Part 16

While there may be more refreshment and enthusiasm in the novelty which American society admits of, it lacks that stability that emanates from the very sameness with which one English year follows in the footsteps of another, and that sense of ancient respectability which rises from the consciousness of participating in the same pleasures from youth to old age in which one's fathers similarly participated in their time.

Lady Randolph Churchill easily overcame the prejudices which existed in the minds of some English women against all American women. Young as she was, there was a commanding quality in her very presence which vanquished that narrowness that harbors petty dislike on a basis of nationality.

Both of her sisters married in England, one to Moreton Frewen and the other to the only son of Sir John Leslie, Bart., of Glaslough Monaghan.

Her two sons were born, the first, Winston Spencer Churchill, on the 30th of November, 1874, and the younger, John Winston Churchill, in February, 1880.

Between the duties of her home and those of a social nature, which her position in the world entailed upon her, the first period of her life in England passed. From 1880, however, dated the dramatic period of Lord Randolph Churchill's career, in which his wife bore so conspicuous a part. He rose to the leadership of that small section of the House known as the "Fourth Party," which, coming forward as an evidence of the vigor yet possessed by the Conservatives, succeeded in June, 1885, in overthrowing the Gladstonian ministry. He was frequently compared to Disraeli, and many people prophesied for him a similar career.

In 1883, in connection with Sir H. Drummond Wolf, Lord Randolph Churchill founded, in the interests of the Conservative party, that powerful organization, the Primrose League. In a membership to-day of over one and a half million, with Knights, Dames, and Associates, Lady Randolph Churchill stands number twelve upon its rolls. The kingdom and empire of Great Britain are dotted with its Habitations.

With its development there began a new phase of Lady Churchill's life. She became from that moment thoroughly an Englishwoman, identifying herself closely with her husband's public life and interests, aiding him not only with the popularity she had already attained, but with the remarkable sagacity she displayed in reference to all political questions. With the qualities that rendered her more charming as a woman she combined those most valuable in a man. Ambitious, intrepid, discreet, she was yet graceful, tactful, wise, and witty. She became at once a force among the members of the League, and, besides being much in demand at the social events at its various Habitations, she endeavored continually to impress upon its members the influence each might exercise in behalf of "that party which is pledged to support all that is dear to England, Religion, Law, Order, and Unity of the Empire."

In her character of Dame of the Primrose League she has participated in so many electioneering contests that she is almost as well known in England as any man in public life. When her husband, in 1885, attacked the seat held by Mr. John Bright for Birmingham, seconded by the Duchess of Marlborough, she canvassed the constituency for him. Never before had women gone thus among the workingmen of Birmingham, entering the factories as well as their homes, and addressing them both collectively and individually. Though they made much havoc in the ranks of Radicalism and greatly diminished his votes, they did not succeed in defeating "the tribune of the people."

Lady Churchill is a rousing speaker, and, with her great beauty and magnetism, evoked immense enthusiasm, her carriage being frequently surrounded and followed for some distance by cheering crowds. In South Paddington her efforts told with better effect, Lord Churchill securing the election in that district.

With the accession to office of Lord Salisbury's government, Lord Churchill went into the Cabinet as Secretary of State for India,--the real head of affairs of the far-away empire where the power is represented by a governor-general. During his brief tenure of that office his wife was decorated with the imperial order of the Crown of India, which has so recently been bestowed upon another American woman in the person of the present governor-general's wife.

Lord Churchill stood at this time at the very head of his party, and when a few months after resigning the office as Secretary of State for India he again went into the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, being at the time but thirty-seven years of age, there seemed opening to him a future of almost unprecedented brilliancy. More than ever was it said that he was treading in the footsteps of Lord Beaconsfield, to whom he had been so often compared, and the Prime Ministership seemed almost within his reach. His name was on every tongue, and when he appeared in public places accompanied by his wife, whose tall, slender figure and clear-eyed, interested face were as well known as his own, he was frequently greeted with outbursts of applause. When she drove in Hyde Park her carriage was frequently followed, and she was pointed out with the most enthusiastic admiration.

Not only in England, but accompanying her husband to Russia and Germany, she excited in both of those countries a similar sentiment, there being among the people an eager desire to see the beautiful American who was so much admired by the court circles.

Attractive as she was under all circumstances, she never more admirably reflected the fine qualities of her character than on that day when her husband rose amidst the absolute silence of the House of Commons to give his reasons for withdrawing from the Cabinet. Absorbed in him, she followed intently his every word and gesture, though aware beforehand of every syllable he would utter. With perfect self-control she revealed nothing either of regret, disappointment, or any sentiment upon which a guess at his plans for the future might be hazarded.

