcely felt.

Independently of the good effect already noted that the unhoped-for lifting of the reserve had for us, the recent rupture of that belt 150 miles wide by more than 300 long, which gripped Texas about the belly, has not failed to give much play to the breathing and to the territorial operations. With the other circumstances deduced above, this one contributes to render accessible to us, on good conditions, from the Gulf to the Red River, very fine spaces where all we had wished becomes possible again.

In this immense territory still desert, where and what shall we have to choose? Room is not wanting between these two lines, north and south, and from the 97th degree of longitude to the 103rd. But I will say no more, this time, of the true choices to be made than I had spoken, three years ago, of the object I coveted above all for you — an object that very few even today know, and which, but for our fall at the first step, it would perhaps have been possible to have! and to have almost for nothing, over and above the reckoning! [the following clause is illegible in the facsimile] — In this connection I must say that, resuming the direction of the movement, one must not expect to find in the Bulletins, for all that shall be within my sphere of action, food for curiosity and even for an interest that would seem to me out of place or still inopportune there. Our positions, in the past, have all been false, and the management was indeed obliged, to sustain spirits and for want of better means, to communicate negotiations in project or in course of execution, which alone allowed any serious hope of something, but whose premature divulging might be very compromising or paid for dearly, and which, certainly, in a normal state, it would have taken good care not to deliver to print.

Under the new conditions — which will be normal — it will be so no longer. What cannot be said without harming our interests will not leave the inner and confidential correspondence before its time. I reserve the right to make, if need be, the whole news section of a Bulletin with these three words: "All goes well." When I send you these three words you will believe me, and, for being so sober, such a Bulletin might well be worth many another.

There are, for the choice of the great sites, various conditions to consider, that goes without saying. Among these conditions I count that of the interests of the sites we already possess, and which it will become all the easier to serve as we are able to act more amply. We shall endeavor to weigh well all the elements of this important question, and — what it is needless to add — I am better placed today than three years ago to work at resolving it well.

In the terms now possible and on a sufficient scale, the territorial acquisitions will constitute, at all events, excellent business. There is not the shadow of a doubt in this regard.

On the other hand, when the lands are opened to colonization, the costs of preparations made under the regular conditions can never constitute losses for the Company; since they will be advanced for persons who will reimburse them, whether in shares or in cash, and in proportion to the needs and the peopling.

Under the conditions of the plan, from which there will be no more departing, nothing remains uncertain but profits for the Company; and I could easily show, had I to treat here the details of execution, how, by carrying out the preparations and the supplies very economically for the immigrant members, the Company can and must reserve to itself still very fine profits on these branches — on the preparations chiefly, for, in principle, they ought to be light on the supplies properly so called.

But let us leave the details and all these questions which resolve themselves easily, besides, by the principles of the plan and of the Statutes, to which we have only to return, and to which I refer for every particular solution. Here and today I have but one aim, which is to know whether we ought to close ranks and march forward — or rather, for I no longer doubt you, friends — my one present aim is to cry to you: Let us rise and march! — and I hear you from here answering in echo, let us march!

XI

I should have wished — I should sincerely have wished, and it is no empty formula in my mouth — that another than I, having an old influence over you, having my experience — which would, moreover, be at anyone's service for our affairs — and not having been touched as I have been by the black wing of fate, might today make you hear the rallying cry. I should wish it still, whatever the joy with which — to direct them this time toward the near goal, the goal we are touching and from which no intermediate obstacle and no unknown any longer separates us — I concentrate today anew our wills and our efforts. I should wish it, so that nothing, even in superstitious and timid minds, might impair the vigor and the perfect unison of this liberating and avenging movement.

Well! since it is the same man who must here once more give and command the maneuver, let him remind you that the superstition of a defeat sustained is, of all, the most puerile and the most absurd. Let him remind you that a thousand times, in the history of humanity's efforts and combats, fortune and victory, when they have had to do with the will and the intelligence that calculates the means of conquering, have raised up good causes from the most desperate reverses. There is here no more cannon and battle than Bonaparte and Austrian; recall nonetheless — the example is good — that despite the best-combined plan of campaign and the most rigorous calculations, the first half of the day of Marengo had put Bonaparte in full rout, and that a happy and sudden circumstance, happily and suddenly turned to account, delivered to him the second half of that famous day, and with that second half Italy conquered and Austria at his mercy! Recall... But I will not make the enumeration of the happy returns of fortune in the affairs of this world; it would be a course of universal history, and above all of the philosophy of the history of human perseverance. No! let us only recall our aim, what we willed and undertook in common, and what we can now seize. I invited you, for your ideas and your existences, to a homeland young, great, and free. In spite of the disappointments and the misfortunes of a buried past, I cry to you that it is there, that homeland; that I am there and that it awaits you, young as the virgin nature of its fair valleys; great as the horizon of its prairies; free as the deer of its forests, as the floods that pour into them, as the breezes that ripple these — and sometimes, no doubt, as the squalls that lash them! — But seek, then, in the present state of this sublunary world, a sky always serene and a climate without storms! And what are they, the troubles and storms of the American constitution and of a liberty still young and a little wild, beside the tempests, the upheavals, and the terrors of which old Europe, the more she brings forth, shows herself the more full?

Believe me! believe me always, believe me better than ever, since, in spite of all and all the same, I tell you again: Come here! — But prepare yourselves to come greatly, amply, deliberately, in numbers and well provided — otherwise it is not worth the trouble.

I have told you the conditions of things here and what there is to do here. The other conditions are in Europe, and in your hands.

