"The South has long since adopted force to fill her ranks. If we are to continue this war and save the Union it is absolutely necessary, and therefore it shall be done."

The great city of New York was the danger point. > The Government had been warned of the possibility of a revolution in the metropolis, whose representatives in Congress had demanded the right to secede in the beginning of the war. And yet the warning had not been taken seriously by the War Department. No effort had been made to garrison the city against the possibility of an armed uprising to resist the draft. Demagogues had been haranguing the people for months, inflaming their minds to the point of madness on the subject of this draft.

On the night before the drawing was ordered in New York the leading speaker had swept the crowd off their feet by the daring words with which he closed his appeal:

"We will resist this attempt of Black Republicans and Abolitionists to force the children of the poor into the ranks they dare not enter. Will you give any more of your sons to be food for vultures on the hills of Virginia? Will you allow them to be torn from your firesides and driven as dumb cattle into the mouths of Southern cannon? If you are slaves, yes,—if you are freemen, no!"

When the lottery wheel began to turn off its fatal names at the Government Draft Office at the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Third Avenue on the morning of July 14th, a sullen, determined mob packed the streets in front of the building. Among them stood hundreds of women whose husbands, sons and brothers

were listed on the spinning wheel of black fortune. Their voices were higher and angrier than the men's: "This is a rich man's war-but a poor man's

fight

"Yes, if you've got three hundred dollars you can hire a substitute from the slums-____""

"But if you happen to be a working man, you can stand up and be shot for these cowards and sneaks!" "Down with the draft!"

"To hell with the hirelings and their wheel!" "Smash it

99

"Burn the building!"

A tough from the East Side waved his hand to the crowd of frenzied men and women:

With a single mighty impulse the mob surged toward the doors, and through them. A sound of smashing glass, blows, curses. A man rushed into the street holding the enrollment books above his head:

-the list of white slaves!"

"Here are your names, men— The mob tore the sheets from his grasp and fell on them like hungry wolves. In ten minutes the books were only scraps of paper trampled into the filth of Third Avenue. Wherever a piece could be seen men and women stamped and spit on it.

They smashed the wheel and furniture into kindling wood, piled it in the middle of the room and set fire to it. No policemen or firemen were allowed to approach. Every officer of the law, both civil and military, had been chased and beaten and disappeared.

Half the block was in flames before the firemen could break through and reach the burning buildings. Down the Avenue, the maddened mob swept with

resistless impulse, yelling, cursing, shouting its defiance.

"Down with the Abolitionists!"

"Hang Horace Greeley on a sour apple tree!" "To the Tribune Office!"

Howard, a reporter of the Tribune, was recognized: "Kill him!"

"Hang him!"

The mob seized the reporter, dragged him to a lamp post and were about to put the rope around his neck when a blow from a cobblestone felled him to the sidewalk, the blood trickling down his neck.

A man bending over his body, shouted to the crowd: "He's dead-we'll take the body away!"

A friend helped and they carried him into a store and saved his life.

For three days and nights this mob burned and killed at will and fought every officer of the law until the streets ran red with blood. They burned the Negro > Orphan Asylum, beat, killed or hanged every negro, who showed his face, sacked the home of Mayor Opdyke, at 79 Fifth Avenue, and attempted to burn it. They smashed in the Tribune building, gutted part of it and would have reduced it to ashes but for the brave defense put up by some of its men.

On the third day the announcement was made that the draft was suspended. Five thousand troops reached the city and partly succeeded in restoring order.

More than a thousand men had been killed and three ! thousand wounded-among them many women.

?

The Democratic papers now boldly demanded that the draft should be officially suspended until its con

stitutionality could be tested by the courts. The State and Municipal authorities of New York appealed to the President to suspend the draft.

He answered:

"If I suspend the draft there can be no army to continue the war and the days of the Republic are numbered. The life of the Nation is at stake."

They begged for time, and he hesitated for a day. The victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg were forgotten in the grim shadow of a possible repetition of the French Revolution on a vast scale throughout the North. The mob had already sacked the office of the Times in Troy, broken out in Boston, and threatened Cincinnati.

The President gave the Governor of New York his final answer by sending an army of ten thousand veterans into the city. He planted his artillery to sweep the streets with grape and cannister, and ordered the draft to be immediately enforced.

The new wheel was set up, and turned with bayonets. The mobs were overawed and the ranks of the army were refilled.

CHAPTER XXXI

BETWEEN THE LINES

Ned

Betty Winter found to her sorrow that the memory of a dead love could be a troublesome thing. Vaughan's tender and compelling passion had been resistless in the moonlight beneath a fragrant apple tree with the old mill wheel splashing its music at their feet. She had returned to her cot in the hospital that night in a glow of quiet, peaceful joy. Life's problem had been solved at last in the sweet peace of a tender and beautiful spiritual love-the only love that could be real.

All this was plain, while the glow of Ned's words were in her heart and the memory of his nearness alive in the fingers and lips he had kissed. And then to her terror came stealing back the torturing vision of his brother. Why, why, why could she never shut out the memory of this man!

Over and over again she repeated the angry final word:

"He isn't worth a moment's thought!"

And yet she kept on thinking, thinking, always in the same blind circle. At last came the new resolution, "Worthy or unworthy, I've given my word to a better man and that settles it."

The fight had become in her inflamed imagination, the struggle between good and evil. The younger man