year from the Island of Cuba, she makes ample amends. All wounds of aggrieved national pride are now healed, and in a realm of free imagination, from which all prosaic obstacles of alien languages and forms of government are eliminated, she creates for Miss Dix an ideal Utopia over which she shall be installed as queen :

"ST. AMELIA ESTATE, CUBA, March 17, 1851. “ If I had rule on earth, Cuba - this beautiful Antille should be transformed into a great Maison de Santé, a home for the sickly and feeble. There they should sit in their rocking-chairs under the palms and the tamarinds, and breathe the delightful air of this island (which I cannot think was better in Paradise), be caressed by the soft, loving breeze, and drink in it, as in Olympian nectar, new health, new life. And you should be the queen here, and have a cabinet of ladies, kind and beautiful, such as I know several in the United States, who should chiefly officiate as nurses for the sick, as noble Valkyrias and healing goddesses for those slain or wounded in the battle of life."

Not unlikely the majority of readers of this last letter would set down Frederika Bremer as a far more imaginative woman than Dorothea Lynde Dix. So widely is genuine constructive power of imagination confused with the activity of a mere dreamy fancy, that the number is legion who think a more vigorous exercise of the "faculty divine" demanded for the creation of an airy ideal Utopia like this, than for first summoning before the mind's eye, and then substantializing in massive buildings and wide-ranging farms, parks, and gardens, the actual "Retreats from a harsh and cruel world, which Miss Dix provided for such hosts of sufferers. In reality, the "noble Valkyrias," of whom Frederika Bremer speaks,

"healing goddesses for those slain or wounded in the battle of life," were far more profoundly conceived, than by herself, by the heroic woman to whom she wrote. She knew, out of stern experience, that the true Valkyrias are fateful and awful powers, who must first stride the blast and sweep to the rescue through the din and shrieks of the battlefield, before they can think to reach, and bear off in their arms to the Valhalla of rest, the fallen warriors trampled in dust and blood.

CHAPTER XV.

THE FIVE MILLION ACRE BILL.

year,

A LETTER of Miss Dix, already quoted in Chapter XIII., will be recalled, in which, in an hour of weariness, she wrote: "I think, after this I shall certainly not suffer myself to engage in any legislative affairs for a year. I can conceive the state of mind which this induces to be like nothing save the influences of the gambling table, or any games of chance, on such unlooked-for, and often trivial, balances do the issues depend."

The stakes for which she had now for years been playing were indeed pecuniarily enormous, involving in the case of each separate asylum from fifty to two hundred thousand dollars at the start, not to speak of the further appropriations for permanent expenses and for enlargement that must inevitably ensue. They were stakes, moreover, on the winning or losing of which hung the devout thanksgiving of a merciful heart at relief now close at hand for cruel shapes of human misery, or the silent torture that the old, sad story must go on unchanged.

In comparison, however, with the far vaster stake she was now about to play for, no longer in the halls of State legislative assemblies, but on the arena. of the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, these previous ventures involved but trivial issues.

To set the subject here to be entered on in a clear light, it will be necessary to go back several years in the story of Miss Dix's career. So manifold were the operations she was in the habit of carrying on, at the same time, that there is no other feasible way but to set apart certain of them and treat them as distinct episodes.

Already, at as early a date as 1848, had she memorialized Congress for a grant of 5,000,000 acres of the public domain, the proceeds of the sale of which were to be set apart as a perpetual fund for the care of the indigent insane; the sum total of the fund to be divided, in proportion with their respective ratas of population, among the thirty States of the Union. Partial failure in her first attempt to secure this grant had only acted on her in the way of that especial tonic which she declared always set her on her feet — the tonic of opposition, and so led her, at a subsequent session of Congress, to raise the amount of her plea to the colossal sum of 12,225,000 acres.

It is easy to write down the numerals which stand for 12,225,000 acres of land. A far harder thing is it to stretch the imagination to the point of conceiving what they really imply. They mean nearly 20,000 square miles of territory. They mean an area nearly three times the size of the State of Massachusetts, an area more than a third as large as England, with Wales included. Could she carry this great measure, Miss Dix felt that the work of her life in her own land would be permanently crowned. A steady iucome, growing in volume with the growth of population in the country, would thus be secured in perpetuity for the most wretched of the children of earth.

To bring the actual situation clearly before the mind, a short explanation is here needful of the relations borne by the Federal Government of the United States to the disposition of the enormous areas of the public lands.

The original thirteen Revolutionary States, stretched along the Atlantic seaboard, the States which had fought for and achieved the independence of the United States, had always maintained a claim to share severally in the vast areas of unoccupied lands lying to the westward, which they had individually ceded to the Federal Government. Through subsequent purchase and conquest, this area had grown to continental proportions; and as new territories were from time to time formed into States, and admitted as integral members of the Union, the same claims were fully accorded to them. Under the condition of a public treasury overflowing with revenue from sales of the public domain to settlers, the representatives in Congress had, every now and then, deemed it wise to distribute this money surplus among the several States. Further, to the new States almost exclusively, immense tracts of land, reaching in 1845 an aggregate of 134,704,982 acres, had been granted for the purpose of rapidly developing a system of general education and of internal improvements. And yet there still remained unassigned more than one thousand millions of acres of the public domain.

In the main, the disposition thus far made of the public lands had been judicious, and, especially, had laid the foundation of an excellent school system in the newly formed and thinly populated States. The immense prizes, however, thus opened up to the schemes of private speculators, internal improvement