One must, in balancing the time lost, the funds ill spent, the experience gained, the recovery well under way, the formal proof that the path is good, the fortunate acquisitions and the fortunate circumstances, the security of the future — in short, the happy accidents and the disastrous accidents — one must, I say, all that balanced, agree and hold:

That we begin today, and that we begin at par, under tried, known, and sure conditions, but with our first funds, already made, immobilized for a time;

That there is occasion, as much to disengage these last most advantageously as to pursue the proposed work, to remake as soon as possible, and anew, at least the amount of them.

— One must, besides, recognize together and hold,

That there is no longer, in the present state of things, any motive excusing the desertion of those who, having engaged themselves to a cooperation on which the others would have had the right to count, should persist, without particular and legitimate motives, in not honoring their promise; and, consequently, that those who have fulfilled their engagements, even when the weather was very dark, invite everyone to do as they do, now that the sky is clear.

These two conditions accepted, as I hope, their consequences, I hold for good, will not be slow to bring us, of themselves and without our needing new efforts, abundant resources.

We agreed, I said, that we begin, under good conditions, known, sure, and at par.

Two consequences flow naturally from this position taken:

1° All the series of dividend shares, issued so far, must be equalized among themselves and assimilated to the first to be opened; and it is fitting to assimilate this one entirely to the former first, re-establishing for it all the conditions that had been opened to the other. — To act otherwise would be puerile, and there is on this subject no course more favorable to the interests of the Company and of the best-standing subscribers of the former first series itself; this is evident.

2° The system of anticipating the interest instead of a settlement in cash must be prolonged until further notice. We had set a date of three years, at the end of which it was reasonable to admit that the colonization would begin to produce cash. This has not been realized, and since we must assimilate the present state to the true beginning, we must show ourselves consistent with that resolution.

It would be supremely absurd, with a view to distributing trifling crumbs to each, to impose strong periodic, half-yearly bleedings — which, once begun, one could hardly stop any longer — upon a fund that it is in the highest interest of all to see growing at this moment, and from which it cannot be fitting to draw a revenue and a yield until it shall itself have attained its productivity.

At the end of this winter my horse was brought back to me from a ranch where I had put him, eaten up with parasites, fleshless, ruined, broken down, and three-quarters dead — much as, then, his master too, and as, then, our affairs. But I knew the beast had an excellent constitution, and, instead of demanding that he do his service, I put him to rest, bathed and curried him myself every day; I gave him hay as good as I could find, salt, sulfur, and plenty of maize — dear though it was. — On this regimen the beast recovered and has already served me well on our last expedition to the Cañons. At this hour, he has fully regained his strength and his ardor, and, just the time to recopy this Report, Domingo, in good trim this time and without feeling it, is going to carry me again to the same quarter and farther, where I have business.

The history of my horse is textually our own. Now, what would revolt good sense in a small affair could not become conformable to it by the mere fact of being applied to a great one. — There are not two kinds of good sense, there is but one; — it is, in business, a secret as simple and as fruitful as it still often appears little known, little applied, or little understood. — I think, then, I may hold it well agreed: we will not draw blood from the beast when, to carry us to the goal, its condition imperiously demands, on the contrary, that we hasten to put fresh blood back into it.

There is, however, one thing to say, or rather that goes without saying: the premium shares were created with the guarantee that they would regularly receive their interest and would be covered against all chances. There can be no question of applying to these the principle deduced just now. These are debts contracted, and which one discharges when the term falls due, unless the creditors offer extensions. I say as much for the small number of dividend shares that called for a payment of interest in money from the outset, because these, in the generality of cases, must correspond to personal situations for which this income of interest entered into the annual budget of the necessities of existence. Here again, then, and although every dividend share accepted all the chances of the enterprise, there is a debt — a conscientious debt, it is true, but one as imperative for us as a contracted debt.

XII

I have done. It is for each of you to take his personal decision in these conjunctures, and to give notice of it to the Management, so that we may soon know, all of you and I myself, on what we are to count. Whatever his resolution, there is occasion for each — it is a duty toward all the others and toward the collective work — to transmit communication of it without losing a day. You know the situation and can each appreciate the value of time.

I have done, I say, for this time at least. I do not know whether all of you, without exception, will answer as I desire to this word risen from the tomb, which you were accustomed to hear, which you loved, and which has been silent so long for you and for all. But what I know, what I know perfectly, is that, were I near you, could I speak to each, resolve all objections that I cannot foresee in their entirety, give on every point all the explanations that each in particular might ask of me; — or better still, could I transport you all here, for a day, speak to you all and show you all what I have already shown to a few — I have said it already — not one would hesitate, not a single one, to take a determination as entire and as absolute as possible. — What I know further is that there are so many powerful motives, so many convincing and decisive reasons in the course to which I call you, that all those who feel inclined to listen to me and to engage in it can do so resolutely and without fear, assured that they may count on a cooperation from the others sufficient at least for us to be in a position to do very well, even should we not be able to do the best possible.

I conclude at last by pressing all the hands that are dear to me; by begging — which I hold as granted — all those who have written to me and to whom I have not replied (I have done so for no one yet, not even for my family) to pardon me and to tell themselves that their affectionate letters have been at least balms upon wounds, repeating to all also that I have re-entered into communion with the living, and particularly with those who love me. Write to me, then, now; address to me, on all the points where reassurances would be necessary to you, regular questions: you will now have answers. Farewell, then, dear friends, and this time, I firmly hope, not for so long.

V. CONSIDÉRANT.

San Antonio, 6 August 1857.

[End of Part Two. — End of the work.]