EARLY DAYS OF SUCCESSFUL MEN.

WILLIAM EUSTIS RUSSELL.

BY LLOYD McKIM GARRISON.

If you have ever attended the Harvard-Yale football game at Springfield, and sat upon the Harvard side of the field, you must have been struck by the enthusiasm that ran along the crowded benches as a certain slender, youthful-looking gentleman passed by them looking for his seat. You might have seen the same enthusiasm break forth along those densely packed New York streets through which the great Columbian parade marched nearly two years ago, or, in Chicago, all the way from Lincoln Park to the White City, whenever among the group of Governors of the different States there appeared the same young-looking gentleman, managing his black horse with a strong hand, and sitting him with a firmness that showed the muscles of his lithe figure under his black official coat. That gentleman was William Eustis Russell, then Governor of Massachusetts, the leader of the Democratic party in his State, and the possessor of a personal popularity which is not limited by her boundaries.

When you are a Freshman in college you are apt to look upon the big Senior Captain of the university crew as a person of unusual strength and size. You never imagine that he could have been different when he was a Freshman. You think he must have been born so, and grieve because in your class there are no Freshmen like him. It is only when you yourself wake up one morning and find that you are no longer a Freshman, but a Senior and Captain of the crew, that you realize that all great men are first boys before they are anything else, and that what afterwards makes them great is pluck and character and their admiration and emulation of other great men. This is true of the greatest generals and statesmen, just as of 'varsity oarsmen. They were not always solemn men with black coats and white cravats, but boys, and probably jolly ones; and so it was with Governor Russell, whose boyhood was such a happy and hearty one that it has kept in his face the appearance of youth, which makes his accomplishments seem so remarkable.

He was born in 1857 in the old college town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard College is. His father was Charles Theodore Russell, a leading lawyer in the town, and in politics a stanch Democrat. William, or, as he was then called (and as some of his older friends still dare to call him), "Billy" Russell, was the youngest of seven children, having three brothers and three sisters older than himself; and the traditional luck of a seventh son has followed him accordingly.

His father was a man of small income, which his interest in public life kept him from increasing. So his large family of children, brought up in what was then a small country town, were left largely to themselves for their amusement. He was strict in exacting from them industry, obedience, and truthfulness. On Sundays they went punctually to church near where the old Washington elm stands. Every evening they settled down to study, which came easily to them; but on holidays, and during the long afternoons after school hours, they were given almost absolute liberty, which taught them self-reliance, the greater because their father, who had a horror of extravagance, gave them no such allowance of spending-money as spoils too many a boy to-day; so they had to get their fun out of the fields, woods, and ponds, wherever it was most wholesome. They were passionately fond of animals, and always had a quantity of pets about, all of which, except a pony, they had either bought with their own savings or had given to them. They built hutches, in which they kept delightful lop-eared rabbits, guinea-pigs, and big fluffy gray squirrels from the Waverly oaks, and many good-natured dogs of no known breed, which followed them on their expeditions.

Billy Russell was a delicate boy, and therefore was encouraged to lead an out-of-door life from earliest childhood. When he was but eight years old his father, who was a great fisherman, took him to the Maine woods for a summer at the forks of the Kennebec. He began to grow stronger then and there, and was soon as hearty as any boy, and much more nimble than most. There was scarcely any kind of sport at which he did not become expert, particularly the natural sports—skating, coasting, and swimming; and he rode the family pony till he went to college, and got a seat he never lost afterwards.

He loved the water, his boat, and his fish-lines, but most of all he longed for a gun; and as his father could not spare a small boy money for such a luxury, he determined to make it himself—and he did. From the inlet at Fresh Pond, and from the little green bays of Spy Pond near Arlington, two miles from Cambridge, he picked great bunches of water-lilies, and sold them for five cents a bunch to passers-by. He collected old horseshoes for the rag-man and did odd jobs for neighbors; and on the other side of the Charles River, where the bare-foot boy shouting at and belaboring some unruly steer was not likely to be recognized as a son of "Lawyer Russell," he many a time drove a herd of cattle from Boston to Brighton yards for a quarter of a dollar; and he was so industrious and clever that he had soon saved quite a handsome sum, and the coveted gun was at last bought; and he never afterwards had any possession that gave him such pleasure.

The ownership of a real gun made Billy the leader of a small set of boys, who went bushwhacking with him through all the neighboring country. They used to camp out on the shores of Walden Pond, cooking their own game, and learning to sleep in the open air in spite of the strange noises of the woods. They shot and fished the whole country-side over, from the Waverly Oaks and the woods towards Watertown out to Weston and Wayland; and in the other direction around Spy Pond, Spot Pond, the Mystic River, and the Middlesex Fells; they gathered nuts in big sacks along the old Concord Road, where the red-coats ran away in April, 1775, and sometimes even plundered the orchards around Lexington village, the leader of the young outlaws being the future Governor of the State.