Socially her life ran in much the same channel. So great was her beauty and so many were her talents that, though her husband gradually withdrew from public life, she was continually in the public eye, being constantly in demand to open fairs, distribute prizes, and take part in concerts. In March, 1888, she went to Clydebank to christen the "City of New York," at that time one of the most remarkable vessels that had been built. During the following summer she opened an electrical exhibit at Birmingham, and a few days later conferred the annual awards at Malvern College, her husband accompanying her and making addresses upon both occasions. About this time also she made her first appearance as a _literata_ in an article on the social life of Russia, based on the observations she had made while in St. Petersburg with her husband. Well informed, keenly observant, clever, and witty, she entered the lists without handicap, and her position to-day in the world of letters is at least unique. The most costly quarterly in existence, now entering upon its second year, is owned and edited by her.

In 1891, when he was but forty-two years old, Lord Randolph Churchill came suddenly face to face with the beginning of the end of his remarkable and crowded life. The utter physical collapse that followed, terminating in death in January, 1895, threw light upon much that had seemed inexplicable in the latter days of his public career.

Accompanied by his wife, he journeyed around the world in quest of the health which he was destined never to find. They passed through New York, Lady Churchill's first home, but made no stay, hastening across the continent to San Francisco. In Egypt, realizing how futile had been the long days and nights of travel and exile, he begged to be taken home to pass there the last few hours that yet remained to him.

From all who saw them they evoked pity and admiration,--pity for the man, stricken and doomed, in the very prime of his days and with the highest place among the statesmen of his time almost within his grasp, and admiration for the wife who, aglow with beauty, spirit, and ambition, manifested for him during those months of tragic gloom, in which his life closed, all the devotion and admiration which the most successful moments of his life, when he stood on the very pinnacle of fame, had called forth from her gratified heart.

The untimely disappearance from the world of a man whose magnetic nature had made him a leader of men and an idol of all classes of society appealed powerfully to public feeling. The tolling of the funeral bell from St. George's, in Hanover Square, a little after noon on the 24th of January, 1895, announced his death.

Though she took no part in the doings of the world for some time after her husband's death, Lady Randolph Churchill did not drop from its memory, nor is she in any degree less interesting to-day than she was as the wife of an eminent statesman. Her musical gifts and tastes gradually drew her from the seclusion of her early widowhood, and she reappeared in public first at concerts and at the opera, still dressing in black.

Her social graces and talents make her the genius of many house-parties, where individual gifts and accomplishments show to best advantage and are most in demand. In the tableaux and burlesque given at Blenheim Palace in January, 1898, to raise money for the Restoration Fund of St. Mary Magdalene's church at Woodstock, she appeared as a lady journalist, portraying the character with a realism that manifested an accurate knowledge of the original. She was also a guest at Chatsworth House during a recent visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales, taking part there in the private theatricals which were part of the entertainment offered to their Royal Highnesses.

To her sons she is a congenial spirit, being interested in the things that interest them, particularly in yachting, horses, and the various racing events of each year. It is owing largely, no doubt, to her love of an active out-of-door life that her figure yet retains much of the slenderness and suppleness of young womanhood. She stands and walks with all the grace of a girl, and is one of the most noted skaters in England.

Not only into their recreations, but into the serious side of her sons' lives, she enters with that earnestness which made her so inseparable a part of her husband's life.

In the summer of 1899 the elder of her sons, Mr. Winston Churchill, made his first effort for a seat in Parliament. Oldham, in Lancashire, the scene of his endeavors, has two Parliamentary seats, which both became vacant at the same time. Though they had been filled by Conservatives, the result of the balloting in 1899 showed that the cotton-spinners, who form a large class of the voters of the borough, were tired of Conservative rule, for both Liberal candidates came in with heavy majorities.

Towards the end of the campaign Lady Randolph Churchill went vigorously and enthusiastically to her son's assistance. "The Liberal candidates being married," she said, "have an advantage." Though she won him many votes and greatly reduced the opposition, as she had done in the days of the Birmingham contest, when her husband attacked Bright's seat, the result was inevitable, and both mother and son accepted it with the grace and spirit of thoroughbred woman- and manhood.

There is an anecdote frequently related of Lady Churchill's ready wit, called forth by a situation which arose during the electioneering campaign, in which she was taking an active interest, of Mr. Burdett-Coutts, husband of the old Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who was at the time over eighty years of age. An old voter upon whom Lady Churchill called, and who seemed ready enough to cast his vote for Mr. Burdett-Coutts, took occasion, however, to relate to her, with much relish, the price which the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire had paid a butcher for his vote in the days of the famous Pitt and Fox contest, permitting him to kiss her lovely cheek. He concluded his narration with a direct intimation that he would consider a similar reward as fair payment for his own vote.

