ed, Gerrit Smith pursued his career without embarrassment,
and in about twenty years paid off all his debts, and had then a revenue
ranging from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a year. He gave away
money continuously, from thirty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars a
year, in large sums and in small sums, to the deserving and the
undeserving. Of course, he was inundated with begging letters. Every
mail brought requests for help to redeem farms, to send children to
school, to buy a piano, to buy an alpaca dress with the trimmings, to
relieve sufferers by fire, and to pay election expenses.

"The small checks," Mr. Frothingham tells us, "flew about in all
directions, carrying, in the aggregate, thousands of dollars, hundreds
of which fell on sandy or gravelly soil, and produced nothing."

He gave, in fact, to every project which promised to relieve human
distress, or promote human happiness. He used to have checks ready drawn
to various amounts, only requiring to be signed and supplied with the
name of the applicant. On one occasion he gave fifty dollars each to all
the old maids and widows he could get knowledge of in the State of New
York--six hundred of them in all. He gave away nearly three thousand
small farms, from fifteen to seventy-five acres each, most of them to
landless colored men.

"For years," said he, "I have indulged the thought that when I had sold
enough land to pay my debts, I would give away the remainder to the
poor. I am an Agrarian. I would that every man who desires a farm might
have one, and no man covet the possession of more farms than one."

I need not say that these farms were of little benefit to those who
received them, for our colored friends are by no means the men to go
upon a patch of northern soil and wring an independent livelihood out of
it. Gerrit Smith was a sort of blind, benevolent Samson, amazingly
ignorant of human nature, of human life, and of the conditions upon
which alone the welfare of our race is promoted. He died in 1874, aged
seventy-seven, having lived one of the strangest lives ever recorded,
and having exhibited a cast of character which excites equal admiration
and regret.

PETER FORCE.

One of the interesting sights of the city of Washington used to be the
library of "Old Peter Force," as he was familiarly called,--Colonel
Peter Force, as he was more properly styled. He was one of the few
colonels of that day who had actually held a colonel's co