Although he was such an excellent student, he was the despair of his teachers by reason of his mischievousness, which was usually of a most ingenious kind, but because of his excellent record they never did much more than take his Saturday afternoons away from him. His followers and he still kept up their sport ardently, and some of his achievements at this time were wonderful feats of daring. He was "stumped" to climb up the scaffolding surrounding the tall steeple of Dr. MacKenzie's church, and did so; and on another "dare" he climbed up the scaffolding to the top of the tower of Memorial Hall, then being built—a feat any one will appreciate who has ever seen that tremendous pile. In these undertakings he was aided, as he was in all athletic sports, by the fact of having the equal use of both hands. He prefers the left hand, and commonly uses it, but the right is equally strong; and when I last saw him he was writing with his right hand because he had just sprained his left thumb.

When he entered Harvard College in the class of '77, which has gone down to fame as the most brilliant (and disorderly) class that ever was, he was only sixteen, but quite old for his age. Just as at school, he treated all his classmates alike, without regard to what team or what society they were on, never himself belonging to any particular set or clique, but to the class at large, where he was universally known and liked. He kept up his studies only fairly well, as the prescribed courses did not interest him; but in the electives, where he chose history and political economy, he reached such high marks that his general average kept him in the first quarter of his class, and he did a great deal of independent reading along his favorite lines of study that was not counted in marks, but, nevertheless, was of the greatest service to him.

In the social life of the class he went along with the rest, without particular eminence, belonging to the "Institute," the "Dickey," and the "Hasty Pudding Club," whose initiations which were then quite elaborate he survived; the men who were "running" him, and calling out to him to "hit 'er up" when he was speeding through the Yard for them, little guessing whom they were ordering about. He kept up his athletics, and played half-back on the Harvard football team against Yale and All-Canada in the days when they played fifteen on a side, and Harvard teams won the games as much as a matter of course as Yale teams do nowadays. Young Russell's athletics made him quite a "horrible example" for parents to hold up, for before he was through college he had twice fractured his arm skating and coasting, broken a finger at baseball, and his nose at football; but his athletics had also given him a sound and sinewy body which has kept him in such good health that he has been able to undertake tasks such as no one else has ever attempted—as, for instance, when he travelled the length of Cape Cod and spoke to twenty different audiences in the same day, and to most of them from the steps of a car. So he is still devoted to athletics in spite of all his accidents, and is an enthusiastic wearer of the crimson at all its great games in spite of its recent ill-success.

In the summer of his Junior year he nearly lost his life in a sailing accident which attracted great attention at the time. He, three classmates of his, a New York boy and his tutor, were at Nantucket, and went out sailing in a twenty-five-foot centre-board on a very rough day, with the wind coming in puffs, and the sea, which had been raised by a storm the day before, running very high. About four miles from the shore the boat was caught in a squall, and in a moment had capsized and sunk, leaving all six struggling in the water. By the merest chance a fisherman who was crossing the bluffs above the beach on his way to his nets saw the white sail disappear in the water, and carried an alarm to the light-house, which was answered as soon as possible, though it was an hour and a half before the dories had made their way out through the surf and picked up the scattered swimmers, each one of whom thought himself to be the sole survivor. Russell was the last to be picked up, and had swum three miles with the help of a strong flood-tide during the two hours he was in the water. One of the party, the New York boy, was found clinging unconscious to an oar, the only bit of wreckage left from the lost boat. His tutor and he were poor swimmers, and neither dared to try the long swim to the shore which the others all undertook, so the boy clung to the oar, and the tutor tried to keep afloat without it. After a few moments, however, he felt himself weakening, and called out, "Frank, pass me the oar or I'll sink!" The boy did so, and the frail stick sank beneath their combined weight.

The tutor never hesitated. "Frank," he said, "this will only drown us both;" and deliberately releasing his hold on the oar, he gave it up, with his life, to the boy whose life had been intrusted to him.

The accident and the rescue caused great excitement in the little island town. The old crier with his bell cried the news of the rescue about the place before the newspaper had out its extras, and every one was deeply moved by the heroism of Sampson, the brave fellow who had so cheerfully died to save his friend.

This experience was a very memorable one to young Russell, and it sobered and matured him, as a great struggle should; and from that moment his life became more settled and serious.

In his Senior year at college, which followed it, he did far better work than he had done in the three years before; and when he entered the law-school of Boston University he began to show his true measure; for he was not only first in his class, but such a first that, as with the old yacht America, there was no second. He took the only prize in the school—-the William Beach Lawrence prize-essay—the first degree summa cum laude ever awarded, and was elected valedictorian of his class by unanimous vote of his classmates.