"Very well," replied Lady Churchill, smiling a gracious compliance, "I will book your vote on those terms, but you must remember that I am working for Mr. Burdett-Coutts, and I must, therefore, refer you for payment to the Baroness."

In June, 1899, the first number of Lady Churchill's quarterly, the _Anglo-Saxon Review_, which had been for several months the subject of much conjecture and speculation, appeared.

"Have you heard of the wonderful new magazine Lady Randolph's to edit with help from the Queen? It's a guinea a number--too little by half, For the crowned heads of Europe are all on the staff,"

ran the opening lines of perhaps the cleverest of the many verses and paragraphs her new venture called forth.

Its contributions included papers from Lord Rosebery and Whitelaw Reid, a poem from Swinburne, with stories from Henry James, Gilbert Parker, and Sir Frank Sweetenham, and a drama from John Oliver Hobbes. Among the illustrations were a picture of the Queen, as frontispiece, and a reproduction of Gilbert Stewart's portrait of Washington. The binding was in keeping with the contents, and was of dark-blue morocco, richly tooled in gold, with the royal coat of arms in the centre, surmounted by the crown of England, with supporters, a reproduction of a cover designed in the seventeenth century by the court binder, Abraham Bateman. It sold, as have the subsequent editions, for a guinea a number, and was, as the enterprising editress said in her preface, a volume "worthy to be taken up into that Valhalla of printed things, the library."

At the outbreak of the war in the Transvaal in 1899 Lady Randolph Churchill gave another evidence of her public spirit and enterprise which identified her once again with her native country. As chairman of the committee of the American hospital ship "Maine," she took an active part in the direction and equipment of one of the finest ambulance ships in the service. The ship itself was loaned by the Atlantic Transport Company, and named in memory of the ill-fated American battle-ship "Maine." The contributions for its equipment were made by Americans on both sides of the ocean. Among the American women living in England who actively interested themselves in the matter were Mrs. Joseph Chamberlain, Mrs. Arthur Paget, Mrs. Bradley-Martin, and both of Lady Randolph Churchill's sisters.

An appeal, issued on the 27th of October, for thirty thousand pounds met with a speedy response, and in the course of a few weeks the American hospital ship "Maine," flying the flag that was a gift from the Queen, and with accommodations for two hundred sick or wounded soldiers, carrying its corps of surgeons and nurses and Lady Randolph Churchill herself, was on its way to Durban.

Though it was as the wife of Lord Randolph Churchill and through her close identification with his interests that Lady Churchill first came prominently before the world, it is undoubtedly her own personality that has made for her the place she holds there to-day.

On the 28th of July, 1900, Lady Randolph Churchill became the wife of Mr. George Cornwallis West. Though marriages of women to men many years their junior are by no means rare in British society, the rumor of this engagement, which had been afloat for quite a year, excited an unusual amount of comment and criticism. The ceremony was performed at St. Paul's Church, Knightsbridge, the Duke of Marlborough leading Lady Churchill to the altar. Though widows of titled men in England may upon entering into a second marriage retain the name and title acquired through their former marriage, Lady Randolph Churchill settled the much-discussed question as to whether she would retain hers by her decision to be known as Mrs. George Cornwallis West.

Not yet in middle life, and with two sons to be launched upon their careers, in which she has already foreshadowed what her part may be, the world may still expect to hear much of her, for there is a bracing and vigorous quality in her individuality that renders her interesting and inspiring to many classes and many countries. She has been frequently reproduced in the fiction of her era, more than one English writer drawing his material continually from her life and character.

To what extent her beauty forms part of her magnetism is with many people a debatable question. Though Long painted her as a typical beauty, and Sargent's canvas of her that hangs in her own library portrays an exquisite feminine loveliness, she leans perhaps too much towards the masculine in mental poise and temperament to be an adequate reflection of purely feminine beauty. A many-sided, strong, self-sustained character, her outward form is an expression of her own uncommon personality rather than a type of conventional beauty.

NELLIE HAZELTINE

(MRS. FREDERICK W. PARAMORE)

Among the members of the graduating class at Mary Institute, St. Louis, in the year 1873, was a young girl who, in addition to the bright mind and intellectual ambition she had already manifested, was endowed with so extraordinary a physical beauty and so lovable a character that much of the brilliancy of her life might even then have been foretold. She was not yet seventeen years old, and was as absolutely unconscious of the unusual loveliness of her person as she ever seemed to be even after ten years of adulation.

