The New Orleans bulletin. [volume] (New Orleans [La.]) 1874-1876, 1875-02-03
Hard Times at the Hub.
s. God Help the Rich-the Poor Can Beg -
Henry and Elizabeth, Moulton and Theo-
dOre, Mrs. Beecher and Ben Butler.
Bancroft's Brief History.
A Possible Future Historian of the Great
Republic.

Il correspondence OF the New orleans Buuetln.J
BosToN, Jan. %. 1875.
We have little to talk about here except
cold weather. hard times and the Beecher
scandal-sad themes all. But the world is
full of sad themes. You must not think the
good people Of your State have all the
troubles. You, at least, are not frozen up.
Your water pipes do not burst, nor your water
tanks explode, to the ruin of your house and
the marring of Bridget's beauty. Nor are
you harassed by the little bill of the plumber
who has combined with the weather to ruin
you. Our plumbers just now are the only
prosperous people We have. They laugh and
grow fat Our poor laborers, out of money
and work. live at the public soup-houses,
sleep in the city beds, refuse empl oyment at
less than two dollars per day, and, on the
whole, are our most comfortable citizens.
They have a pleasant consciousness that the
twenty-odd millions deposited to their credit
in our savings banks are undisturbea, and
draw fair interest.
Our rich men, real estate owners, great
merchants, retailers, respectable middle-class,
worthy women, struggling to live honestly
and honorably, these are our poor. They
suffer and need sympathy. Their costly
stores are not rented, their houses are shut
up or tenants do not pay, country dealers
| fail to remit, city retailers cannot pay, ex-
penses, taxes and assessments are heavy and
increase steadily, poverty aud want stand just
ahead, and there is really more heart agony,
more keen suffering among our hitherto pros
porous people, than among the laboring
Glasses. "God help the rich in these times,
'the poor can beg We are having failures
every day among our wholesale and retail
dealers Very few houses are paying expenses.
Many manufacturers are struggling on, sink
ing money steadily and seeing no hope. And
Of coulse we are not happy.
We get money enough to so occasionally to
a concert or theatre, to keep our courage
up, but our wives and daughters go without
new pair of six-bottoned gloves to pay for
it: and as q last resource to hide and Danish
from ourselves, our families and friends cur
hidden grief, we plunge day by day into the
New York Tribune, and lose ourselves in the
truthful verbatim and interminable length
of the Beecher-Tilton report. Of this famous
case we may not speak. The judge says so.
As virtuous, law-abiding citizens, we comply.
We would not prejud &c the case, or affect the
mind of any honest juryman into whose
hands the New Orleans BULLETIN may happen
to fall. 1t may not be unjust, however, to either
party to give the general impression here,
which is that Moulton and Tilton are a nice
pair-''drcades ambo id est, blackguards BOTH"
that Henry and Elizabeth, for strong saints,
have perhaps acted like weak sinners; that if
Mrs. Beecher looks like her picture in the
Graphic, q little straying away, on the part of
the great preacher, may be somewhat pardon
able; that the parsons wife acts nobly in
sticking to her husband, right or wrong; that
Moulton is thorough man of the world, an
improved Jim Fisk, an accomplished liar,
whose word is as good as his oath, and no
better; that Tilton is worthless. vain, con-
ceited brilliant, unprincipled gas-bag, who
has very shamefully ill-treated a loving
trusting, long-sufering, weak, interest.
ing, poetic, and sometimes strangely
fascinating wife; that Beecher is fearfully
punished for his indIscretion; that, if really
guilty he has been an inconceivable fool for
owning it to anybody, especially to such a
creature as Moulton; that he is the victim Of
a most cunningly devised conspiracy, and
that Butler is the properes! man living to aid
Moulton and Tilton, for suitable consider
alton, in pushing the thing through to sue
cess, viz: the utter ruin of Beecher. The
opinion prevails that Bowen has been at the
bottom of the whole mischief, and i. is
hoped that the able lawyers on each side will
dig out the truth and that justice will be
done, though the heavens, and Beecher, and
Tilton, and Moulton, and Elizabeth fall in
one grand and indistinguishable ruin.
Bancroft has finished his history, and
finished it in ten volumes. He has been lust
forty years about it, and we ventura to think
not forty men have ever read it, or ever will
Any gent eman of taste and means who wishes
to ornament an upper shelf of his library
with ten handsome and expensive calfbouud
volumes, to be taken down and busted as often
as the census is taken, once in ten years,
would do we'll to invest in this valuable work
Charles Lamb would place it by the side of
Josephus, THAT learned jew" 1t was not
until many centuries after the glory of the
Roman empire had departed, that an historian
appeared who could wolthily write the story
of The Decline and Fall.
Perhaps at some distant age some brilliant
stranger from foreign parts, standing upon
the broken arch of the great bridge not yet
built between New York and Brooklyn (of
which the two unfinished towers have al
ready cost five millions, at which rate the
whole cost will be more than the cost of the |
Erie Railroad), and gazing upon the ruins on
either side Of the East river, may feel like |