During all this time he had been working in his father's law-office, supporting himself from the day he left college, and had made six hundred dollars a year alone by revising and correcting the proofs of Wharton's books on criminal law, and verifying the references, which was the most tedious of tasks, but served him a good lesson in care and minuteness.

In 1879 he was a practising lawyer, with a small practice, and no particular ambition, except to increase it; and so he continued for two years, when, to his enormous surprise, he found that without his knowledge or permission he had been nominated for the Common Council of his native city of Cambridge. This was in the fall of 1881. The election was a hot one, and Russell was elected by one vote over his former High-school principal, which was said to have chagrined the latter excessively.

Russell was now twenty-four years old and at the beginning of his political career, which during the next dozen years was destined to be remarkable.

He had always had an interest in politics because of his father's interest in them, and in the Hayes-Tilden campaign of 1876 he spoke for Tilden as a sort of experiment in public speaking, which gave him confidence enough to do considerable speaking during the Garfield-Hancock campaign in 1880. All this had been excellent training, but Russell had to show that he had other good qualities when he was elected to office.

Cambridge at this time had a dishonest government under Mayor Fox, who had put in office corrupt and incapable men, whose idea was that public officers were not elected to make a city pleasant and safe to live in, but to have an easy life on other people's money.

Young Russell was an American born, fresh from the ennobling associations of Harvard College, who knew what American government had been and ought to be, and he at once made himself so outspoken against this corrupt crowd as a Councilman that in the following year he was elected Alderman, a position of far greater power.

He was no sooner in office than the ring began its warfare against him and he against it, in which he gave as hard blows as he took. There were two rival horse railroads in the city. The Mayor was interested in one, and determined to destroy the other. Russell opposed him, and so skilfully and boldly that he carried the Aldermen with him, after one of the bitterest and most difficult fights in his long career.

In 1883 the ring carried every district but Mr. Russell's, and he was re-elected by forty plurality, and remained during the year a minority of one in the Board of Aldermen, but powerful for good because of his unsparing opposition to and exposure of the corruption he could not prevent.

His identification with opposition to the ring had become so absolute that when, in 1884, the citizens of Cambridge, without regard to party, united to overthrow it and set up a businesslike government, Mr. Russell became the natural candidate. He made speeches in all parts of the city, and his knowledge of the facts was so great that his speeches had deadly effect. His victory was complete, and the ring was so badly beaten that it has never regained power since. As Mayor Mr. Russell's course was most honorable and successful. Though not thirty years old, his thorough study of government, his reverence for American institutions, and his knowledge of the peculiar needs of Cambridge made him better able to serve the city than an older man of a different bringing up. He destroyed the ring, root and branch, and made his own appointments to office for fitness only. He saw that the laws were obeyed, even though they were laws he personally opposed. He reduced the city's debt, lowered its taxes, and made its name as respectable as it had been before the days of its local Tweed.

Indeed, so grateful were the citizens to him that they re-elected him without any opposition in 1885, 1886, and 1887; and in 1888, although he desired to retire, he withdrew his declination on being presented with a petition of three thousand names, and was elected again by two thousand majority, carrying every ward and every precinct but two, in spite of hostility to him because of his firmness in stopping disorder during the great railroad strike during the winter before.

His administration as Mayor had made him so conspicuous a leader in his own party that in 1886 he was offered the Congressional nomination for his district, which he declined to accept; and in 1888 he was made the Democratic candidate for Governor—city and State elections coming in different months in Massachusetts. As Massachusetts is strongly Republican, he did not expect to win, but his personal popularity gave him more votes for Governor than Mr. Cleveland received for President. In 1889 he was renominated by acclamation, and made a brilliant campaign of the State, which established his reputation as a debater of the highest ability; but although he made great gains in the Republican part of the State, he lost it by a small majority. In 1890 he was again renominated, and made his third canvass of the State, which was more thorough than ever, and resulted in his triumphant election as Governor.

His administration of his new office was like that of his other one. He never made a promise he did not keep, nor did he ever make a promise he could not keep; so he became the "reform Governor," and put out bad men to put in good ones, kept the taxes down, saw the State funds were properly spent, and that the government was the people's and not the politicians'. He accomplished a great deal, but most of all the converting of political opponents into personal followers, for he won over enough Republicans to make him Governor again in 1891, and still a third time in 1892; and he might, it would seem, have kept on being Governor as long as he had kept on being Mayor except that he refused, in spite of many entreaties to do so, to run again after his third term.

So he left public office, which he had had to undertake for a dozen years, and went quietly back to his law practice, which he makes as successful as his campaigns, and to his home, for he was married while he was Mayor, in 1885, and has a charming wife and three jolly children. You may see him any day in Boston going quietly about the streets, or riding his horse out to Cambridge over the Milldam. He spends his vacations, as he always did from boyhood, in the Maine woods, and loves fishing and shooting as much as if he were still a boy.