Her figure had already attained a faultless contour, and in her simple graduation gown of white French muslin, the flounces of its skirt headed with wreaths of pink roses and green leaves, and its round bodice offset with a bertha covered in the same design of roses and leaves, she suggested all the fragrance and beauty of a flower. Her red-gold hair seemed to reflect some of the sun's own glory, and with the marvellous delicacy of her skin, the deep wine-color of her eyes, and the classic perfection of her features, there can be little doubt that she was, as she was so often said to be later, the most beautiful woman ever born west of the Mississippi.

Among her school-mates Nellie Hazeltine had won that popularity that was hers in after years to so remarkable an extent among all women. The power she possessed of diffusing herself and all that pertained to her among others precluded every thought of envy, and those with whom she came in contact experienced rather a sense of personal gratification in the contemplation of her gifts than any desire to despoil her of them or of the admiration they attracted.

She was the only daughter of Captain William B. Hazeltine, a man who had made a large fortune in the mercantile world, and she went from school to further enhance the attractiveness of an already beautiful home. There for several years she continued her studies, though it was not unusual then for girls of her age to take up their position in the social world immediately upon quitting school. As a result her accomplishments were of a higher order than those commonly possessed by the young women of her period. She was well read, she spoke French with the same ease with which she spoke her mother tongue, and was a musician of unusual ability. Such attributes soon gained for her a wide reputation and a unique position in the society of her native city.

In the matter of its social complexion St. Louis has generally been classed among the cities of the South. Besides the French, who formed a large proportion of its early settlers, those who rose early to a leading position were the families who had migrated there from Virginia and Kentucky. They were slave-owners and landholders, and as such gave a substantial character to the social foundations of the city. The Anglo-Saxon gradually absorbed the French element, which, though it disappeared from the political horizon, still formed a powerful undercurrent in the lives of the people, harmonizing the forms of their social intercourse and imparting a certain artistic value to their existence generally, that gave St. Louis a distinctive place among the growing and wealthy young cities in its vicinity. This, with the character it took from the dominant race, which restrained it from that tendency to display that was elsewhere more or less apparent, yet which ever inculcated the sacred laws of hospitality, blended into a delightful whole and gave to the city a charm that it has never lost.

Of such a civilization Nellie Hazeltine has unquestionably been the fairest product. Yet no one was less conscious than she of the eminence of her position or of the sensation her appearance invariably created.

Shortly after the beginning of her social career she went with her father to Washington to attend a competitive drill of military organizations from all sections of the country. While there she was selected to present the colors to the company of which her father was captain. Among the spectators of a scene which is always more or less inspiring, was a man who, though already past middle-life, was yet not proof against the witchery of such a singularly lovely presence as Nellie Hazeltine's. From the moment she thus crossed his life, like many another man of less prominence, Samuel J. Tilden followed her career with an ardent and chivalrous admiration that increased as her beautiful character developed and disclosed itself.

When he came before the country as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, and captured not only the nomination but the majority vote of the people, when his name was on every tongue in America, and everything that concerned him was of absorbing interest, the story of his devotion to Nellie Hazeltine spread throughout the length and breadth of the country.

From the moment it became known that Samuel J. Tilden had been elected President of the United States, till Samuel J. Randall, Speaker of the House of Representatives, cutting the tie vote of that body, redeemed its pledge to abide by the decision of the Electoral Commission, which declared Rutherford B. Hayes President of the United States, forms one of the most thrilling periods in our political history. It was but eleven years after the great civil struggle, and people living to-day, when the sinews of the nation are again knitted, cannot easily estimate the bitterness engendered by the campaign that fell during our centennial year.

The contest reached nothing less than a sublime climax when Randall, with nothing in his great form or his strong face to betray the struggle it had cost him, stepped quietly down from the Speaker's platform, and, taking his place on the floor of the House, uttered amid its breathless silence that affirmative syllable upon which hung national tranquillity.

Both men took the oath of office,--Tilden, the people's choice, in the privacy of his own home in New York, and Hayes, twice, first, on Saturday afternoon, the 3d of March, in the White House, overlapping Grant's term of office by a few hours, that there might be no intermission occasioned by inauguration-day falling on Sunday; and again on Monday, the 5th of March, in the presence of the people.

A Presidential campaign that proceeds and terminates in the usual way is sufficient to entail an enormous amount of publicity upon the candidates. The campaign of '76, however, gave Tilden both a prominence and a place in the affections of the people of his country that could scarcely have been greater had he been permitted to fill the high office to which they elected him.